fltsimbuff

The F-22's airframes are going away? That's news to me. And yes, when the F-35 was first planned, and with the initial cost estimates it may have been a better deal than keeping F-16s and A-10s in the fight, but no, it would not be cheaper now. We are still rolling F-16s off the assembly line, so it's not like they would need to start from scratch. The role of the F-35 keeps expanding along with its budget. If in 20 years the F-35 lives up to every expectation and saves the world, I'll eat my words, but diminishing capabilities we have used very recently and are still using (WVR combat prowess in Desert Storm and low-and-slow CAS we use today) isn't worth it IMHO.

That's all well and good, but I would much rather see BVR become the order of the day BEFORE we decide to make our aircraft less WVR capable. Many of the engagements as recent as the Gulf war still went into the Merge. So far there has been no indication that future battles will be strictly BVR, other than the same assumptions that have been made since before Vietnam. The fact that we work increasingly in coalitions makes attacking a radar-only contact iffy to this day. Now if the Air Force has no intention of filling the "Light Weight Fighter" role, they should say they are changing the doctrine to exclude that capability rather than saying "the F-35 can do that too".

My comment was directed at yours about "Maybe it isn't even needed" in reference to the Air Supremacy role. The F-22 is better than the F-35 when it comes to Air Supremacy. And it ought to be, as it was purpose-built for that. I believe that they are sacrificing great programs to save a good program that has overrun on cost, and placing the survival of that program over other things that are also very important. Ask yourself what they would do if they decided they honestly believed the F-35 wasn't worth the cost. Could they afford to cancel it? Would they? It is in their best interest to salvage it at any cost. The DoD and service leaders in Washington do not have a particularly good record where things like this are concerned. Are you playing devil's advocate or do you put full faith in the bureaucrats and politicians making these decisions? The F-35 is a great capability to have, but I still maintain it's not worth giving up masters of various capabilities in favor of a jack-of-all-trades.

I suppose I should have said "Air Supremacy" as that seems to be the new term they coined after superiority. My point still stands... Other programs have been repeatedly sacrificed in order to get this platform. For those sacrificed platforms that either means they have decided we do not need that capability at all, or that the F-35 can take over that capability. Air Supremacy has proven invaluable in every recent conflict, so I am not sure what would make you think it might not be needed. The difference is in recent conflicts we have had it by default, with no real challenge, but a peer-state competitor would be a completely different story. I am not calling the F-35 a bad plane, but just like a Ferarri is a great car, you wouldn't use it to replace the capabilities of a pickup truck and a minivan as well as your track car. You need to be careful what capabilities you are sacrificing to get it.

So I'd be interested to hear what is replacing the F-16 in the Light Weight Fighter role. I don't doubt the F-35 will be great at replacing the F-16 in the strike role, as like you said, that is what it was designed to do. The problem is that many other programs are being sacrificed with the Air Force saying "The F-35 can do that too!" when it really can't. The F-22's production run was cut short, and the F-35 is obviously not going to be as good in the air superiority role. They are trying to scrap the A-10, though the F-35 wasn't designed for CAS. So it wasn't intended to be an air superiority fighter, lightweight fighter, or CAS plane. Okay... why do they keep saying it is one?

I decided to play with this a bit. I was able to attain stable-ish flight at 65,000 feet with 50% internal fuel and no external stores. Of course this was at about mach 1.5 with afterburner. At about 20% fuel I was able to start a climb that arced up to 74,000 feet before I stalled. Again, full burner all the way. I am looking forward to the view (curvature of the Earth and better atmospheric effects) of DCS 2.0 at 60,000+ feet :)

That was the first thing I thought when I saw that screenshot... I figure that spot is going to be very busy on multiplayer servers. They might need to put in a tower to de-conflict air traffic.

I think this is my favorite part: Keep in mind that the "luxury" of fine-tuning performance will probably be unrealistic once this is in the hands of the masses, as that will likely take a back seat to bug fixes. For that reason alone, I'd like them to take their time and do as much performance tweaking as possible before release. Lots of good news in this update!

At least until DCS: SR-71 ;)

50,000 yes, big difference from 65,000

They usually don't go to war at their service ceiling. That's the max, not the most efficient.

Were you trying to zoom climb? I was up at about 60,000 feet the other day... A clean F-15C with full afterburner can probably gain ground on 65,000 slowly. Up there in the thin air your stall speed is VERY high and it takes a lot of speed to keep gaining altitude. 65,000 feet may be possible, but it isn't for cruising...

Data point of one, but I ditched playing through Steam so I could get earlier access to patches and new modules. I suspect a lot of people that may have originally found DSC via Steam have done the same. I play pretty much exclusively single player currently, as I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to getting to know vSquadron mates and familiarizing myself with a lot of the necessary procedures for efficient communication with teammates. Maybe some day...

It's going to be tough to wait for release! I've been holding off on TrackIR, because I figure it will give me bad habits that I'll have to break once I have an Oculus...

That reminds me of "War Eagles" for DOS, as you could fly the Sopwith Camel: And then there's Aces over Europe:

I believe my first was called "Miramar"

You should read about the Black Buck missions during the Falklands conflict. It was something like 11 tankers with 2 bombers to get them from Ascension island to the Falklands http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck#/media/File:Refuelling.plan.black.buck.svg It was a big pyramid of tankers refueling tankers and bombers so the tankers could refuel other tankers to refuel the other tankers and bombers.

I thought the training mission mentioned the lack of a TGP indicator, and that you should adjust the depressible pipper to boresight with the TGP and use that. I may be thinking of something I read on the forum though. Here's some details: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?p=1000591#post1000591

This is highly dependent on what he means by freezing/crashing. You should immediately suspect drivers if it affects the entire OS. There is a separation of where code runs and thus what certain code can break when it breaks. For example, Java, the browser, and plugins these days all run in "user mode" and it would be extremely unlikely for a problem with "user mode" code to affect the Kernel, thus crashing the OS. On the other hand, certain driver code must run in the Kernel or at least use kernel interfaces. Video is the most likely culprit as the code necessary for accelerating 2D and 3D video on websites will be working closely with the driver. The bottom line is that these days with the OS/App separation, it is always the driver's fault for allowing an application to crash it. A single app misbehaving should never bring down the entire OS. The OP hasn't responded yet, but hopefully if he returns he'll be able to provide more detail about the issue, or try updating video drivers.

We don't even have it yet and you already want to break it? ;)

The current engine appears to be very much CPU-bound, and it has been implied that there is a lot of graphics overhead keeping the CPU busy. There are a lot of people that have insisted more things need to be put into different threads to better utilize multi-core CPUs, and ED's response regarding 2.0 was that they looked at it, and it wouldn't make much difference. To me this implies that the overhead has decreased so much with EDGE that it is no longer CPU-bound. This would make sense given the DirectX changes that are supposed to take a lot of the CPU overhead out of the 3D rendering. If the CPU can now keep the 3D pipeline filled without having to run full tilt, it should be freed to keep up with the more mundane tasks (systems simulations, physics, and game objects). If ED says they don't need to use all the cores on a CPU to get good performance on the new engine, I believe it. This is the way 3D graphics engines have been since the beginning of 3D graphics. Graphics cards eventually outpace the ability of the application to feed them, and the APIs and engines can/need to be rewritten to put more of the load back on the GPU. This is especially true given that GPU performance has been growing MUCH faster than CPU performance over the past few years. Increasing the resolution to 4k is going to put a lot more additional load on the Graphics card than it will on the CPU, as that's where most of the additional work needs to be done. Most of us are probably already running 4k via MSAA anyway. The bottom line is that I think we should stop making assumptions about the performance of the new engine based on the current engine and how much or little we think is changing with regards to multi-threading. It is probably irrelevant anyway.

My initial guess would be video driver issues. Are those up-to-date? Other than that info about your setup would help. What exactly do you mean by "crashes"? Is it a blue screen? Does it freeze? Does it reboot itself? Or does your browser just close? What OS and what browser?

I've had some real concerns about the capabilities of the F-35 in the past, but it does look like it will make a very good replacement for aircraft such as the F-16. The main issue I have with it now, is that as the program becomes more and more expensive, the USAF seems to be willing to sacrifice more things at the altar of the F-35 to justify the cost. "Sure, it will cost a few million more, but we can replace the A-10 too!" I am waiting for them to say "With an AESA radar this powerful, why would we need so many AWACS planes anyway?" :)

Balance I imagine it is probably a lot like riding a bike. If you have a realistic bicycle simulator where you have to use a controller to shift your weight, you probably won't get far in the sim. On the other hand, when you are there and can rely on your sense of balance to detect the slightest movement or force, you can immediately counter it. You just can't replicate this in any sim. We miss so much in being unable to affect some of our finer senses.

That's pretty much what I was saying. I see complaints a little earlier in this thread about how slow it is moving when it hits the target... It makes sense that it would be moving more slowly at impact than a bomb in free-fall that doesn't try to convert downward momentum to more horizontal travel.