RedTiger

You said "avionics", remember? Avionics does not only constitute the radar. What I'm saying is that I highly doubt a 5th gen air frame with 4th gen avionics is going to stand a chance at being equal to a fully 5th gen fighter. This is what you seemed to suggest...let them use stealth to get WVR and then dogfight. Don't waste money on all the expensive integrated systems the Raptor has. IMO, that would be a total failure and a waste of the PAK-FA. Russia should just make a stealth MiG-29 if all they want to do is win a dogfight. Even then, my money would still be on the Raptor vs. a lower-tech LO fighter.

Man, I'm so on the fence about this one. I've heard such great reviews of the FS9 version -- basically saying that its the first flight sim they've played with an air plane that actually feels like a chunk of metal flying through air. My problem is that I don't know if learning to use another Sim (FSX) AND learning a very complex study-sim aircraft is worth the time considering it can't really fly any missions.

If it wants to get the first shot and maintain equal SA, it sure as heck does. This is an extreme example, but pretend the PAK-FA is an F-22 but with the radar and avionics of a MiG-29. Are you really sure that the F-22 isn't going to eat it alive? There's a lot more to the Raptor than just stealth.

Bye Leafer! Best of luck! :)

I'm home from work now, so let me better explain. I'm aware that they might have needed fuel, but how about you stow the truck somewhere and figure out another way to give them the stolen fuel? Did they intend to sell it? If so, it would be even more imperative that you and your customers are NOT blown up in the process of the transaction. Did they bother to tell them it was stolen: "hey, buyer beware, we stole this fuel from those invader guys. They're probably pretty pissed off about it". My mother has a saying: "I cannot care more for someone else's own well-being than they do". This is what bothers me in these types of situations. This is precisely what NATO (and to a some extent any modern Westernized force) are having to do in these modern conflicts. They have to care about the lives of civilians more than the civilians' own countrymen do. And they have to care to the point of literally fighting with one hand tied behind their back. They have to care to the point that they'll end up sacrificing their own just because their target doesn't have the sense or the scruples to avoid needless death and destruction. Someone steals something valuable. They intentionally put innocent people in harms way by bringing the valuable thing to them. The guys who it was stolen from smack that thieves hard...arguably harder than what was warranted and some innocent people also get smacked. Who's the first finger pointed at? The guys who did the smacking. Uh hello? Are we going to completely discount the fact that the guys who were smacked were THIEVES and purposefully put innocent people in harms way? Are we just going to call that ok and say the other party should have known better? I totally understand that these poor people were just civilians. The other party is a volunteer force of soldiers. Sacrificing soldiers who volunteered for the job rather than putting innocents in harms way is a noble thing. I'd like to think I would rather put my butt on the line than just drop a bomb and take out a city block just to get to one person. I just don't like how quick people seem to not put any blame on the idiots who caused all this. As for the legality, I can't comment because I'm not familiar with what laws or codes could apply to this. If the hammer is dropped on someone about this, I just hope all the facts are examined thoroughly.

Maybe he means "I know no migs...just MiGs". ;)

For clarity: you're speaking in a legal sense of what you can and cannot do, not in a judgement call on what is right and wrong, correct?

Why not ask the hijackers why they decided to drive the stolen truck in an area populated by civilians? If you care enough about their lives, and you personally willing to take on the risks, why not keep away from them?

GG's example is very, very extreme. In that type of scenario I think the CEO (and the public) would understand that he'd be choosing between. A. At the very least being out of a job B. Being out of a job since the country he's standing in no longer exists or is very severly weakened economically. Public opinion is kinda meaningless in such extreme scenarios.

I re-read that article again. I still think they're nuts. How they think that their ideas are actually beneficial is beyond me, especially when all their supporting information make so little sense. I know that Mr. Sprey is an intelligent guy, but I'm at a loss to figure out why he thinks that idea would be beneficial circa 2010.

That article was a crock of crap that made no sense whatsoever. So much, so wrong. GGTharos might come in here and fully pick it apart, but I can't because I'm confused. I'll try my best. They spent all that time discussing how the SAC-minded guys were all a bunch of idiots (WE GET IT ALREADY! ENOUGH!) to argue...uh...what was their point again? It sounds like they're saying that history proves strategic bombing doesn't work well...so lets scrap the F-22 and F-35. What? :huh: That's just plain non-sequitur. I'm guessing what they're trying to say is that what the USAF status quo wants doesn't work (which isn't always true) and history is repeating itself with the F-22 and the F-35. To prove this, they cite a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the type of missions that the F-22 and F-35 would fly. Their argument is...arguable...but their supporting information stinks. The part about how the out-numbered Sabres flown by pilots with superior training achieved a 10:1 kill ratio basically contradicts everything they say in the rest of the article. Also contradictory, the F-22 is just a much, much further refined and advanced piece of hardware of the concept already established as being dominant in the "unwanted' F-15. Oh and: lol wut Yeah, that's how the Aim-120 works alright. It relies on seeking out the bandit's radar...just like a HARM! :D Obsolete the F-22's electronics? What about AWACS and GCI? You gonna hide from them too with your passive electronics? Why sabotage your argument with BS that isn't even true? Are they hoping that a bunch of politicians who don't know any better will just nod and agree? Good thing the Russians, Chinese, Indians, EU, and the rest of the world are not interested in exploiting any technological breakthroughs! ...oh wait. I think the authors of that article are certifiably insane.

I get the fact that this is an attempt to model one airport exactly as it is, but having never visited that airport, I wouldn't really know the difference. I was expecting to see this terrain at a higher altitude and more of it. I appreciate you sharing that, as it is pretty much the best detail we've seen in a flight sim. Even though I completely understand why, I think it is funny that what we consider to be top-notch detail in a flight sim is probably what a FPS looked like 10 years ago. Thanks for sharing, though. +1 :)

Hence my suggestion for lasers! :D

9.8? You read the part where I said NVIDIA, right? :D

Thanks man! I have a Barracuda, but I'm not sure about the series. I've had it for almost 2 years now with no problems. I'll keep your post in mind in case I ever do! :)

Good point, I didn't think about the laser destroying itself in the process.

The idea was to develop something that hovers or flys above all the mud and dirt. Don't ask me how. I'm a conceptualizer, not a scientist! :P I was thinking about a point where they'd be powerful enough to cut through armor instantly. I guess that would have to be unbelievably powerful and betting that no one develops a very easy answer for armor. Would the ablative stuff you find on the space shuttle work against a laser?

You're welcome! Flight sims are what I call "strange animals". LOMAC is an even stranger one sometimes! ;) You're not the first person to scratch their head at this one! There have been cries of "unoptimized coding" for a long time -- whatever that means. ;) IMO, LOMAC is a very good example of what happens when you try to make a game future-proof. I play MMOs from time to time, and I have found very similar issues to the ones you find in LOMAC in a game called Everquest 2, a game that the developers specifically said they developed to be "future proof" -- in other words, you couldn't run it at the time cranked, quality was supposed to improve as technology improved. This was supposed to increase longevity and keep the game looking up to date over the years as people continued their subscriptions. Unfortunately, technology didn't happen the way they thought it would. I don't think ED has ever said they designed LOMAC this way, but there are similarities between the two, with EQ2 being the only game I've ever heard the developers say was intended to be future proof. Both would seem to expect you to have a very fast single-core processor. Both do not seem to take advantage of video cards in any special way beyond bump mapping and specular effects. The way to get good performace out of both is a blazingly fast CPU with the hardware to eliminate bottlenecks. Even at 3 ghz, you still can't get a steady 30+. You will never get the 40, 60, 80 at all altitudes as you might see in a modern PC game that is more dependent on GPU. This is my experience with Black Shark; I get much better FPS at those lower altitudes than I would in LOMAC, but overall I don't get nearly as good a framerate as I do in LOMAC on average. This probably has less to do with the sim and more that you don't spend any time at high altitudes and get those really smooth FPS spikes. Black Shark is far more optimized that Flaming Cliffs, IMO. I have never gotten around to playing a campaign in Black Shark, but in very small missions the frame rate has been very playable.

Ever noticed how modern sci-fi tends to make kinetic projectile weapons still very prevelent in the future? I'm going to have a good laugh if we do end up having "ray guns" like the 50s and 60s sci-fi. More seriously, directed energy weapons fascinate me. There's some part of me that will always identify them with "The Future". If I went into the future and found out humans had colonized the moon and mars and I'd still ask "that's cool...but do you have laser guns yet?" If these weapons become small enough to be mounted on a vehicles, I predict the next thing that they'll try to do away with will be wheels and tracks. Who needs those when you're weapon has little to no recoil?

Also...consider water. In case you don't know already, water is rendered under the land. It doesn't stop at the shore. The reason behind this, IIRC, is that it was harder and involved extra calculations to make the water stop rendering at the shoreline. And as you can see, LOMAC has A LOT of coastline. ;) Medium water gives you the waves and ripples. High adds sky and cloud reflection. Very high adds reflections of land, ships, planes, etc. If you can run medium comfortably, you can run high. There's minimal difference. Very high, OTOH, will KILL your framerate. Remember how I said that land is reflected on very high? No one has ever been able to confirm this for me, but I swear up and down, left and right, that all the land that sits above the water is being needlessly rendered as a reflection on the water surface. If the water is rendered under the land due to engine restraints, why would it not also keep its other properties, like what it will reflect? The difference between high and very high is just too great for me to think otherwise. Going from from very high to high will increase the frame rate by at least 15. Sometimes the increase will be much greater. High quality is a good comprimise. You still get a nice sky and cloud reflection that is a very noticible increase in eye-candy over using medium. EDIT: I thought I'd mention this just in case. If you use high quality water or above and you have a completely overcast sky, LOMAC might crash at mission load. Modern nvidia cards (not sure about ATI) don't seem to like the way LOMAC renders overcast on the water. As I have updated my drivers, sometimes a driver set will work, but the next set usually kills the ability again. I have yet to try this with my new card, but I'm expecting the same. EDIT #2: Sorry for the long-winded responses!

Frame rate in LOMAC is VERY dependent on your altitude and what you are flying over at the time. That is the most important thing to consider. If you're getting low 20s when you're flying at 30k - 40k feet, something isn't right. Sometimes the FPS counter in LOMAC will be over a hundred for me in that case with no vsync. Now, if I fly very low, almost nap-of-earth over Krasnodar where I can see that massive city stretching out all around me? I'm lucky to get 20. I've seen it go as low as 9 -- NINE -- single digits -- for a short spell during take-off. This is on a E6850 that was OC'd to the same speed as your processor. Note also that I saw a completely negligible FPS increase over the stock 3 ghz speed. I found this funny because in Crysis this small increase made a noticible impact. I gained about 5 FPS. Crysis makes use of the processor more than your average FPS due to physics, but I still assumed that this small increase wouldn't have much effect. To give a "middle of the road" type of figure, in a busy mission, flying at 7500 meters flying over Sevastopol, I'll get a steady 40 fps. I'd like to see someone who has done some -serious- OC'd, like 4 ghz+, (and has the hardware not to bottleneck) post what their various framerates are. I'd be interested to see if there's a point where you bottleneck due to the engine's limitation. While it is true that flight sims are CPU dependent, I think LOMAC is its own beast and just runs however its going to run due to the way it is coded. I'll cite the fact that I can fly over very large cities in DCS: Black Shark and still maintain a framerate that isn't much lower than just flying across the countryside.

I finished the book a couple of weeks ago. Now I get the whole "Holy sh*t! Ed Macy? Really!?" thing. I wish I would have heard about Jugroom fort back when it happened. It is an honor to have you here, sir!

They already play with labels on, why not just go the whole nine yards? :lol:

Does Vista have the hibernate feature that XP has?

At a glance, I would say those are good enough to be illustrations in a coffee table book on the Ka-50 or other aircraft. Very nice.