panton41

This made me think of a line from Firefly: "Six men came to kill me one time. And the best of 'em carried this. It's a Callahan full-bore auto-lock. Customized trigger, double cartridge thorough gauge. It is my very favorite gun… This is the best gun made by man. It has extreme sentimental value… I call her Vera." "Well my time of taking you seriously has certainly come to a middle."

I upgraded from 32GB to 64GB recently for reasons unrelated to gaming and found overall performance improved. One thing that helps is that Windows is able to use more RAM for the file cache, which improves load times across the board.

FWIW, the F-15 wasn't designed to carry that heavy of a weapons' load. Four Sidewinders, four Sparrows and two or three fuel tanks that would be dropped before combat anyway. Now, the F-15E Strike Eagle certainly carries a crazy amount of weapons, but that came almost a decade after the original Eagle came into service, probably 20 years after it was originally designed, and mostly because they overengineered the hell out of the original design.

[citation needed] People have been saying this for decades with nothing to back it up except handwaving and saying "everyone knows it." For gaming Windows 10 and XBox One OS are functionally identical other than the GUI and XBox getting rid of a lot of legacy Win32 cruft. For that matter, the Game Mode in Windows 10 brings the behavior of desktop Windows more in line with the XBox version when it detects games are running. I'm using default Windows 10 networking settings, other than changing my DNS, pay for 400Mbps, routinely get 450+Mbps and my pings are limited by DOCSIS overhead. And that's running a speed test with other users on the network streaming and playing online games.

There's close to 400 KC-135s currently in US service and that number of tankers is too few for how much demand there is. Civilian aerial tanker services are a thing, when they really shouldn't be.

I've noticed that even when it goes on sale on Steam it's merely a leg. Not that CMO or DCS modules are cheap, but it feels like it's priced for professionals who can write off the expense to their company.

I've always wondered why the USAF didn't just add a drogue receptacle to the KC-135 fuselage like the KC-10 or wing pods which would practically be snap-on with decades of service on Navy and Marine transports. Or, for that matter, just replace them decades ago. The newest KC-135 was built when Lyndon Johnson was president. Bubblegum, duct tape and bailing wire are probably the three main things keeping them flying these days.

The F-16C Viper has become one of my favorite modules, despite its early access status and in large part because what is completed puts its capabilities roughly on par with the original release of Falcon 4.0 in the late-1990s (other than ground radar, obviously) which was my favorite flight sim "back in the day." Though I miss Mavericks (I rarely used HARMs), the fact air-to-ground is limited to dumb bombs and laser guided only makes it feel like the mid-1990s flight sims I cut my teeth on which nearly all focused on Desert Storm. So while I'm excited for more modern weapons in the future, I'm just happy to be tooling around in the Viper in VR and partying like its 1999... again.

Not only did I do it in Falcon 4.0, they actually had a sound for when it happened. (A man screaming in terror.) I once set it as the sound for an early wake up alarm. Once.

Dark Helmet: I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate. Lone Star: So what does that make us? Dark Helmet: Absolutely nothing.

One time I was going to go for a hop in the F-5 and decided to taxi to the runway with the canopy open. Then I took off without closing it...

Honestly, if a NATO navy wanted to sink the Kunz they'd use submarines. In real life it's not going to be a concern for the foreseeable future (Last I heard its in really bad shape and might never cruise again.) But the Chinese have one of the Kunz's sister ships fully operational, and a second indigenously designed carrier that was strongly based on the Kunz's and two more of the latter being built.

Shades of the Mythical Man Month. Adding more people to a project won't speed it up - nine women pregnant for one month won't make a baby faster - and adding money is essentially the same concept.

Take the AEGIS Cruiser for example: The Standard Missile can pretty reliably shoot down... a drone behaving how testers think an antishipping cruise missile might act. What if they don't? CWIS work pretty well, again against drones. Again, drones. The shipboard systems can engage hundreds of targets within minutes until the magazines deplete... in a computer simulation. The radar works amazingly well, under near perfect conditions against a small number of target (mostly civilian overflight) and even then the Iran Air Flight 665 incident happened. Let's not get into hundreds of "Vampires" cluttered against dozens more civilian and friendly air traffic. None have been tests in real life situations, even under otherwise test conditions. (Like hundreds of real missiles with no warhead, for example.) I'd call it a crap shoot, but the dice have vastly better odds. FWIW, Naval planners know this. The book I mentioned is a textbook at the US Naval Academy (among others) and is considered a basic primer on modern naval warfare.

I think in 100 years satellite-based radio navigation, advanced INS with accuracy that can't even be predicted today and digital compasses updated dynamically from a database of known offsets will be standard navigation even for civilians. Let's face it, 100 years ago cloth-covered biplanes navigating by the seat of the pants were top of the line fighters. Twenty years later we had radar, radio navigation, all-metal monoplanes and the very earliest jets were on the drawing board. Twenty years after that supersonic fighters with radar targeting, nuclear air-to-air rockets and transcontinental bombers were normal. Let's not get into the advances in 1980 and 2000. Trying to figure out technology in 2120? Ask a question, shake a Magic Eight-Ball and see what comes up, because that as good of an answer as the smartest research engineer will have today.

For the near future there's merely a need to keep magnetic offset charts up to date. In the longer term all bets are off. I like to read and write science fiction, so there's plenty of times where my brain is thinking 100 years in the future. One of my stories, set in 2116, makes a passing reference to the "canals of New York" to give you an idea. (Turns out, Kim Stanley Robinson had the same idea in his novel 2140.)

Modern fleet defense is totally untested and no one knows how effective it really is. For that matter, no one knows how effective the antishipping cruise missile is against defending targets. They have never once been fired against target that actively tried to defend itself and the closest they have come, in the Flaklands, shows countermeasures like chaff and ECM are extremely effective. The only warships that have been hit were extremely small and there is no knowledge of how well a large warship could take damage other than the vague knowledge that the US Navy fired an ungodly amount of weapons at the USS America and didn't manage to sink her. (The exact results are classified, but the video of a controlled scuttling of a visibly heavily damaged ship are open record and can be found on YouTube.) During the Tanker Wars of the 1980s, large civilian bulk crude carriers could take quite a few hits from Harpoons and Exocets and not sink. The USS Stark was hit by two Exocets in 1987, without attempting to defend, and was taken out of action. Read Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat by CAPT Wayne Hughes to get a better understanding, but we're at the "dawn of the 20th century and haven't had a real naval war in decades" point in naval combat where the results of the battles of World War I surprised everyone. (Hint, not in a good way, but in an "oh shit, we were totally wrong" way.)

In Command Modern Operations the surefire way for a Ticonderoga-Class VLS cruiser to sink a Kirov is to use the Standard Missiles as Surface-to-surface until the Kirov empties its magazines, then fire all of your Harpoons. It takes about 80 missiles, both surface-to-surface and surface-to-air defending against the Kirov's missiles. Fire Harpoons first and they're shot down like target practice. The simple fact boils down to the VLS Tiggy holds more missiles in total than a Kirov. Seriously, though, if you want "big picture" operation ideas look at Command Modern Combat, it is to higher level planning what DCS is to individual units. (Both companies have served as military contractors for training software.)

Look up a map of the drift of the North Pole over the course of time it's been tracked. In the last 50 years it's moved dramatically from solidly in Canada to very close to the actual pole. There's been a growing anomaly in the South Pacific for at least a century tracked by both geologists and astronomers (in the latter case, it's due to a weakening of the Van Allen belts). But besides that, you'd have to pick through tons of random geology news articles that talk about signs, though an actual total reversal might be a while off, but there's evidence in the past it's happened within a human lifetime and could cause enough weakening in the next century to cause a navigation problem. https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/10/the-north-pole-moved-to-the-north-pole-in-a-single-human-lifetime/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/02/05/earths-magnetic-north-pole-has-officially-moved/#52d129fc6862

I won't question the others, but support those who are saying wait for the GeForce 30xx series. It's looking to be so vastly superior to the 20xx it's not even remotely funny. Like half again the performance, raytracing for "free" (which doesn't benefit DCS but does other games and the nVidia iRay-based CGI pinups I do for fun) and 2/3 the power usage. On top of that the rumor mill is that it'll be cheaper because AMD and Intel (of all companies, Google their Xe architecture) are making competitive discrete cards these days.

Don't think of them as "bugs" think of them as "features."

Hey, 0500 hours is too goddamn early to be fighting. Wake them up at a reasonable hour, and pour coffee down their throats, and they might be more willing. By, I don't know, noon or so I'm ready and willing. But, 0500 hours? Jezus, I need my shuteye.

Despite magnetic heading versus true, wouldn't TACAN focus on bearing from the transmitter itself? Ultimately, we're interested in the bearing information transmitted by a radio antenna, not the earth itself. And, in the scheme of things and beyond the scope of the game, the magnetic compass is going to become an increasingly useless instrument in the coming future. The various world navies, who have a vested interest in magnetic compass accuracy, have been tracking a pole shift for the better part of a century and all indications is that it's rapidly increasing to the point a steady magnetic pole might not last the century and, honestly, even within in my lifetime (I'm 41) hasn't been steady.

I will say, the times I've flown in real life one thing I noticed that I'd never seen a simulator was rainbows in the cloud tops.

1) Was experimented with off and on for a long time. In the 1990s there was speculation that the Su-27 and R-73 missile had that capability, complete with rearward facing radar, but I don't think it panned out in real life. 2) There's a long-range air-to-air missile in development for the US that has a two-stage design called the Long Range Engagement Weapon. (Which is different than the AIM-260 JATM.)