Raisuli

No no, let's be clear, the taxi light is first, the wall paper is second. This is third at best. They really need to get to the important things before they worry about trivial stuff like...everything else.

Craters of the moon National Security Area. The most bombed real estate on the planet; people used to go to Vegas to watch the sun rise in the west, but MOST of those are subsidence craters. Quite a few building codes that exist today started on Frenchman Flats out there. Sedan was a 'peaceful atom' demonstration to dig canals, reservoirs, etc quickly and radioactively. Apparently the Soviets actually did that according to my wife. The best were the two tests in western Colorado; sort of an early attempt at fracking. Worked great, but the natural gas produced was radioactive and had to be burned off. Second best was a decoupling test in Mississippi. Six months after the second test the void was so hot it burned the paint off a camera they lowered into the hole. Then there's Cannikin... Seriously, who thinks all that was a good idea? Once in a while I'll helo over that way and try to identify test craters. I don't know them all...

I have no idea why I haven't seen this before today, but...Megan at 34:52 talking about the F-14 is enough to get me out of the hornet long enough to learn this beast. The F-14 was THE jet when I grew up and was in the Navy. I was on the F/A-18A's first deployment, and all we wanted were F-14 flybys. The F-18 was the punch line of a joke. Oddly, we also didn't see the F-18 in the air much. It blew the mach on a flyby during the tiger cruise up from Hawaii, which was fun...but almost all my pictures are VF-21 with a few of VF-154.

The real reason? >200 hours in the hornet <50 in the viper Which one do I know better I don't really have the time to get good at both. If the Viper came out first those would be reversed.

Awesome! My dad was stationed at Tinian first when he got to the Pacific theater. Slept through a typhoon there. Nose turret gunner in B-24s. Ball turret was his alternate position. Still have his gunners manual from the 1940s.

Take care of yourself, SD! You're more important than the thread; it was just all very sudden and we missed you!

Or more tellingly remove this thread as well

I'm pretty sure in an Apache it would be some variation on a name of Peter. Unless you want to bring in Stanislav Petrov. I'd just sit with the engine off and talk to him all day. Partly because my Russian isn't great and it would take a while to get my ear back, but mostly because he would have amazing stories to tell. Maybe a 'Harry' AI, but I don't think that would be possible without getting political.

The other reason I come here. I thought it was just me.

When Burbles fight it's a Burble Battle When Burbles battle with paddles it's a Burble Paddle Battle When Burbles battle with paddles in a puddle it's a Burble Puddle Paddle Battle... ... When Burbles battle with paddles in a puddle on a poodle eating noodles it's a... Isn't the burble really just an area of turbulence created by the island and all the hardware therein associated, so if they come up with a way to model that turbulence wouldn't the aircraft automagically respond, or is this something that needs to be fine-tuned for everything with a hook? Now, for the dumber question; would this be less of an issue for a straight-deck carrier? I'm assuming we worry about this because the flight path crosses the turbulent air created by the island as we aim for the angled deck. Just trying to wrap my head around this. I did like John Young's biography when he mentioned the burbles were classified, and different for every carrier.

Learned something new! Good day.

I've finally concluded (after working on CQ) that this is really a problem with the turbulence on the water being single order. There's wind ripple, and five or six orders of other waves, ripples, and swells going on at once in a dynamic environment. If you watch videos of aircraft around the boat you can really see how the multiple order turbulence blocks the kind of mirror-like reflections we get. Is it 'realistic'? Maybe, but those reflections down low sure aren't. People are pulling out pictures taken at 40,000 feet just to get close to our waterline reflectivity. Since I don't think they're going to change the fluid dynamics model my vote would be 'unrealistic' turbulence and more realistic reflections. Well, that and when you look at the wake of the CV doing 27 knots you can't not laugh. Even the Pegasus had more wake than that.

The answer hasn't changed, but I thought this was interesting given the OP: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Nellis+AFB,+NV/@36.2267336,-115.0516239,104m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x80c8dd979f1a4539:0x890a4a296fadb5ef!8m2!3d36.2406295!4d-115.0542759 Google maps, Nellis, switch to satellite. There are a bunch of hornets, and several have their wings folded. Let nobody say they never fold them at Nellis!

The enterprise was the last carrier to lose the bridle catchers, I believe. Those were the big things that stuck out in front of the flight deck and 'caught' the bridles so they could be re-used. As far as I know, and I am not a SME, any carrier could launch a bridle. Once. Because the bridle ends up at the bottom of the ocean. The French do not re-use theirs last time I checked.

Heatblur == $instantPurchase This would also give us a reasonable stand-in for the Deuce and Dart (F-102 and F-106) in cold war scenarios, but I want an AIR-2B if we're going that route. On the other hand, we're missing so much Soviet iron it will be pretty lonely in those cold war scenarios...all fueled up and nobody to fight... Incidentally the 'muricans bought a handful; pretty boring livery, but can do the Century Series stand in liveries, and the Draken is MUCH sexier in the air...

Yes

I'm almost twenty-thirtynine, and I still get bummed out when I park my I-16 in the nuke hanger in Incirlik and they won't mount up those two B-61s. I know the I-16 carries bombs; I've seen 'em under the wings! Bloody ground crew takes off for lunch and leave a pair of purple meanies in the hanger and I have no way to hang them! It would be cool to have arresting gear (air force style) on runways. It would be even cooler to have IFOLS and a box painted on the runways. The ROI on these kinds of things is vanishingly small, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be cool. Just like it would be cool to have those B-61s. Totally useless, but cool.

The last time I saw Cell Block 70 we were both home ported in Alameda. Been a little while. The Enterprise was ported in Alameda as well in those days. In classic California fashion I overheard someone say they would never permit a nuclear anything in San Francisco bay. Well...Enterprise: 8 reactors. Vinson: 2. California: 2. Arkansas: 2 (all of those were visible). San Francisco (not visible): 1. Let's not talk about the sub base in Vallejo, or all the purple meanies that might or might not be on board any or all of those aforementioned vessels, including the boomers... Last time I was in San Diego was boot/beep at NTC before reporting to Great Mistakes for A school.

It's worth noting that this is the group that announced they were working on an AI A-6, and some time later also said that, eventually, RealSoonNow in geologic terms, they will build a full fidelity A-6. Oddly enough, that same company has said they were working on an AI Draken. Does make a person wonder what next gen project(s) might be in the pipe...around the time the Pacific Ocean is narrower than the Atlantic, but RealSoonNow...

Oh, I never take the picture's color as given; I've been there, seen that (taken the pictures), got the sea service ribbon to prove it, and I have seen the ocean that over saturated. On a grey day the ocean is dark blue, on a sunny day it's bright blue, in the middle of the north pacific in 40' waves on the way to Petropavlovsk it's still blue, but more of a grey blue. Pictures do NOT do blue water justice; you just have to see it to appreciate it. 12 (*cough*) miles off the coast of Kamchatka it's greener; at least that was the color of the water breaking over the bows of that Soviet patrol boat and drenching the poor sods manning the forward 40mm gun mount. At least until our CO politely-ish asked them to turn off their fire control radar. (They picked up our garbage, and we made sure to put in some...entertainment when we tossed ours, but my wife has since told me the officers would have kept all that...things are different on that side of the curtain). I can't argue too much with color; particularly near any coast. Off Hvar and along the Dalmation coast the water is crystal clear, off California it's kind of green, off Virginia it's just icky. In the Indian Ocean you can see the bottom (no, not really). It's the reflectivity that gets to me. I've only seen the ocean reflect like that a couple times. At 40,000 with the sun shining it's close, but there's always chop and rarely are there never any whitecaps at all when you're down low. I've had to use radalt to figure out how far I am from the water, which needs some tweaking. Not convinced I've ever been near a large land mass and there was no wind, leaving no whitecaps... Better than 2.5? Oh, yeah. Work in progress, though. They'll get there eventually, or I'll just keep using radalt...as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. Ugh. The gulf. 120 degree wind blows off the desert and hits 90+ degree water. No wonder the people who live there are cranky. Not exactly Hawaii, where at least the breeze is refreshing. Seriously, depth and content of the water is everything. The gulf is a bathtub, and full of all kinds of sediments and nastiness. Hawaii is a sea mount, and all you get is ocean water flowing freely all around. This is why the ocean is less clear anywhere near a large land mass (other than Croatia, apparently).

This is so fake! Tom Cruise was NEVER that young (he's 15 days older and a whole lot nuttier than I).

Navy pilots don't need ILS; ICLS is something completely different. At least that's the thinking in NAVAIR, which has steadfastly refused to put civilian precision landing equipment in Navy fighters forever. Nobody knows why, but apparently it's cheaper to train a new pilot than add $150 worth of electronics to the jet. That there have been so few deaths from Naval aviators trying to land in bad weather is a testament to the skill of the operators.

On a cruiser (DLGN) we kept a white stern light and the port and starboard lights on, otherwise it was always darken ship. If life was likely to become more exciting the white stern light would be a blue convoy light. Red lights on the bridge; hugely visible on the forward deck at night. I read a book sitting on the aft missile launcher on a moonless night; the stars are that bright in the middle of the IO once you adjust to the darkness.

I spent three and a half years at sea, and I've seen water like this...maybe twice. First thing I noticed when I finally came out of the clouds, and was half-hoping it was part of the 'work in progress'.

I don't see any chatter about this, which makes me wonder if this isn't a local problem, but two out of my three Cougar MFDs have stopped working. They show up in Thrustmaster's software, they light up, they appear everywhere but DCS. All modules, incidentally; those two devices simply don't show up in the controls any more. This is fairly recent, and the only change I made was adding a half keyboard to slaughter SOC auditors Zombies in CoD. If I unplug the extra KB and reboot I get the same behavior. I know modules like A-10 II really screw with MFD controllers, so I wondered if something changed. In the short term I'm going to spend more time with aircraft that rely on the stick and rudder and less on the piccolo.