Raisuli

Oh, we really need to talk! The AH-64 is out to get me...

Thanks, BN! F-16 loves to dance for me, too, and I've always assumed the nut behind the stick was a little loose. That's been slowly improving as my flight time increased, but this provides some concrete cause and effect to think about beyond over-correcting (which I do) and getting ham-ankled with the brakes. I don't expect that nut to get any tighter, but maybe the guys in the tower won't hurt themselves falling down laughing every time I land...

The 'Next' button is aggravating. So much less carpel tunnel from scrolling.

Yeah. Discord. It's almost a shame pretty much every squad/MP server uses it, because I'll only go there for things that have no other solution, like ordering the backplane for a FCP. The S/N ratio is asymptotic to Kindercare as often as not. Discord changes the value metric for a lot of things, but being somewhat non-social (for very large values of 'somewhat') that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Thank you, sir, and have a great weekend!

I've already contracted for a few tons of popcorn. I seriously hope it's going to be enough, because spot prices have skyrocketed...then there's the batteries for my active noise-canceling hearing protection, but if the noise is canceled what's left? Am a bit curious about some of the finer (and honestly less important) details, but my gut is we're going to see a call for a larger closed beta team before the year is out. I have an idea how QA works given I've been sucked into that department since I seem to be the guy who finds all the bugs at work (and I also work directly for the CTO, so no escape either...). One of the developers has been assigned to me, but he's also the guy who collects real avionics. No complaints! The community has gotten its wish, probably because this simplifies life for ED as well. They will get it ironed out sooner or later, but it might be interesting for a while! But, to your point, isn't this going to be a battle between Beta, Stable, and Unified? Last executable standing wins? Scraps of shattered lua littering the battlefield? Rivers of broken mods and disjointed missions soaking into the ground? The unmistakable smell of charred DLLs and torn APIs fills the air?

I would call it very unfortunate, for a number of software development lifecycle reasons. Hopefully ED has their act together, but the complexity of what they do suggests otherwise. This is one case where I would love to be wrong.

I suppose nobody else remembers collecting cereal box tops and mailing them in for some awesome thing like a little toy 747 shortly after it started flying? First you have to eat all that cereal, then get your parents to put the box tops in an envelope with the form cut off the back of a box, then put it in the mail. Then you wait and wait and wait because tracking numbers and overnight delivery were still decades away... We're talking months of waiting here, which at that age is a significant fraction of your total life experience, not to mention you've only eaten one kind of cereal all year; 8 box tops is a lot. Then there's the doubt; maybe the post office lost the letter? What if you wrote out your address wrong on the form? What if... I figure the F-4 will arrive eventually, and I'll probably be around to see it, and two weeks after that it will get about as much use as the toy 747 that took so long to arrive back before Neil Armstrong did whatever that was that made him famous. I don't get tons of sim time and there are other priorities when I do, so it will have to share. Honestly, this reminds me of the F-14 release. All that anticipation, then it came out. A day after that the novelty wore off, and apart from the few dedicated Tomcatters it's just another jet in the hanger. A very, very cool jet to be sure, but so are the others. We'll see how the F-4 fares against all that competition once the novelty wears off.

At least there's hope. Until you see military inaction you don't even know what that is. In fact, if this was the Navy they'd just do more of what they're doing, because if something isn't working that's the obvious solution. Eventually while you're briefing the flight in the ready room the LSOs come in to give you the cut-pass before you launch, just be be efficient... (I'm being mean to LSOs who, for all I know, are conscientious, hard working people. I've never actually met one. I did spend enough years in the Navy to know how it operates in general, though...)

It's my fault. There's only one ship in the Navy I've been aboard that's still in commission...and this one isn't it. Though I did nearly go for a swim doing line handling when she pulled out of Alameda once, and spent some time in number one MMR, where there's still a sea story that on shakedown St. Rickover himself sat where I was sitting and ordered dinner be brought down to him, which they did despite being an egregious violation of the rules. He pretty much ignored dinner; he just wanted to know if they'd actually do it... <edit>Ok, there's a second ship that is still in commission, but not in the US Navy; that was an Ayatollah class frigate</edit>

That cracked me up. In my day, which was the first deployment of the F-18A, the running joke was it had just enough gas to get from one end of the boat to the other. Then again, we compared it to the F-14. With ferry tanks. When I 'cruise the strip' at NTTR, which means mach 1.3 in the viper and 1.15 in the hornet, the hornet get at least three laps before it's time to find a gas station, where the viper is almost lucky to get two, so compared to the F-16 it really does have long legs! The viper can take off (barely) with 10 CBU-97s and 4 AAMs. The hornet can't even carry the -97, which is a shame, but it will take off with 8 -154As and 4 AAMs. There are things the viper carries that I wish the hornet had available, but overall I really do like the hornet's hauling capacity. I boils down to whether you prefer to spend your time on trim and engine management or pushing buttons on the computer. I kinda like all of the above; some days I want to trim and watch those needles, some days I want to push buttons and make things go boom twenty miles away. Some days I take a steam-guage Cessna and fly ninety knots, other days I take the same route at five hundred. But there is something special about 800 knot overhead breaks.

That was normal in those days. Back when we splashed around in that bathtub the R2D2s were pretty much always in standby, or just flat out turned off. Those things have a mind of their own and the first thing on their mind is not always the promotion path of the commanding officer, which runs counter to the purpose of a Naval vessel in those days. The scuttlebutt was nobody felt comfortable leaving them turned on lest something career limiting happen.

I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out why I would want a launcher. I have yet to meet one that adds value; maybe eye candy, and they love to flash marketing crap for the developer, but otherwise just add yet another layer between me and where I want to go. If they want to improve the eye candy give us the option to change the wallpaper that's built in to modules, because quite honestly the vast majority of those are awful. If they want to make some kind of utility to manage mods or setting or whatever fine, but if I want to play DCS I'll launch DCS. Launch a launcher that launches DCS? Why not launch a launcher that launches a launcher that gives you access to the launcher that...

Track files. That's a nice addition. Most of my flying is only suitable as a warning to others, so it would be nice to have it properly documented.

Hoping someone has some ideas... I have 8 controller panels, all of which are Serial, Keyboard, Mouse, Joystick Arduino-style microcontrollers. Almost every time I start DCS, certainly almost every time I start my computer, those boards scramble, so the button assignments for one board are now assigned to a different board. I might get it to work consistently for, say, a day or two. It takes about an hour to assign all the controls on a complex jet like the F-18 or F-16, then the next time I fire up DCS everything is completely fouled up. To figure out of this is OS or DCS I jumped into a (simulator that shall not be named, but I will call it X)plane and all the controls are still configured perfectly. Correct switch on the right board does exactly what I expect. Simulator M also manages to get all the right controls in all the correct places. Come on, if Simulator M can figure this out ED should be humiliated... Only DCS makes me reconfigure every aircraft constantly. Anyone have any insight on this?

My experience is a little different, and I sit arms length from a 38" screen; no noticeable blur anywhere. Then again I use a special (non-progressive) pair of glasses for flight sims, so at the distance I view everything it's all sharp. With my normal computer glasses the screen does blur in places, but that's the lens and not the graphics card. Screenshots might help demonstrate the issues you have.

That's a relief. I always have nothing but sympathy for boomers; the most excitement anyone ever gets there is an emergency pump start. Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled squadron search (but I can't get "Make your altitude two seven thousand, aye. Fifteen degrees up bubble, make turns for three six zero knots!" out of my head.)

Six years in submarines. Let's see...about two, two and a half years to get through the pipe, that puts you on your first boat with three and a half to four years to EAOS. Three and a half to four years on submarines operating a nuclear reactor, which makes you an ET (as opposed to the EMs and MMs who play aft of the tunnel but don't operate the reactor). I've heard nukes get to miss the normal A school, which sounds boring. Six months-ish to qual the panel, another six to qual the boat. Two and a half to three years with your dolphins pinned on submarines operating nuclear reactors 6x6 P&S, probably, unless a lot has changed. The avatar looks boomer-ish, which means three out and three in, most of your time making steerage turns and every transient has burned out, so absolutely nothing ever changes other than the endless drills during the COs day (your real job is to get the CO promoted, and if that means you never sleep that's a price he's willing to pay). Welcome to DCS! You can do barrel rolls here, and it only takes one person to manage flight!

As near as I can tell they're etched into the surface of the RWR display. Pretty much any aircraft can be cold and dark and you still see the rings, so no power required. The other option is to print/etch them yourself and overlay the display.

And, just because, the C position is labeled HLY HG now. Sometimes the only way to get rid of an annoying rodent is the Holy Hand Grenade. I did forget to change "SWITCH LABEL" to "QTY" and very nearly used Dyno tape to correct it, just on principle. I do have Dyno tape, but it's black. No, I don't take this game very seriously. Probably why delays don't ruffle my fur.

Any time there is a controls question, and I'm about to have several, LeCuvier is the solution.

Watched one fly at the airshow in Rockford, IL in 1986. Not going to say no to that. Drove out there just to see an actual MiG up close. Ish.

My simpit went in for a D, or maybe even an E or F, check on December 10th. When it comes out it will have an RWR reticle on the 4th MFD. Basically using the same computer and monitor, everything else got updated and rebuilt. Plan to start wiring the weekend, if all goes well it's back in the air on Sunday and I'll re-export the RWRs.

Hopefully after this weekend the lack of a reticle won't be a problem anymore