EtherealN

As you say, WP tech. They did not need to conduct ELINT agains Iraq to figure out how it worked. They and others had been doing that constantly against the actual WP since WW2. Also, the Iraqis did have a lot of western tech as well, which obviously was well familiar to the west. (Remember, the west supplied them for a decade precisely because they fought the Iranians.) The rebuild youare talking about was 2 years . Regarding use of the term Gulf War, you can see the "Gulf War disambiguation" page on wikipedia. Again, the tricks you mentioned has nothing to do with learning secret protocols and targeting modes. Nor did anyone need Desert Storm to know learning those things is a warwinning idea. Everyone, including nominally neutral countries, already knew that. But thesame thing you mentioned is and was used for a different warwinning tactic; forcing the opponent to show you his IADS components, many of which are mobile and therefore less susceptible to satellite tracking.

Number of russian-speaking staff vs english-speaking staff, in a company based in Moscow. Do the math. :-)

Im not being a smartass. I ampointing out that there are large parts of the world where the gulf war meant what we call iran-iraq war. Including, quite relevantly, the gulf itself. :-) Though, on ELINT having masive impact on another war, I propose World War 2. Desert Storm was decided by massive technological superiority. The coalition did not need it to win, since they could massacre the Iraqi IADS through dropping smart bombs from stealth jets. The land fight was then decided in large part by deception. But again, that wasnt my point. The value of EMCON and ELINT was understood by everyone way before Desert Storm. Flying formations in fake attacks isnt about analyzing specific radar technology, it is about forcing the other guy to show you where his toys are at.

More time than you think . PR has to be planned, subjects checked, facts checked, pictures sourced and vetted etc etc. Information control also has to happen, since devs work in closed dev code and can have inprogress features visible that may ormay not be for public products, may be unfinished and lead to speculation and false hopes etc. What looks like a quick forum post can easily have a full day of work behind it. And considering a work week is 5 days... ;)

What i am pointing out is that "the gulf war" means something else to a lot of people internationally. What you call "the gulf war" can also be called "UN police action against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait". That is less relevant though. My point is that everyone already knew to think about this many decades before Operation Desert Storm. Sweden played that ELINT game with the Soviets in the 50s, pretty much on contract for the USA, and the Soviets did the samr thing back. It is as old as radar itself.

There was no "coalition" in the first gulf war. The first gulf war was a brutal, decade long affair, between Iraq and Iran. The second gulf war was a short thing afterwards, but it did get some CNN... ;)

Wags is busy with work. You know, designing simulators and making content for them. :-)

Svrim, my example was 70s to 90s. I highly doubt anyone learned lessons from the 2nd gulf war before it even happened. :-)

No, but they don't use the "real deal" either. Scanning and tracking are different things though. What i suspect they would restrict is track and some stuff in fire control. (For example, in the JA37 there were weapon guidance modes the drivers were disallowed to use unless in a state of war or specifically arranged exercise, precisely becauee they did not want russian ELINT to be looking at them. So even when locking fire control systems on interlopers (both NATO and not) they would not be showing what they would really be using if it came to a shooting war.

That wasnt reallythe questionthough. :p Interesting the question is, however. Now I want to know too.

In the military you have discipline to keep people from thronging around the women. The discipline situation on the internet, though... :p

Ragnar, hes trolling his squadmate. :-)

It will be fun for the russians to build an EOS grid across all of siberia... In that case, they might as well just add a couple bases and air regiments with PAK-FA's. :P

That's a good point, actually. Either that, or E-SATA, I guess. (Though do they even make chassi with E-SATA ports anymore? My previous one had one (that I never used), but the rebuild I did a couple weeks back didn't have that luxury.

Regarding having an "edge" over the F-15, I'm not sure we can analyze it so simplistically. The two aircraft have different jobs; the F-15 is an air superiority fighter with good BFM capability, the MiG-31 is an interceptor meant to defend a vast area against bombers coming over the pole. The ability of the MiG-31 to engage F-15's efficiently depends a lot on whether the R-33 can be effective against them. Those missiles are designed to attack bombers, not fighters. (Like the Phoenix on the US side.) Basically, it might very well get the first shot, which is of course really nice, but said first shot might also be very easy for the F-15's to defeat. To my mind, the most likely reason the MiG-31 stayed in service in the numbers it has is that there is nothing else that could effectively defend such a huge area without having to add a lot more bases and a lot more aircraft. Someone know if the 33 has been tested against maneuvering fighter-sized targets, and similar for 37 or derivatives (which I guess might be what would equip the 41, unless they are intended to be exclusive to the upgraded MiG-31)?

It's not really Win7 that makes the safety difference for SSD's, it's that current-generation SSD's have a LOT more write endurance than previous generations. You can see here: http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb At present, the simulated write load is 300GB per day (every day) for five years. Some minor issues on the newest Samsung (but it has more overprovisioning to compensate; the "problem" is caused by higher-density cells). For comparison, I've had swaps etcetera (and savedgames folders, everything) on my Samsung 830 for about a year an a half, and the total write load is 6,38TB. Assuming nothing else breaks, I should therefore be good for at least another 10 years or so with this usage pattern. :P Things might be more sensitive on older SSD's, but you have to go a good few generations back for this to become an issue. (Like first-gen Intel SSD's etcetera.)

Now read it: "The Lockheed YF-12 was an American prototype interceptor aircraft" "The program was abandoned following the cancellation of the production F-12B, but the YF-12s continued flying for many years with the USAF and with NASA as research aircraft." Regarding dogfighting: launching missiles at high angels and high speed is NOT dogfighting. MiG-25 pilots trying to "dogfight" is precisely what killed them in Iraq. NATO believing the MiG-25 was both a really fast plane and a dogfighter is what caused the US to spend rediculous amounts of money developing the F-15. But when a MiG-25 defected to Japan, they found that it was not a dogfighter at all - but a highly capable interceptor, sure.

It'll come in due time, I'm sure. From my understanding, the problem is that back in the 32-bit days when launcher and simulator had to be completely segregated (memory concerns, renderer issues etc), the simulator was (understandably) written to take a lot of things as launch parameters. Therefore, getting those things back in might require some re-engineering of the simulator code, which can easily be harder than it sounds. (Changing existing code is always harder than writing code on a fresh design.) We've got the remapping in, and I doubt the devs will stop there. But as for a "when", I don't know. Depends on priorities, staff availability and so on and so forth. (Remember that you can't take just any programmer on the team to do any random job; they're all specialized and bad things would happen if you try to force them to suddenly work on code that they are not famliar with. Think of it like asking a humanities author to suddenly write a book on quantum physics, and you'll see that just as "author" doesn't mean you can write a book about any topic, "programmer" doesn't mean you are well placed to hop between fields.)

TOPIC: MiG 41

I think the difference is implicit; patrol vs intercept. Basically between having planes patrolling and having planes on alert ready to take off an burn like mofos in the desired direction. For me though, as long as it sounds as awesome as the 31, go MiG! :D

...when the TrackClip Pro doesn't get delivered on time? What you need: Coathanger Tape Reflective vest Scissors Rage Looks pretty good, doesn't it? :)

Also the question of whether the maps in question would even be practical in DCS World. Depending on the purpose they were built for, they might simply be too small. They might completely lack damage models (and thus have a huge chunk of dev work left that, considering other factors, just isn't worth it), etcetera etcetera etcetera. So yeah... Unless it's got a DCS Press Release about it, try not to read much into it. That said, I would love to have them. But there's lots of things I'd love to have. :)

Who knows, but don't carry that too far. What worked well in a purpose-build, can be brought back in a general build. It just probably entails a LOT of troubleshooting and adaptation. After all, most developers start their code in one environment, and then gradually test the code against more and more permutations. It's usually a case of there being different kinds of "tricks" you can use in those different situations, though. The point being, if you made it run on, say, triple GTX 480, it might still be eminently possible to make it run just fine on a single GTX 780. But perhaps you used a lot of special stuff in your previous code that was specifically meant to work around having three 480's (perhaps because you wanted so much more screen real estate), and to get the same code running on just the one card and on one "PC" you have to rip those parts out and replace them with "PC oriented" code. Basically, who knows. Just don't assume "hardware" on everything. There is also the variable of which hardware the CODE was written for. After all, if you write code in 68k assembler to make it run REALLY well on a Motorola-based computer (read: Amiga), your massively overpowered PC will still have problems understanding what to do with it. So it's not even necessarily a matter of hardware capability. Could simply be a case of "different hardware", full stop.

It's amazing what happens when people make assumptions. :) I'll pose some rethorical questions for you to consider: 1) What hardware was used to run those sessions that are being posted around? Unknown. 2) Was the software hardware-agnostic, or purpose-built? Unknown. 3) What other components are running? Unknown. 4) Is that using a "PC" setup, or a cluster? Unknown. 5) Is that built for DTS, or full-motion simulation? Unknown. Basically, your definition of being "behind" is... weird... since it would require that you know the answers to these questions. Do you? Something I could pose as a scenario (and honestly, I don't know if this is "correct", I have no involvement with those kinds of projects): we have seen some interesting pits used with the Mi-8 (remember the one showing the "clack-clack" of the trimmers in russian helos?). We've seen youtube vids with fullsize cockpits associated to those devs. Considering the development cost of said pit, my personal guess is that they're running something completely different for physics (or perhaps something that the Mi8 physics was derived from later, who knows), and had a rendering cluster to run the dome around the fullsize pit. ...as I am sure you'll understand, building software towards running a rendering cluster on very specific hardware is a TAD different to making the same software run on PC's that not only can have any of a wild assortments of GPU's, they might even have any of several different operating systems... :P It's a completely different ballgame. People underestimate how HARD it is to make something run well on the "PC" compared to homogenous, purpose-built, platforms.

I have absolutely no say or special knowledge, but I'd be a bit careful with such assumptions. Re-using code when possible is often a necessary part of building a viable business, since it allows you to offset development costs on multiple products. A classic example would be Quake 1 and Quake 2. Both were fullprice products, but Quake 2 re-used a lot of what was done for the Quake 1 engine. You see the same thing in games like the Battlefield series. (And the most extreme example is when you adapt your existing game engine for multiple games.) Basically, I'm sure they'll do whatever they have to do to both give us awesome products and stay afloat as a company themselves. No-one will be happy if they go belly up because they failed to charge appropriately for their products. This is, after all, a very harsh market to be in.