Moa

Hi Tom. Great work. I think the carrier should have a yellow line that extends from the centerline down the aft of the ship. Helps you line up. Dunno whether the Bush has it but at least some other Nimitz-class seem to have (or have had) that paint scheme. Don't forget colours for the meatball too (perhaps you've already done this).

Usually it is hard to interfere with the signal of a satellite controlled device, unless you are near the sending station. I'm not an expert, but I remember reading this somewhere. This is what the Israelis did when they commandeered the Syrian missile batteries during their raid on the Syrian nuclear research site ("Operation Orchard"). What can be done instead is to blanket jam the carrier frequency used by the control signal. This is a brute force, but effective, way of blocking remote control of a device. If remote control was blocked there should have been autonomous guidance systems that caused the drone to RTB. Several years ago in Iraq it was made public that the video feeds for the first generation of US UAVS were not encrypted. This was made on the assumption that no enemies would be smart enough to intercept them (!?), plus encryption uses extra (precious) comms bandwidth. The insurgents using some cheap satellite TV gear and smarts were able to see what the American commanders were seeing (there are some very clever Iraqis). Hopefully that was rectified on this ship, although you never know, the same hubris could apply.

IvanK, when you are in ILSN mode 4 waypoints are selected (not visible to players, but you can see them if you are exporting nav data). IIRC, Waypoint 1 is on the base (the others are on approach). I think this is why you are seeing what you do - althogh if course this behaviour could be modified by the developers. It would be nice it if worked as you suggested and showed the airfield number.

From the article, it appears the Russian government don't seem care about the Syrians themselves (yes, yes, they are not unique in this - but it is no less true), just the arms deals they can make. I think this trip to Syria was part of an arms transfer. The fleet is just a bit of muscle to make United Nations members think twice before halting and inspecting the transports. Supposedly this arms transfer will bring peace to the region - perhaps when the Syrian government has killed all every last opposing civilian this will be true.

Cheers Chris, hope you had a great birthday.

For some reason this never shows up on the list, but is always pretty busy: 104th Phoenix A-10C: 75.67.253.246:10308

My point was than the sabre rattling is the same - and has the same reaction from its intended targets (who don't think Russia is someone good to deal with).

> Looking at Russian recent defense expenditure trends and acquisition programmes, they are constantly reinforcing their power over their regular sphere of influence. Bah! This is just Russia is throwing another tantrum. This time it's because they won't get to threaten western Europe at will. Russia is a great regional power and nothing more. It never has, and never will have global reach as the US has. Russia will have to spend more and more effort securing its territories in the east. Rattling its sabre in the european sphere does it no favors - in the same way North Korea's posturing is equally ridiculous, and very apparent to all except fans.

Hi Sobek. If you have two monitors it can be helpful to display the GPU-Z sensors while you are running and see if you are running out of Video Memory. Once the video card starts swapping with main RAM you can get noticeable stutters. I also found last night that if I leave anti-aliasing and an-isotropic filtering (after a FC2 session) on my ATI card as well as having the same effects enabled in A-10C I got horrible performance. Not only stuttering but continual swapping from the hard disk as it loaded textures. I guess it must have run out of video memory for the filtering and was thrashing away. Once I turned the driver-level effects off and let A-10C manage it everything was sweet again (=> not an A-10C problem). I wonder whether you should check for the same things with X-Plane 10 on your rig? GPU-Z is very handy here.

Wow! Love the packed carrier in the screenshots section. The flight model also runs on its own thread. I'll definitely be getting this.

Just had a look at how the program is started. The default command-line arguments are: java -mx512m -cp .:overlay.jar overlay.OverlayFrame Now Java has a safety mechanism that limits how much memory a program can use (very important for servers or programs downloaded from the Net - and Java is designed to be very safe in this regard). The -mx512m command line options tells the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that this program is allowed to use a maximum of 512 MB of RAM. If any more more memory than that is request the program will try and 'garbage-collect' to recycle unused RAM, but if that recycling of memory fails the program will fail. From the 104th Phoenix moving map I see that the memory required for the (huge) unpacked map with antialiasing is around 1024MB in memory (plus some more for the rest of the program). So I tried running the program with the following command line and loading the TC-1 map: java -mx1512m -cp .:overlay.jar overlay.OverlayFrame which allows the program to have up to 1.5 GB. The map did not get displayed, but I also didn't see an out-of-memory exception either. Some other things I should mention about the program (as a mostly-Java dev I couldn't help noticing). The developer has embedded directory paths of "\" which means the program can't find some resources on my Mac. He should have used File.separator instead (which works on Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris etc by sorting out what character it should be). Also a simple 'manifest' file would have allowed you to double-click to run the program instead of having to specify overlay.OverlayFrame for the program entry point (Java programs can have an arbitrary number of entry points). It is surprising this wasn't done as it is very easy to do. I hope anyone else developing Java programs learns these tidbits on how to improve your applications.

Technically this is entirely possible since it is a Java application. You could embed it in another application (if the licensing permitted), or add enhanced class that can read igormk's excellent TC-1 map. I have done this to several Java programs in the past so this is entirely possible to enhance such software even without the source code. The license conditions specifically prohibit do this though. http://www.theoverlaymaker.com/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=34 From the license: 4. The General Software Licence Agreement specifically prohibits:b. Modifying, translating, reverse engineering, de-compiling, or creating derivative works based on The Overlay Maker, in whole or in part. @RIPTIDE: I'm at work so can't put a screenshot up. Could you (or Presing) please put up a screenshot of the 104th moving map (even if you have an old version). This moving map is in development by 104th Phoenix and will be released soon (it's currently usable, but it does need a bit of polish for general use). It's not a map editor but it does show TC-1 in action.

A full-treatment hasn't been done AFAIK, but with a couple of good tricks a very good approximation can be done (even 8 years ago). Considering no sim can accurately simulate a precise weather model (eddies, turbulence) and its effect on an aircraft we'll never get a perfect simulation of reality, this means such an approximation for fluid flow in the rest of the application is almost certainly good enough for a game. Please see: http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/people/stam/reality/Research/pdf/GDC03.pdf I believe some implementations are moving the calculations to the GPU, where you could do the full shizzle in real-time (especially if you have a dual-GPU card like me, which is underutilized by most applications).

XKCD 980 - Money Chart http://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-6400&y=-8960&z=1 All those people who thought that $20 for an *upgrade* of Black Shark is too much. This chart will help put it all in perspective. I especially hope that those of you spending (on average) $1320 on your smartphone annual bill without blinking but have the gall to complain about the $20 for the upgrade (or worse, complain and then try pirate it) will read the chart and have a think.

Very nice beczl!

It's not an individual sortie debriefing per-se, but you can get pilot monthly and career statistics ('stats') when you fly certain servers. For example, Flaming Cliffs 2 stats: 51st Sqn stats: http://www.51st.org/stats/index.php 104th Stats (also covers =4c=): http://stallturn.com/104th/(requires the free Java browser plugin, download for free from http://www.java.com) Virtual Naval Air Operations (VNAO) stats: http://stallturn.com/scores/ (also requires Java plugin). Logging has changed a bit in A-10C/BlackShark2 and stats for these sims are actively being worked on (by 104th at least, we're making good progress).

Thanks for letting me know. I'll take a look.

No big deal, non-linear or not, since you just solve the differential equations numerically. Modern computers are more than powerful enough to do this (especially in multi-threaded applications).

It is cool to see how others fly this mission. Couple of things: 1) Pirates these days are based on 'motherships' and take over cargo ships. That's why if you fly over the freighters to inspect them you'll be given a message to let you know whether they've been taken over or not. 2) For night fighting in the DCS:A-10C you can use Night Vision Googles (once the sun has gone down) or a flare pod. The following link has screenshots where I carried a flare pod for some fellow 104th members: http://www.104thphoenix.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=3366 I hoped you liked my mission - it's a bit different.

Actually in this article he already received financial success: http://techhaze.com/2010/03/interview-with-x-plane-creator-austin-meyer/ Here he talks about how choosing OpenGL (when everyone else went with DirectX) he was able to quickly port to the iPhone (which has OpenGL ES hardware, as do most portable devices). He got half a million sales relatively quickly on the iPhone and iPad and the profit he made was US $7 per copy. This dwarfed his PC sales. So, if you do the math you can see how he has already profited handsomely, although belatedly. The general theme developers should take away (and I did) is that exclusively tying yourself to Windows (or any single platform) limits the opportunities you'll have later. Hopefully with the extra cash X-Plane will get the resources to make v10 really good.

Wow aaron886 that vapour looks nice. Is that in a published mod? No weapons on the wings, what's with that? :)

Here are some screenshots from a mission that VNAO (Virtual Naval Air Operations) flew on the weekend. The objective was to find and destroy SCUD launchers (using beczl's excellent SCUD mod) A gallery (low-res) can be found on these forums at: http://forums.eagle.ru/album.php?albumid=583 A complete slideshow gallery (hi-res) can be found here: http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k529/104th_Moa/VNAO-2011-11-19/?albumview=slideshow Enjoy! Credits: * 14th_JAR - for the mission * 104th_Presing - for integrating the SCUD into the VNAO mod * beczl - for the SCUD mod and other excellent models

... and the Israeli pilot selection is very tough. Plus, they practice "relegation" in their squadrons so the fighter pilots have to perform very well to keep their place. ... and Israel pumps out more scientists and entreprenuers per capita than just about anywhere else. That is why they innovate in targetting pods, UAVs, helmet-mounted sights (got a mate who worked in this area), anti-missile defences (including lasers), Western-Soviet weapon mashups (think Su-25 Skorpion among others), and electronic warefare (when they raided the Syrian nuclear reactor site a few years back they took over the Russian missile batteries, lol). Lots of Americans impressed with 'their' military tech don't realise it is often of Israeli design (just as Intel's CPUs are) or joint US-Israeli design (often meaning the US pays and the Israelis innovate). So you're right the Israeli airforce has not been combat tested in a while, but the evidence is they have only got better while their opponents have not. What can definitely be questioned is the quality of (ground-force) IDF reservists, although programs are underway to improve this.

If you have BlackShark 2 look for the folder Data\EagleFM\P51B That's a pretty strong hint that some work has been done on the P-51B Also there is a file Mods\mod_plane_sample.lua (whose content will probably change over the course of development) but it contains a lot of data that used to be scattering in many files but is now centralised. This is a very good design change, IMHO.

Actually if you really want you can use little-dog's EFA mod to fly a C-130 around (as well as other stuff in the sim). Cockpit ain't right but the rest if it is cool (with some limitations, props don't spin for human pilots).