Andrew_McP

They're at RIAT as well, but only on static display according to the participants list, which seems strange. At Waddington they (or at least one of them) seem to be doing a simulated refuelling. I hope so, because if I don't see them fly at one of these shows there will be much pouting and toy depramification. I don't think there'll be much in the way of a display routine though, sadly. FWIW they're apparently over with 4 other Su-30s for an exercise with the RAF, and should be based at Waddington. This thread's worth keeping an eye on (as is the forum in general for UK aviation enthusiasts)... http://forums.airshows.co.uk/cgi-bin/ukarboard/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=23;t=28622;st=200 Andrew McP

Great photos! Thanks for sharing them. Andrew McP... freshly inspired by his Biggin Hill trip and currently building up strength in his left arm so he can lift a camera with a Sigma 50-500 lens. :-)

There's an F-15 in LOMAC? Sorry, I'd never noticed. ;-) Andrew McP... Sukhoi sychophant

2 Indian Su-30MKIs at RIAT Just noticed this and thought I'd mention it in this thread. Looks like I may be forced to try and go both Saturday and Sunday. It could be an expensive and sleepless weekend! :-) http://www.airtattoo.com/showcontent.asp?ParentID=@0000000030&CollectionID=@0000000898 Andrew McP

Thanks for the links. Great pictures. Andrew McP

A polarizing filter and the "I'm feeling lucky" button in Picassa have a lot to answer for. :-) Some of those shots are a little over the top, but I've always been a fan of clouds, and the man-made ones can be just as dramatic as the real thing. Andrew McP

The surpising thing was that the Eurofighter is quieter at low speed than the Spitfire. Which is just as well, because the Spitfire makes one of the best noises on the planet. There are plenty more (and many better) pictures appearing here... http://www.ukar.co.uk/cgi-bin/ukarboard/ikonboard.cgi?;act=SF;f=10 ...which looks like a good resource for anyone interested in the UK airshow scene. Andrew McP

Not at Biggin. I think there's a Spitfire based there, but otherwise it's a small commercial airport. You might be thinking about one of the Vulcan projects, and I believe that aircraft may actually make it into the sky this year. If it does it'll be superb. They don't, these were planted on the ground and fired off at the appropriate moment. I was quite amazed when the first one went back, and even more amazed when another went off and the pressure wave swept across the crowd. I believe this demonstration of airforce operations is going to be shown at several UK airshows this year. Hopefully they'll tweak it a little, because although it's a great idea, it doesn't quite work as a whole. 10 out of 10 for effort though. Andrew McP

Just a random selection of shots (about 2.5Mb's worth) from the weekend which have been hacked about a bit with Picassa's crude editing. The line up was probably more interesting than my selection shows, with a good attempt at an RAF combat role display as the show's set piece, and up to 10 WW1 aircraft in the air at once (not very photogenic, but very impressive to witness). But me and my Pentax K100D made quite mess of many shots. The guys with their massive Canon lenses probably got some better results. Still, throwing away the lousy shots is a lot cheaper now than in my film days. :-) http://www.andrew.mcp.dsl.pipex.com/bh07/bh07.htm Andrew McP PS. Working nights I wasn't sure I'd get there, but in the end I went and enjoyed Saturday enough to go again on Sunday for a few hours (it's only an hour away by public transport). My only disappointment was not getting wet... you get much better photos in damp conditions. :-) And of course I'd have swapped everything I saw for the sight of a single Su-27, but it's been a few years, sadly, since Biggin had a visit from a Flanker.

No Jag at Biggin Hill yesterday, and that has to be a first. No Harriers either, which is *definitely* a first... they're too busy out in real world operations at the moment apparently. A sad sign of the times. The Jaguar is a really nice aircraft though. Plenty of character in its design. I'll miss it. Andrew McP

http://www.alide.com.br/noticias/su35_01/su35_10.jpg Oh dear. Now I need a cold shower before looking at any of the other pictures. Andrew McP

I haven't got my copy yet (it's still in the post somewhere), but it's not sounding very good so far. It'll be a shame if G2 cast a shadow over Razorworks' good name, turning EECH into OUCH! Andrew McP

Another excellent movie from Dobberman, with lots of really inventive and entertaining ideas. I enjoyed that a lot. Thanks. :-) Andrew McP

The problem now is that after swallowing ATI, AMD have all our competetive eggs in one basket. A poor year or two for processors *and* their DX10 cards (which need to sell well into the enthusiast market where the high margins can be made) could put the business in danger. I'm sure they'll survive, but AMD don't have Intel's "war fund" to fall back on in lean times, and if they end up heavily indebted that's not going to do their development budget much good. So while you're right that competition is good, when one team pulls too far ahead it can seriously damage the opposition, and that's not good for us at all. Andrew McP

Not 50fps, no. But with flight sims I find minimum frame rate is *far* more important than maximum, and anything over about 20fps is fine for me. It's the dips towards 10 or less which ruin the immersion, and my recent move to an overclocked E6600 has finally allowed me to fly over large cities at maximum viewing distance at 20+FPS. It's very impressive indeed, and even cluster bombs and rocket attacks fail to bring my PC to its knees any more*. Towards the end of July Intel will apparently have some significant price cuts. Combine that with the current low price of DDR2 RAM and it'll be a great time to upgrade to any of the 4Mb cache C2D CPUs. Andrew McP *I do still get dips, it's not perfect. But this upgrade really has lifted LOMAC into a different performance league.

Agreed, but at the moment I'm quite worried. The ATI DX10 card is getting fairly unimpressive reviews, sadly. And if that's a bit of a flop too AMD could soon be in trouble with their shareholders. However I don't regret this move back to "the dark side" at all. The more I use the new setup, the more impressed I am. When I moved from Athlon to x2 3800 the results were nice, but not impressive except when using software which could really make use of the second core. http://forum.lockon.ru/showthread.php?t=14757 But this time I really *feel* like I've spent money and have something to show for it. Of course it might just be because I have a fresh install of WinXP. :-) Andrew McP

You're right, it has to be heat judging by your open case experiment. Now try directing a desk fan into the open case. If "industrial strength" cooling like that solves the problem, you can then work on improving the airflow inside your case under normal circumstances (which can be tricky in some cases). Or wait until winter to play again. I'm not sure when winter arrives in Texas though. Just after the next nuclear war I imagine. ;-) Andrew McP

I've been a big fan of AMD systems for many years now. Great value for money. But it turns out the Intel Conroe fanboys aren't fanboys... they're just right! :-) System (1): AMD x2 3800 overclocked to 2.4GHz, 2Gb DDR, Asrock dual SATA, 8800GTS System (2): Intel e6600 @ 2.4 GHz, 2Gb Crucial Ballistix (5300 but famous for working well beyond that at a bargain price), Gigabyte DS3, 8800GTS. System (3): as system (2) but CPU overclocked to 3.15GHz (I haven't tried hard to push it any further yet, as I have a recent e6600 which needs higher voltage and is not quite as overclockable as earlier CPUs). LOMAC test (a): An F2 view from behind an Su-25 flying low over Sevastopol. LOMAC test (b): A short 25T mission involving a rocket attack (lots of smoke & explosions) on a base defended by anti-aircraft missiles etc. Fraps is used to measure the average, highest, and lowest FPS in 60 second replays of tracks from missions (a) & (b). LOMAC was run at 1280x1024, x4fsaa, x8aniso, *high* visibility range, medium water, and everything else at maximum apart from shadows, due to 8800 shader problems. ______________(1)______(2)_______(3) (a) AVERAGE___10.2______18_______23 ___MIN FPS_____8_______15_______18 ___MAX FPS____13_______23_______30 (b) AVERAGE___21.8______30.5_____37.4 ___MIN_________3_______14_______12 ___MAX________35_______46_______54 I could throw more numbers at you, but I think those LOMAC figures say it all. They're not scientific tests, averaged over many repetitions, and the minimum FPS can be very variable. But those results tie in very well with what I've seen in more "standardised" benchmarks like Aquamark3 and the various 3dmarks. And LOMAC really does look and feel smoother, especially during intense action, and over cities. I was expecting to be disappointed, to feel I'd wasted even *more* money chasing better LOMAC performance... but this upgrade was definitely worth the money, even though I've only had the x2 3800 a year and I usually make a processor last two years or more. Hopefully these numbers will be useful to someone else trying to justify an upgrade. Andrew McP PS I did a quick Vegas (Movie Studio) render test. On my x2 3800 it took about 1 minute 30s to render a 9 second test clip with various effects added. On the e6600 setup @ 3.15GHz it takes 36 seconds. That 4Mb of dynamically shared on-chip cache really seems to make a huge difference compared to the 2x512k on my AMD. Of course owners of better (more cache/faster) AMD CPUs would see less of an improvement.

Good point Anytime. He'll need a 939 x2 rather than an AM2, and it's easy to make a mistake when ordering. If there was a new AM2 motherboard required, then an Intel Conroe would make much more sense instead. Andrew McP

The AMD dual core will almost certainly fit in the same motherboard. No need to rebuild the whole machine with motherboard, CPU, DDR2 RAM, and a fresh Windows installation. Anyway, I had no problems with LOMAC when I went to a x2 3800. The only gains I saw came from changing from a Barton Mobile Athlon to a 64bit CPU with improved memory controller. None of that will apply here, so it'll purely be about the difference in MHz between the two CPUs. Andrew McP

That's a really nice composite. Well done. However after a few seconds I find the two suns kind of distracting. Which planet is this? :-) Andrew McP

I've been quite impressed by Megaupload, although the pop-ups can be a little sneaky. While testing I had one window pop up implying I could only download the file if I agreed to join a particular site. Cancelling that did reveal the proper download window behind it though. Anyway, I'm sure everyone's aware of those kind of tactics, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. Ok, movie archive 1 contains my first 7 movies, from the most basic beginnings (the first three movies were made with the LOMAC demo) to the more adventurous later on. McParchive1.zip, 317Mb, http://www.megaupload.com/?d=UMBXRTUA 1) Mig-29 flight 2) Kamenka (A10 attacks convoy) 3) Better Late Than Never (A10 attack after a ground battle) 4) Tonight (a bit of post-release fooling around in the Su-27) 5) Sync or Swim (formation Su-27s, low res but very smooth as I recorded it using the AIW vid card on my second PC) 6) Su Tai Chi (slow flying experiment with new editing software) 7) Stay Out of the Clouds (A lone Su-27 taking on 2 F-15s) Movie archive pack 2 contains movies 8-11. McParchive2.zip, 335Mb, http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GFQK3NVY 8 ) Frog or Prince (Su-25 attack) 9) Untitled movie dealing with FC's delay. 10) Hastily prepared movie after watching the amazing and flawless online airshow by the VFTC. 11) Tornado: Precision Strike (my homage to the Tornado). These packs may help fill up some gaps in people's collections...or merely illustrate just how little life I really have. ;-) Andrew McP

Ah, sorry. I did check it and it worked then, but not know. Strange. Anyway, all I did was search for "avi recorder problem" and it throw up a few interesting threads. Andrew McP

Heathen! What's not to like about Bach? ;-) Purpose-made soundtrack music, like Zimmerman's, is excellent, and GA and others make superb use of it. I just enjoy the challenge of making "normal" music work with a LOMAC movie. Still, any music is great... as long as it's not hard rock or thrash metal. ;-) A lot of those clips you see are shot at pretty high zoom, so the range is probably longer than you might think. If you look carefully you'll also find that it's the AI aircraft (29) which fires most of the vikhrs. I get too angry at the over-heating laser to use them much, and when I do they have a habit of missing. :-) When I started that movie last year it was because I hadn't flown the 25T for a while because although I love the flight model, I hate the fact it's a heavy, sluggish tank. When ED give us the same modelling for the Su-27 I will be able to die happy... though at this rate I may well be too old to use a joystick by the time they get round to it. :-) Anyway, I hadn't flown the 25T for ages and when I loaded it up again I was reminded of just what a good looking aircraft it is (from some angles anyway). And even if I don't really enjoy flying it, and struggle to fight in it effectively, the FC package is still a pretty impressive piece of work by ED. So I was inspired to start a movie using it. Andrew McP

If you search through these forums (might take a while to find the right combination of search words) you'll find this discussed many times. I don't think anyone has ever come up with a definite answer to the problems with the AVI recorder. It just seems to hate some PCs. :-) Good luck finding a solution. Andrew McP http://forum.lockon.ru/search.php?searchid=284568 seems to throw up a few useful threads.