Trident

Quite a bit of Chinese and Korean stuff :)

Speaking of bloom, I have one plea for ED: when you introduce it, please - pretty please - don't overdo the effect like almost all current games that take advantage of the technology! So very many graphics engines become a blurry mess because the programmers jumped on this bandwagon and tried to one-up other titles by making the effect stronger and stronger. It has now come to the point where everything that isn't shaded from direct in-game sunlight by some other object has this comically exaggerated bloom and it actually looks *less* realistic than if there was NO bloom at all. Seriously, you have to wonder if some programmers really ever look outside the window - NO the world is NOT blurry and drained of colour, infact it is crisply sharp and vibrant!!! This sharpness is what LOMAC has captured better than any other flightsim, including the frequently acclaimed console games like Ace Combat etc.. Please don't stray from this promising path in future - by all means introduce HDR bloom for extremely bright light sources such as the sun, flares and explosions/fire at night. DON'T however make me squint at the screen to see any detail like I'm dangerously drunk, need glasses and have a huge sleep deficit. Because to me at least, only in that type of condition does the real world look like some of the HDR games out there! Sorry about the rant.

Gorgeous! I can't wait :D

Well, sign me up for the Su-27, F-15C and F-16C modules (in that order)! Please do try to get hold of the required info for a Mirage 2000 (C-RDI) or a C-model Hornet (APG-65), though ;) I'd take those over the Eagle and Falcon.

They already have Mi-35s.

Surprising, certainly. Hard to believe? Not really, after all it seems to be a deliberate omission because it was not considered useful for the intended role of the missile.

That's a good point, using mechanical rather than electronical roll compensation is a popular way of downgrading export radar sets. Notional export variants of the British Blue Vixen would have followed that path, IIRC. I certainly doubt even the domestic N001 would have electronic roll compensation, but I'd fully expect most Russian PESA arrays to feature that technology. There are a number of systems with completely fixed arrays, after all (Zaslon, Zaslon-A, -M, -AM, Zhuk-MSF, Kopyo-F, B004 and as mentioned above, I was under the impression that the Bars antenna only moved in azimuth). I find it a bit hard to believe they didn't introduce electronical roll compensation somewhere along the way.

Why is it credited with additional mechanical scan in the horizontal plane only (unlike Irbis) then? Wouldn't Bars be capable of mechanically slewing the antenna in the vertical plane as well if it was able to roll, similar to what the Irbis demonstrates in that video? I suppose your sources are better than mine though.

If they really need mechanical roll compensation that would certainly indicate something is seriously amiss. I tend to agree with Weta, most likely the intention is to have only one gimbal for slewing around the vertical and horizontal axes. The further aft you can mount the radar inside the radome, the bigger you can make the antenna. Does the Bars antenna roll?

I agree entirely with EvilBivol-1, Russian aerospace R&D is still world class but production infrastructure has been neglected and is failing. There also seems to have been a lack of coherent spending strategy in the industry due to the absence of domestic orders, a vast number of minimum-effort projects were started in a bid to win export contracts but few ever got off the ground. Consequently, even less money was available for the really important fundamental technologies for the future and as a result many such programmes are not as mature in Russia as they are in the West. Where the state did provide funding they frequently favoured Soviet-style projects rather than encouraging progressive post Cold War thinking. The good news, IMHO, is that deficiencies in manufacturing infrastructure should be relatively easy to fix by 'simply' throwing money at the problem. Look no further than China to see how fast they were able to become a production powerhouse, while their lack of R&D experience is only now being overcome. Russia now has money and they still have excellent R&D - that's a pretty decent starting position. Additionally, tighter integration of the various design and production organisations in Russia is long overdue - there have been some rather bizarre situations where the production plant launched its own product improvement project in competition with the design bureau. This kind of 'inhouse' rivalry created unnecessary duplication and further diluted funding. So, as you say, there is hope. With Russia's current political situation you can only hope that state involvement won't mess up a promising starting situation due to cronyism and institutional inertia, though. EDIT: One thing I don't quite agree with is your assessment of the educational system. As far as the academic side is concerned, Russia's universities and institutes still have a great reputation and are much sought after by foreign students. The fact that many Russian graduates end up working abroad is another indication that they can't be too bad ;) In the fast-changing world of engineering no curriculum is ever going to be perfect though, that's a given. As long as they keep their eyes open they should be ok.

Could be to lower bending loads on the wing structure during high-speed, high-g turns by reducing lift near the tips. It is hard to tell whether they are actually deflected in the same direction or differentially in this video, though.

I think some of those shots provide the first good look at the new terrain mesh, and it looks quite promising to me. Still waiting for a close-up shot of a proper gorge in the Caucasus range though ;) It also seems that visible range for buildings and trees has increased, or is that a function of viewing the LOMAC world from a helicopter POV? Certainly a possibility, given that LOMAC provided visibility far in excess of any helo sim to date, so it might be an illusion due to the low altitude perspective.

WOW - thanks for that, CoNa and TekaTeka - I had seen a crappy flash version of that same video some time ago and fervently wished there was a HD version available somewhere. I consider this a belated christmas present :) ;) Now someone needs to come up with HD incarnations of these:

Yup. Here's hoping they'll get rid of it in Black Shark! No use giving the player the opportunity to mess around with something that can basically only cause trouble - just remove it from the GUI, that would be enough already ;) With 20/20 hindsight, I think it's one of those ideas that sound neat in theory but cause all kinds of havoc once you dig deeper and try it out in practice. Is it supposed to affect only your own missiles, all friendly missiles, the enemy's or flat out all missiles in the sim? Which performance parameters should it adjust, anyway? What happens when you play back a track file from somebody who has a different slider setting? How about multiplayer? Arbitrary solutions can be - and no doubt have been - defined for all of these cases, but in some situations it will be impossible to accomodate all requirements. For example, a single setting, probably the host's, will have to be enforced in multiplayer - discarding the individual player's preference. So there are configurations where a 'best solution' really does not exist and that's never a good thing. All that effort and compromise for a feature that was rarely used in the end and has apparently proven a nightmare to get right on the development side? Not worth it, I say!

Well, that's all the better of course! One thing I really want to stress is that the wingman should automatically play it safe and remask after the attack unless the player explicitly tells him to continue attacking. We've all seen the suicidal acts that LOMAC AI units are liable to commit if left to their own devices once they've gone into attack/kamikaze mode ;) BTW, can you also leave target selection to the wingman and just tell him to unmask and fire on any enemy unit he sees (or perhaps restricting him to airdefence units, but not preselect an individual target for him)? Do we have the choice of telling all wingmen to pop up simultaneously or just one or two of them in particular? And last but not least: will the wingies attempt to avoid contact with the enemy when I tell them to rejoin formation or are they likely to cut straight across the dangerzone to get to my own position? Thanks in advance!

That's pretty cool! An old idea of mine is this: lead your wingie to a safe (masked) position within engagement range of the enemy, tell him to hold position, seek an attack position of your own and once established there tell him to pop-up and fire for a coordinated attack. He should then remask (!) rather than continuing to attack. This tactic requires only two simple commands ('hold position' and 'pop-up'), yet can be used to devastating effect on stationary targets in EECH. Is this being considered for DCS:BS?

Nice Tiger! The F-111 is a good move too, what version will you be modelling?

FANTASTIC work! Certainly one major facelift, very promising :D

Another move in the right direction for Black Shark. Communications and navigation have been very primitive in ED's sims for a long time, good to see they are not only working on features that have been traditional strong points anyway. Now that it is a stand-alone product, I as a hardcore fastmover (I tried to get into helos with EECH, but success was marginal - and not due to shortcomings in the sim but my rotary wing incompetence, lol) am no longer sure whether I'm going to buy BS, but I'll keep my eyes peeled. Don't get me wrong, I agree with the decision to go stand-alone, it should help keep fixed and rotary wing issues separate and prevents the former from diluting focus on the latter. But I'm a disgrace as a helo simmer, there's no way around that ;) If nothing else, I'll be sitting in the wings, waiting to pounce on the first fixed wing DCS module :D Proceed, ED!

Excellent! I'm so looking forward to seeing one of my favourite aircraft in the air, my only exposure to the Vulcan sofar is the static example at RAF Hendon :)

GSh-6-30? Higher rate of fire, faster spin-up but a slower muzzle-velocity and a lighter projectile. All in all, they should offer comparable firepower. Both guns are in a completely different class than the GSh-30-1 or the M61 however, being far to bulky to be used in fighters, and are thus of minimal relevance to the point he made.

I think this is a great suggestion - and then you should go on to redo the Mirage 2000C and make a new Mirage 2000D ;) Thanks for that outstanding model, BTW!

Unlucky airshow season this year. The Blue Angels, the Snowbirds, the recent crash in Poland and now yet another accident. Sad news :( I suppose the only consolation is that there have been no fatalities on the ground ("only" a few injuries in the case of the Blue Angels crash) in any of these tragedies, IIRC. I sure hope we've had our share for 2007 now :(

http://www.airliners.net/open.file/1256765/L/ Interestingly, it has a second canopy and lacks the IR jammer. However it has the correct Pastel RWR antennae, so it doesn't seem to be just a Su-25UB dressed up as a Su-25T/-39. An ex-testbed for Su-25T/-39 systems development perhaps? Oh yeah, and we absolutely need that new weapon ED!! ;)

Troff, IIRC the origin of the basic model is well known in this case. It was created by krazyscotsman for the Phoenix flightsim project, and lo-fi obtained permission from him before starting to work on it for LOMAC. So, unless krazyscotsman himself is not the real author Yeniceri is in the clear here. That's all I know, please correct me if my information on the situation is incomplete.