ZachariasX

They all say that until someone just does it, then you can cout to three and everyone has it. Nobody needed clouds until MSFS came along. And then...

For me, it was Microproses F-19, that was really ground breaking with its features and the proper resemblance of a flight model. But taking a closer look at the old sims again, it is like watching an old episode of TV shows like "Knight Rider" or "A Team" again. Doing so really soils the fond memories I have about them... I want to look forward.

They look really good!

Another US torpedo that didn't really torpedo, the Mark 14: A presentation by someone who knows about buoyant things.

So, we are getting torpedoes that don't torpedo? 😉 Still the renders look great!

Look, you can build them again. Go on ebay, there are still new in box kits from the re-re kits available, prices not being obscene yet. 😉 My first,the Wild Willy. Alas, I sold it at some point to a friend about thre years after I had it. I needed the cash for upgrading my next buggy. I got it for my b'day in 1983. A friend of mine had just got that one and I absolutely must have had one as well. A remore controlled car unlike I ever saw! I was in RC before, it was a big hobby of my dad as well and I just had gotten into RC airplanes. But Tamiya kits being the kits they are, I had to have more of them. Next was the Grasshopper when it came out, that I then pimped and converted to the Hornet. It came out the year after, so next b'day it was. The Super Champ was way out of my price bracket (but they have the re-re of it now that is still on sale. For trademark reasons it is called the Fighting Buggy.), the Rough Rider was just out of sale, same was the (now) legendary Blazing Blazer and the Toyota Bruiser. But as third iteration, I had to have the SuperShot when it came out. Another friend of mine got the HotShot as that one came out, in many ways a revolutionary car back then. When I finally had the money, it had the SuperShot though. As they were cheaper as kits, I had the NewMan Porsche and the Williams Honda F1. First taste of really fast RC, but man, those poor cars suffered for that... So, in the good old days those six were the ones I had. Along with RC boats and more RC aircraft. Some two years back, a friend of mine who had kind of gotten back in the hobby told me that he was thinking about buying an Avante. That was the buggy that just when I was about to exit the hobby somewhat (for getting a pilot license) that I no way could affird, the dream car. i was like whait, what?? Then I saw that Tamiya was preying on helples people like me by making those re-res of those cars and sure there it was on sale. I couldn't help it, but as they were going out of production, those last units actually were available on sale! So there I was back in the hobby with my re-re Avante2011. What a joyful build! Totally overengineered and one can see it is from an era, where many parts that are standard now were not and certain links were constructed from more generic parts. Maximum 80's vibes! At least the expensive kits, they still come with the blister packs etc... and they smell and feel exactly like they did back then when you open them first time. As if you were 10 years old again. Now I can afford those toys just like that, but boy they need accessories to run. (All this anodized aluminum bling bling stuff... totally unreasonable, but hey, were not doing this for being reasonable.) Also, it is borderline obscene what you can do now in terms of motors and batteries. It goes twice as fast for almost an half an hour continuous full power instead of maximum 10 min. But as building RC cars and plastic models is about the only mode where I can be present, but folks recognize me for being "unavailable" for the rest at home, I began to appreciate it as a nice past time. And the list grew quick. The Plasma Edge II and the Super Anvante (actually both are great buggies in their own way) are my kids cars. Feels like 1985 going to their school yard along with the kids and spend an hour there (on a single battery!!) zooming around. The kids there in general, lobotomized by the iPad, still recognize that this is something somewhat cool. It's their fathers (that also get expelled from home from their vives for some hours) that sometimes would get glassy eyes... because.. we all were there, weren't we? So, eventually I added the re-re Bruiser, the XV-02 chassis with the Audi body, the XV-01 Lancia to the collection. (One HAS to have the Lancia.) And now, since Tamiya came out with the BBX, I have this one in my stash now and will build it as soon as I have time for it. The BBX seem sto be the essence of the Rough Rider and the Super Champ in an all new, modern buggy. It has great reviews, much better then the TD4 Super Avante, who's only real downside being "just an Avante in name" but IMHO actually it is the better buggy than the Avante ever was. Of the bat, it runs like a charm; few tweaks required (like a slipper clutch). So yes, so far for me, Tamiya only. Kyosho make great products, especially the helicopters. Top notch. Yet they never really intrigued me. Even though they are usually of superior quality (lots of metal parts, high quality plastics), as kits they come across to me as Meccano does versus LEGO. You can try to like as much as you want, but it's just not the same. In the end though, I might get weak and build at least one of them. And the Optima Turbo that is currently available again and it is a marvelous buggy indeed. To me, the cars get most their charm through building them, and there are simply no kits like Tamiya kits. And I don't care that none of their cars are actually robust in any way or would even remotely qualify as bashers. Ideally, they still run on a silver can motor. But with some care, you can make them fast, 40 mph is easy works with many of them. And that is plenty fast. But if you crash, then that is a 40 mph crash with the result of a 40 mph crash. Going faster is also easy, but I think you have to be completely emotionally detached from your car to make it go 100 mph with the almost guaranteed result. Also, you need a fantastic amount of space to drive it. Team Associated and Schumacher make fantastic racing buggies and seeing an RC10 surely can make certain grown people emotional. I undertand that. Those cars indeed are awesome. But they are mostly awful builds from what I saw. Putting together the re-re Bruiser is a great experience and when you have it together, and it just works, then that's still this great feeling. What I could never do, is buy a RTR car. That is like ordering your Netflix&chill date chilled alredy, so it's just gonna be Netflix. Ehm, no. I see the utility in saving time in principle, but "This is not the date I am looking for". A similar issue I have with modern racing buggies that can well run circles around anything I ever built. But they are so friggin' ugly that they are most definitely "not the date I'm looking for". I so much need this!

iPads are poison, I tell you.

I just posted this in the IL2 forum, but since I mentioned the following builds here already, I'll also post it here. My kids got the Typhoon and the Tempest kits from Airfix, both 1/72 scale: The Typhoon for the younger and the Tempest for the older. Their choice. It is of note that the kits are from new moulds and do not in the slightest resemble previous kits, like for instance the MatchBox Tempest that I built when I was the age of my older son. The plastic parts are relatively thick walled and make for robust parts. See here the example of the Typhoon: The Typhoon is a bit more conventional to assemble than the Tempest, following the matching of the fuselage halves, then add top and bottom of the wing parts and attach them, plus add the empennage parts. The digital construction of the kit shows as the gearbox inside the wing can be used as a base for the cockpit as well as serves as structure to attach the wing on, the lower wing being one part to ensure perfect alignment. From just gluing together parts, they are really kits with parts that snap together and just need some glue to keep them in place. Regarding details, it is clear that these are beginner kits that are supposed to give best results with minimal proficiency in building them. There is no engine and for the ones that care for dealing with small parts (although they might seem huge to you @Feathered_IV) that would be just the cockpit assembly. The riveting... well.. the aircraft has flush rivets that shouldn't be visible to anyone (with exceptions) and they also have small gaps in the panels. Because it makes the aircraft fast. In the kit however, the prominent panel lines would be what corresponds to gaps that are basically the with of two fingers or more. Those are drainage channels. It is really made to pour wash in and be able to wipe excess in rabid manner, yet it still looks like panneling. But be it. It suits the purpose, even though if the kit were from Eduard, it surely would look different. The younger, doing the Typhoon, quickly understood that is was sensible painting the parts on the sprue. He had to mix the green for the interior. As it is aircraft, he gets to decide what the exact shade of green he wants. But I printed pictures for him as reference. The assembly of the cockpit is a nice feature, though challenging for a child. As British aircraft engineers hadn't invented the cockpit floor yet, it turned out to be a fun assembly and using the gearbox structure as base is a neat feature of the kit. Fitting that inside the assembled fuselage halves is a different question though, especially with the dashboard and the sighting assembly. Tears and terror, but it worked out eventually. The elevator parts fit only one-way (which is a big help for some) and the also snap in maintaining the correct angle. Very, very nice. That was about the time the older one found the nerve for plastic modelling. Jealousy is a big and widely underrated motivator. The Tempest kit takes the assembling technique a step further: Both upper and underside of the wing are one part with the gearbox structure in between, as you can see in step 8 of the plan. That part is actually the most important step in the whole build, as it turns out. Meanwhile, the work on the Typhoon continues and the wing parts get attached on the gearbox structure. The plane assembles nicely and the parts really need little work compared to other kits. Given how thick the parts are cast, they are also very easy to glue together and they make for a very, very solid construction. How far to build for painting and decaling is not a trivial decision, especially for a kid, so I told them when to call me to set up the airbrush. This time I bought the Tamiya colors and silently cursed myself for having blowing the Revell Aqua Color snot through an airbrush. The kids were eager to play with the airbrush. Which is normal, anything that can cause major damage to the surroundings is popular with them. That said, it was that damage that prompted me to stop them from proceeding for the sake of my marriage. I reall, really needed a spray hood. Some months later I finally bought one to have the kids finish their builds as I needed my space on the desk for building some RC Buggys. It was money well spent on that hood. Of course, it had to be the one with the big mouth. The paint scheme doesn't have to be exact, i just showed how to cut waves in the masking tape and how to stick it on the plane to make the patterns match "in spirit". It is a very unintuitive process for a kid. But I guess it turned out ok. He was happy. We were even painting the yellow leading edge of the wing, only to find out there are stickers for that. m( I let him do the larger decals; stencils are for kids that killed their parents. Meanwhile the older cared to proceed with his Tempest, seeing the progress of the other. In the Tempest, the the very English cockpit is a piece of work to assemble. In principle, it fits but... He pressed on, as one absolutely had to attach the wings to the airframe to get a semblance of a finished product. Alas, what even I didn't see when I passed by again (for some damage control to the hobby room), that he inserted the gearbox part upside down bewteen the wings. The lower part of the cooling duct (red circle) should insert as bottom of the fuselage, but is now inverted! Meanwhile the Typhoon needs rockets. Rockets with yellow tips. These are his kind of rockets. But first the rails. As the Typhoon progressed further, the older assembled the English cockpit. But as he tried to insert the wing/cockpit part into the fuselage, great misery! The wings were glued such, that is was not practical to take them apart anymore. I realized that I maybe should have had a closer look at the building progress instead of mainly checking for paint and bloodstains. What to do? In order to salvage the model, I had to take over, and I cut off the inverted cowling part, reassembled the cockpit and put the things together. Now, everything kind of fit, but the problem was that the inverted gearbox insert has all the notches to attach the somewhat complicated landing gear struts in the wrong place! It meant ihad to do the whole landing gear, as for a kid, tuning the parts and making them fit is not really their cup of tea. So I fit it together and stencilled the Typhoon. Alas, the kid not only inverted the gearbox part, but he also didn't drill the holes for the antennas as well as for the fuel tanks. They are marked on the inside of the part. Also, he didn't put in the transparent parts for the landing lights and formation lights. They are inserted from the inside and are wedged that way. That will be a fun procedure getting them in from the outside... A neat detail is that the fuel tanks are on a transparent sprue, as their fairings are transparent. Really, really cool finally having that right on a kit. The kid still had fun airbrushing the parts after I got the parts together. Same procedure for the camo, an excercise in cutting masking tape and puting it on ina meaningful way, rather than getting fussed by being exact with the outlines. Putting the one central part wrong cooled his building enthusiasm enough already. I guess it turned out ok. This time, we used the sticker for the yellow leading edge, only to find out that masking and painting it would have been easier. Again, I let him do some of the big parts, but doing the leading edges terminated his enthousiasm for the moment. I mean, they really are a piece of work. Putting on the wheels and tanks as well as the transparent parts for the lights on the underside. It was a fun exercise, but not for kids. I mean, we know where the tanks go even without having the marks for it. Same for the Antennas. However, he was happy with the result and put on the makeup for dust and dirt himself. With trenches like that, it doesn't really need much paneling, unless you like the look of a 3D puzzle. Putting on my usual mix of 50-50 humbrol gloss and satin cote, they turned out ok and are now finger proof for dakadaka. The landing gear on the Tempest was also a piece of work. In principle, it works great, but with all the notches in the wrong places, one has to get a bit creative with the parts to make them fit the right way. The Typhoon has a much simpler arrangement. The photos are poor quality, but the planes are not meant for too close of an inspection. But the kits are really nice. One thing I though funny, on the plan, they inverted the red and green light on the wingtip, making starboard red. On the boxart, it s correct. But given these are English aircraft that take off on the other side of the runway, it might make sense and thought sensible to put it that way. These are really great kits that, as a first in 1/72 scale I'd say, they are actually fun to assemble. They have great details, like the option of having ammobox covers open on the Typhoon as option or having the double stack exhaust pipes assembled from two parts each to make them correctly aligned are nice features. For casual builders, these are truly top-notch kits.

That would be someone late to the party:

I thought the same. But I enjoyed both movies.

Team Fusion started with one item: sunk costs. And that is why they remain in the dump, no matter what even if they release version 7 in hundred years from now or whatever. Game engines are for rent -> UE5 Clouds are for rent -> Truesky Geodata is for sale. Doing things wrong is actually more complicated today than doing things right from the start. Just think of it. Every idiot can render a sphere on a PC. But for flight simulators, it‘s ok if the sphere is flat, because they say it‘s too complicated making it round…

You bring up a great point, and this is about what makes that one a great game. IL2 1946 has one on all other sims: this is the amount if content, quantity rather than quality. The other exreme is DCS, where content is available in quality, but not quantity. Enigma on his channel made a rant about that concerning DCS on YT, and I think he has a good point. Quantity has a quality in its own. Plus, by now the game is free and moddable to each ones liking. You can do there what you want to do in all things dakadaka, if that is what you ask for. The ongoing popularity is understandable. But then, what IS the PTO? What do you do there actually and what are the challenges? Is it just Wildcat vs Zero with a tree or a ship in the middle? If so, then ˋ46 does a great job and you are served. Is that how the pilots lived through it in their service? Definitely not, but it may still be a fun game to some. For the game just described, I truly do not need Jasons current effort at all as I can still use ˋ46. Just giving the planes and ships more polygons adds nothing to the gameplay. Flight as such is no challenge at all, weather doesn‘t exist and generally less than one percent of what is important to real pilots matters to a gamer in ˋ46. Who still plays ˋ46? Is this a number of clients you would think is viable as a busines? I would cater a different experience. MSFS has proven that „just flying“ can be rather gratifying if you make it such in your game. I can hardly think of a more pointless exercise than „just flying“ in ˋ46. Just flying real aircraft in real life can be (and sometimes may become extremely so) a challenge in itself. Even in Europe, during most missions, pilots didn‘t see enemy aircraft. The PTO was even more peaceful in that regard, not counting occasional Flak at destination points. So what is flying in the PTO? Most of all, it is long range flying, three hours an a half for fighters, eight and more hours for bombers over distances between 500 to 1000 km. All over grounds that are essentially lethal to the pilot. A partly beautiful, mostly bland hellscape. It is evident that the PTO as I just described just doesn‘t work from a gaming perspective as we are used to it, where anything beyond taking off, bombing your own carrier (or a ship next to it) and then land on it again gets to be a stretch. The challenge for this game I don‘t see in putting the right numbers of rivets on a Tony. It is providing half the globe (as depicted above) with areas of interest in suitable LOD and provide game mechanics that allow completing missions within reasonable (and family friendly) time. There must be means for achieving that, such as time compression or skipping in a meaningful way, that does not take away from the challenge of navigating to the target. If this new game could actually replicate the tasks as presented to the pilots back then and allows for following these procedures in game, then I‘d say this game has a bright future, regardless of what Han or Nick Grey might come up with. Neither could be fussed with such subtlties. In ˋ46, airmanship is a joke, but the planes in all their crude simplicity offer for meaningful gameplay. I sincerely hope that @Jason_Williams will set his priorities accordingly, and not deliver what we essentially had in ˋ46 (or in a minimally improved manner in GB). Going that road is a terrible path of sunk costs that trap you after a reasonable and very straightforward depiction of Midway, then Wake. But as soon as you go towards the Solomons you get stuck with artificial island maps. (Geodata won’t even fit anymore and have to do the wrong thing the hard way.) While the island maps are fun in RoF and fast fragging MP servers in general (they WILL be required), it is NOT the PTO that the game actually promises. To illustrate how absurd the idea of shrinking the theater is, it is revealed in the argument that you might just make planes twice as fast as well with a similar result. ANY plane cannot be remotely realistic or plausible, if it is not placed in a world like we have it. It is downright disingenuous asking for a precise depiction of an aircraft, if in the end basic metrics don‘t match the real world. You know, in a world half the size, a 109 has a pretty good range. Or shall we give it 30 min endurance, but pester devs for the correct label on the dash? During the history of human kind, then and now, the argument has been made for a flat world, consisting mainly of the proponents area of interest. Then and now, it was and still is is a dumb one. With no exceptions. Building the game for the actual scenario might sound daunting given its size, but that at least doesn‘t exclude any artificial modes of playing that MP does require. Going for small maps gives no real benefit other than producing fast fragging maps, while precluding any meaningful depicion of the world pilots flew in. The latter I consider a built in death of the game. Failure as a feature. Saying that nobody needs a simulated world that resembles our world is like the statement that nobody needs more than 640kb RAM. Given that most of us are old enough to have witnessed the invention of the abacus, 640kb might indeed seem a lot. But the deliberate choice of restricting yourself drastically in your scope for no reason other than the traditions is fatal for sure. So please Jason, nobody cares about the correct number of rivets on exotic planes, as long as we have that plane in a somewhat plausible manner. People who are happy with a flat world are also happy with simpler planes. (That is why they like ˋ46 as well.) We will bitch and moan about everything anyway. But you know that. What we need is a suitable gameplay to fly those long missions with the little of me-time life permits us to have at hands. THIS doesn‘t exist today and with that you have a game that sets itself apart from everything your old team and the rest of the competition ever might come up with. If you provide a way to make a full three hour mission reasonably playable in just one hour, you are the king of the hill. And if the monumental success of MSFS teaches us one thing, then it is that for a flight simulator the world is more important than the aircraft.

It would be definitely a the main reason to take a pass, as paying something like 80 bucks or so to fly around a palm tree or a ship mast… is a lot. The world has moved on from that.

Doing „maps“ I consider a fatal idea for any future development of this new sim. It has no advantages and all disadvantages one can think of. „Maps“ are not smaller in terms of bytes than a whole geoid with just an area of interest rendered in higher LOD. Having a geoid would reflect the world in which we live in. That is the base for and „realism“ in a simulator. How much that matters is proven by Microsoft. Clouds are a big part of the scenery, even bigger than terrain details. I wonder if we had new cloud tech in both DCS and GB if it wasn’t for MS to show how that really should look like. It was another instance of how much we got so used to crap. There is nothing more important to flight than weather. For the longest time „weather“ was difficult to achieve and the result was mainly ugly enough to get used to having it turned off. You could get away with that 30 years ago, when three nerds without any budget tried to code a game and they had to keep things very, very simple. I so much hope this bad habit will get extinct. Actually, I am certain the market will take care of it. Any young gamer looking at scenery tech from 30 years ago will hardly shell out money for that ugly crap, because at least ROBLOX, for having similar visuals, is always fun. No need to learn superchargers.

You only need to put on „that world“ what you need. The whole world fit on a sinle CD ROM back then on previous iterations of Flight Simulator. You just make your area of interest more detailed. Wh cares if Helsinki is 10 km2 per pixel.

On a WANG monochrome Laptop (so B it was as for „installation“, as it came on a bootable floppy disc) and then in CGA.

Great start and fingers crossed!

We definitely agree on that. While that may be true, some might consider such an attitude childish and irresposnsible, provided you live in a country where the citizen actually does have some agency. Same goes for children who get caught with their hand in the cookie jar, screaming „I didn take any!“. But let‘s leave it at that. Dude… seriously. Move on, shall we?

There are a couple of vids out there where you see such. Then again, often you don‘t see it. It might depend on the ammo or other things. None of the tracers I ever shot did this. 🤷‍♂️

English 7.7mm.

This „map“ is half the world.

I got it right after release. It was a long wait, but the result is worth it I find.

It is out now. Hands down the best GA module.

Given Rey Palpantine and Fleabag Jones are essentially stand-ins for KK herself, it is fair to assume that she is one of the main drivers obliterating the characters she hates from the creators she personally despises. It is true that she is not acting alone, more than half of the Disney board consist of folks pushing that same agenda as well as Iger taking part in turning Disney into an intersectional feminist cult, yet SW and IJ are both directly overseen by KK and are her personal monstrosity. Funny enough, some say that when Iger called KK on the carpet for the failure of IJ, she did actually throw the boming at the box office of The Little Mermaid et. al., all of which being failures as well. ("You can't fire me because my movies bomb, yours bomb too!") Regarding legislation, that buck stops with you. It is you who elected your lawmakers. They are the monster of your own making.