Nah, I just found the image online. A friend of mine had one when we were kids and I was always jealous.
Pretty sure the line of unlocks that requires the rank is the multiplayer line.
The campaign unlocks just require finishing missions.
If you’re thinking of the lock at the bottom of the tree, if you to play multiplayer to get ranks. But it’s all multiplayer-only upgrades down there.
Yes, this has been fixed for a couple years.
The most probable theory is budgetary politics. The most insane theory is they developed something better. I believe the former. It’s quite possible that today they have unmanned hypersonic drones we don’t know about. Or the satellites are much better - but you are still constrained by orbital mechanics in what you can see and how frequently. But back when they mothballed them I think it was politics plain and simple rather than a compelling alternative.
Such a shame - its a work of engineering genius that rivals anything done in the last century. Ask anyone who knows jack about planes and they will tell you it looks futuristic today - even though the first A-12 flight was in 1962…
That’s sacrilege pure and simple!
It took a long time, maybe a year and a half. :-) I need to come clean here and say I didn’t build them - I commissioned a very talented person to build them for me. If I recall we started with only three and then decided to go the whole hog in the end. A lot of custom work was done - no model kits today properly represent the A-12 or the A-12 trainer, let alone the other variants.
I have been obsessed with the Blackbird for a long time but lacked the skill to do it justice. It was a passion project of sorts.
I would even say that just like in spaceflight, we seem to have peaked in the late 60s, and 70s. Bit sad really. The gizmo’s have evolved beyond startrek, engine tech has benefitted from materials work and CAD/CAM but the airframes themselves are really seem not to be moving forward much at all.
Eh, tell that to an F-22.
Stealth my friend. Maybe not in a direction we consider worth the dollars, but there is some insane tech there.
I’d love to hear his story on this. Has all the trappings of a jilted lover. Nothing worse than seeing that ex thrive after you’ve broken up.
Edit: In reference to Tom’s post and your response:)
Yeah, F-22s were supposed to be enormously superior to previous generation fighters due to the enemy’s failure to lock on to them. So of course naturally we threw them away so we could spend multiple times as much on planes with inferior stealth and all other performance qualities apart from payload because I can’t even-- I assume it was graft that moved the USAF to go with the F-35, because they used to be so big on air superiority to the exclusion of other roles…
Anyway I’m annoyed with some of these AC7 scenarios where there are a million enemy dots converging from all directions and I don’t know which ones are more important to shoot. Are tanks more important than APCs? You’d think, but who knows, maybe it’s the infantry taking stuff over that I have to stop. I realize it’s silly arcade play, but even so I think I do about 99% of all damage on the entire battlefield with my allies just flying idly around shooting missiles and mostly missing things.
If you’re talking about the missions where your goal is just to do damage, there is a point goal listed in the top left, and whatever you are locked on to will display a point value below that. Stuff like bombers taking off, enemy jets, SAM sites or fuel storage are usually worth more than things like warehouses, tanks or trucks. Fuel depots can also take out nearby structures so they’re good targets to go for.
It’s an arcade shoot em up game, not a sim. So rage! rage until the big number is incrediblynormousgantic huge bigly big. Embiggen it some more. That’s it. Rage!
I want this game to come to PC. DCS is fun, but doing one arty battery in an A-10 is about all the raging a single jet can do in there.
It will in a week.
I can’t wait!
I am afraid I can’t say. @tomchick threatened to delete my QT3 account if I aired our dirty laundry. Make of that what you will!
Hey, I didn’t say that! I’m far more charitable to my wingmen!
Preload finished, only a mere couple of hours until I unplug my HOTAS and VR goggles, put in the xbox controller and start blasting fools and their drones. Chomp chomp chomp at the bit.
This particular review really sells me on this game. Although the first third of the review focuses a little too much on presenting an editorial about how the narrative doesn’t necessarily match up with the action scenes, and how that compares to other games that try to make a point of demonstrating that, hey, War sucks and as a player you should feel bad for feeling good, once he delves into the actual gameplay I came away learning a lot more about the game than I knew previous.
I especially like that the game starts applying more restrictions to the players as different missions come and go, things like limiting altitude ceilings and such. Increasing the difficulty not by making the actual enemies harder, but by slowly and surely tying one or another hands behind the Pilot’s back and seeing how they do there. It does make the missions seem like they’ll be much more varied and offer a much greater variety of gameplay than simply fly and shoot, shoot shoot shoot every other mission.
I’ll be picking this up in the next day or so and probably will play it shortly after that. It’s been on my radar for a while, but I’ve been holding out because of the slew of games coming out at the end of January and through February, and I wanted to give them all a fair shake (through demos and reviews) instead of throwing money at multiple full price games. Although I buy a lot of games I try not to buy half a dozen $60 games in one freaking month.