I’ll see your Iranian-stached Tomcat pilots and raise you some pre-Tailhook era F-14 drivers posing with a Ferrari and some dancers from the local strip joint.
- I didn’t know Eli Manning was a Tomcat driver ;)
- They are way overdressed for dancers from a strip joint.
Vegas showgirls maybe? That pic has so much testosterone I feel my 'stache growing by simply looking at it!
How about SOLID GOLD dancers?
Jesus I’d purged that show from my memory banks.
THANKS JMR.
But…Solid Gold was awesome…
I admit I’m a child of the 80s, but I’m afraid I gravitated more towards the punk rock / speed metal / alternative side.
They are equally as obnoxious, so your point is taken.
It wasn’t Jell-O that made the F-105 flub, it was one of his guests. And in that guy’s defense, it’s not exactly like current pilots need to be 100% up on designations of allied nation hardware that was mostly retired over 30 years ago. I just thought it was funny because AvGeeks obsess about those details, the guys who actually do the work are more concerned about the current stuff.
Solid Gold was ass-end of the 70s, ass-start of the 80s period. It was a confusing time.
Lots of great music though.
Grumble. Eh. Punk was peaking. American New Wave was peaking. (Both imploded a few years after). Punk got absorbed into guitars wot made loud noises, and Euro New Wave turned into Joy Division redux, redux, redux.
60s/70s arena dinosaurs were going as far as they were going to go (Pink Floyd, Bowie, the Stones, Led Zepplin, ZZ Top, et. al.) and would do their fade from mainstream prominence over the next few years.
Disco was turning into industrial, techno, R&B pop, and a weird fad called rap.
NWOBHM still hadn’t broken into the American mainstream as thrash.
The hair bands were still playing small gigs in LA venues.
MTV started to do its thing in disrupting the music industy.
I was 9-13 during those years, and I just listened to a bunch of stuff all over the map, and I don’t hardly ever listen to much of it from that period any more.
I’m probably biased as I love disco.
The Fort Lauderdale place? A friend of mine used to drag me there after we had gone to nightcubs. There was some place called “pure diamond” as well I think. I say drag as I never really liked strip joints tbh.
For a fighter, the Hornet carries entirely too few countermeasures.
I hung out as a clean-cut teen with the long-hair Metallica / Slayer headbangers, mohawk Repo-man skate punks, and make-up Cure / Bauhaus deathrockers in San Francisco area in mid 80s . They certainly didn’t look any less ridiculous than the Solid Gold dancers. Never heard of NWOBHM until now (Motorhead I guess). Always thought the skaters or metallifucks were supposed to be thrash.
The DCS Liberation dynamic campaign generator thing is a bit further along now, and makes eminently playable missions. (They could stand to scale up a bit; as it is, enemy aircraft spawn in pretty close.) Even in my relatively early-on, not-many-planes-yet game, there are things going on, along with traditional DCS and related tools jankiness.
Mission #1: take off from carrier in Hornet, escort Harriers to strike targets. Spawned inside of a Harrier, exploded, sank the carrier.
Mission #1a: tried an air start instead. That worked, but the air start sets up a bunch of things in ways I don’t like, and my countermeasure dispenser was off, so I got pegged pretty quickly by a MiG-23.
Mission #2 and #3: front-line CAP over Abramses advancing northeast along the coast of the Arabian peninsula, taking off from Al Dhafra AB. (Easier landing than a carrier.) In both cases, I got shot down by Mirages in dogfights.
Mission #4: same setup as 2 and 3, except this time I finally got up to sufficient speed with the Hornet’s radar and HOTAS to bag a Mirage, two L-39s on a CAS mission, and a friendly Harrier by accident because I forgot how the IFF symbology works. Greased the landing, too, but landing the Hornet on land is pretty much cheating.
Does the generator also create the mission briefing? If so, is it pretty detailed, or somewhat robotic?
Also, I’ve been playing around with CBU-97, which is really cool. I’d love to pop up some screens, but haven’t been able to take anything decent with my usual methods. Any pointers screenshots in game?
Yes, but it’s a terrible briefing. A list of waypoints and what happens at each one. No maps or anything. Hopefully, when DCS gets its own dynamic campaign engine, there’ll be better recce features, a la Falcon 4’s mission planner.
The MBot DCE campaigns are better in that regard, but clunkier when it comes to playing. Either way, it’s nice to have some missions I haven’t either made myself or already played.
Edit: an example of a great briefing is that pre-emptive strike mission I linked here a while ago, I think. It has a detailed map, some annotated photos of the target area, and good explanatory text on the moment of attack. That’s going to be tricky to do in an automated fashion even built into DCS, though. Honestly, I don’t have especially high hopes for the dynamic campaign they’re working on unless they manage to do some kind of Falcon 4-esque bubble; DCS isn’t good enough at super-large scenarios yet to make a serious war feel real.
In other fun mission #4 news, I also bagged a helicopter with a radar-reticle gun snapshot after closing for visual ID, which was a great ‘I know what I’m doing!’ moment with the HOTAS.
Some VR news from the latest DCS newsletter:
Virtual Reality Update
We see VR as an amazing tool to enjoy DCS World and the future of PC gaming for many. To make DCS World even better, we’ve been working on some great VR improvements that include:
- Optimized VR performance
- Touch control that allows direct finger interaction with cockpit controls
- Touch control to allow the right and left Touch controllers to act as stick and throttle when positioned correctly in the virtual cockpit and holding down the middle-finger buttonThese will provide a much more immersive VR experience, particularly for those flying warbirds and other aircraft that do not require HOTAS controls.
I wonder how far out that stuff is. My guess is they are reverse engineering the shaders mod to optimise their own.