DD_Arthur

The B1 entered service in 1956. Along the way they had upgrades to produce the B1A. These had different wings(?), electronic counter measures and capability of in-flight refuelling and uprated engines. In 1960 the B2 entered service with all the changes the B1A had plus different, more powerful engines and lots of detail differences to accommodate them. They also had a great deal of radio and nav equipment updates. As Soviet missile and fighter development advanced the Vulcan's operational profile was changed in the mid-sixties to a low level attack and B2 airframes were strengthened to reflect this. As our primary nuclear deterent was about to change to submarine launched Polaris missiles it was judged not cost effective to upgrade B1 aircraft to low level work and they were all withdrawn by the late sixties. When I was at school we had a maths teacher who had been a v-bomber navigator in the RAF and he could occasionally be persuaded to talk about it. For all bomber crews, whether they were British, American or Soviet, nuclear war was a one way trip. No one had the range to return home after bombing their enemies major cities. The Vulcan's fuel use at extreme ranges in combat use was apparently a bit of a mystery and it was generally accepted that the Vulcan force would run out of juice somewhere over western Poland or East Germany on the way back. There was some debate over whether they'd get a better reception from the Poles or the Stasi....

Cor! That's a blast from the past. Whoever thought of putting an Asteroids machine in a pub table was a genius!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg1z42pkj8o

As you're all no doubt aware, now they've gotten rid of Jason Williams the 1CGS team have been working on their new Korea sim. You might be less aware they've also been making...other stuff.

FT’s robot floor sweeper

Not really. Bypassing the ‘connect to internet’ bit allowed me to complete the windows install and access this ‘armoury crate’ business. This checks for the relevant drivers and installs them. I think I needed a LAN driver for Win 11. At my level of expertise the best analogy is fumbling around a completely dark room full of furniture until you find the light switch. Good news; installed TrackIr without problems and my hotas and MSFFB2 stick were plug and play. Disabled hyperthreading, downloaded the 380 gig monster that is MSFS 2020 overnight and gave it a spin this morning whilst monitoring temps and fans and everything’s groovy. Bit more than groovy actually; freakin’ bonkers! At the moment it’s set up in the living room temporarily - which is verboten - so I’m going to have to break it down and put it where old faithful lives. After I’ve done that I’ll start on DCS. I can see another ‘shall I get a big, 4K screen or shall I get another VR headset?’ situation ahead.

Oooooohhh.....Aaaahhhhh......it works. Now I've got a vast amount of stuff to transfer/download/remember how it actually works...

Quick update; I’ve managed to bypass the online registration stuff by finding a command prompt bypass. I’m now installing ‘Armoury Crate’ and a Lan driver - hopefully. This is all completely new to me but I hearby promise that if I can get all this stuff working I will load DCS. Shouldn’t be a problem; I’ve got 3 TB of storage to play with…..🤪

Hello Colin, the router has a list of all the devices that have ever connected to it but I don’t think there’s a list of approved devices. Network cable works fine with my other pc and yes, I’ve restarted the new one several times but no joy so far.

Okay, have finished chucking it all together and it's an understated thing of beauty but.......I downloaded Win 11 Home edition onto an external USB hard drive. I bought myself a legit (and expensive!) Win 11 Home product key. I plugged in the external hard drive, a key board, mouse, monitor and connected it to my router. Took a deep breath and pressed the button. Hey! It fired up, the fans worked, the cooler pump is working as far as I can tell. Windows started loading thing and everything is fine until I get to that bit in the Windows loading screen where it says 'Connect to the internet' and nothing happens. I can see from the lights indication on the ethernet port that it's working but nada, nothing connecting. Any ideas greatly appreciated. I can check the router and it's working and connected to 'old faithful' but when I connect my new pc to it, nothing is showing on the router page and Windows loading screen is still waiting for an internet connection.... Ignore the BT hub in the background. I'm not trying to plug into that.

Have got this far; The main problem has been the lack of documentation that comes with this stuff these days - with the honourable exception of the motherboard and the distraction of running over this beach with grandma and grandchildren Spent a couple of days pondering how I was going to extract one of the SSD's from 'old faithful' and stick it in 'ere before the obvious occured to me ; just buy anuvver one and I need to get more USB ports too. Have realised the ones on the front are going to be useless for fixed items like a joystick and TrackIr....

Cor! Well done Bongo. Amazing

I must admit I'm enjoying shopping for this but I've been pretty slack about it. We've just returned from another long weekend away without children - which is a novelty in itself - however, I now have a few weeks of time on my hands so I'm ready to go....except I've got to buy a new case and actually look into the process of how to squeeze a new copy Windows11 into it all without a disc drive. I settled on this card as a) I really can't bring myself to spend four figures on a graphics card and b) the 50xx series probably won't see the light of day until the end of the year and will no doubt conflict with a)

Well it's strange you should say that as my now good friend Stephen from DPD delivered another inviting looking box from Ebuyer this morning....

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