Tribunus

In Europe, they are at least talking about cutting back on government spending and reducing their budget deficits. The U.S. government wants to continue borrowing billions from China and Saudi Arabia. As T_O_A_D said, it’s sickening.

~S~ Tribunus You’ve been flying RoF for some time now. What do you think about it, now that it has matured for a year? I've spent more time testing, than actual fun flying, but it's nearly as ready as it's going to be I beleive. It will have some tweaks and addons for sure, but it functional now. Do you fly mostly 0n-Line? One of the main complaints was how little Off-Line content there was. I'm 99% Online with it as I am with IL2, But again its mostly testing. Finding a fun server, State side thats populated is even yet a bitch, with my schedule. How difficult is it to get it set up and running properly? I understand that setting it up right can be a bit frustrating. If you have a machine in the last two years, dual core, and a 896meg vid card or bigger, you should be fine. I believe that you use a MS FFB Joystick. How well does that work with RoF? It is the easiest stick to setup for ROF. The developers have designed the Game using that very stick, and they even recommend it. I see that they are now offering a boxed addition called Rise of Flight – Iron Cross Edition. It now comes on a disk and has all the patches, upgrades and tweaks. Plus it comes with a respectable amount of aircraft and a few Off-Line missions and campaigns. Based on your experience, would you recommend giving it a try? If your into War aircraft, and History of them, and feel you won't mind a slow pace, Then yes, it's worth owning. Dagger the Campaigns are scripted, I don't beleive the off line stuff is dynamic at all. But if you can figure out the Mission Editor, you can include triggers. I myself, am very frustrated with the mission Editor.

Why, are there sheep near the airfield? But then we are talking about Painless and Sid. So just about anything is a reason to………………..Celebrate. :fireworks:

Our resident chef has a recipe for Road Kill. Why am I not surprised.

I can relate to that Sweper. And I’ll share a toilet story with you. A long, long time ago, I was in a bar in Saigon and had to visit the men’s room. There were urinals along the wall, but there were no pipes connecting the urinals to the sewer line. Your urine simply poured out the bottom of the urinals, splashed on the floor (and all over your boots) and then disappeared down a floor drain.

Mate, over in this part of the world, 40C+ is not considered to be that terribly hot. We don’t really start complaining about the heat until we hit 50C. The hottest temperature that I’ve personally experienced was 56C in Baghdad. Not only was it hot, I was of necessity wearing a helmet and body armor and carrying 3 liters of water in a Camelbak, a rifle, a pistol and 300+ rounds of ammunition. Trust me Mate, that can make for a long day. Think about opening your kitchen oven and having that hot blast of air hit your face and arms. Most people will involuntarily wince from the discomfort caused by the heat. That is what the heat is like once you get into the 50C range. Except it’s not just for a moment or two, it’s all day. As far as solar water heaters. That’s fairly universal over here, but it’s not a fancy system. Pretty much each apartment building has a water tank on the roof, but there is no elaborate specialized method of collecting the heat. The tank simply sits there in the sun. By the end of the day the water is scalding hot. It’s actually too hot to shower in, so you shower in the morning. Given the power of the sun here, you would think that there would be a booming market for Fresnel lens and reflective parabolic cookers, but there is not. Cooking is women’s work and in a Muslim country, women are expected to stay in the house away from the prying eyes of other men, so the cooking is all done indoors. It would be the scandal of the neighborhood if your wife was seen outside cooking. Then there is the problem of food preparation if you’re cooking outside with all the extra dirt and dust in the air. Life is different over here, interesting but different.

I was an invited guest , so I didn’t have to pay. But, there are all sorts of little food kiosks near the metro stations, where you can buy four Pita breads stuffed with Falafel for a grand total of 4 Egyptian Pounds, which is around 70 cents U.S. If you are willing to eat where the locals eat, you can get a full meal for about one U.S. dollar

Are you sure you want to know Mate? Most people don’t want to think about that. The ‘kitchen’ is not much more than a sink and two burners that run off of bottle gas. The ‘cook’ is a young draftee who has been assigned the duty. Now it’s important to remember that Egyptian/Arab men as a rule don’t know how to cook. Cooking is considered woman’s work and is beneath them. (As Allah intended). So the kid that gets assigned cooking duties is not going to really know much about cooking. Kitchen cleanliness is far from western standards. As I said, there is no air conditioning and it’s fairly warm here. So naturally the kitchen windows are all wide open trying to catch a breeze. That combined with the lack of window screens means the kitchen is full of flies and they are crawling on everything. Anything and everything you read about living in North Africa will mention the flies and every word of it is true. Then there is the water, the water used to clean the cook ware and vegetables is of questionable purity. There is no hot water available, so dishes, pots and pans are all washed with cold water, which means that the accumulated oils and grease never really get washed off. Food storage is the same way, there is no refrigerator so things go bad quickly. The windows are open, so everything will soon be covered with a dusting of windblown sand. Egypt is a poor country and as I said living conditions here are very austere, so the oil that they use to cook almost everything with is used and re-used, again and again and again. It has to be really bad before they throw it out. So as you have probably figured out by now, eating even a simple meal over here can be real adventure. It’s not a question of IF you’re going to get sick from the food it’s a matter of when and how badly sick you going to get. But you can’t refuse the meal. It’s offered in the spirit of Arab hospitality and to not eat, and eat heartily, would be an insult. So no matter what they serve, you need to eat it. Over the years I’ve developed a cast iron stomach, but even I can have a queasy moment or two. This meal turned out to be one of those occasions. I’m not sure if it was the rancid oil that they fried everything in, or if it was the cream cheese that set out in the heat too long. (I’m personally betting on the cream cheese) But by the end of the day my stomach was doing flips. It’s all part of the fun of living and working in the Third World.

I was out at an Egyptian base today that is literally in the middle of the desert. There is nothing as far as the eye can see but sand. Sorry, I have no pictures. The Egyptian military is extremely sensitive about cameras on there military installations. So when lunch time rolled around, we went to the Egyptian Officers Mess. Now the Egyptian military live under some pretty austere conditions. None of the buildings here have air-conditioned and it was about 43C at lunch time. So the Officers Mess was a little warm. What we got for lunch was typically Egyptian. The Mess Steward brought everyone a plate with four small pita breads, four thin slices of tomato, three thin slices of cucumber and two very thin slices of green bell pepper. The first pita had a layer of scrambled eggs inside. The second one was full of fried potatoes. The third one had a Falafel patty inside. Falafel is a fried patty of finely minced fava beans, seasoned with garlic, scallions and God knows what else. It's actually very taste. The fourth pita had a layer of cream cheese spread inside. We washed this feast down with a can of Pepsi, served at room temperature. Now remember, the temperature was around 43C, so it was like drinking sweetened carbonated bath water. That was lunch in the Egyptian Officer's Mess. I know that this sounds trivial, but it was actually a decent lunch and I had good time.

Sand stone. Old crumbly sand stone.

That is a Classic Sweper.

~S~ GrayKnight, That was me Mate, but this is the first time that I really had a long period of time to play with it. The other times I’ve been in the simulator, all pretty much fall under the heading of ground school. There are a lot of buttons and switches to remember in an F-16. As far as the flight log…. Oh yes, they would think a monkey was flying the thing. I’m flying around the virtual skies trying to trim the bird properly and make simple turns without gaining or losing altitude. ~S~ Snacko No mate, I’ve never flow an F-16. The hottest fixed wing aircraft that I’ve ever flown was Cessna 310. As far as getting help from the contractor, absolutely yes. There are 6 of these simulators scattered around Egypt. When I visit the Egyptian Air Bases where they are located, I somehow always find time to drop by and chat with the American technicians. So as I told GrayKnight, I’ve got a decent amount of knowledge about how the cockpit controls are laid out. Rotation speed for takeoff is marked on the Air Speed indicator with a little green arrow. The Air Speed indicator has an outer needle for knots and an inner needle for Mach number. The contractor advised me as to the appropriate speeds for dropping the landing gear and making my landing approach. I’ll look at that Pit trainer link when I get some time. But the picture of instrument panel on the title page looks good.

I got to spend about two hours today in an F-16C flight simulator. I was visiting an Egyptian Air Base, and discovered that the Egyptians were not using it today. It seemed like a waste to let it just sit there and not be used, so I talked the American contractor, who maintains the simulator, into letting me take it for a spin. As you would expect the cockpit is an exact replica of an F-16. The cockpit sits in the middle of the room almost half surrounded by a wrap around screen. The screen wraps around maybe 150 degrees, so it is almost a half a sphere Regrettably, the graphics are awful. The old Micro Soft Combat Flight Simulator 1 had better graphics. But this simulator is about training pilots, not eye candy. The simulated airfield I took off from was fairly short, so I had to use the Afterburner for takeoff. This was actually pretty easy. You just go to full throttle and then move the throttle sideways and forward through a gate. Then you’re in Afterburner. Rotation speed for takeoff was 170 knots. Then it was gear up and way. This thing climbs like a scared cat. I was just getting settled into the climb out, when I looked at the instruments and noticed that I was already at 17,000 feet. I then flew to Suez and made a bomb run on shipping in the Red Sea. Then I flew to Cairo and made some gun runs on the Sphinx. The damage model on the Sphinx is awful. Repeated runs with a 20mm Vulcan had no affect on it at all. Then I flew back up the Nile to my base for some practice landings. The F-16 is a lot hotter than what I’m used to. In IL2, I normally enter the landing pattern at a little over 200 kmh and make my final approach at around 160 to 150 kmh. With the F-16 I entered the pattern at 220 knots. When I dropped my landing gear, the drag took me down to 200 knots, flaps are automatic. Your final approach in the F-16 is right at 170 knots. By IL2 standards that is screaming fast. I’ve got to admit that I aborted a lot of landings and had to go around multiple times. I was coming in too fast, too high, too low, you name I was doing it. Part of it was the very fast approach speed and part of it was that I wasn’t use to the way the graphics engine depict the 2 Dimensional representation of the ground. In IL2, I’m use to the all the little 2D clues that help you determine your height when you’re coming in for a landing. It wasn’t pretty, but I eventually go it on the ground. The funny thing was that after I ended my session and I got out of the simulator, I was wobbling and weaving all over the place when I tried to walk. That huge wrap around screen, which would bank, climb and turn with the simulated aircraft, had thrown my sense of balance off.

I like a Manly sport like Darts. You play it in a Pub, you hold a projectile weapon in one hand and a drink in the other.

I understand that there is a way to get the Speed Bar to show True Air Speed (TAS) as well Indicated Air Speed (IAS). That would solve a lot of the mystery of level bombing. Does anyone know how that is done?

A college student explains Obamanomics. Recently Obama announced that he is going to work to cut 100-Million dollars of spending out of the Federal Budget. VERY well done! http://www.wimp.com/budgetcuts/

~S~ Sweper Hang onto that mate. Something like that could be worth some real money if you can find the right collector.

Those were the days??? Mate, the Egyptians are still using the 1980s version of the M1A1 Tank simulator to train their tank crews. These simulations still use 5 ¼ in floppies for loading the different programs. It’s a different world over here.

Boy, there is absolutely no room for error in a maneuver like that. You’re really depending on the aircraft to not have the slightest problem. One hiccup with the engines and it could get really bad, really fast. On a side note, it took me a moment to figure out the CAF part, but I finally got it. It’s a CAF F-18, as in Canadian Air Force. When I first saw the title I thought it was a Confederate Air Force F-18. We’ve got that in Texas.

I’m glad that we’re getting updates again. It at least tells us that SOW is making progress.

I wouldn’t say its fix just yet. I’m having great difficulty staying signed in. As I move from thread to thread I get kick and have to sign back in multiple times.

Flight Sim Files was once know as Flying Legends.

The Bull wins again! Excellent

I think the bull missed him. I think the bull’s horn is on the other side of his head and what we see is just the illusion that the horn went into his neck and out his mouth. The total lack of blood is the tip off. If he was gored the way it appears, there would be lot of blood.