ftldave

The Launch America live stream on YouTube and other sites was fun to watch. They did a great job. Reminded me of when I was a kid, when my elementary school teachers would bring a TV into the classroom so we could watch the Gemini and early Apollo launches. I've always been grateful that they did that for us.

Thanks for the great video. David Vincent and I are very interested. "The Invaders, alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it their world. David Vincent has seen them."

In 2020 there are "gaming laptops" that would have more than adequate specs and performance for sims and hi-res games. But £800 isn't enough money to buy one. Fact is, so many of the newest, fastest cpu's are first intended for laptop\mobile use, the goal to run faster and use less power, run longer. Sure, lots of clear advantages for a sim hobbyist to have a desktop, but the "got to have a desktop" advice isn't necessarily so in 2020, not if you have enough money to spend. TECH RADAR - BEST GAMING LAPTOPS 2020 - https://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/best-gaming-laptops-top-5-gaming-notebooks-reviewed-1258471 "The best gaming laptops aren’t only for having an incredibly immersive gaming experience while also being portable. Now that they’re closing the performance gap between them and the best gaming PCs with the latest mobile versions of cutting-edge internals ... "

Yesterday Justplanes.com released its classic 3-hour-long "Plane Spotting At LAX 2001" video on YouTube. They'll continue to release video features every Saturday at 2 PM EST during the pandemic, as entertainment for us locked-in plane fans. Lots of 747s, DC-10s, MD-11s, a few L-1011s, and a wonderful night takeoff of a U.S. Navy Constellation, plus many, many other aircraft. Watching it made for an entertaining Saturday afternoon. Thank you, Justplanes.com!

7,477 Covid-19 deaths as of midnight 3-16: WORLD METER - CORONAVIRUS. Don't blame the media for reporting what the World Health Organization, scientists, and knowledgeable doctors are saying. "Happy talk" is pretty easy to recognize when you see it happening, just makes people more distrustful, doesn't help. This reminds me of when I was a kid growing up here in Indiana, when I heard some of my young friends talking about how all their great grandparents had died during the 1918 "Spanish flu" epidemic. Back then I wondered how it must have been, what it was like, living through a global pandemic. So, it's happened before ... undertakers were busy around here in south central Indiana 102 years ago. And history repeats itself, no matter how much we want stock prices to go up. One economist said the covid-19 crisis is just the pin prick that popped an already very inflated, unsustainable bubble, which I suspect is probably a spot-on analysis. The fact that we can't see a virus threat, don't know if we can effectively avoid the risks or not, how bad it could get, adds to people's fears. We're hard-wired to react to that, I believe. The "B" word is coming ... Bailouts. Airlines and Boeing, in particular, have uncertain futures now. Though open talk about bailing out the cruise ship industry deserves a 'SAY WHAT?!?"

Maybe more accurate to say that "originally 2D panels WERE designed only to fit 4:3 ratio". Some models, like Philippe Wallaert's, include both 16:1 and 4:3 2D panels (sometimes a VC as well). Concorde X 2D wide panel

Some VC's look amazing and yes, others look cartoony awful. As for TrackIR and other VC gear, you may enjoy it but I don't particularly want to have more hardware on my head. My teenage son laughs at me enough already. Headphones are enough, thanks. If a payware plane doesn't have a 2D panel, with rare exception, I won't buy it. Freeware, there's often ways to add a suitable 2D panel with extra work if one isn't included, sometimes not. All my favorite FSX aircraft have 2D panels, and I fly them that way. Personally I find the VC experience more akin to "flying a camera" than flying a plane, and for me, it's not enjoyable. Sorry, but much of the time I disable the VC, stop wasting any RAM on them. No disrespect intended to those who work so hard on them, really. If the new flight simulator doesn't have 2D panel support, I hope at least there will be a better VC user experience than what we've seen before, with easier, less cumbersome view control. Don't believe all the polls you see, Bill. The popularity of flightsim 2D panels is alive and well.

I fly the Stratojet Excalibur often, a favorite imaginary supersonic business jet with 2D wide aspect panel by Philippe Wallaert. Thank you, Philippe! I stopped the porpoising by modifying these two values, a somewhat simpler technique that yields good results on this and other planes that needed it, though the two values require testing. Every plane model is different. Be sure to make a backup copy of the original aircraft.cfg. [flight_tuning] elevator_effectiveness=0.9 pitch_stability=3.0

Yeah, let Mitja in Slovenia patch your Windows 7 after end of support. What could possibly be wrong with that? :p

From CNN: Can Microsoft Flight Simulator's 2020 reboot solve the pilot shortage? I don't think a new flightsim will address the life-crippling debt from expensive pilot training, the low starting pay, or terrible working hours of new pilots. But a good read.

Windows 10 and FSX Gold on my rig, lots of add-ons. Zero problems. I think I had to reset my NVidia Inspector profile for FSX once after a Win10 build update, an unwanted side effect that I fixed in a few minutes. Other than that minor annoyance, as I said, zero problems. At work, thousands of pc's running well on Win10. All software has a life cycle, and so does Windows 7.

For the big global companies, surely it's a big issue. And on the developer's side, there's a big difference between theory and reality. Microsoft has screwed up, mismanaged repeatedly with its "SaaS" Windows 10 updates, and that's cost them $$$ and lots of bad press. At my place of work, we still have the option to restrict pushed-down updates, but consumers can only postpone them ... and hope there aren't bad effects when they eventually do install. From Digitaltrends: "The massive rollout that was the October 2018 Update for Windows 10 was nothing short of a blunder for a company as sweeping as Microsoft. With reports of severe data loss by users who downloaded the fall update, Microsoft paused the rollout after only two days. Windows users who had adjusted the location of specific folders found their data completely wiped from their drives. Without a proper backup, the information was lost — a grave failure for a critical update."

Isn't the move away from software version numbers also a dodge from financial penalties in the EU, the Euro legal requirements that "new versions" of software must be backward compatible and "inter-operable" with previous versions? So, Microsoft, Adobe, all the big software companies are moving away from version numbers. Service Packs are now "build" revisions, etc.

Windows 7 support ends early next year for consumers. Businesses and big organizations can subscribe to extended support over next 3 years, paying more each year you hang on to Win 7. But that option's only available for corporate/academic licensees. Don't believe everything you heard about Windows 10. It's got its own quirks, sure, but people always complain and rail every time a new operating system arrives - and as you are probably showing in your post: people hate change.

Officially: never. Unofficially, well, lots of Cold War secrets have been unclassified in the past 10-15 years, but not all of them. Soviet missiles and, in the late 1980s, the MIG-31 with its networked\phased-array radar made SR-71 overflights very risky. MIG-31s might not have been able to intercept SR-71 in chase, but four of them, at least once, did block an SR-71 flight path on the periphery of eastern Siberia. To quote one historian's explanation: "Gary Power's [u-2 spy plane] shoot down spoiled the party."

A fascinating report about the use of exotic fuel additives on the A-12 spy plane, the SR-71's predecessor. From TheDrive.com: A-12 - Cesium-Laced Fuel

Thanks to all who looked at this anomaly. John's scenery has the great museum planes on display, and I miss that in the SDB version.

Fueling occurs in the parking apron with each and every plane I've tested in John's Dover scenery.

Thanks for the good info, but the Dover scenery doesn't show any fuel triggers - at least none that anyone's been able to identify after close scrutiny, and that's the root problem. ADE shows no fuel triggers; none of the examined BGL files do either. Can't delete what cannot be seen. Refueling occurs across the entire parking apron, but how/why it is happening remains unclear. In the meantime I'm returning to TeamSDB's now out-of-print Military Airfields Set #1 Dover AFB scenery, and fixed that one's problem: grass textures bleeding through the Dover runways during landings - by raising the entire airport's elevation two feet above it's original altitude, a technique others have used for scenery with the same problem. The elevation change isn't noticeable and no more runways sinking into the ground during final approach.

Alas, an exclude polygon set to stop triggers, in place across the entire apron, also fails to stop the refueling. No joy. It's FSX - BGL - not AFCAD based. I think it's just buggy from it's conversion from its FS9 origins. The inability to right click on a selected parking spot and add a fueling trigger is a sign of that, I would think. There are other alternates out there, like MegaSceneryEarth Delaware 2017 that's available as a free demo - and included Dover AFB, but bright green textures all-year photoreal scenery next to white snow-covered land is too weird for me. SDB's now out of print Military Airfields scenery set #1 included Dover AFB, but if I remember correctly, its elevations needed fixing, with some of its runways sinking into the earth during landing. What is it with Dover???

This continues to stump the chump ... namely me. Setting the airport service properties in ADE so that all AV and JET fuels are set to NO does not stop the aircraft refueling at all parking spaces. Hmmm ...

A friend recommended deleting the kdov_doverafb fuel station.bgl file - but no joy. Planes continue to top up 100% fuel across the entire parking area. Rats.