if they send out their "champion" to challenge yours, but their champion is 100 lbs, cross eyed, drooling, basically essentially mentally retarded....would you send out you best fighter as your "champion" when even someone only 1/10th the warrior should be able to win the duel ?
no. because there is still the chance whomever you send out will somehow lose (slip, fall on own sword, something in eye, etc). since its not a zero-risk game, while risk throwing away your best fighter, even when its obvious he should win?
you take a large risk, to your assets if not the overall war, for a disproportionately tiny reward. and battles and even wars have been lost over such things before.
A classic example from boxing would be Ali's match against The Bayonne Bleeder, Chuck Wepner. You know...the real guy who inspired the Rocky story. and this is Ali in his prime, the worlds greatest boxer. And this no-name easy fight just would...not..go...down. A match everyone though Ali should have easily won went on for 15 rounds. He even knocked Ali down int he 9th.
So appearances and expectations can be decieving. Thats why, even for easy wins, you never risk more than you are willing to lose.
take a piece of wire. lay it across the edge of a sheet of metal. now subject to many many hours of vibration and movement. now imagine you dont have one wire, but thousands of them, ziptied into bundles. and its not one metal edge, but a few hundred as the bundle passes through the ribs and bulkheads of an airframe. now also add to that vibration the techs and mechs who work on the aircraft, tugging and moving the bundle, cutting it open to replace wires, adding more, tracing wires from the nose to the tail finding the fault... its labor intensive. and now youre gonna change out or add wires for a new peice of gear, but probably not every gear, so some wires stay and some go...the labor is intensive. and that's just one airacraft in an inventory of several hundred.
and then there's the boxes that are frequently custom tailored to that airframe. its not just a box Yea big stuff in some convenient location. It's actually tailored to precisely fit the curve or angle of one specific location on that aircraft. And oh by the way, then inside that is the circuit board, made to fit the box thats made to fit the plane. frequently the board matches the shap eof the box, cause its got so much stuff on it they need every available square inch to get all the components it needs to do its job. and there's dozens of these boxes.
and oh by the way, these boxes have to talk to each other. and new boxes need to still talk to old, and the old need to be able to talk to the new ones too! and they dont use standard protocols, cause they didnt exist yet. in fact, the roots of some of your standard protocals can be traced to these military avionics/electronics needing to talk to each other.
then theres teh ruggedization factor. microelectronics are great, but a thin wire filament or solder connection (or whatever) is far weaker than a fat wire or solder connection. these thinigs are going on military aircraft. they're gonna get dirty. droppped by techs. bumped around, rough landings. oh, and shot at. all this stuff makes it harder to make the stuff in military birds smaller.
and ya, the plane, or parts of it, are pretty much designed around it. or rather, around one or two electrical busses. you typically get 1 DC bus and 1 AC bus, and 1 backup for each. That's 4 total comprising two electrical systems/sources. and EVERYTHING needs to be able to powered by one or the other, or both in some cases. thse systems are powerd by teh engines,a nd since space is limited theres only really room for one generator per engine, outputing one DC voltage level, and then an invertor to power the AC busses off that.
so ya. avionics gets expensive fast. both from deisgning it to withstand a hostile envirnment, not fatigue from vibration (and theres special isntallation procedures for the mechs to use to help in that, such as bushings and stuff), maintain backwards compatibility, etc etc so on and so forth.
that one radar probably has 5 or 6 different avionics boxes that control it, and thats not even counting the display in teh cockpit. and several others that while controlling it, its still connected to and talks to.
austere locations isnt crap, and you obviously have never been to a FOB in the middle of nowhere in the middle east. incase you didnt know, such FOBs dont have runaways. yet the Harrier can still base out of one and provide additional support for the FOB itself and the helos that also based out of them.
so no, it's not crap. you are however ignorant of the facts.
Im going to list some of the most successful fighters in US history. We produced thousands, and they in turn downed thousands of North Korean, North Chinese, and North Vietnamese pilots. In addition they carried out thousands of ground attack sorties and dropped thousands of pounds of ordinance.
F-80 F-84 F-86 F-100 F-102 F-104 F-105 F-106
Each of these aircraft has one thing in common: they only have a single engine. And these were the aircraft from the days when turbines were "unreliable" and had incredibly short work cycles (maximum hours flying time) in between total overhauls. In one case, the F-105, the platform was responsible for over 75% of all ordinance dropped in Vietnam; yes, the F-105 dropped more than 3x as many bombs as all other aircraft combined in that war, and that includes the massive B-52 bombing runs.
This single engine lawn dawn thing was a baseless criticism leveled at the F-16 by its competitors, and it stuck. But it was baseless then, and its baseless now.
plus there's that whole situational awareness thing. drone pilots have very poor SA because they arent in a cockpit and able to constantly scan the whole sky around them. they have the limited FOV of a single camera. its amazing how much you can pick up with the peripheral vision,a nd pilots absolutely depend on that.
The 35 would win. The Reaper is a ground attack bird. It has what is essentially a BriteStar II sight unit (video camera, infrared video camera, and laser designator), but lacks a targeting radar , or other avioncs, needed to launch AA missiles. Also lacks a gun, is far less manueverable or fast.
and that one that got shot down in Serbia was a lucky shot. it wasnt detected or tracked by the radar. but if you knew anything at all about Russian designed SAM installations, which they were using there, the systems as one of its redundancies includes not jsut the radar tracker, but also proximity fuses, including magnetic type, and a master detonate-on-command switch as well. that sam site launched every missile they had loaded, and the operator manually detonated the warheads when his spread of missiles reached a proper height. essentially he recreated the old WWII scneria of throwing upa curtain of flak (shrapnel) for the plane to fly through.
incorrect. the F-117 went in first and killed known strategic targets, including SAM sites, without any backup. It was designed for, and performed in, an unsupported first strike role for the duration of the conflict. the very first aircraft sortie of the gulf war was a flight of 117s hitting high value/threat targets.
turbine engines are also a whole helluva lot more reliable, by multiple orders of magnatude, than when the Navy SOP was to require two turbines for that reason. Navy hasnt had a hard on for that since the mid 70s (reason they picked the YF-17 to become the F-18 after it lost to the F16 for the air force competition). and even then analysts were pointing out the two engine requirement likely wasnt that necessary anymore, for the same reason.
most of the Super Hornets drawbacks stem from teh fact that it isnt new. Its an upgrade of the Hornet; refreshed avionics, tweaked aerodynamics (chiefly around the inlets), etc. But essentially still airframes that date from the mid 80's at best (since upgrades tend to be just that: old airframes with new parts....few of them are totally new manufacture from the ground up). Any additional Super Hornets will likely be new made, since all the original hornets have either been upgraded or boneyarded by now. but new made with older gear.
so like said: its main drawvbacks are around its age, and though more and newer upgrades can be performed its -not stealthy -doesnt have the range needed for the Air Force -cannot replace the Harrier for the Marines -has older/less capable avionics (compared to the new shinies) and so on.
will more Super Hornet purchases happen? Unlikely.
The Air Force, while its fleet is aging and any new SH's will truly be new made, has penty of multirole F-16s and 15s. The SH isnt really designed for Air Superiorty, though capable of it (just not as capable as dedicated designs like the F15 and 22), and isnt really needed to supplement the 15s and 22s in that role.
For the Navy, they dont lack for SH's already; they have em. What the navy wanted was naval stealth supplement, much like the 22 and 35 were to supplement the lower tech 15s and 16 for the air force. (a total stealth force while nice, is prohibitively expensive and most planners agree not economically feasible for the forseeable future). What they navy also currently lacks is a dedicated air superiority plane, since the retirement of the F14. The 18s have fulfilling that role, but they arent dedicated to it, and arent as capable as even the 14s were (remember the 14 was designed quite literally around the PHeonix missile, which itself was tailor made for the navy, to stop enemy planes far far away from the fleet to keep them from threatening the fleet with anti-ship missiles). a navalized 22 has been talked about, and the navy has proposals and requests for ideas out about a dedicated AS plane, but so far its still not moved past the talking phase.
The Marines also already have SH's, and again, what they were looking to get from the 35 was a replacement for the Harrier that is due to leave service very soon. That's why the Marine version had VTOL ability, so it could operate off the same LHA's and LHD's, alongside our helos, that the Harrier did. The stealth being an added bonus as frequently the Marine MEU's dont have Air Force Stealth squadrons to make a pre-strike run for them and clear the airspace before they go in (which is standard AF procedure when stealth aircraft are available).
So i dont really expect to see many more SH's purchased by the US unless the 35 program completely falls through, which simply isnt that likely
there's also the whole of, how did they know where to plant the wires? do they even know if the rats can communicate? how do they know rats even shared information and not just random brain impulses? how do they know they used the shared information?
What games have they released that haven't been fun? Even Diablo 3 was fun the first time through.
and if you just want a competent RTS without any backstory, there's already 1000's of those. half the attraction of the warcraft and starcraft games are the stories that provide the motivation/reason for the missions
Tribes Ascend was fun for a bit. And then they start releasing overpowered instant kill weapons for $$$. And that's when it became unfun. People want to feel like they have a chance in competitive games. Releasing game breaking gameplay elements for money ruins that.
the "talent system" was another turn off. and then they infected WoW with it too. Even worse, all the talents, at least for the witchdoctor and marksman, might as well not even be very different. every "skill branch" seems to have "escape ability X", "AE ability X", "Single target abilty X", "Regenerate X", and so on. just the names and graphics are different.
so basically it boils to whether you want to hit the 1 key to heal, or 2, and want 3 or 4 to be your spam ability....its silly. and jsut a further reflection of the "sameness" that pervades the game, right down to the compeltely linear map design.
no, Blizzard lost a lot of the built in fanbase by releasing a completely linear game with almost 0 replayability.
you dont have to use the RMAH. no one is forcing it. people do however because the game itself is so utterly boring and uninteresting after the first one or two play throughs. it is almost completely linear. tiny pieces are random, such as "will this one room basement be open on this playthrough?", but that's about it. This makes actually playing the game long enough to get that specific thing you're looking for utterly boring and mindnumbing. Diablo 1 and 2 on the other hand were almost compeltely randomly generated, EVERY TIME. This makes that quest to get something constantly different, the sense of adventuring always there. it takes far longer for boredom to set in when the maps are randomly generated.
the overbearing linearity is what doomed D3. And, given the reason D1 and D2 were so appealing and popular was largely due to that very non-linearity, I'm surprised whomever abandoned that aspect of the core game world didn't get fired.
Slashdot Mirror
Saturn's Race, by Larry Niven. similar concept, only a scientist melding his own mind with a shark.
combat is inherently risky.
if they send out their "champion" to challenge yours, but their champion is 100 lbs, cross eyed, drooling, basically essentially mentally retarded....would you send out you best fighter as your "champion" when even someone only 1/10th the warrior should be able to win the duel ?
no. because there is still the chance whomever you send out will somehow lose (slip, fall on own sword, something in eye, etc). since its not a zero-risk game, while risk throwing away your best fighter, even when its obvious he should win?
you take a large risk, to your assets if not the overall war, for a disproportionately tiny reward.
and battles and even wars have been lost over such things before.
A classic example from boxing would be Ali's match against The Bayonne Bleeder, Chuck Wepner. You know...the real guy who inspired the Rocky story. and this is Ali in his prime, the worlds greatest boxer. And this no-name easy fight just would...not..go...down. A match everyone though Ali should have easily won went on for 15 rounds. He even knocked Ali down int he 9th.
So appearances and expectations can be decieving. Thats why, even for easy wins, you never risk more than you are willing to lose.
ever Play quake?
Ever play on a server half way around teh globe against someone sitting int eh same room as the server?
sucks dont it?
thats what its like for a drone pilot sitting in a trailer at Nellis facing off against an ordinary fighter plane.
in short: whooosh, you missed the point.
take a piece of wire.
lay it across the edge of a sheet of metal.
now subject to many many hours of vibration and movement.
now imagine you dont have one wire, but thousands of them, ziptied into bundles.
and its not one metal edge, but a few hundred as the bundle passes through the ribs and bulkheads of an airframe.
now also add to that vibration the techs and mechs who work on the aircraft, tugging and moving the bundle, cutting it open to replace wires, adding more, tracing wires from the nose to the tail finding the fault...
its labor intensive. and now youre gonna change out or add wires for a new peice of gear, but probably not every gear, so some wires stay and some go...the labor is intensive. and that's just one airacraft in an inventory of several hundred.
and then there's the boxes that are frequently custom tailored to that airframe. its not just a box Yea big stuff in some convenient location. It's actually tailored to precisely fit the curve or angle of one specific location on that aircraft. And oh by the way, then inside that is the circuit board, made to fit the box thats made to fit the plane. frequently the board matches the shap eof the box, cause its got so much stuff on it they need every available square inch to get all the components it needs to do its job. and there's dozens of these boxes.
and oh by the way, these boxes have to talk to each other. and new boxes need to still talk to old, and the old need to be able to talk to the new ones too! and they dont use standard protocols, cause they didnt exist yet. in fact, the roots of some of your standard protocals can be traced to these military avionics/electronics needing to talk to each other.
then theres teh ruggedization factor. microelectronics are great, but a thin wire filament or solder connection (or whatever) is far weaker than a fat wire or solder connection. these thinigs are going on military aircraft. they're gonna get dirty. droppped by techs. bumped around, rough landings. oh, and shot at. all this stuff makes it harder to make the stuff in military birds smaller.
and ya, the plane, or parts of it, are pretty much designed around it. or rather, around one or two electrical busses. you typically get 1 DC bus and 1 AC bus, and 1 backup for each. That's 4 total comprising two electrical systems/sources. and EVERYTHING needs to be able to powered by one or the other, or both in some cases. thse systems are powerd by teh engines,a nd since space is limited theres only really room for one generator per engine, outputing one DC voltage level, and then an invertor to power the AC busses off that.
so ya. avionics gets expensive fast. both from deisgning it to withstand a hostile envirnment, not fatigue from vibration (and theres special isntallation procedures for the mechs to use to help in that, such as bushings and stuff), maintain backwards compatibility, etc etc so on and so forth.
that one radar probably has 5 or 6 different avionics boxes that control it, and thats not even counting the display in teh cockpit. and several others that while controlling it, its still connected to and talks to.
austere locations isnt crap, and you obviously have never been to a FOB in the middle of nowhere in the middle east.
incase you didnt know, such FOBs dont have runaways.
yet the Harrier can still base out of one and provide additional support for the FOB itself and the helos that also based out of them.
so no, it's not crap. you are however ignorant of the facts.
Im going to list some of the most successful fighters in US history. We produced thousands, and they in turn downed thousands of North Korean, North Chinese, and North Vietnamese pilots. In addition they carried out thousands of ground attack sorties and dropped thousands of pounds of ordinance.
F-80
F-84
F-86
F-100
F-102
F-104
F-105
F-106
Each of these aircraft has one thing in common: they only have a single engine. And these were the aircraft from the days when turbines were "unreliable" and had incredibly short work cycles (maximum hours flying time) in between total overhauls. In one case, the F-105, the platform was responsible for over 75% of all ordinance dropped in Vietnam; yes, the F-105 dropped more than 3x as many bombs as all other aircraft combined in that war, and that includes the massive B-52 bombing runs.
This single engine lawn dawn thing was a baseless criticism leveled at the F-16 by its competitors, and it stuck. But it was baseless then, and its baseless now.
plus there's that whole situational awareness thing. drone pilots have very poor SA because they arent in a cockpit and able to constantly scan the whole sky around them. they have the limited FOV of a single camera. its amazing how much you can pick up with the peripheral vision,a nd pilots absolutely depend on that.
The 35 would win. The Reaper is a ground attack bird. It has what is essentially a BriteStar II sight unit (video camera, infrared video camera, and laser designator), but lacks a targeting radar , or other avioncs, needed to launch AA missiles. Also lacks a gun, is far less manueverable or fast.
and that one that got shot down in Serbia was a lucky shot. it wasnt detected or tracked by the radar. but if you knew anything at all about Russian designed SAM installations, which they were using there, the systems as one of its redundancies includes not jsut the radar tracker, but also proximity fuses, including magnetic type, and a master detonate-on-command switch as well. that sam site launched every missile they had loaded, and the operator manually detonated the warheads when his spread of missiles reached a proper height. essentially he recreated the old WWII scneria of throwing upa curtain of flak (shrapnel) for the plane to fly through.
your facts are wrong.
incorrect. the F-117 went in first and killed known strategic targets, including SAM sites, without any backup. It was designed for, and performed in, an unsupported first strike role for the duration of the conflict. the very first aircraft sortie of the gulf war was a flight of 117s hitting high value/threat targets.
turbine engines are also a whole helluva lot more reliable, by multiple orders of magnatude, than when the Navy SOP was to require two turbines for that reason. Navy hasnt had a hard on for that since the mid 70s (reason they picked the YF-17 to become the F-18 after it lost to the F16 for the air force competition). and even then analysts were pointing out the two engine requirement likely wasnt that necessary anymore, for the same reason.
most of the Super Hornets drawbacks stem from teh fact that it isnt new. Its an upgrade of the Hornet; refreshed avionics, tweaked aerodynamics (chiefly around the inlets), etc. But essentially still airframes that date from the mid 80's at best (since upgrades tend to be just that: old airframes with new parts....few of them are totally new manufacture from the ground up). Any additional Super Hornets will likely be new made, since all the original hornets have either been upgraded or boneyarded by now. but new made with older gear.
so like said: its main drawvbacks are around its age, and though more and newer upgrades can be performed its
-not stealthy
-doesnt have the range needed for the Air Force
-cannot replace the Harrier for the Marines
-has older/less capable avionics (compared to the new shinies)
and so on.
will more Super Hornet purchases happen? Unlikely.
The Air Force, while its fleet is aging and any new SH's will truly be new made, has penty of multirole F-16s and 15s. The SH isnt really designed for Air Superiorty, though capable of it (just not as capable as dedicated designs like the F15 and 22), and isnt really needed to supplement the 15s and 22s in that role.
For the Navy, they dont lack for SH's already; they have em. What the navy wanted was naval stealth supplement, much like the 22 and 35 were to supplement the lower tech 15s and 16 for the air force. (a total stealth force while nice, is prohibitively expensive and most planners agree not economically feasible for the forseeable future). What they navy also currently lacks is a dedicated air superiority plane, since the retirement of the F14. The 18s have fulfilling that role, but they arent dedicated to it, and arent as capable as even the 14s were (remember the 14 was designed quite literally around the PHeonix missile, which itself was tailor made for the navy, to stop enemy planes far far away from the fleet to keep them from threatening the fleet with anti-ship missiles). a navalized 22 has been talked about, and the navy has proposals and requests for ideas out about a dedicated AS plane, but so far its still not moved past the talking phase.
The Marines also already have SH's, and again, what they were looking to get from the 35 was a replacement for the Harrier that is due to leave service very soon. That's why the Marine version had VTOL ability, so it could operate off the same LHA's and LHD's, alongside our helos, that the Harrier did. The stealth being an added bonus as frequently the Marine MEU's dont have Air Force Stealth squadrons to make a pre-strike run for them and clear the airspace before they go in (which is standard AF procedure when stealth aircraft are available).
So i dont really expect to see many more SH's purchased by the US unless the 35 program completely falls through, which simply isnt that likely
there's also the whole of, how did they know where to plant the wires? do they even know if the rats can communicate? how do they know rats even shared information and not just random brain impulses? how do they know they used the shared information?
What games have they released that haven't been fun? Even Diablo 3 was fun the first time through.
and if you just want a competent RTS without any backstory, there's already 1000's of those. half the attraction of the warcraft and starcraft games are the stories that provide the motivation/reason for the missions
" The article goes on to quote her: '...residential customers have thus far shown little interest in TWC's top internet tiers"
Ya. Cause you charge too damn much for it. You priced it out of reach of most people. It's not that there isn't demand for it.
Not sure you could flamebait any harder.
depending on who you're dating, it could be help intel.
Yes, but the obvious FIRST place to look is where they said it was.
If I tell you there's a man eating lion in your living room, you dont first check to see if it's in the attic.
Tribes Ascend was fun for a bit. And then they start releasing overpowered instant kill weapons for $$$. And that's when it became unfun. People want to feel like they have a chance in competitive games. Releasing game breaking gameplay elements for money ruins that.
the "talent system" was another turn off. and then they infected WoW with it too.
Even worse, all the talents, at least for the witchdoctor and marksman, might as well not even be very different. every "skill branch" seems to have "escape ability X", "AE ability X", "Single target abilty X", "Regenerate X", and so on. just the names and graphics are different.
so basically it boils to whether you want to hit the 1 key to heal, or 2, and want 3 or 4 to be your spam ability....its silly. and jsut a further reflection of the "sameness" that pervades the game, right down to the compeltely linear map design.
no, Blizzard lost a lot of the built in fanbase by releasing a completely linear game with almost 0 replayability.
you dont have to use the RMAH. no one is forcing it.
people do however because the game itself is so utterly boring and uninteresting after the first one or two play throughs. it is almost completely linear. tiny pieces are random, such as "will this one room basement be open on this playthrough?", but that's about it. This makes actually playing the game long enough to get that specific thing you're looking for utterly boring and mindnumbing. Diablo 1 and 2 on the other hand were almost compeltely randomly generated, EVERY TIME. This makes that quest to get something constantly different, the sense of adventuring always there. it takes far longer for boredom to set in when the maps are randomly generated.
the overbearing linearity is what doomed D3. And, given the reason D1 and D2 were so appealing and popular was largely due to that very non-linearity, I'm surprised whomever abandoned that aspect of the core game world didn't get fired.
Hmmm. Dont those Computer or Wire fraud laws cover MITM attacks?
Or would that only apply if your name is Aaron?
thankfully its not the law.
and once the first bad actor exploits this vulnerability for nefarious purposes they will also be open to suit.
not to mention the 35$ fee just to have them "review" your case, with no garuntee of overturning the decision.
same goes for you.