GHAO

In a remarkably clever move, Easyjet have revealed how they have merged passenger rehydration with fire-fighting. Their spokesperson said: "These are difficult times, and with the amount of money saved we can now afford better holidays for our chief executives, thus reducing the levels of stress in the higher echelons of our company."

If loading time is worrying you, get an SSD - they move data around about 15 times faster, so FSX should start in seconds, not minutes. You'll need at least 128GB I think - some will go to OS, and the rest to FSX and sceneries that fit in the remainder. That will cost anywhere between £60-120 (I don't really know, but it used to be £1/GB, but the price is dropping fast). Get a normal HDD as well for the remainder of everything else, including small-scale sceneries that don't take ages to load. If you splash the cash, 256GB SSD and 1 or 2TB HDD seems best. Any better CPU you can get, the bette

Ah, shame. I'll still consider it with ORBX , fantastic-looking shots!

I assume Mut is getting Southampton? This sounds good, but so expensive! £20 for each airport?

Psst! I'll tweak Lenore for you, 20,000lbs lighter, less fuel, 15% more power out the old engines? It'll fly from Gatwick to Honolulu non-stop if you get it to FL530... just give me the baton, $50,000, and a Canadian passport, no questions asked. Also, that was a wonderful dawn, and had I spent a day longer on my brand-new REX I could've told you exactly what sunrise that was As for your landing, I'd say that was about my normal - float it halfway, stomp, and if I'm lucky I stay on the runway..!

Also, those are great videos, I was laughing along to number 1

Dragging things up again! We have Aerofly with beautiful scenery, we have P3D with the coding for high-end computers, we have XPLane with the laminar research, and we have Microsoft with the money. Someone needs to say: Microsoft, give us enough money to develop this - it'll be good enough for real-world pilots to practice on, it'll run on today's machines, and don't forget there's an audience of flight-sim enthusiasts who would be forever grateful if it came to fruition... we might even buy Flight Mark II if FS11 was good enough. We have the individual components, why can't they all get alon

Just buy a laptop and keep it warm, all your cats will flock to that! Same problem here really, the jar of sweets would have to be eaten :O

Is this default P3D scenery? If so, I'm seriously tempted!

The bigger scenery of the future will probably have so many textures to load at once, particularly in rapidly changing locations when the radius of scenery complexity to set to large, that an SSD card will increase fps. As to loading - with something like REX, the loading time takes a while, but there's no fps reduction. As a rough guide, assume if it's all on an SSD it'll load 15 times quicker. To me that's worth it. It all depends on the size/budget! For a 60GB - put OS, and maybe FSX, maybe REX (if room), other stuff can go on the HDD. Then again, it's up to you.

Then I can look forward to the short-term and long-term future! P3D will be very useful - we as a simming community aren't powerful enough for Microsoft to bother with, but if an airforce got on board, that's only a bonus, and that's what LM seem to be doing, giving the same product to institutions and consumers. 10,000 was much more of an arbitrary comparison, I can't tell the difference between 22 and 25 As to touchscreens - I am a composer and I use the computer a lot for that. I am always dreaming of a horizontal (maybe slightly slanted towards me) touchscreen that I can move my score o

I strongly recommend even an 80GB SSD. Yes they are expensive, and in a year when they've dropped price again you'll be annoyed, but the computer will, from pressing the on button, be in FSX and flying within 30 seconds, assuming Windows and FSX are installed on the SSD. For me on my 7200rpm HDD, it takes nearly 5 minutes - I have so much freeware FSX takes nearly a minute to load all my planes. Assuming you don't hold a huge music library, you could actually have a 256GB SSD and no HDD... you'll never use 1TB unless you have a lot of music on your computer. If you have lots of sceneries like

Acceleration uses all 6 cores on my machine, and RAM only really means you can run multiple things with ease - FSX may take up 2GB, REX might take up 1GB, so everyone should be fine there. Anyway, the only reason I'm replying in such a late fashion is a comment you made, John, about MS's gaming sector. If the entire thing is 3.5%, that means FSX is more lik 0.001%. Why could they not just write that diddly bit out of their books and make a good job of it? Surely 0.001% less profit but a better reputation founded on listening to consumer concerns, pushing the flight simulator envelope forward

Sorry to drag it all up again, but talk of the future interests me! Windows 8 has turned out to be a sensible manouvre, heading for the mobile/touchscreen devices - and touchscreens will become much more common around us. My friend has an HP laptop, touchscreen, about 2.5 years old. Touchscreen desktops should be less than three years away. However, at some point all OS makers (Microsoft, Apple, other), will have to make another jump forwards - but not 128-bit. I mentioned the future - IBM has acheived a very small amount of quantum computing. For people who never studied it, the theory of

Any time anyone feels like giving an easy one for us - go ahead! Well done Sean, looks like I was miles off

Fighter plane, high wing, one pilot. Nose looks like the F4 Phantom. Can't see them, so assuming there's two engines, one on each wing? EDIT: no, second picture shows the engine, long and thin, tucked right against the body, forming part of the wing. Looks like a Valiant (apart from cockpit), but according to Wiki that saw service. Also looks like a Tupolev Tu-16, but that also saw service. How close are we getting now?

ASL, not AGL!

First: look how I glide my aircraft through the looming canyons of water, where one touch would spin my aircraft into oblivion. You might need to imagine the looming canyons of water How low can I go? About 8000ft! - AC is a lovely freeware Boeing T45A Goshawk. US Navy. Also just outside Paro, up on the road heading East. About 9000ft ASL. Same T45.

Not a Russian something or other..? They've reverse-engineered a lot over the years. The 'not been in service' is really stumping me!

I see one problem - they're going to run out of places to make soon! FSX: Moon Edition, anyone? Seriously, that's a huge improvement in some places. Having just got REX working on my machine, the one thing I want now is good normal textures - freeware sorts me for planes and airports (some real beauties out there!), and the skies are covered. Mind you, at £125, that's not going to be a Christmas present, that's going to be THE Christmas present.

You called your daughter Consolidated? But yes, immensely impressive aircraft!

"Aberdeen's drier than usual, eh Geoff?"

Got three (if that's allowed!): "Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to England, the time is 12 noon British Summer Time. I hope you had a pleasant flight." "The retirement spray from the firefighters was overly enthusiastic this time, and the groundstaff were not pleased." "Remind anyone of Laker Airlines?"

Lots of amazing-looking aircraft this month! I'm definitely jealous of a few Anyway, I'm completely surprised no-one's opted for either the B747 or A380! Also, my favourite aircraft, the B737, here at 50,000ft.

No fuel shortage then - good news! I love the three monitors. Anxious me is waiting, poised for the 3rd leg. Hopefully REX will appear on Christmas Day and I can get stuck in whatever flight I win. I'm guessing we would hop across the Pacific to Alaska, but there's also scope to go to Australasia: can anyone confirm the approximate route?