M31

One of the details I read, was part of one the adventures you are given clues for the location of your treasure (or whatever it was?) by using the built in Bing bar search ... just unbelievable! I don't do Facebook but heard they are getting hammered on there for this game.

I read the news as it spilled at 2PM our time yesterday (GMT) on Avsim ... oh dear, there are some very disappointed guys over there and one or two of the guys who were promoting Flight to the Hilt seem to have disappeared I guess most of us knew it was not going to be a regular MS flight Simulator, but I was pretty shocked at what its turning out to be, its an arcade game surely? I think MS have made a big mistake, gamers and even simmers will try the base pack because its a free download, but the more casual gamer they are trying to attract will give it a go and either ask for bombs and gu

Well, its simulator does Scroll down to the simulator pics of their apparent public demo for the J-20 we've all no doubt heard about, that's a Thrustmaster Warthog Throttle and Stick for sure ... cant make out the rudder pedals, but I'll bet they are Saitek or similar .... Saitek and Thrustmaster are probably made in China now anyway! http://china-defense.blogspot.com/2010_12_01_archive.html Actually, looking at it closer it might not be? The stick looks like an F-18 style stick, but the bottom grey ring and screw plate look exactly like my TM Warthog, even down to the screw placing holes,

Using a generic figure of 1.3 t/cu. yd. for broken limestone, it's typical load, and adding the weight of the bucket (230 tons), that's a deadlift capacity of something over 500 tons. Judging from the data above, it appears the rated capacity is 325 tons, but that wouldn't include the weight of the bucket, which it's lifting at the same time as the load. Note that this machine was mobile, though had to have a "tail" consisiting of a very large electric cable. It moved itself by walking, raising one pad by hydraulics, moving that pad forward, setting it down then moving the next. When all th

Hi Needles, Happy New Year to you too. I've not planted my flag yet but will do soon, I live in Elgin close to RAF Lossiemouth, reading back on this thread again I see you are on Loch Ness side ... nice one, Inverness was my (and my late Dad's) birthplace ... I used to love Bike runs from Inverness down Loch Ness to Fort William to see an old girlfriend. I don't suppose you know some one called Gavin Findlay who the last I knew early to mid 90's (at least) also lived on the shore of Loch Ness? He was a very clever engineer who worked at the old Ardersier fab yard and he thought me a lot there

Ahh, found it, here is how we lifted the bottles to the two top corners of the jacket it was such a more elegant simpler safer solution .. and I can remember (as a sprog) saying to top management, why dident we do this in the first place? A lot of folk were sacked over that crane episode as I recall .. that pic in the last post shows just two sides of the jacket swung up, here you can see more scale of it, four sides up and braced together and awaiting the bottle lifts Everything you see here was built on site from a raw plate of steel, shottblasted and rolled ''' I miss those times and ch

I know, and forget it/. Wrong move on here ... 50 odd looks and no reply, back to Sim HG for this guf

Its all about Aircraft? But. back in the day at our Ardersier oil yard days it was always feisty, Supposedly you had to be 18 at least and Male to work at the yard... unbelievably this held true until the yard closed down in 2001 But ,,, I was there as an 18 YO ... it was British engineering at its best, it was insane how much I got paid back then. I got in about 1978, it was insane the engineering we did. Anyway, we built a few rigs I'll always remember, we were pioneers back then and money was no object .. we'd built the original Piper Alpha jacket and topsides, later we built Piper Alpha

Any thoughts as to what happened with the Tornado? I reckon ... well its clearly a Tonka in for a re fit, balance or COG is critical in the air for most aircraft, but guys on the ground forget this sometimes,.. The radar unit from the nose has been removed on this Lossie Tornado GR-4 as well as much of its intakes, this might not seem like a lot of weight, but with a wheels forward critical balance cog point of this Aircraft, it was enough to tip it and surprise the ground crew I'm sure

Needles, if you need any help in testing or tweaking your Saitek gear, en masse or future proofing a GPS to your panel, let me know ... looks like I live not too far from you. I've hesitated to post this next thought, but I've spent nearly as much on Saitek hardware as Needles, all is guaranteed to work in FSX and most in FS9, but the ludicrous secrecy over the forthcoming MS Flight means we don't even know if this sim will be traditional MS or just a Hawaii Flight game at this stage? i'll just leave MS FS division to their top secret Flight announcement expected first week in January ... bu

Looking to sell one of my Nvidea GTX 570 SC's 1280 MB on here, bought from Scan UK with their warranty (that i will honor if not expired?) one was bought from Scan in Jan 2011, the second in June 2011 ... but EVGA offer a 10 year warranty too. Boxed as it arrived ... I never over clock my GPU's so its been used at stock and not too much as I use another comp for main usage Reason for selling ... I have another that will tide me over until GTX6xxx series, and I've gone off the idea of triple screens that needed 2 of these for modern Nvidea surround. Looking for £175 inc postage to anywhere

I have resubmitted the photo's now so you should be able to view them. Thanks. Thanks, this is looking very very impressive and exactly the kind of panel I'd like to build my gear into. In the new year I'll be purchasing one of the Saitek trim wheels too, as for a GPS ... I do recommend the VR Insight GPS 5 and despite what the company say it can work with FSX in full screen, its a bit expensive new and I got mine by being patient and having it in my saved searches on Ebay for a while and eventually scored it for about half price, there is new software now for it too that is much better

It happens to the best of us though EDIT: this was a couple pictures of a Rockwell B1 Lancer that had tipped over on to its tail that I wrongly hot linked to (should have downloaded em and hosted) and was apparently as I recall due to fuel balance problems with the internal wing tanks that also sweep back ... i don't think that was what happened with the Tornado though.

Oh and funny accidents happen when just servicing Aircraft and forgetting about balance

I do remember one time at the annual Luchars air show in Scotland ... inside a hanger they had one of their Tornado F3's jacked up to demonstrate under carriage retraction and wing sweep ... it was a well used bird and the RAF spokesman kept saying, don't worry, we will paint it again before it goes back into service ... he seemed very concerned we should understand that. I remember being amazed at the quickness and precision the gear went up and down, and also the doors to follow the gear retraction, very smooth and precise .. it also happened with a very satisfying LOUD clunk as the gear dr

The thing with Nvidea cards and FSX, is FSX was optimized for Nvidea from the start ... some games sims work slightly better with ATI, so you have to balance your priority ... but if FSX is your priority, go with Nvidea. I run a rig with 2 x GTX 570's in SLI sometime with no SLI , also have an I7 920 rig with the ATI (XFX) 2 GB 6970, that CPU can handle FSX quite well of course, but tweaking the graphics is an unknown science with ATI ... you do get ATI multi monitor surround with a single ATI card of course (Nvidea need two) so that is one ATI advantage. But if you are a one monitor user an

For me it was about FS95 before I got settled down to exploring more of what Flight Sim could do in a general aviation sort of way ... it was a big thrill learning navigation for the first time, taking off into heavy cloud and descending to find the Airport where it was supposed to be ... I do go back to FS2, but was only mucking around up until about FS95 ... that's when I started taking the hobby seriously. The first military combat sim I loved was F-19 Stealth Fighter on the Amiga ... I can still remember dodging between the radars and keeping my stealth profile to a minimum ... the real F

I have some hours in a real Piper Warrior III, but am no expert on flight models. I will agree with Mal on the Aerosoft Katana in that it just feels right as much as FSX will allow ...I also love flying Aersoft's Twin Otter for perceived feel of flying something real. One of the biggest challenges in Flight Sim (as in real life) is flying the Twotter into Lukla in poor weather with full FSX realism. Moving on to Military combat sims, Lock On's Flaming Cliffs SU-25 shows what can be done in feel for a realistic flight model (they have never pulled this off in any other of their series IMHO)

Forgot to add, when our RAF family moved back from Germany to the UK at (ex) RAF Kinloss, they were still flying the Avro Shackleton (about 1975 ish) I used to love watching them and especially hearing them, miss the Nimrods too now. But yeah, Shakelton's were described by their crew as something like ... thousands of rivets flying in loose formation. Here is a wee video of the interior of one of these old birds, its probably more sophisticated than we imagine. EDIT: You have to laugh, recently we had the Russian Aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov parked in the Moray Firth, just bes

Interesting stuff. I've always wondered why the Russian Mig-15 was called a Fagot?, surely that's a derogatory Western world snipe? Most Aircraft have exotic names, but this one bewilders me I've always thought the Mig -15 was a very capable Aircraft for its time and it took the F-86 Sabre much development to better it or even equal it. SU-25 Frogfoot ... <--- Ehh? Why not call it ToadTonsil? someone out there has a great sense of humor I also belive this Aircraft to be the equivalent of the American A-10, probably much cheaper to produce too and at least as effective if used in anger.

Cant see the images Needles?

I actually find Stephen Hawkings books more digestible in audio format (not in his voice) ... sometimes I listen to them as I start to sleep and dream and wonder about this too. Was watching Wonders of the Universe with Prof Brian Cox tonight again ... so many scientists take on things ... pretty good in a hippy sort of way though Cosmos with Carl Sagan is always my benchmark though. Looks like an exciting announcement from CERN this week about ... maybe ... The Higgs bosun? We'll see

Nice ... I actually took advantage of Scans zero interest, pay within 9 months for zero free interest option for most of the rig in my sig ... that runs out for me in about late Feb 2012 I think? I'm paying it off in full in two weeks (well before the arranged final date) I actually did the agreement online on a Sunday night and had the parts at the end of that week. you put up a small deposit of course. We only live once, and the economy needs us spending not keeping our cash in our pockets EDIT: Just be aware of Scans third party finance company's terms and conditions, was looking at the

We all have our own methods of applying thermal compound ... I always use Arctic Silver, its supposed to be the best and after splashing 250 or more quid on a CPU I figure I need the best compound too Its supposed to last a lifetime but I always buy a new tube when I Intend to over-clock a CPU. I also clean a new CPU and heat-sink with IPA. This is not always the case though and I've built at least one system with toothpaste as a compound, we tested it and it it was surprisingly fine temp wise, Arctic silver would have been better of course but I never had a tube at the time ... I'd read fr

I actually like the FSX missions, sometimes you just want to let your hair down in flight sim as well as do a round the world flight or just fly A to B as realistically as possible ... I'm glad the missions will still be kept on in Flight, they will be an option and you don't have to fly them, but some of them were damn fun all the same. Who never enjoyed the Amazon mission in FSX never enjoyed a good film too Having said that, I'll be glad when we can see a bit more than Hawaii from Flight though and also bit more openness ... will all my panels work with it, ETC ... they do them selves no