Re: Number of engines, was: earliest moon landing

From: OM (om_at_our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_research_facility.org)
Date: 01/04/05 

Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2005 00:23:09 -0600

On Mon, 03 Jan 2005 19:59:58 -0600, Herb Schaltegger
<herb.schaltegger@gmail.com.invalid> wrote:

>In article <7kjCd.1084$Ik7.296@newsfe1-gui.ntli.net>,
> Mary Pegg <nospam@widetrouser.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> > Compare a 747 with 1/2 its engines out to a 777 with 1/2 of its engines
>> > out. For lots of fun, try a 747 with both of the left engines out and see
>> > how it flies and lands.
>>
>> If you pay for the sim time, I'd love to.
>
>Do it in MS Flight Simulator - close enough for most people who aren't
>multi-engine jet certified.

...Maybe it's just me, but I always found MSFS to be totally fucking
boring. In fact, I've found only three flight sims that I've ever
found worth playing more than once:

1) Sublogic's Jet 2.0. This one I played at least once a day for the
first five years after I got the game, and at least once a week for
the next five. After that, I finally *bought* the game when I found it
priced what it was worth - $9 in the closeout bin. It was simple line
vector with almost no shading, but it was *fun*, especially if you
used your imagination. It was to flight sims what Tinkertoys were to
bedroom dogfights. I still have a copy of it around here *somewhere*,
and I'm curious if the damn thing'll even run on a 2.4GHz box :-)

2) Chuck Yeager's Combat Flight Simulator, or whatever it was called.
This was great for the "There I Was..." mode, where you could live out
your best fantasy of flying an F-4 against a B-29 bomber squadron,
pretending they were Bears or Bisons going towards Washington, and
nailing them from the rear before they had time to act.

...Honorable mention here goes to the original Yeager's Flight Sim,
where due to some really wild quirks you could actually get an F-4 to
Mach 3 and remain there for quite a while before the wings ripped off
:-)

3) F-29 Retaliator. I still have this one loaded on one of my servers
for graphics card testing, as it *will* load fine across the network.
I've found that it's really good at testing cards under 32MB of VRAM
for memory glitches, and every now and then I get a call from a friend
in the salvage business who gets these older cards - Matrox, Number 9,
and ATI cards in the 4-16MB range - and wants them tested in a real
world environment. So I do it in exchange for credit, which means he'd
better get another batch in because I need a 128MB card with DVI and
Analog in now :-(. Either way, you get to fly a fictional "F-29
Stealth Fighter", with lots of buildings and targets and opponents,
including nuke plants, and while it's probably the one FS I've played
that is damn near impossible to land properly, I still enjoy it
because you can *also* fly the X-29 FSW demonstrator in combat mode!

...On a side note, tho, I will make an impassioned plea here: if
anyone can find the trainer for F-29 Retaliator, I'd be in their debt.
This is one trainer that I've never been able to find, even though
it's out there. I need it to get to the advanced missions because the
damn thing is so fucking impossible to land. It was the biggest
complaint the game rags had about the game when it came out, and they
recommended a trainer *and* even listed the BBS from whence it
originated. After four months of constant busy signals, I finally gave
up :-(

...One other honorable mention was one of the Jane's Flight Sims. I
used it as a test util at Dell, and had a lot of fun with the five
minutes each test cycle allowed me to run the game in - the idea was
to load the game and play it for five minutes, exit the game, and
repeat the process 30 times, each time checking for memory leaks in
both VRAM and system RAM, all with the original NVidia 16MB PCI card.
That game, along with Dungeon Master II, Quake, and one other game I
can't remember right now, helped Dell decide to kick ATI out the door
and go almost completely with NVidia, with Matrox sticking around for
the Twinhead requirements some of our government contracts demanded. I
was so damn sold on that card that I dumped all my Matroxes save for
the one Twinhead, and bought eight of the N16's for all of my systems.
Lucky for me, NVidia sold them to me at cost *and* gave me four of the
proto samples in gratitude that had the S-video out that Dell chose
not to implement.

God, I fucking miss being in multimedia engineering test...

                                OM 

-- 
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