David Hingtgen

Shoot down the aces in every level, in an actual play-through (not free mission), on hard. Also helps to have an S on every mission (can use free mission for this). (There's still AFAIK no consensus on EXACTLY what the minimum requirements are, but this'll almost certainly do it)

I cannot STAND dead pixels of any kind, period. The "wait a week and see if it still bothers" you is about as utter BS as I've ever heard. And what's with "if determined to be defective"? Do they have testers play your machine after you send it to them, and see if they think it's annoying enough to warrant a new screen or machine? Anyways, when I bought a GB color, it had a "dead" pixel. Always lit blue, just left and above of dead center. Less than 1 hour after I called Nintendo (on my 1-hour old GBC) they had contacted a FedEx driver, who stopped at my house and sent it to Nintendo at Nintendo's expense, and I had a new GBC within 5 days, again returned via FedEx overnight. I may consider Nintendo at the bottom of the list for games/hardware at the moment, but their customer service can't be beat in my experience.

F-12 would have had vastly greater endurance than the F-108. F-108 had like 10 mins max at Mach 3 (which is actually a lot as supersonic interceptors go). Blackbirds etc CRUISE at Mach 3... AFAIK, most Mach 2+ fighters can only go max speed for less than 10 minutes (usually more like 5), mainly as a result of afterburner fuel usage, secondarily for heating effects on the aircraft.

The comparison that is always made is F-100 vs F-8. Same engine, same role, same time. And the F-8 kicked its butt, hard, in every category. Thus, the F-100 wasn't that good, since with the same knowledge, materials, engine, etc the F-8 did a much better job. All while carrying a few extra thousand pounds to make it carrier-capable! (mainly the massive landing gear) That could really be considered a "Vought vs North American" contest---give two teams the same goal, same materials, etc---and see who makes the better plane. PS--if you like the Matchbox F-100, get it. For the price, Matchbox 1/72 planes are nice.

Finally some news to post... Elmendorf is going to be the 2nd base to get F/A-22's, after Langley. http://www.airforcetimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-742601.php Interesting, I wonder how replacing Strike Eagles with Raptors will work out. "Half the load, twice the ingress speed" has never really seemed to be an objective for bomb-delivery... I would have figured Kadena or Osan, not Elmendorf of all places...

If it's a fighter jet, going out to fight, it's got HEI. A-10's of course have their tank-busting ammo, but that's certainly not your standard anti-air load... (it's 4:1 AP:HEI btw) The "does everything" round still isn't that common in the US AFAIK. Because it likes to explode... There's little need for AP because aircraft no longer have armor. The only reason the new SAP/HEI came about is because so many planes nowaday are multi-role, and are 100x more likely to be firing at tanks, jeeps, trucks, bunkers, SAM sites, infantry, etc than they are another plane. The only time a US F-14 has ever used its gun has been for strafing. The F-15E, F-16CG, etc are probably going to get a LOT more use out of a "stops vehicles dead" round than a "makes fuel-filled aircraft wings burn" round. Basically---since the MiG-29 (in original form) is about as pure air-to-air as it comes, it'd almost certainly be loaded with HEI. The MiG-29 isn't nearly as adaptable to the strike role as the Flanker, and will probably remain primarily air-to-air with only limited air-to-ground for its entire existence.

I'd be surprised if it was anything but HEI.

Nitpick: The Intrepid has an A-12, not an SR-71. There actually are rather few SR-71's on display, 9 out of 10 "SR-71's" are actually A-12's. Even otherwise "accurate" museums will proudly put up a big "SR-71" plaque next to their A-12, figuring nobody would notice, and since the A-12 has almost no name recognition. And don't think it'll ever move, it was a heck of a job to get it on board in the first place. The only real true SR-71 on display I can think of right now is the one that was at Offutt, and is now roughly in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska. Maybe the new Dulles part of the NASM has one. (Actually I think they do, probably the one that did the final record-setting flight).

I would absolutely postively make sure to see the carrier Intrepid. If you're going to the WTC, it's not too far away AFAIK. Intrepid's collection of planes rivals that of the Smithsonian IMHO for "coolness". http://www.intrepidmuseum.org/

If you want a hot ninja, buy Nightshade. In addition to being an awesome game in its own right, Hibana's one of the best video game females in a long time, IMHO. And after you win, you can play as Hisui.... And Nightshade/Kunoichi is easier than Shinobi, thankfully.

Guessing: Cobalt blue with blood red. That's an incredibly "red" shade of purple. Do not dare add any sort of "bright" red for they are inherently orange, and orange+blue=brown=drab, and you need an intense color. Use pale blue (watch out for greenish-blues) to lighten if necessary, or even pinks/magenta. Actually, royal blue plus hot magenta might work pretty well. Insignia Red is probably the brightest "non-orange/scarlet" red there is. Best paint-mixing book I've found is "Yellow+Blue DOESN'T make Green" or something like that. Because it's very true because pigments are not "pure". Depending on differences between paint/monitor/what you want, you may want to try EVA-01 purple. On TV (at least mine) EVA-01 is pretty "neutral" but a lot of models/paints of it lean towards the reddish side of purple.

Worked for a little while. Now forums and threads are ok, it's reply and quote that keeps refusing me.

Sea Harriers are 1980's, nothing later. I have the Matchbox F-104's, due to there being no other 1/72 F-104 to get. Nice enough, and for $12 at Target, hard to complain. The bare-metal F-104 is actually two different shades, not simply "silver all over".

Back on topic: Clearing out MW's cookie seemed to work (for the moment), but I won't know until I click through a few dozen more sub-forums etc.

F-16 tanks are F-16-specific. Most drop tanks are. The only one I know of that isn't, is the later-style F-4 centerline tank and the F-15, they use the same 600-gallon tank--it's a "standard large tank for large twin-engine MDC fighters". Bombs should fit on the DW F-15E wing pylons, don't know for certain. On the other boards, they only like DW because of the lack of screws and paint IMHO, if you really look Dragon accuracy is no better than any other brand, despite people constantly talking about Dragon's "accuracy". I think "small engraved details and thin, fine panel lines" are a more accurate term than "accuracy". I own all the Corgi's you mentioned, here's my comments: Tornado: very nice, best Corgi there is. Main gear doors very difficult to position correctly in the open position though. Wings swing with a movable section to fill the gap! Only model plane I know of where "wings forward" won't leave a big hole behind the wing. Phantom: only accurate for an F-4C and possibly a UK one. Do not buy a US Navy one, it will be horribly inaccurate. As an F-4C, very nice, Tornado seems a bit better. Harrier: I only have Sea Harriers, but they're pretty nice, if a bit more "simple" than the others. Movable nozzles, canopy doesn't open, speed brake doesn't open (that's important for Harriers). I often go by the weapons, as Corgi weapons are permanent, and some are painted well enough, others are simply pure white. Landing gear/doors is very much like Dragon, but I always spend more time "scraping paint" etc to get the posts in the holes on a Corgi than a Dragon. Mainly I think because Corgi just puts a very thick layer of white paint on the gear.

Also having issues----trying to click on a FORUM often says I'm not logged in or not allowed (either through the clickable links near the top or through the window menu near the bottom), but direct links to a THREAD are ok. And it "remembers" I'm logged in like every other click, so I don't need to "log in" every time, it just kind of auto-logs-out then auto-logs-back-in every other click. Happened in the last 24 hours. Doubt it's a cache issue, it was cleared out just this week.

News(not really): http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12500282-1243,00.html JSF over budget and behind schedule. USD$125million each now. (they seem to switch between Austrailian and US dollars often in the article) Boy, I'm glad we're buying those instead of EXPENSIVE planes like the F-22... PS---RN also not happy, retiring the Sea Harrier starting to look like a bad idea, since there's now going to be a several year gap that the Gr.9 simply isn't going to be able to fill. And not that the latest RN carrier design has been going well either...

I bought the JP version almost purely because of the stacks. I know trucks (not nearly as well as planes, but enough to know stacks) and the US version's stacks are just plain "stupid" IMHO. It'd be like an F-15 with v.stabs only half as tall, or an F-14 with 5,000lb thrust engines, for the aviation guys here. It just looks wrong due to small size. Of course, my main gripe with Prime is that truck mode was heavily sacrificed for both robot mode sculpt, and gimmicks. G1 Prime is a much more accurate truck, though of course robot mode is only 1/100 as good as MP Prime's.

Prime is the best toy I've ever owned, period.

But there's no way the ENDING of Kotor 2 could be put into Kotor 3. This isn't a planet, scenario, villain, etc. This is simply the ending and it really wouldn't fit into another game.

Glad someone else brought this up. Basically: "Hey, there's a whole lot more backstory for the characters, and a long, satisfying, multi-branching cool ending! We just left it out of the final version, but 99% of it is still on the disc, inaccessible" Read most of it here: http://forums.obsidianent.com/index.php?sh...pic=29764&st=15 4th post, much easier to read than the "raw" dialogue.

Real YF-23's are huge like a Flanker. IMHO most diecast planes are a bit too big for their "official" scale. I'll see what I can find about F-8 gunsights. And yes F-8's can decelerate very well, they have HUGE airbrakes. (As does the A-7)

::long post shortened:: A Tomcat with its wings out is burning a lot of fuel. Throttling back doesn't really help nor does going slower. If it did, the airlines wouldn't be running their planes at 90% thrust for hours on end. If it's a jet, it's going to be most fuel efficient at about Mach .8 and 80-90% power. From a private jet to an F-15 to a 747.

Agreeing with the second part---frankly, nobody "agrees" with me for games, there's little point in going by a score at all. The fact that Suikoden III, Xenosaga, and Xenosaga II all got nigh-identical scores by most reviewers I saw says a lot, since I consider those games to all be vastly different in quality, in different ways.

hellohikaru---while the F-8E's certainly could carry the Bullpup, I can't find any evidence it was actually USED. The hump on the F-8E's back is purely for the Bullpup avionics, but in later ones it's used for ECM instead of Bullpup stuff. If it was used at all, they wouldn't have deleted the equipment in the F-8H/J/K etc.