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SchizophrenicMC

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  1. SchizophrenicMC
    I'm also going to recommend avoiding ASUS mobos. They've gone a bit junk lately. MSi and Gigabyte have been good to me. On the topic of your CPU, Skylake isn't quite the upgrade from Haswell/Broadwell/Devil's Canyon some people might expect. Skylake CPUs are about as good at processing as Haswell procs, but they do use considerably less power doing it. I'd wait for the next revision of the 14nm process architecture if I had the patience, as that's where the performance bump will come from. Unfortunately, Intel has a nasty tendency of changing sockets every time they revise their CPU designs, so it's hard to futureproof. That said, Haswell has dead-ended. Even avoiding the fact that the selection of boards for that architecture has dried up, it all uses DDR3 and doesn't support USB3.x, SATA-III, or M.2/MSATA nearly as elegantly as the 170 chipset. And while DDR4 couldn't nearly match the bang-for-buck of DDR3 when Skylake came out a few months ago, the gap is quickly shrinking. All of that is, to say, if you're going for an i5 build, consider Skylake. If your gaming experience isn't proc-bound, you'll be able to use a lot more of the nifty features of the 170-series chipsets, and be able to carry more of your stuff over to your next build. If you need CPU performance though, you might think strongly about looking back to a Devil's Canyon i7. (ie: 4790k) The price-performance chart still favors the 4790k to the 6700k and their respective mobos/RAM. You won't be able to move any of it over to your next build, which is something that matters to me, but may not be important to you, but it's hard to beat it now. And why would you want CPU performance? Unless No Man's Sky is programmed a lot more elegantly than most of the other procedural games that exist, it's going to ask the CPU for a lot of calculations. While framerates will remain stable as a function of the GPU, the game may slow down if the CPU can't keep up. I can't speak to No Man's Sky specifically, since it hasn't really interested me, but in a similar vein, Space Engineers simply drags on lower-end CPUs. Or older really-high-end CPUs. My 975 just dies. Just to demonstrate the point that not all games are GPU-bound. There's also a fair few titles that aren't written well enough to load graphical junk into the VRAM, which has made my 8GB R9 390 a bit redundant in a few situations. I am going to recommend the R9 390 though. My Sapphire R9 390 8GB cost about what a 4GB GTX-970 does, with the same kind of performance level from the GPU, but with a bit more VRAM to play with where that matters. Power consumption is probably slightly higher, but I've got enough PSU for it. I'm personally probably going to take on a Skylake i7 build later this year, unless news of the next revision comes before then. I'm getting a bit tired of dealing with Bloomfield and its triple-channel quirks.
  2. SchizophrenicMC
    Radar jamming is a game of cat-and-mouse between your jammers and the enemy's radar. Blacking out a bunch of TVs is one thing. Those are low-power transmissions across a few bands. Many military radar systems can actively- even randomly- change their frequencies across a fairly wide band, and remember: interference at one frequency only affects that frequency. Generating interference over a lot of frequencies, sufficient to jam enemy radar at long range, consumes a lot of power, and any frequencies the enemy goes blind on, so do you. Then there's the issue with triangulation. With continuous jamming, it's possible to triangulate the position of the jamming transmitter, which has led to techniques like pulse jamming and so on. And then there are some issues with modern digital radar, and AESA radars are minimally affected by jamming- though those are typically western equipment that wouldn't usually be available to groups you might consider "adversaries". Still, electronic countermeasures probably offer fewer compromises than passive low observability. It's not like "stealth" aircraft are totally invisible to radar either. And making them low observable requires a lot of design compromises, as we've discussed round and round already. Of course, in a world where we have incredibly long range missiles, and the only time we wouldn't use long range doctrines is in close air support roles where methods of detection that aren't affected by ECM or low observability, it's hard to see the point of either. All the toys we give the military cost a third of the tax dollar, and I'm not scared enough to feel like that's a good investment.
  3. SchizophrenicMC
    It's the image that counts. The idea that it takes up the whole ship makes the gun seem even cooler than cheaply adding a third tit to the bottom of the boat. Keep the double-barrel WMG, add more shock cannons instead. Put a turret on the bottom. This is a space ship, it has to be able to defend its underbelly right?
  4. SchizophrenicMC
    Personally I feel like the third wave motion gun detracts from the notion that the wave motion gun is an enormous thing taking up the whole length of the ship, in a straight line from the wave motion engine. Sure, it's a cool idea: a triangle of wave motion guns. But it's a more powerful image, that the ship is built around the gun, and it draws directly from the power source.
  5. SchizophrenicMC
    Just wanna throw it out there: the M3 V8 is developed from the M5 V10, which was loosely inspired by the P38 V10, but shares no actual component designs, just a few broad design elements. Production realities and what have you. But that's as much of a response as I'm willing to justify to mister bimmer circlejerk there. In much more exciting news, I got new tires put on the Subaru, just in time to have to wear the mold release coating off in the rain. Heavy understeer transitioning to wild oversteer? What are you, a 300ZX? Unfortunately the bunch of parts I have on order for the S13 still haven't shown up. I can't even get any email response out of FR Sport- I knew I shouldn't have tried ordering from them again. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me three times, shame on the diminishing parts supply for CA18DETs in America.
  6. SchizophrenicMC
    Both are inferior to F-14s. #shotsfired #from150milesaway
  7. SchizophrenicMC
    It'd be one thing if they weren't so painfully teutonic, but they're also expensive and unreliable. Quality has suffered since the 90s, and parts cost has skyrocketed. As BMWs have become more attainable, they've become over-engineered junk. It's great while it runs, but when it stops running, the repair bill will bankrupt people who have 320i money. Of course, if you're buying a new M3, you're the kind of new-money showoff who's "into cars" about as deep as your line of credit allows, and that's fair enough, but we're not going to get along because I think you're the type of guy who's too eager to congratulate himself on having an expensive car. Especially if you're the kind of guy who calls his car a ///M3 I'm gonna drive something dumpy that I've spilled my own blood into. It's not as fancy-schmancy, but it's mine. Everything this car does is as a result of my willingness to pick up where the engineers left off decades ago. It doesn't boast of its pedigree (even if it has a rich lineage), it simply offers its capability to a driver who can extract it. And that's all I ask. But honestly I'm not even really against BMWs, even as much as I hate their tendency to do the German overengineering thing. What I don't like is people with more money than creativity, who buy an M because it's THE BEST CAR and YOU SHOULD GO AND BUY ONE RIGHT NOW. IT'S RACING DESIGNED AND COOL AND STUFF. If you wanted something well-rounded out of the box, that's nice I guess. Glad you could afford it. But what a great way to show off that you have a bunch of cash, and not a lot of creativity. Like, for M3 money, I could buy any daily driver I wanted and still have money left over to build the 240 as a show-quality trackable GT that would be more fun to drive and get more heads turned. That sounds like a LOT more fun to me, than mindlessly taking the advice of 3 rich tossers from the other side of the pond. But to each his own. Glad you've got M3 money. Take your pride in that fact somewhere else please.
  8. SchizophrenicMC
    I was just thinking about modeling and 3D printing an O'Neill Cylinder last night. Looks like it's been sold out for awhile though. Still might be my best bet to model and print one.
  9. SchizophrenicMC
    #bmwmcirclejerk There is literally nothing bespoke or unique about a German performance luxobarge. None of it is "F1-derived" and it's not even particularly BMW. Without looking into it I'm 90% certain it's just the same 4.4l V8 they've been using for over a decade, with a few modernizations. I'm going to have a liter of coffee now. Maybe my deep-seated sense of loathing for the middle-class willfully uncreative will improve. Probably not.
  10. SchizophrenicMC
    I really like my Outback. If Subaru wisens up and makes a manual turbo Levorg for US consumption, that's gonna be the Outback's replacement. Even if they don't, I still might get a WRX in a couple years. I just prefer wagons to sedans.
  11. SchizophrenicMC
    My gut feeling is, the Navy was forced into the deal. The Air Force couldn't justify what JSF was going to cost on its own and the Navy was left high and dry after the F-22 turned out unsuitable for NATF. So the DoD said the Navy gets its own variant of JSF, and the F-35C was born. Even though it goes against every part of Naval aviation doctrine. If we bought the F-32, they'd be in production by now. Unlike Lockheed, Boeing is pretty good at meeting production deadlines. I wouldn't necessarily blame the engineers. The bureaucrats have really slowed it down. They're also trying to engineer the impossible in a few areas. (Thanks to the bureaucrats) That takes time. And money. So much money. It benefits Lockheed to drag this out, you know. Budgets are allocated year over year. It's not like there's been a fixed program budget at any point. The longer it takes to get the plane in the air, the more money Lockheed makes without ever producing an aircraft. And at this point they know we're into the program too deep to pull out now, so they're counting on collecting that sweet, sweet child support for a long time to come.
  12. SchizophrenicMC
    The WRX sold over 33,000 units in the US alone, in 2015. Impressive, considering US WRX sales in 2010 were just over 8,000. Of course, in the meantime Subaru has more than doubled its US sales from 260,000 to 580,000. Still, for doubling their sales, WRX sales quadrupled in the same period. That car won't be going anywhere any time soon.
  13. SchizophrenicMC
    Do the funnels hold up together much better than the Ver.Ka? I can't pose mine with the funnels on the back without a rod inserted through them, which is a universal problem with the MG.
  14. SchizophrenicMC
    I think the key difference between the 5th gen fighter and the 4th gen fighter is, in 1970 we had a legitimate military adversary capable of the same level of aerospace development as us. By 1990, that adversary no longer existed. By 2000 they were a distant memory, and by 2005, we didn't even have any national governments who openly posed a military threat. There was strong justification to advance from the 3rd generation fighter to the 4th generation fighter. And, in 1980, when the ATF program was first conceived there was still justification to develop the 5th generation fighter, even as good as the gen-4.5 fly-by-wire teens were. But by the time ATF had aircraft to show for it, the USSR had folded. There wasn't any reason to propose the JSF program. There certainly has yet to be any reason to spend the kind of money that has been spent thus far on JSF, and there is still yet more money to spend before a production-ready aircraft is available. I mean, preparedness is great and all, but who are our potential military adversaries, capable of projecting air power? After all, the T-50 was made as a response to the F-22's production, and only really has theory backing up claims of its performance; the modern variants of US-deployed aircraft all carry much more sophisticated equipment that suits the modern modes of operation, ie long-range standoff deployment. The F-14 was designed to blow up targets over 100 miles away, and since we proved the concept 45 years ago, we've put a lot of development into standoff interception and attack. Get into a field of operation, identify and attack targets before you are capable of being engaged, and exit the field of operation. That's the modern MO. That's why the F-22 and F-35 have been designed for multi-aspect low observability. It decreases the minimum effective standoff range. Not that there was a ton of need for it, given the advancements to our missile and tracking systems. (Again, I'll give the ATF a pass since it was developed during a time when there was need of such advancements) The problem with the low-observability brief is, it drove the entire design philosophy of the aircraft, by necessity. Which in turn means the small, low-volume airframe has trouble being serviced, packaging all the cooling it needs, carrying munitions and fuel, and still supporting its advanced electronics. Add the STOVL system to the mix and it's even more hopeless. And while the aircraft may still be capable of long-range standoff engagements, and perhaps even close-in aerial combat (which is no longer relevant), if it's intended to replace the F-16, F/A-18, and A-10 as a close air support platform, there are serious concerns about the survivability of an aircraft as delicate and composite-armored as the F-35. As good as the Gen4.6 fighters are, I'm not convinced there has been sufficient financial justification for the $391 billion the program is expected to cost by 2037. For reference, Apollo cost $110 billion, adjusted for inflation. F-22 cost $66 billion when all was said and done. And for all of this, we don't even get F-23s!
  15. SchizophrenicMC
    I do not believe that aircraft has a lift fan hatch. I also do not believe the program has proven itself to be worth the billions we've spent on it, considering we still have none combat-ready aircraft, 10 years after they were supposed to be in mass production.
  16. SchizophrenicMC
    "Dinosaur" Still a 300+hp 4-cylinder. #ej25forlife The FA20 just isn't as torquey as the EJ25. It does respond well to turbocharging, but it's gonna take some more work to have a fully-baked EJ replacement with the type of power delivery the STi gives, with the new engine platform. And then we can bring the Levorg to the US while we're dreaming.
  17. SchizophrenicMC
    When you try and cram as much stuff as they did, into as small an airframe as the F-35, you run into cooling trouble. The F-16 isn't much bigger. And of course a more powerful engine generates more heat. So you need to pack even more cooling solutions into an even more cramped airframe than before. Just another reason to go with big twins, in my opinion. And no, Lockheed Martin, play dirty? Never.
  18. SchizophrenicMC
    According to GE engineers, the whole system only added around 10lbs to the engine, over the valveless prototype. I believe the X-43B, if they ever made it, was supposed to use a modified YF-120 that could bypass the engine core completely and operate as an afterburning ramjet in addition to its turbofan and turbojet modes of operation. Ultimately the X-43 project was scrubbed before it ever got that far, too. I think I'm right in saying the closest thing to a production jet engine that could change its mode of operation is the J58 turboramjet, which could famously bypass its turbine and compressor at high mach numbers. In any case, it's also impressive that the YF-120 was a 35,000-lbf class engine, given its size. (About 4" narrower than the F110, around 20" shorter) The F-119 didn't reach 35,000lbf until they got the go-ahead for a production variant, and it's longer than the F110. (Remember that whole conversation a couple months ago about GE9x adding more stages for more power) Of course, we know the engine has even more potential; the derivative F-135PW100 makes well in excess of 40,000lbf. I just wonder what GE could have pulled off with the same amount of R&D money appropriated to them, considering what their prototype could do. They do, historically, have a record of doing really good in this field.
  19. SchizophrenicMC
    There were a few plans for the F-14's further development around the mid-90s, ranging from the F-14D Quickstrike, which would have just been an F-14D with APG-71 radars (which were planned for the D anyway, but most of them were scrapped at the last minute) and modified software and hardpoints to handle more types of stand-off weapons, to the ASF-14 which would have been a totally new airframe in a vaguely Tomcattish skin. Cost projections for the ASF-14 actually outperformed the F/A-18E/F, but the Super Hornet was ultimately chosen because our military didn't trust Northrop after the B-2 cost so much. Let's play Ace Combat, where all of these planes became combat realities.
  20. SchizophrenicMC
    A boy has the right to dream.
  21. SchizophrenicMC
    The YF-120 is probably the biggest loss from the YF-23 scrub. I wonder what that engine could have done as an F110 replacement. They're very nearly the same size, but the YF-120 was supposed to be a 35,000lb thrust engine, and the YF-23 supercruised at mach 1.6. Imagine what that could have done for the F-14. Could have had a super-cruising 1:1+ F-14. The YF-23 makes me sad, but the F-14 absolutely crushes me.
  22. SchizophrenicMC
    Locally, VR4s are right between Z32 NA and TT prices. Anything else isn't worth looking at. Mitsubishi also make a wildly successful line of centralized ductless air conditioning systems.
  23. SchizophrenicMC
    Which is a typical weakness of stealth aircraft. Changes to the aircraft profile are difficult to validate, making future revision much more challenging and expensive, when it's even possible. However, the F-22A is a wildly different aircraft to the YF-22. So too would the F-23 have been to the YF-23. Even between the prototypes, there were more than a handful of changes to support the GE YF-120 engine over the P/W YF-119. I've heard it opined that the YF-22 only won out because their demonstration was flashier, involving irrelevant but fun to watch single-point demonstrations, while the YF-23 demonstration showed the aircraft in much more typical modes of flight for its operating requirements. Of course the YF-22's 9G turn was impressive to watch. But neither plane was ever going to be a dogfighter, and Northrop Grumman didn't show that off as much, as such. Of course, it's also likely that the YF-23 was passed over because the B-2 had significant cost overruns. Then again, the F-22 had even greater cost and timeline overruns and we only made a handful before giving up. Of course, the way I really feel is, what's the point of any of this? Why spend all this money on air power we don't need? I only care about the YF-23 because of all the flight science it represented. All the possibilities we decided to give a miss when we went with the more conventional F-22. And you're probably thinking of the F-15ACTIVE or F-15S/MTD.
  24. SchizophrenicMC
    Mitsubishi has never had a reputation for reliability in America, and most of its best-selling years were during its time as Chrysler's import manufacturer. Mitsubishi sales have always been pretty low, and have dropped even more as its low-cost Asian competitors (ie Kia, Hyundai) have improved their own reputations. Ultimately, developing cars is expensive, and the more commonality you have the better. Hence the Mirage, Lancer, and Outlander share a chassis, engine families, and numerous other components. And at the end of the day, the Evo costs more than its competitors, (including the Focus and Fiesta ST, both of which stole Evo market share) and can't compete with a new STi and the new Focus RS. The Evo X is too old and not very profitable, even as the most expensive car of the bunch. And developing a new Lancer Evolution would push that figure even further up. The 3000GT was absurdly expensive in its day- more so than the 300ZX Twin Turbo and Supra Turbo. It would cost even more today, and nobody would pay that for a Mitsubishi. They know that. At this point, Mitsubishi is only a few years away from ceding the US market. The company doesn't rely on its US car sales. Mitsubishi's real bread and butter is its ships. And then its HD trucks, then its construction equipment, electronics, fighter jets, missile systems, and so on. That's why companies like Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Kia/Hyundai, and Daewoo don't really put out amazing efforts. Their cars are not their core business. It's a spinoff. The only reason Suzuki made USDM cars as long as it did is because of GM's stake in it. Not so much anymore. Actually, a lot of the same is true of Subaru, but Fuji Heavy Industry has put a surprising level of investment into making a functioning car company, seemingly with only one purpose in mind: get outsold by Mazda. To be fair, I would buy a Mazda. I would also buy a Subaru. Not a lot of new cars can put me in that position. If Subaru gives us a manual Levorg in the US, I will buy a new Subaru.
  25. SchizophrenicMC
    There are new F-15 and F/A-18 variants that accommodate systems, radars, engines, and weapons that didn't exist 40 years ago, with small enough amounts of redesign that it was profitable to do so, even at lower prices than their competitor, the F-35. (Which is going to have to be redesigned soon to accommodate systems, radars, engines, and weapons that didn't exist 15 years ago- before it even reaches actual service) To say nothing of how boondoggled the F-22 became during its short production run. All I'm saying is, maybe Lockheed doesn't have the capability to actually make these planes. Maybe Northrop Grumman, who have a long history of delivering on time, should have received more consideration. Maybe next time they will. Maybe the F-23 is the porkbelly military spending we really need. Or maybe it'll come down to Lockheed's lobbying dollars again, like it always seems to in recent memory. In any case, the YF-23 is certainly the prettier plane, and it boggles my mind a bit to think that thing flew on computers available in the early 1990s. There's nothing conventional about that design, and hardly anything aerodynamically stable about it. The amount of flight computer intercession needed to keep that thing in the air has got to be pretty large.
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