The hangar doors have opened...

It's out. Finally. Enough said.

Get. :)

www.realairsimulations.com

200K for Vectors?

So the unstoppable farce actually made it to 200,000 views tonight. I'm pretty blown away.

My sincerest thanks once again to the crew that helped pull it off, Pebble, Mark, Eric, Flagstaff, Sidra, Lyn, Mugar, and Dustoff. Thanks also to those who left some really amazing and inspirational comments on the movie. I truly can't tell you how much I've appreciated those. :)

So, having said that, here's my little homage to everyone else, the ones who left a stupid, demeaning, or perfectly incoherent comment on it, or asked one of the two questions that invariably results in me adorning my forehead with keyboard imprints: 'wut dat song?' and 'wat hapend to teh othr jet?'.

This my friends is just for you lovely lovely youtubers. :)

Enjoy!

(oh, and be sure to crank it up) ;)

Courchevel on the ground...

Man I love Top Gear. I *hate* TV yet I adore this show. Even better when it's a 'best of' vid set to one of my favourite tracks like this. Nice remix too! :) I draw huge inspiration (and ideas) from the videographers and editors who work on this series.

And yes I know it's nothing but car porn but it still rocks. ;)

Enjoy.

Chase the Sun Tour complete!

Well done all! We fought disconnects, we fought weather, we fought the laws of physics and we won! The Chase the Sun Blackbird Round the World Tour was a great success.

First, some stats:

Total legs flown: 12
Total distance covered: 23930 NM
Total flight time: 17 hours 23 minutes
Total trip time: 22 hours 15 minutes
Average speed: 1378.5 Knots
Longest leg: 2373 nm, Kashi - Assab, 1 hr 35 mins
Fastest leg: Rochambeau - La Mesa, 1480 knots avg.
Highest speed attained: Mach 3.37 - 1999 knots ground speed
Highest altitude: 84500 feet

Bottles of Stella Artois consumed: 46 (approximately)

Habus destroyed: 0 ;)

The circumnavigation record we had to beat (including refueling time which is factored into trip time) was 36 hours 14 minutes set by the B-1B in 1995. I'd say we fairly well kicked its ass. ;)

Again, great job guys, that was one hell of an effort! I'd mark that down as a serious FSX accomplishment. I was thoroughly impressed with your mastery(s) of the Habu by the time we wrapped up. :)

Thanks to everyone who participated, and my apologies to those who suffered many disconnects and lag. I wish FSX multiplayer was a little more robust than it is, but we made the best of it.

Pics below!















-lotus

Blackbird Air Miles and Rewards points...

If you've been cruising along with us in the Blackbird round the world tour, or are planning to join us for some of the final legs, please download this file, there's a little present in there for you. :)

Reward File Download

When you get the zip file, extract it into the following location:

(your main FSX folder)\Rewards\

Overwrite your "sandbox_rewards.rwd" with the one in the zip file.

Don't worry it won't mess up your current or future flight rewards or logbook in any way.

Many thanks to Pebble for putting all the hard work into something you will see at some point soon. :) After the run I will post how to collect your reward if it doesn't happen for you automatically.

Cheers,

-lotus

Sound familiar?

At least FSX gets a nod. ;) It's the Zero Punctuation review of Crysis, a game I hate and absolutely refuse to play on principle. Why? Simply because all the problems FSX SP2 has with Nvidia hardware would be solved in a bloody heartbeat if this game didn't exist. It's a long story. Anyway I LOVE this guy's reviews.

Enjoy!

From totally out of left field...

Ummmm...

I don't really know *what* to make of this, but I figured you guys would want to see it.

It's an FSX movie, I think. Actually I don't know what to think. It's awesome, it's odd, it's clever, it's boring, it's cute, but maybe most of all it's ummm.... huh? :) Normally within seconds I either love an FSX movie, dislike it, or am ambivalent about it, but this is the first one I can't even begin to make up my mind about.

See for yourselves, I'm curious to hear what you think of it. It's kinda like Tinfish meets Navigator meets me meets Spice. Every movie these Things to Come guys have done for their scenery products (Edwards AFB in the Acceleration pack in this case) is a little out there, but this one... They definitely put a *lot* of work into it, that's for sure.

K, I'll shut up now, have a look. :)

Shoulda coulda...

I actually considered putting one of these in Vectors, as Alphasim made an Orlenok Ekranoplan awhile back, but I couldn't find a way to fit it into the story and have it make sense... not that anything in it did anyway. ;)

Good thing someone else took care of that for me! Got a laugh out of their attempts to traverse land with one, with mixed results. ;)

Cheers to Pebble for the link.

*Much* better...

Ok leg two of the RTW trip went much much better than the first. So staying out of gamespy worked and helped the lag immensely. Aside from a little garbled comms here and there it was perfect, good job all. I'll be sticking with this direct IP method for the rest of the RTW sessions, thanks for your extra effort in that. It paid off. I've posted the info for the next session on the sidebar to the right, and will do so for each subsequent leg from now on instead of writing posts.

Cheers and see you there! (We'll probably take a few days off after this next leg, let the wings cool and all haha.)

PS: Stats for the Honolulu - Wake Island leg were 1993 NM covered in 1 hour 27 minutes for an average speed of 1374.5 knots. ;)

-lotus