Top of the Sunday morning to ya! And a happy belated St. Patrick's day to every one of all y'alls.

Here's what I've got for the 2nd post in THIS WEEK IN F99TH:

1. 16th AGR Match Update
2. F-5 vs. MiG-21 "Red Flag Rumble"
3. Wags' Normandy '44 Livestream
4. Heatblur's F-14 Dogfight Footage
5. ArmA 3 64-bit Executable Released
6. A Selection of Assorted Interesting Real-World Stuff

16th AGR Match Update

This might not the update you were looking for on our match versus 16th Air Guards Regiment, but for now we'll call it officially "on hold." We briefly discussed arranging a smaller, more crashy-DCS-patch-friendly event, but progress in arranging even that has been sufficiently slow that there's no reason to keep holding our breath waiting for that to happen. In short, whenever I can get to a "setting a date & time" conversation with 16th AGR is when I'll be able to say we've got something coming down the pipeline with them. Instead, I would like to announce an alternative option: our own team vs. team event. At this point I'm thinking we'll forgo the straight-up CAP jets and we'll leave it to our skilled ground pounders to sort it out amongst themselves, like the good old days before FC3 was released. I'll make a new thread to sign up and discuss the event, but I'll start with the existing list of people who signed up for the 16th AGR match and see if I can figure out some mass email/PM deal to get the word out. Tentatively, the aircraft selection will include A-10A/C, Su-25A/T, F-5E, MiG-21Bis, AJS-37,UH-1H, Mi-8MTV2, SA-342M/L/Mistral, and Ka-50. And I just got this crazy idea about maybe forcing some dumb weapons in to the mix, but we'll see about that. We'll set the date for this coming Saturday, March 25th.

GET MORE INFO AND SIGN UP HERE .

F-5 vs. MiG-21 "Red Flag Rumble" Hosted by 104th

Some of you know I'm sure (at the very least Tscro) that yesterday was the "Red Flag Rumble" that 104th put together for F-5/MiG-21 enthusiasts. For the uninitiated, the objective was a faceoff between F-5s on the Blue team versus MiG-21s on the Red team with some mirrored ground targets that each side could kill for extra points. Originally the event was supposed to take place on NTTR, hence the "Red Flag" branded title, but because of stability issues they moved it to 1.5 and the rumble took place over Sukhumi instead of 65A. I say I'm sure at least Tscro knew about it because I was very pleased to watch on the twitch.tv livestream as he bagged himself a Fishbed. Congrats, very nicely done! I would have thought the MiG-21s would have a huge advantage because they're a good deal faster than the F-5s, if they got in trouble all they'd need to do is plug in the burners and run away, but it ended up that the F-5s on blue won the day. Final tallies have not been posted as of yet, but from my drifting in-and-out attention paid to the livestream I saw Tscro earn at least one kill and I saw my buddy Esonub bag one each of air and ground kills. The livestream recording is available below and whenever the final scoreboard is posted I'll be sure to get a link up here if someone doesn't beat me to it.

[BBvideo=560,315]www.twitch.tv/videos/129568781[/BBvideo]

Wags' Normandy 1944 Map Livestream

Again, continued Normandy '44 Map/Assets hype. Though this time we did get a few useful bits of knowledge like airfields will be short but they should be long enough to support almost all existing DCS modules, the only things we can definitely rule out are the AI B-52s and the like. That being said, I think it could still spell trouble for some heavily-loaded aircraft (like the Su-25T, at least the way I load it up on the rare occasion that I fly it), but overall good news. And the map is looking oh so good. Cygon once said my video of some Spitfire flying with Eso made him consider getting the module, I think the Spitfire + Normandy '44 when it's available might finally be the winning combination we need to drag him and others like him in to the piston-powered DCS realm. I can't wait to plink Panzers hiding out in those hedgerows. Livestream linked below:

[BBvideo=560,315][/BBvideo]

Heatblur's F-14 Dogfight Footage "DCS F-14: Fight's On!"

Heatblur released on Tuesday a quick bit of footage of some defensive and offensive BFM in the Tomcat, see below:

[BBvideo=560,315][/BBvideo]

Of course it looks pretty fantastic just in terms of how fluid the motion is, loved seeing the spoilers come up and all that. What stood out to me though is the HUD refresh rate. I know they made a point of saying early on how as an early example of the forays in to actually implementing a heads-up display, the F-14A's HUD was actually quite slow to update and that would be reflected in the module. I've since found some HUD guncam footage from F-14s, and it doesn't seem nearly as slow to refresh as HB's version does in their dogfight video. For example:

Am I crazy? Or maybe this isn't actually indicative of what the pilot sees in the HUD (Vampyre or any other SMEs)? The version in HB's video looks like a real pain in the ass, significantly more so than would be true to life. Of course, this is all academic. In real-life DCS: World any would-be dogfighters against the F-14s would have been shot down at 60-80 nautical miles by Phoenixes..

ArmA 3 64-bit Executable is Out, and it's Looking Promising!

For our cadre of ArmA-enthusiasts, the 64-bit version of ArmA came out yesterday and I got maybe 2 hours worth of a look at it and it was looking very good. I joined some Invade and Annex servers that would normally come with a healthy dose of framerate drops or consistently low frames and everything was around a silky smooth 45 fps. If you aren't familiar with ArmA, this is pretty much a huge deal for multiplayer but for singleplayer it isn't so much. Singleplayer has always been silky smooth and, for me at least, always around 60 fps. Multiplayer has historically been an entirely different case, where it seemed there was always an arbitrary hit of 30-40 frames at best and on many servers you would be faced with unplayably-bad lag spikes. Oftentimes it would just ruin the game. The new 64-bit executable (inexcusable as it was in this day and age to be stuck with 32-bit) remedies the issue by giving the game access to more than 2 GB worth of RAM. I guess the way ArmA has been built over the years, they've stuck with some core elements and built on top of it to make the successive versions of ArmA and it's always confined us to a 32-bit environment. Obviously, such an expansive and detailed environment as ArmA provides (even just visually speaking) requires a lot more than 2 GB of material to be loaded so up until now they've had some workaround that made the game work even though it couldn't utilize the speedy read/write capabilities that RAM is intended to provide. And like I said, it worked in singleplayer at least, and under the right conditions multiplayer was still good. But now those days of compromise are over and the only issue now is that mods like ACE need to be updated for 64-bit. A minor inconvenience, but a worthwhile one for the kind of multiplayer fluidity and stability like I saw yesterday.

Some Interesting Stuff that Happened in the Real World, Not the DCS: World

The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) successfully intercepted what was likely an S-200 (SA-5 in NATO terminology) with their Arrow (unknown if Arrow 2 or 3) anti-ballistic missile system in the early hours of Friday. The IAF was undertaking a strike against a convoy of advanced weaponry in Syria destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon (one of a number of such convoys which have been sent and attacked since the start of the Syrian War, but the first of which has actually been acknowledged by the IDF) and when the fighters had released their ordnance and turned back Syrian air defenses engaged them by firing several missiles. The IAF fighters escaped unharmed and one of those missiles was detected and engaged by the IDF's ballistic missile defense system. In some sources I've seen that it is thought that one of those S-200s was launched in a ballistic, unguided mode which could account for the Arrow engagement, but the exact circumstances as to why or how the interception took place are unknown. Arrow is part of a multi-tiered system of missile defense that the IDF has developed and deployed since the late 1980s with Arrow itself having been developed in three iterations thus far. Arrow 3 recently became operational while Arrow 2 has been the mainstay of the ballistic missile defense since the early 2000s. Arrow comprises the top-tier of missile defense, being designed primarily to counter ballistic missiles launched from Iran, while David's Sling (a.k.a. Stunner on the US side of the joint development between Rafael and Raytheon) is oriented toward countering cruise missiles and long-range rockets, and of course there's the famed Iron Dome that counters shorter-ranged rockets, mortars, and artillery. More Info

The CH-53K, slated to replace CH-53Es in USMC service nearing the end of their service life surpassed a nice, public-hypetrain-friendly statistic this week of featuring a unit cost to surpass the most recent block of F-35A purchases. Now, I don't know if that's good, bad, or what, I'm nowhere near qualified to make that characterization, but it begs the question: "How in the freaking hell is that even remotely possible?" It's a helicopter. Albeit a personal favorite, kickass heavy-lift helicopter that I wouldn't want to see our Marines use anything in its place, but it remains a helicopter. From what I gather, the K-update includes an overhaul of avionics, an all new fly-by-wire system, fancy composite materials (of course), and 3 new and much more powerful turbine engines to boot. The bottom line is the K will be able to carry more than twice the capacity of the E and thanks to the enhancements of cutting edge design it should be significantly less of a pain in the ass to maintain. Plus, as far as the USMC's needs are concerned it's a must-have. Once the CH-53K enters full-rate production the unit cost is expected to drop below $89 million, but the current unit cost is a whopping $122 million which roughly equals the current F-35B unit cost. Welcome to the most expensive helicopter in the world. More Info

One other story that caused plenty of hubbub over the week was the one about a "US ally" shooting down a consumer-grade drone in the ballpark of $200 with a MIM-104 Patriot missile valued at multiple millions of dollars. Of course, everyone is speculating as to who this "US ally" was and within seconds they move on to freaking out over the economics of the exchange. If I'm allowed my own guess as to who did this, I'd put forth Turkey, Iraq, and Israel as my top 3 candidates, and it's all about the way those $200 drones are being put to use in Syria. My take on it is that this is obviously a total crapshoot on the dollars-and-cents side of the equation. No one in their right mind could justify that as a sustainable way to pursue such engagements. However, some of you may have seen the videos put out by Daesh and the like where they use such a $200 drone to drop a small bomb on an unsuspecting group of soldiers on a street or in a vehicle, anywhere they might get the highest proverbial "bang for their $200 drone bomb buck." In light of that, I can understand the decision to take the multi-million dollar hit in using a Patriot to shoot down such a drone. You've got to use whatever is at your disposal to get the job done, and lucky for some guys on the ground wherever this transpired, they had a Patriot battery that was able to detect and engage the target. From a purely technical standpoint, I think it is a noteworthy subject and a point of pride that the Patriot was actually able to succesfully intercept such a small target. Obviously that's getting well beyond the parameters under which Patriot was designed and produced, but it successfully adapted to the situation and kept a handle on its air defense tasking. In the future though, they obviously need to get those laser air defense systems up and running. There's nothing on the horizon that can compare to the pennies on the dollar cost per engagement of downing a drone/missile/aircraft with a high-power laser and so far as I know that's the only method likely to yield a truly sustainable cost exchange ratio. They're in development now (as it seems they've been for like 20 years already), but unlike THEL or ABL I think they'll finally pursue one of these to the point of actually deploying it. " Iron Beam " (an homage to Iron Dome, but this time with LAZOR BEAMS) was supposedly starting deployment last year, but I haven't heard anything further about it.

Anything else catch anyone's eye? Throw it in for discussion!

So it's now past 10 am, I'm just about typed-out and I can't think of anything else worth including, I think that's where I'll cut it off for this update.

Godspeed, gentlemen. Another week of success and domination of your opposition to you!

I think it was acknowledged on Redit by HB (COBRA) that while they are including the slow refresh rate on the HUD that the one in the video posted is slower than what they want the end product to be. I'll dig up the link and share once I find it again, but I'm positive he acknowledged it is way slow and they are working on it.

Edit - From what COBRA posted on Reddit referencing the refresh rate on the F-14 HUD in the video:

"The HUD is accurate to the F-14A/B HUD (and A-7). We tried counting the frames inbetween each polling update; and have matched it in sim. It just looks very jarring with everything else being 60fps.
Once the HUD is complete, it will look way more "lo-fi" and natural.
Also, some elements that are laggy right now, should not be as laggy when the HUD is complete. In this particular video examples are: the guncross and tracking diamond. Both poll at a faster rate than the Nav elements. "

Link: www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/5ze5i9/...nts/#bottom-comments

Well the Marines did request power windows and locks....

Good stuff again, pyro. Stimulating read, thanks!

Updated original post with link to "F99th Faceoff" event thread.

Hot damn, I didn't realize that.. King Stallion is friggen awesome. To hell with the price tag, I wanna see that at a Miramar airshow at some point.

Thanks for the update! I never think to keep an eye on Reddit and it's hard to follow anything of interest on the ED forums these days, so I probably would've missed that entirely. For the NAV modes that makes much more sense. As long as the gun sight is functional like it is in the video I linked I'll be happy.