Thanks @nicholas.dackard! You’ve got a ton of eager fans looking forward to this 
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So you’re saying that you don’t track ips? Kudos, you are an unsung light post of privacy then. It seems like nowadays everybody else tracks what ever they can get.
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I think the analytics does ‘sessions’ but IPv4’s get recycled enough to make it worthless (unless comparing a metric with itself). For the main www articles site people don’t log in, plus we don’t enable user tracking. Plus most sensible people run adblock or ublock or something so even for page view I think it under counts, and we don’t gather server-side stats on www.mudspike.com. I mean, it’s not going to improve our revenue.
Anyway, kind of getting off topic of the F-14, so here’s two dogs hugging.
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Its in testing right now. you have an early access build.
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Here We Come 
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Yas! I have my early access Tomcat!
Spoiler
No. I really don’t but I have a 3D printer and this cool little print:
Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful. I don’t have that either
I am enjoying the patient wait for the features and fixes to be filled out. Pretty sure I wouldn’t want the pressure of having to write something up, plus, I can fly this one around the room
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So imagine how good you think it might be. Well, it’s better than that. It’s simply jaw dropping. As one would expect when looking at that cockpit geometry and textures in VR.
I’ll try to get some “through the lens” shots tomorrow. It’s almost like work knows I have a cool module, and they have been flying the snot out of me the past few days. I know, I know…smallest violin ever…
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Good luck with the new direction…! So if you are already interviewing, are you having to relocate or is it in the same city? You don’t have to answer that and go back to lurking…LOL…but we’ve missed you!
@BeachAV8R So how many times have you killed yourself with it yet? Managed to bring her back aboard yet?
@near_blind Wishing you luck on your new endeavor. You will rock it, be sure.
Probably killed myself a half a dozen times - mostly out of just trying to reach the limits of the airplane. It gets very unstable once you exceed whatever the critical angle of attack is. I was messing around with the autopilot tonight - just turned it on, I haven’t really looked to see what kinds of modes it has - but it struck me as being almost Airbus-ish. You can pitch and roll the airplane, and the autopilot servos just sort of lock it in there. But you are free to move the stick and reposition the airplane. It is really quite useful.
I’ve managed carrier landings every time I’ve tried them, with one ramp strike due to me getting silly. I think it is harder to bring aboard than the Hornet for sure, but not really that much harder. The Hornet’s HUD data is really where it shines. The F-14, by necessity, you have to have a faster instrument scan to keep everything where it is supposed to be. I’d like to be able to ask Jester what our current weight is, and what our Vref speed should be (the Navy probably doesn’t call it Vref…I dunno what they call it).
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How easy to it read in vr ? Numbers and letters , visible without zoom ?
Had that same reflection on tuesday midnight
Listened, on my drive home from work that day, to Fighter Pilot podcast episode Vietnam Ace with WillyD and was so motivated that I spent that night with DCS Ka50 and MiG21.
Fortunately there was heavy snowing next day so flying didnt hapen 
Do you really need to check any instruments during trapping? Isn’t there an AoA gauge next to the HUD and on-speed AoA, line-up and center-ball is all you really need?
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One of the main problems might be that you cannot see the ball very well in DCS (and in VR it is even harder) so you have to read the instruments more often.
That’s great to hear Chris! I’m itching to get my hands on it myself. Hopefully my new PC will arrive before they release it to the rest of us.
I have a pretty brutal week ahead myself. Should make for an interesting AAR though :).
This Makes ME…
I’m not sure what the old school naval aviators were taught. I’m sure you can just trap in close with just the AOA (I just tried it), but I don’t know that I would put all of my faith in it. The Hornet has altitude (MSL and radar) and vertical rate all concisely put together. In the F-14, the VSI, airspeed indicator, and standby ADI are all mounted there at the top of the panel so it is just a flick of the eye down (in real life they might even be in your periphery such that you don’t need to really look at them). I’m not sure either what weather minimums the F-14 operated to, but again, you’d need a better and faster scan than the “easy” Hornet.
I think the ball has gotten a bit better after the last few versions of DCS World, at least, I seem to be able to spot it a little bit further out. I still wouldn’t mind an inset window “cheat” that shows a zoomed in picture of the ball given our monitor and VR resolution challenges.
My impression was that they were readable without zoom, but might require you to sort of dip your head. It helps to turn the cockpit flood light on and the instrument lighting just to give a bit more contrast. Will test more today.
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