Holdit

It's not even that their systems are light, it's more that even stuff that's supposed to work doesn't e.g. their B200 (IIRC) had gear indicator lights that didn't work. When they can't even manage an unambitious level of fidelity such as functioning gear indicator lights... Regarding ABBA I like some of their stuff but also can't stand some of it. As I've got older I've got less into bands and more into tracks, giving me a music collection with bits of everything from Alphaville to Zeppelin. It's been decades since I listened to an album. 🙂

I'm still on MSFS 2020 with the Black Square analog King Air and I can't see Carenado coming close to that in quality, apart perhaps for eye candy like opening doors and for me that's not a good enough reason to support their business model. Also, there seems to be an intention by Black Square to do a ground up King Air for MSFS 2024. I can't remember the last time I bought a Carnado offering.

The Boeings and Buses are, but I have a soft spot for the BAe RJ's and the MD80. Not enough to actually fly them, but they do have plenty of character compared to the others, and I get the impression that they're a bit more hands-on. My Black Square Bonanza keeps me busy enough for now...

I used to play FPS gams and had a blast playing Duke Nukem and Unreal Tournament over the LAN at work. I also enjoyed Far Cry, but that was as much the tropical setting, I think. I've moved away from FPS's since, preferring open-world RPGs along the lines of Fallout 3/4 and Skyrim.

That's the one - I didn't have time to find the URL when posting.

Black Square hinted on the Just Flight forums that a ground-up rebuild of the King Air may be in the works. It didn't say anything about having it in 2026 though.

The only surprising thing to me is that they ever worked together. Thranda is known for good-quality add-ons and Carenda is know for cranking 'em out as fast as they can turn the handle of the sausage-machine. One of the parties was going to have to undergo a Damascene change in its business model.

Black Square has hinted that a ground-up version is on the to-do list.

I've never been mad about the Caravan, but in the absence of a decent Twin Otter and with the Caravan used for similar work, and if it's made by Black Square, it's an easy choice to make. The only black square aircraft so far that I haven't got is the Starship and I've only put off buying that because of my existing to-fly backlog.

I'm curious why there would be three stop signs at a T-junction. In this part of the world that would be managed by (a) the road crossing the T having priority, with the stop sign on the "vertical" road only, (b) a mini-roundout or (c) traffic lights. Neither of those arrangements prevents rule-breaking of course. (Mini-roundabouts do occasionally provide entertainment when three cars reach it one the same time and each stops waiting for one of the others to make a move and you get a scene reminiscent of the Sad Hill face-off in The Good The Bad and The Ugly. 😆 )

An organised crime group operating in the craft fair circuit.

Maybe the Raffia was behind it.

On holiday in Italy last year, we had purchased 2-prong round adapters for our plugs (3 x rectangular prongs - Ireland uses the UK system) only to find that some places we stayed in used older style Italian power sockets that the adapters didn't fit into. After a bit of hunting we got the correct adapters-for-the-adapters and all was well...but the end result looked awful. 😃

It's when one military unit moves through the position of another. Not a big deal nowadays, I suspect, since soldiers are so well spread-out, but in the horse-and-musket period, when men were shoulder-to-shoulder and a line had (usually) three ranks, it could be tricky to do without leaving both lines disorganised, not a good thing if the enemy is in close proximity.

How time changes things. I can't even remember having a strong opinion either way on passage of lines. I do remember a reference in Duffy to units from Vandamme's division performing "the difficult passage of lines maneouvre" at Austerlitz. More recently, I've been reading up an a slightly related topic; how the Romans rotated fresh troops into the battle line, but since even ancient historians can't agree on that, I can't reach a conclusion either. Unfortunately it seems that the method shown in Episode 1 of HBO's Rome, while it looks plausible, wouldn't have been possible.

I can't even remember the details of what that was about... 🙂

Don't get me started on AI. In my experience, AI is a lot more "artificial" than it is "intelligent". And I think it's going to do a lot of damage.

Quite. LHookins mentioned the Warren commission: I've never had any firm opinion about the Kennedy assassination one way or the other, mainly because neither the lone shooter theory nor the theory that the conspiracy was wider than that seem to me to be in the same level of bonkersness as, say, Kubrick filming the moon landings* or the 911 conspiracy that half the country seems to have been in on and yet nobody talked. I wouldn't even write off the Rockwell dead alien story, since I can easily imagine a government covering something like that up. My objection is more about what comprises evidence for the promoters of such theories, and how comically low their bar often is. *On location, apparently, because he was such a perfectionist. 😁

I've explained my position clearly enough, and while I can explain it to you, I can't understand it for you, so I'll follow Hookin's good advice and leave it there. I'll just add, however, that I wasn't directly accusing you of using such tactics, since I have no experience of debating you in such a context. I was simply stating that in my experience in many such debates, that is what I've found to be the case. If you are an exception to that then I'll gladly applaud you for it, but I stand by my opinion that those who do use the kind of tactics I mentioned, and more, have earned every name that gets thrown at them.

You see, this is precisely what I'm talking about. I made it clear perecisely what behaviour self-identifies these people. Disagreeing with me does not in and of itself make someone a conspiracy theorist, but rather their tendancy to argue dishonestly and their inability to think or evaluate critically and inability to grasp that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, whether that be accidentally or by design. From your reaction it would appear that such behaviour is likely to be your own modus operandi also, so yes, in that case you're wise to avoid me. Good call.

Or as Richard Dawkins put it, "It's good to have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out."

In my experience, most conspiracy theorists don't debate, though, either because they don't know how to, or they don't want to. Instead they play a game of rhetorical whack-a-mole where each bit of evidence that is debunked is replaces by another, and another until they circle back top the original one. Far from producing real evidence, they just regurgitate bad science, innuendo, cherry picked and out-of-context information, and outright lies. When challenged, their frequent response is to dump a link to a > 60-minute YouTube video, which they appear to assume people won't actually look at. If you ask for the critical timestamps in the video, you'll get tumbleweed as a response. It's just as futile as debating with creationists - and for similar reasons, in my opinion. Most of them richly deserve the ridicule they get, and they bring it on themselves. P.S. You're confusing desperation with exasperation.

Exactly, too much credibility is given to randomers on YouTube over qualified experts, and the concept that "my ignorance is just as good as your expertise".

More completely, the simplest explanation that fits the facts. Or put another way, pick the explanation that requires the fewest additional assumptions.