This video is still relevant.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6273027/F-16-fighter-jet-EXPLODES-damaged-Belgium-mechanic-accidentally-opened-fire.html

The basic action is, but not the mechanism.
My idea....think spiral channels inside the tube with the cog shown attached to a piston that rides in the spiral channels. As you turn it and force is transferred, it forces the piston forward because the spiral turns rotational force into linear force. With a spring, you apply an opposing linear force so the piston only moves when those forces are unbalanced. This spring could be tunable so you select where the balance point of those forces is, thus selecting the maximum force you could apply before it changes gears for you. When there's more force applied, it "lowers" the gear, when less it automatically goes up a gear. No electronics or battery required.

I'm curious to see what mechanism they use to change gears.

Looks like the plane will last forever. That old technology is better than the new stuff in many ways. The controls are all hard-wired with mechanical linkages. The magneto means the engine keeps running even if the the alternator or battery fails.

Even with no electric power, a pilot can keep flying.

This is about the newbs and the pros. Basically, the ones who have enough leisure time and lack of responsibility to sit around and bitch about the game.

The Gen Xers are just gamers. We know that arguing over the game mechanics isn't going to sway the devs.

Play the game, collect your phat loots, don't rush to the level cap, and take some time once in a while to appreciate the open world game design.

Of course the game is unbalanced. But nevermind the campers, griefers and OP players who exploited the glitches, find the side missions you enjoy and equip a sunscreen potion...you'll be glad later that you did.

MAGA isn't anything. It's as vague as "Hope and Change". It's a slogan.

Starting trade wars that wreck the economy is a bad thing. Deregulation that harms the economy is a bad thing. A lot of his policies are bad things.

And before you say, "well, the economy is doing great!" or "black unemployment is at an all time low", or whatever fact that completely ignores the macroeconomic phenomenon known as the business cycle, remember that national economic policy takes time to take effect. Instituted properly, it keeps the economic dips at recession level lows and duration, not 2008 level catastrophes. Aside from emergency measures such as those instituted during 2009, the federal government can't generally have immediate impacts. It'll take awhile.

I'll even go on record as saying that a recession under Trump is virtually inevitable even if he conducted good policy. The measure of his policies will turn into how bad the recession ends up being, and how well the damage is contained.

And that's the problem. Because of his tax cuts, he's put us into larger deficit spending mode in a time that we didn't need it. Macroeconomically, it was time to run surpluses. But he didn't care. In fact, he cared so little, he didn't even just keep deficit spending at where it was. He made it worse.

So when the other shoe drops, there won't be many mechanisms left to do other than lower interest rates when they're already low aside from sacrifice future economic growth when we have to deficit spend out the ass to stimulate the economy.

And the worst part is his poor decisions, when it's evident they were poor, reversing them won't help end a recession. If you realize a trade war screwed us, removing the tariffs doesn't in the short run increase consumer spending because people won't have jobs to buy those goods, and if the recession is globally felt (which it will be), Chinese people will have less money to buy American goods.

Taxing the rich more in the short run doesn't put more money into consumers' hands who would actually spend it. In fact, that reduces capital at a time when capital would help build new businesses to hire more people.

Not that any of this is surprising. Trump has no idea how macroeconomics work. He talks like he does, but he doesn't. Just says stuff that sounds obvious and easy to understand, and too many people fell for it.

But the reckoning is coming. It always does.

I loved Trespasser even with all its flaws. There is a VR game called Island 359 that does a great job of recreating the mechanics of that game.

The first person PC one was actually pretty good. It had some novel and interesting gameplay mechanics, particularly with the player control. Especially for the time it was way more advanced than the standard jump+shoot+move controls.

I'm proving it right now.

I'm sitting down and not sliding all over the place. In order to move, I have to propel myself by some mechanism, such as appendage movement (i.e., contraction and extension of muscle fibers that terminate at more rigid structures, e.g., bones).

Yeah, I'm not seeing how I'd be able to move otherwise, except perhaps by some kind of motion device external to my person.

I don't like to speak in absolutes, though, so I'll still just say I *think* there might be something a little fishy about this video. Maybe.

I got interested in that question based on the Elder Scrolls series. Morrowind had a basically static world, Oblivion was basically entirely scaled to the player, and Skyrim is scaled to the player but within a min/max range.

To me, Morrowind was great because it could put appropriately powerful rewards in difficult (or just plain obscure) areas. Oblivion in particular was bad at making leveling feel like a treadmill because every time you leveled up as the player, pretty much every enemy would be that much more powerful also. Skyrim was better about that since an area would generally set its difficulty scale based on the first time you visited it, so you could leave and come back later if it was too tough, but it still felt a little off.

Another associated problem is how loot gets influenced by those leveled lists. In Skyrim, loot in containers and in the inventory of leveled enemies generally scales, but loot sitting out in the open in the game world generally doesn't. Which is really annoying, because all generic loot pretty much everywhere ends up being crappy low-level iron. God forbid there's some steel, elven, or dwarven gear in places where it would totally make sense to be (say, dwarven gear in dwarven ruins) that you might venture into before that gear becomes "level appropriate".


In a related issue, one beef that I have with general RPG mechanics is how they all feel the need to make you drastically more powerful at level 5 compared to level 1, and again at level 10 compared to level 5, and so on. By the time you're near the level cap, you're probably 100-1000 times as powerful as you were at level 1, which gives a good sense of accomplishment but just doesn't seem realistic, and leads to this problem with fixed difficulty or level scaling. Western RPGs (boiling back to pen and paper DnD rules) certainly aren't great about this, but JRPGs are completely ridiculous about it, which is pretty much why Final Fantasy 3(6) was the last one that I enjoyed. In my adulthood, I just can't handle them -- even going back and trying to play FF3 that I *loved* way back when.

I'd like to see more games where you get more skills, polish, and versatility as you progress, but overall you aren't more than 3-5 times as powerful at max level as you were at the beginning. Mount and Blade is one of the few games I can think of that comes close to that.

Lol. You're funny.
Ok, in your world, MLK, Ghandi, and Mandela were successful against tyrannical governments because their causes were backed by armed militants and their movements used threats of force not peaceful protests while clearly denouncing violence.
I don't live in that world. What color is the sky there? Do you celebrate MalcomX day there instead of MLK day?

Yeah...we're discussing America today.....but you must go back to when mechanical warfare didn't exist and the military used flintlocks to make an argument that your AK might make a difference against the military. *facepalm

You clearly aren't being rational. Good day.

Amazing model, but I'm having a really hard time getting my head around how altitude can be controlled. I think the lift produced by the rotary wing would vary with airspeed, but that seems an awfully crude control mechanism.

Funny, that's exactly how my parents felt when I asked them for a car.....
....but they helped my older brother get his hardship license at 14 in Texas, bought him a pickup truck, and replaced it with a new Toyota Supra when he turned 16. I don't think he even paid for gas until he was over 18.
I bought my own 8 year old Pontiac Lemons and paid for my own insurance and gas (and repaired it myself, no money left for mechanics), and got my license with no help at all when I turned 16....and I feel excessively lucky I was fortunate enough to be able to do it.

I really liked the 3 main games in this series, though the first version I played of the earliest ones were apparently nerfed on the PS2.

Good video too, really synthesized what seemed to be happening with the company teeter-tottering between improving the core mechanics of the squad tactics with appealing to more the quicker twitch FPS play that seems to be the industry default.

The squad tactics are what made these games fun to play, but the inaccuracy of the weapons in iron sites was infuriating. Authentic? Maybe, but I think it was a reasonable criticism and I can see how the over-correction lead to watering down of "what made the game great".

One of those things I kinda guessed was going on, but never paid attention to. Interesting to find out the actual mechanics of it.