The A-10 is great and all… if you have air supremacy.
Air supremacy you achieved with a bunch of F-16s.
Yeah, just as I prefer a car that is also a boat…
In all seriousness, the F-14 is the last US interceptor and the AIM-54C is an amazing missile that hasn’t been really matched. The fidelity of the simulator the Heatblur released is just stunning, especially in VR. Two-seat multiplayer really seals the deal.
Hornet will always be my bae though.
I kid, the F-14 was a fucking phenomenal machine that represented a high water mark for military aviation.
F-16 is my plane crush. Light, versatile, elegant, and known for gettin’ shit done.
Full disclosure, I logged ~6 hours in a real full cockpit simulator…
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Wait we have a thread debating the merits of planes? Let me throw the F/A 18 into the mix. I grew up knowing a pilot of one of those that never quite made general. I was supposedly put in the cockpit as a baby and he got in trouble over it. As such, it’s my go-to in those air/ace combat games.
Tomcats are the best because
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If we’re talking fighter planes, we can’t forget the F-15. Of all the planes discussed recently here, it’s the only one that’s undefeated in combat.
I have a soft spot for the F-111. It’s the first fighter-type aircraft I saw flying in person, doing a dump-and-burn over the river in my city.
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When I was about 11 I saw a Harrier up close at an air show. Just fucking hanging mid air. It was like magic. The loudest fucking magic I’ve ever seen, but it certainly stuck with me. Now if I see a jet without VTOL capability, I’m a bit let down.
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F-111 is just a shittier version of the F-14 
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Talk about oversimplification…
The F-111 and F-14 are completely different aircraft with completely different roles. Okay, admittedly the F-111B (the Navy variant) was meant to have the same role as the F-14 would eventually have, but that didn’t work out, in part because the DoD decided “let’s start with a design for the Air Force and then figure out how to adapt it for the Navy.” This was done, in part, due to both having a requirement for a supersonic aircraft with long range and a heavy weapons payload capability. The F-14, on the other hand, was designed for the Navy from the get-go by Grumman, a company with a very long history of designing excellent carrier-based aircraft.
However, the Air Force (F-111A) variant was meant to be a tactical fighter-bomber, not a fighter-interceptor like what the Navy wanted, and it actually did very well at that job, as did its later revisions. In fact, it served the Air Force from 1967 to 1998, a solid 31 year run.
I know, but I also don’t care. 
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Someone hasn’t heard of the bombcat
Oh, the F-14 was retrofitted for bombing runs, but that wasn’t its original stated goal. Its goal was as a dogfighter/interceptor capable of launching the ridiculously huge Phoenix missile, most likely at Soviet Tu-95 Bear bombers.
It was also replaced in the strike role as soon as the FA-18 Super Hornet was made available and was merely a stopgap between the A-6 Intruder and the Super Hornets.
Was it an effective stopgap? Signs point to yes, but again, it’s not fair to compare the F-111 and F-14 given they had two radically different missions as part of their initial design parameters.
Oh, and the F-111 would also be modified into the EF-111 Raven electronic warfare plane, and it was also very successful in that role.
That said, I would have loved to have seen the rumored “Super Tomcat” come into service as opposed to the Super Hornet that did. Supposedly Grumman did propose an upgrading Tomcat to the DoD, but they instead chose to go with the upgraded Hornet instead.
The Tomcat is one of my all time favorite jet fighters, but please, give the F-111 the respect it’s due for doing a damned good job at what it was designed to do for 31 years.
I only just bodged this together this morning.
So here:
If you wanna go to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism
This isn’t about me, but it’s about watching someone’s stream, so this is the most appropriate thread.
Here’s the deal. Mario Maker has an endless mode. The way it works is you pick a difficulty: easy, normal, expert, or super expert. Then you get X lives to start with (I forget how many) and there’s a maximum of 99. Then you just play random levels of the chosen difficulty until you game over. All user-made levels completely random. If you clear a level you get a point. The idea is to play forever to keep getting a higher score without ever getting a game over.
You can get 1-ups, but there’s a maximum of 3 per level, and you only actually get them when you clear the level. This means you want to beat levels by getting 3 one ups and dying less than 3 times so you are always positive on lives. You also carry coins over to the next level, and 100 coins of course gets a 1-up (if you don’t have 3 yet).
You also have the option to skip levels as much as you want. When you skip you get no points and no lives, you just move onto another level. You also can’t cheese the skip when you’re about to die. To skip you have to be standing on solid ground (e.g: not falling into a pit) and the skip takes 3 seconds to execute. It sounds cheap to allow skips, but it’s necessary because people make levels that are just complete horseshit. e.g: Here are 3 pipes two of them are death traps, completely random. No reason to waste precious lives trying to clear that kind of level.
The player in first place for expert level difficulty is SlyHunter7 from Spain. As of this posting, they have cleared 2720 levels without game over, and they are playing right now.
But I don’t care about the first place person. I care about the second place person. This nice Irish guy named Dazran who is also playing right now and has cleared 2626 levels. I found Dazran’s stream just browsing around. It does not have a lot of viewers, relatively speaking, and it is very very nice. He is also very very good at Mario Maker. A great stream if you like Mario and don’t like typical Twitch/YouTube shouty people. I have felt zero “that guy” vibes so far, and I have been watching for a few days.
Also, if you are wondering why care about players playing expert and not super expert, that’s because super expert levels are all complete bullshit. They all are going to take even a great player way more than 3 lives to master. It’s impossible for someone to actually play it endlessly. Current super expert first place is a Korean player named Vins6708 with a score of 250.
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