2Slow's Story
Where to begin? So much information stored in Brain 2.0 after my recent upgrade, so little of it a value to anyone.
Served 20 years USAF, retired as a Staff Sergeant on 1 Dec '93 at Ellsworth AFB. I married a local rancher's daughter in 1986, so I stayed in Rapid City , SD after my retirement. Graduated from National College with a BS in Computer Information Systems. I have been working for Green Tree Financial Servicing since April of 1995. I am a senior network administrator with them.
I have enjoyed many flight simulators. Chuck Yeager's Air Combat Simulator, Falcon XT, Red Baron, Flight of the Intruder, F22 Raptor, F-15 Strike Eagle (Atari version) and a few others I am sure.
1979: Discovered Radio Control Airplane flying. Bought a Cox Cessna ARF, 2 channel, 049 engine. Had a lot of fun with it until the dread full day of the dead stick, down wind landing, in a freshly plowed field against the grain.
1980: Exposed to my first computer. A friend's TRS 80. 2kb of memory. Cassette loader. When he upgraded it to 6kb, we thought we were gods! Learned BASIC programming on it. He figured out how to get sound out of a machine with no speaker. Reversed the input/output jacks on the cassette player. Then used to POKE command to send values to the cassette buffer.. With the cassette player on and paused, we got sound from its speaker! No flight simulator experience with this machine.
1982: Bought a Sinclair ZX81 computer. Cassette loader. Got a flight simulator for it. A very simple affair. Takeoff, fly around the airfield, which only had an east/west runway. When I tired of this and perfected my landing technique: Instead of landing east to west, I would land south to north. Not much room there, but you could do it. Not for the faint of heart.
1985: Bought a Apple II Plus. Rented a flight sim, the name of which escapes me now. I was not impressed with it. Discovered CompuServe and Mega Wars III. I do not recall the hourly rate, but one month I ran up a $1200 bill. Ouch! Latter in the year I got a Apple IIC and continued with Mega Wars III.
1986: Bought an Atari 800XL. Played F-15 Strike Eagle a lot and continued with Mega Wars III. Atari only had a 40 char display. I was using RGB monitor with it. So I wrote my own communications program for playing Mega Wars III. Using graphics mode, I was able to generate an 80 column display. My program would capture text streams and using the BASIC mid, left, and right string functions I could determine the nature of the message and respond automatically. Things like “Missile hit from Ming” would trigger an auto-generated string that would fire a missile at Ming. I could go on and on about this, I was quite proud of it, but I will desist. I later acquired an Atari 1200 XL and an Atari XE system. Atari then came out with the 16bit ST systems.
1988: The writing is on the wall. Atari is melting down. I bought a Franklin brand (sold in Sears) IBM compatible system. 8088 processor. CGA graphics. Dual 5.25 floppies! I could use WordStar and have the dictionary floppy in drive 2. No floppy swapping! Rewrote my Mega Wars III program. Dropped my CompuServe account and went with Genie Net. Continued with their version of Mega Wars which was called Stellar Emperor. Tried a version of Air Warrior on Genie Net, but did not like it. Bought Falcon XT by Spectrum HoloByte. 5.25 and 3.5 disks. I loved it. I still have it in the original box, with original manual and disks. Any offers?
1989: Bought a Commodore Colt (IBM compatible) with 3.5 and 5.25 floppies. More memory and a 5 MB hard drive! Still had the Franklin , so I setup a null modem connection using the serial ports and now my brother in-law and I could go head to head with Falcon. What a blast!
1994: Hired by a finance company as a Network Administrator. Was given a Corporate account on CompuServe. No connection charges! Dropped my Genie Net account. Discovered Game Storm and the World Wide Net. Tried Stellar Emperor on it, but did not like it. It was no longer text based, they had their own graphic front end on it. I fooled around with some of their other stuff like Air Warrior for Windows and Alien. Did not play much. Played a lot of Chuck Yeager's Air Combat Simulator. Sure wish EA would re-release it and Flight of the Intruder.
1997: Discovered Air Warrior II on CompuServe. Joined the SKBG by invitation of Wolfman, the CO, in Aug/Sep time frame.
1998: Moved from SKBG to SKFG in June. Loved flying fighters. Even developed some skill at it under the tutelage of Bluii, Alpo, and Axe4u.
1999: Promoted to XO of SKFG under Alpo as CO. We refined our escort close escort tactics. While the Buffs flew the classic diamond formation, we flew a reverse diamond. A pair of fighters at 3 and 9 o'clock 1 to 2 k lateral separation from the Buffs and 1 to 2k in altitude above the Buffs base altitude. Trailing the Buffs at high 6 would be a flight of two fighters. They would trail 2k behind and 2k above. The fighter commander would be in this flight. We also worked on a loose escort with some success. Combined with the close escort, this worked well. We had the numbers to execute this tactic.
From '97 through '98 we developed into a good military organization. Command structure and tactics improved. We were a force to be reckoned with. I heard rumors that the enemy had a bounty hunter points system in place with us as the hunted. We, however, recognized that losses were inevitable. In the real 8 th Air Force, losses of 30% were common and losses as high as 70% were experienced. Like the 8 th Air Force, we too experienced these losses. However, we too performed as well as the Might 8 th . No missions were turned back and we always struck our targets.
2001: Promoted to rank of Col. and assumed command of the SkyKnights. Changed organization from one of a squadron to a Wing. SKBG and SKFG were organized as two squadrons under a central Wing command. Alpo continued as SKFG commander. Hawk was commander of SKBG. Air Warrior was bought by Electronic Arts. Facts and rumors indicated that Air Warrior was in an end life cycle. Reconnaissance of other available products brought the SkyKnights to Aces High. I have not regretted it yet.
2003: The burden of command began to wear on me. Two years of ordering the same 20 to 30 men to their deaths a thousand times became unbearable. I longed for the days of old when CYA applied only to myself. I resigned my command, assumed the rank of Major and Alpo was promoted to Col. and Wing Commander.
