The Texas Shoot-Out: F4:AF LAN Meet Page 3

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“Fight’s On!”

Enough of the background. On with the blood.

Acquisition

AWACS

The 1v1 competition began, and with it the smack talk of this hardcore group of simmers. The engagement was simple: realistic settings, guns only, 15000 feet, and at a distance of 10 miles. Essentially, it was pistols at twenty paces in modern air combat parlance. The competitors were given ten minutes to warm up against each other before going into the matches that counted. Voice comms were connected via a TeamSpeak server. Larry “Machinegun” Nissen grinned and told me the story of how the 817th used to use a telephone switching box for voice comms back in the Falcon 3.0 days. These men have been flying together as a team for that long. They had used telephone operator’s headsets with twenty-foot cables and tied into it to speak to each other. Things had come a long way. We were about to see just how far.

“Showtime’s” Cockpit

Fight’s On!

The dogfighting was quick and decisive as Cody “Bogll” Dean and Matt “Black Angel” Adair took an early lead in the winner’s bracket. It was interesting to see the machines and gear of choice of these online aviators. Most of them preferred the Cougar HOTAS and the clicking noise of the throttle travel of these well-used devices could be heard as they tried to get “nose on” with their adversaries. Early in the game, “Mad Dog” found his way into the winner’s bracket after defeating “Falcor” and “Showtime” getting the best two out of three. Meanwhile, those two vanquished pilots had gotten into a vicious aerial fistfight, bare knuckles and knees only. One of the pilots watching the fray on the big screen absentmindedly asked, “Where’d he go?” after losing sight. Someone else, delighted with his own wit, shot back, “Where’d who go?”

Where’d he go?

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