Flossy said:
Are you sure that wasn't the mannable ack gun? It was discovered during the Sicily scenario, that mannable ack guns do not show any tracers - but it certainly had us scratching our heads at the time! 
Yeah, I'm sure it wasn't that. The only ack in the sector, that at V64, was friendly and didn't have an LOS to me anyway. The battle was fought on the northern approaches of V64. V64 is on a plateau. If you drive north from the VH about 1/2 mile, you go over the edge into a long, wide valley running NNW between 2 mountain ranges. You can't see into this valley until you're at the edge of the plateau and I'd driven over the edge and about 1/2 mile down the hill to park on a tan area of ground for camouflage. And even from there, it was still like 2500m to the nme spawn point up the valley.
So I was like 1 mile from the nearest ack, that ack was friendly, and I was well below the edge of the plateau to it. Yet I and several colleagues all died for no apparent reason. I was the 4th kill of whoever got me. I wasn't filming and I didn't pay any attention to who got me because at the time I didn't know about the invisible nme issue. It wasn't until I came in here later that night that I saw this thread.
Invisibility cheats are nothing new. I've seen them a number of times over the years, in both DOS and Windows AW and now in AH (don't recall them in WB). I even got a guy busted in DOS AW for doing it--he made the mistake of bragging about it in progress, and you could see him on radar, just not in the air. And not only was he invisible, he was doing about Mach 2
.
As for planes disappearing for a while, then reappearing further along, I've seen that before as well. Folks can interrupt their data flow to the host so for all intents and purposes they're not in the arena, fly along for a while on their FE, then reconnect to the host and thus reappear at their new place. Alternatively, they can also stop their FE, so that when they reappear it's in the same place they vanished, leading to you overshooting them and then finding them on your 6. There were a variety of ways to do these things in Windows AW and Kesmai could never quite figure out how to stop all of them.
On the subject of connection quality, that's definitely not a universal problem. I haven't suffered a real disco at all (IIRC) in the last 3 or 4 TDs. Of course, RL problems have limited me to 20-50 hops only each TD, but I'm also squad scorekeeper and I haven't seen many in my squad, either. Some of my squaddies always have a very high percentage, however.
For instance, run a squad score on me, BH3841. At present, we have 1 guy with 480 sorties but only 10 discos, one with 212 sorties and 0 discos, while another guy has 7 discos in only 15 sorties. I have 1 "disco" in 14 hops but that's on me, not the connection--my computer locked up once and I pulled the plug on it.
However, despite the fact that I don't get dumped, I do see a fair number of warps, but only really just beyond con range, not during fights. It's quite acceptable, people die when I hit them, I die when they shoot at me, and all seems pretty much normal, although I am seeing more dots warping than before. So when the "how is connection quality" poll came up, I answered it "good but not great".
