There is a reason why people don't play football while wearing 10kg shoes on each foot. By your argument, that doesn't matter as long as all parties wear 10kg shoes.

Has it ever occurred to you that benefit has NOTHING to do with enjoyment if no one is enjoying it due to retarded lack of responsiveness due to latency?

One of the main reasons why WoW is so popular is that its so damn responsive due to very permissive ruleset on what client can do mostly independent of server. Things like moving around for example.

Having latency on your every motion is utterly horrible in MMO. It goes against one of the core reasons why WoW is so successful.

You brag about it when it's desperately needed to keep the spirit of a nation that has been under severe blockade for years and decades. It's about propaganda value. Not actual hardware.

MMOs don't need "better AI". They need CONSISTENT AI.

In many cases, AI being too good is actually a very bad thing for a MMO.

I suspect it was "selling ultimate DRM to publishers".

Then publishers noticed what kind of turd it was and pulled the financing.

Turn based-anything comes to mind. Turn based strategy for example.

But that's pretty much it. Anything real time is dead on that latency.

If you're 300 nautical miles away, why would a fighter pilot care? It's not his zone of engagement.

The "flying AAM site" MiG-31 probably could detect you, but even that plane wouldn't be able to engage. And it's the longest range air to air fighter craft in existence as of writing this with no analogues in NATO arsenal. It's max engagement range is sitting at 228km (according to wikipedia) and it's a high speed interceptor designed to rush to target at mach 2.8. So yeah, your poor ground hugging Cessna is toast. MiG-31 is designed to hunt and kill ground hugging cruise missiles, not piss slow civilian prop aircraft.

FYI most of the early prototyping of aircraft involves messing around with small scale drones shaped like various prototypes of the fighter. This is likely one such prototype.

Same goes for cockpit mockups. Some are used to demonstrate instruments and largely forego controls. This is useful when testing things like layout of instruments when shifting from one type of instruments to another (analogue dedicated instruments to digital MFDs for example).

The "plane" doesn't look that different from what early prototyping looks like for any modern fighter. A small scale drone shaped like a fighter to test basic airworthiness and such.

Of a "production" of F-14 I imagine. Have you seen early prototypes? I'm not sure about F-14, but I've seen some early mock ups of AH-64. It was cobbled together from old CRT displays. Literally.

If you were a apache pilot/gunner today, you'd call it a fake at first glance.

Plane itself is internal propaganda. Look at the unveiling date, compare to the rest of Iranian fighter programs. Vaporware aimed at general populace to foster patriotism.

But cockpit isn't the part that is telling.

You'd be surprised at stuff you see stuck in early prototype cockpits. They used to shove production CRT TVs to showcase early versions of multifunctional displays in military prototyping. Because just making a TFT panel back then cost huge amounts to make a couple for every prototype. Then production stuff carried TFTs.

Regardless, this thing is obvious vaporware aimed at internal propaganda, just like the rest of Iran's fighter jet programs. But cockpit mockup and usage of everyday crap in it isn't the telling part. It's the build of the thing, like ridiculously small engine intakes or radome that couldn't fit any modern military jet radar. Cockpit could actually be a real prototype (though doubtful).

Pretty much this. Iran had multiple similar vaporware "homegrown" fighter jet projects that are supposed to be operational, and yet they have to use Frogfoots for anti air combat over Persian Gulf.

Pretty much all of Iran's "own fighters" have been vaporware so far. This is pretty well known. They cannot really make anything of their own with all the crippling sanctions that isn't overly cheap knockoff.

That said, it doesn't mean that they can't test new stuff. Most planes start off as drones and eventually move to production. Most of the Russian and various Western jets that jumped up in generation had severe teething problems of their own (F-22 and F-35 make great examples here), and those nations actually have great expertise in designing these planes, not to mention economies that can support huge development costs associated with these programs. Iran lacks all of these.

Iran could, and likely is working on something. It's highly unlikely to be practical and working fighter jet, just like all of its previous fighter jets. Beyond the propaganda bullshit, it shows that with all the sanctions, they still have some degree of expertise and skill and every once in a while they have to show off something like this. Something that will never become a practical application, but to show that they still have some semblance of capability of making a high tech device.

And then they sell their anti ship missiles that cost next to nothing and manage to cripple a high tech Israeli ship. Or have a NATO general win war games using nothing but their low quality, but cheap and numerous hardware against significantly more technologically advanced NATO forces.

Cessna 172 has a huge radar cross section. Those wing mounts and engine are shiners. You're talking about flying under radar horizon, which is not stealthy as any modern fighter is equipped with look down-shoot down radar which will find you and light you up like a christmas tree in a matter of seconds of entering its range.