SonofEil

I’m at a job site right now and was just watching a MD-500 variant doing high voltage line work, sling loading dudes and equipment between towers. It got me wondering if anyone has an O/A/MH-6 in their pipeline. I love the type and it’d be awesome to have a zippy little infil/exfil bird to play around with. I also think it’d be fairly straightforward to model, no need for fancy sensor suites etc. Just a solid flight model, some guns and rocket pods and you’re gtg.

While there’s still room for improvement in this area, DCS actually has undulating runways. LV Mccarren is one that comes to mind. The picture you posted was taken from a low profile and long distance with a telephoto lens. This crompresses the subject of the image and exagerates the perception of ‘non-flatness’. Clouds...yeah. We’ve been promised new clouds for years now. I mean, if they don’t have the resources or knowledge to get this done at least open it up to, or collaborate with, some of the established third party companies that specialize in aftermarket sim weather.

Ohhhhhh! Your squadron had a twin under the same fighter wing at the same home base! :doh: Now it makes a lot more sense, no wonder you shared a lot.

Your "wait for 2nd Gen" comment was in regards to a big price drop on first gen from the mainstream manufacturers. I'm sure there will be some good discounts for the holidays this year, but Oculus/HTC/Samsung are definitely not dropping their prices in response to the (insincerely named) Pimax 8k.

Ah yeah, didn't think about it that way. For every launch we had one or two spares ready to go as backup. So I did see pilots step into planes without their name on it. Quite frequently. Stateside the spares were often unassigned aircraft (not always though), and launching 12-15 aircraft for a training sortie there was ~50% chance someone was stepping into a spare. But if the spare was uncooperative too, or already spoken for, yeah, the pilot sat that one out. Your deployment experience sounds like what I described. Fluidity during transition and a lot of helping out. We had a one or two left-behind jets for a couple weeks when we first showed up but we didn't fly them. Now I think that's extremely strange. We always came and left with our aircraft. If a plane was grounded it got left behind with its pilot, a crew chief, and one or two maintainers, depending on the problem. Sometimes that meant a week or more standing around with your thumb up your butt waiting on parts, but we always stayed with our planes. What the heck did you do for three months without jets?!

Haha, no. Even if I could I probably wouldn't, but the truth is that those guys weren't the conversational types. ;)

True gen 2 headsets from are still a long way off. I bought what could be considered a "1.5" headset, the Samsung Odyssey. I love it. But you might be getting your hopes a little high for current consumer VR. The Odyssey has ~30% higher resolution than Oculus or Vive, on par with the new Vive Pro, and I've honestly been disappointed in how inadequate this 'high' resolution actually is. I never used an Oculus or Vive so my point of reference has to be my old 1080p monitor. Going VR is a serious handicap compared to using that ten year old monitor. For me, personally, the profound increase in depth perception and feeling of immersion balances out the resolution handicap. It's so much more enjoyable to just fly. To actually answer your question, I'd avoid the DK2 unless you want to experiment or set your VR 'baseline expectations' fairly low. If you're stateside I'd recommend waiting for the holiday shenanigans to start. You should be able to pick up a good current headset for under $300.

I never witnessed that much interchangeability. My experience is that aircraft/pilots/flightline maintenance in a squadron stuck together like glue. I don't think I ever saw a front line pilot jump in a jet that didn't have his name on the side. There's a little more fluidity on the maintenance side during deployment transitions, but that was just a consequence of having two squadrons occupying the same space for a short period. Backshop (if available at all) and Support personnel could be different from your home base during a deployment though. That's not to say one doesn't get around in-theater. There were plenty of "need a hand?" and "can you spare a warm body?" instances. I helped out with F-15's, 747's, C-130's. Even Army Chinooks and Black Hawks. And most interestingly, an Mi-8 flown by some serious looking civilian-clothed Americans.

All the reasons mvsgas listed are good ones. Kabul is damn far from any bodies of water. The E/A-6B also has a unique and very specialized mission, it's likely they were there just because they were needed.

Does anyone else still have this problem? Fired up the Huey for the first time in years (A-friggin-mazing in VR btw, much easier to fly too), but the exterior lights are illuminating the cockpit. As far as I know all the other modules fixed this a while ago. Is it being addressed for the Huey?

Navy and USMC regularly operate from land bases. There are plenty of stateside NAS's, to a civilian they'd be almost indistinguishable from AF bases, and they operate from in-theater operational bases as well. My first experience with the Navy was in Afghanistan. There was a squadron of E/A-6B's based right next to us. I was AF but got to know some of those guys pretty well. I remember a lot of them were happy to not be aboard ship. The base also regularly had extended operational visits from Harriers, and the occasional F-18 as well.

This, my friends, is the key to happiness. If you're getting unsatisfactory performance, tweak until it's livable. Chasing a number will make you crazy! I honestly haven't checked my FPS in years. Exactly. Yak specifically I think was a commercial or military contract, like the A-10C. We just have consumer access to work they were doing privately anyway. And things like cows are necessary items to fill out the world. If people are going to complain about cows then they should also have a problem with tractors in Normandy, fast food signs in Nevada, etc. I think ED just wanted to have some light hearted fun showing us the cows, a small part of many static upgrades they're working on, and the whole community sadly shit all over them for 'losing focus' or whatever. I will say that there've been more times than I can count that I've felt the frustration that dangermouseb51 is feeling and there's a lot of truth to his post. I guess he's just at that point where he has to decide whether it's personally worth it to stick around or not. ED has always been this way and, right now at least, I'm choosing to live with it. Hell, I sat on the sidelines for almost five years before deciding to come back in 2017. A lot of the old problems and bugs (tracks!!!) are still here, but I'm having a blast in the new toys and maps.

I never have. It depends on a hundred different factors, but aircraft are often extremely difficult to spot in real life, even with TCAS or ATC bearing and altitude. And those are aircraft that want to be seen, not little grey fighters zipping around at low level. BUT, I just switched to VR and visibility is abysmal. I'm about to experiment with labels for the first time.

Yep it's actually pretty easy to put the Hornet into an intentional flat spin at high altitude. Pull the stick all the way back into a stall. With left engine at idle add full left rudder and right engine to burner (or vice versa of course). Once established in the spin you can idle the right engine and neutralize controls and she'll pancake all the way down. To recover just firewall the left engine to counteract the rotation, the left wing will rise, nose will drop, and you'll be recovered. I've never flown a real plane that's at risk of entering a flat spin so I honestly have no idea how closely this conforms to reality.

Some definite improvements in damage modeling in the last Wednesday patch. I was in a scrap with a 29 and took some rounds. Punctured a tank or two, lost my DDI's, an elevator, and the FCS among other blinky lights and tones. I was still able to high alpha into a stall (dancing on the rudder) and hit him with a 9X. Prior to the patch the damage modeling mostly consisted of dead and crash or explode and dead.

Huh, that’s too bad. I thought I’d seen a mod or .lua edit that made it possible but I guess not.

My first VR experience was at a Red Bull booth at a concert ~4 years ago. They were giving some sort of demo on an Oculus DK2 I think. It was terrible. Washed out fuzzy image of late 90's 3D graphics. After about 30 seconds I took it off thinking it'll still be a long time before VR is consumer ready... My first VR experience since then was just a few days ago. I got an Odyssey for $350 and I'm mostly impressed with it. I'll give you a rundown as a fellow noob: The Good: Setup in Windows was mostly a breeze. Plug it in and it works. I'm actually typing this reply right now on a floating virtual desktop within the Windows Mixed Reality Portal. Basically, I'm in the future. The 'screen quality' is excellent. Blacks are black, colors are accurately rendered and vibrant, the terrible Oculus DK2 screen door effect is absent. Tracking is fine, I don't have varied experiences to compare it with but when I move my head there is no discernable latency or glitches in the view. Overall immersion, as has been stated many times, is truly remarkable. It's nothing like watching a 3D movie where the effect is gimmicky and mostly forgotten about after a little while. It's extremely difficult to describe other than to say you really are inside the goddamn cockpit. I keep trying to rest my arm on the canopy rail or grab the canopy bow when my wife interrupts. : ) The Bad: Getting the Odyssey to work with DCS was an entirely different matter. It took me an entire day of screwing around, google searches and forum posts to get the Odyssey to work with DCS. I'll save you the trouble: https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?p=3611619#post3611619 Post #9 is all the info you need, and for some reason this isn't readily available information, in a sticky, or easily searchable here on the forums. I guess it's just assumed that everyone has Steam. While the screen door effect is gone, I can still clearly see individual pixels. Even though the Odyssey has a resolution on the higher end of consumer headsets...it still sucks. It'll probably be at least two generations, another 5+ years maybe, before the resolution even approaches what we're used to on just a 1080p monitor. The image is fuzzy as a result and target spotting is much more difficult. The headset lenses, though I hear they are of comparable quality to Oculus and Vive, still kind of suck. You have a sweet spot of clarity directly in front of your eyes but everything on the periphery is blurry. I understand this is a currently unavoidable result of all headsets using Fresnel lenses. My conclusion: It's still a major trade-off and compromise, which I expected going in. I was playing pretty close to max settings before switching to VR, but now my settings probably average around 1/3 max. The good news is that the image is fuzzy enough due to resolution and lense limitations not to be able tell your settings are significantly lowered. I'm still super green and adjusting and tweaking, as is ED, so hopefully improvements will keep coming. I'm going to try Kegetys' Shaders Mod tonight. https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=215373 Overall the immersion really does overpower almost all the drawbacks. Another oft repeated saying here is that once you go VR you'll never go back to a 2D monitor. I'm beginning to believe this is true.

Is it possible to have the in-game mouse cursor remain stationary relative to where you place it in the cockpit instead of the cursor being tied to where you're looking? I'm sure this has been covered but I couldn't find it in a search.

I have a couple of 'extreme' cold weather missions with cat launches. (Cold weather missions are fun because it makes low altitude fuel consumption even more of a mission factor.) Even with the 8/29 and 8/31 updates the Hornet is still not launching unless temp is well above freezing. Fix please!!!

F4 view in VR is heart stopping and watching the wings flex from there is simply phenomenal.

Holy shit backspace! That did it!! I was skeptical as hell and I still for the life of me can't figure out why I need three(!) separate Steam apps in order to run this Steam-less headset and DCS install but it's working now. That was fifteen straight hours of misery and frustration followed by one of the most mind blowing things I've ever experienced. I've sat and flown in dozens of real life cockpits but for some reason when the odyssey screens opened up with me inside the virtual hornet it literally took my breath away. Wholly different experience vs. flying with a monitor. Wow! Thanks for the help everyone!

Non Steam DCS install.

Complete wipe of dcs, downgraded to stable install, still no luck at all getting dcs to display in the headset..

Yeah, Open Beta Aug 29 patch. So...VR doesn't work period? Looks like other people are using it.

I just got my Odyssey today, went through the setup, Mixed Reality Portal is working fine. I started DCS on my desktop monitor and selected "Enable VR Headset" in the VR Settings tab. DCS restarts...right back to my desktop monitor. "Enable VR Headset" is still checked but I only have the Windows MR Portal 'apartment' visible in the headset. The closest I've come to success is getting my desktop to float in front of me in the MR Portal while DCS was running. What am I doing wrong!? Edit: this is all non Steam.