Tank50us

With how much Nick likes the Hellcat, I'm surprised we haven't heard anything on aircraft like the Betty, which saw quite a bit of action in the Pacific. It would also be nice to have the He111, Ju53, the C-47, B-25, and many, many more aircraft. But then again who knows, the WW2 team was pretty hard at work on the Mosquito, so maybe they'll release some new toys along side it.

Yeah, like the throttle, stick, and pedal settings... seriously... when someone has over a dozen aircraft, it gets a bit...... taxing. One thing I didn't see on the list is a dedicated mod support system where people can easily install and uninstall mods without 3rd party software. On top of that, certain mods should just defaulted to everyone's machine, like the A-4, Military Aircraft Mod, and Civilian Aircraft Mod. I say this, because the Skyhawk gives people another free aircraft to fly, and the other two add so much to immersion in DCS.

Do tell?

I would disagree, both on this and the time it would take to make any aircraft. For starters, the aircraft of the Great War are about as basic as they get. Wood, Canvas, Wires, and fairly early internal combustion engines with wooden props. The gauges are simple, giving only basic information like your airspeed and how much fuel you have. The guns are aimed using iron sights, and most don't even get any other weapons outside of maybe a hand grenade tossed out by the pilot. If it were my project, I'd make it an entire pack, similar to FC3, which you buy one pack and get a dozen or so planes and some WW1 era assets including units, statics, and other things that DCS is actually missing (like the aforementioned bunkers and trenches). This is the first age of aviation after all. Almost all of the lessons pilots learn today were literally written in the skies over Europe in WW1. And I could see people using these aircraft to learn the basics of flying and fighting in formation because, again, you can't get any more simple than these aircraft got. You don't have to worry about systems. You don't have to worry about any complex avionics. It's all stick and rudder flying.

I personally don't mind the idea of prototypes, aircraft with limited production runs, or even planes killed before they could get off the drawing board being added. To me, that's what even the most realistic flight sims are about, getting the feeling of flying the aircraft, and even exploring what it could've been had history played out differently. And inb4 the usual comments on that, I should add that this attitude means I should "just play War Thunder", it just means that for me, my enjoyment of DCS just typically revolves around it being as real as possible, but also fun, and creative. Heck, after the Mosquito trailer came out, me and one of my guys are toying with the idea of doing a Indiana Jones/Kellys Heroes style Warbirds campaign with both DCS and ArmA.

I mean, there's always the option of making the modules yourself. In theory the aircraft of the era would be easier to model and animate, and their flight data is well known so a professional flight model would be comparatively easy to make. Even better the ground assets could translate well to even the modern day, such as the trenches, bunkers, and funnily enough, even some of the tanks!

It would be a nice module to have, but remember that this is a mid 80s era F-16, so, it wouldn't have all the capabilities of the existing Viper. Not saying that to discount it btw, I do think it would be a nice addition, it's just going to be a lot more work than one might initially realize

It's actually the AWG-9s 'computer' doing the locking, not Jester. Jester can (and often does) over-ride the system and moves the hook around onto targets that are hostile. But to answer the question for how *he* knows, it's simple: The F-14 is one of the earliest aircraft with data-link capability, and the E-2 would bounce an IFF challenge off of a target, and if the code it got back was hostile, it would spread that information out to all available Tomcats. By the time of the hornet (and F-14D) the system was light enough to be put on a carrier based aircraft

OK, I'm gonna hopefully end this right here any now: 1. Have you actually flown an F-14A/B/D Tomcat in the real world, or did you work on the real aircraft as ground crew? 2. If the answer to 1. is 'yes', then prove it. 3. If you can prove it, then please provide HB and ED with actual evidence of what the gun should sound like in the correct conditions. IE, in the cockpit, at speed and altitude, and with the same equipment the pilot and RIO wears for an internal sound, as well as the actual sounds for close, medium, and long distances away, and varying angles. Now, if you can somehow pull off all three, then maybe, maybe things will get done. But right now all this rings of is akin to a German model railroad enthusiast griping about how the railings on a locomotive not even in use in Germany isn't the right thickness for the scale. There are far, FAR more important things for Heatblur to worry about right now, like getting the Early A and Iranian Tomcats out, finishing/improving Jester, finishing Forestall, getting Typhoon out, finishing the Viggen, getting the AI A-6 in our hands, and finally, getting the piloted A-6 ready for eventual release. Trust me when I say that for a company, all of those are far more important than the sound of gun that most of us will only ever use in less than 1% of air to air engagements (I've scored all of two A/A kills with the gun in the last year, vs dozens with the various missiles)

Is the E-3 Template ready for upload yet? or is that still WIP?

Because that offense also comes the real possibility of war.

We're also getting A-6 remember.

Given how they flipped out about people cheering that Taiwan actually beat them at the Olympics, are you sure about that?

They're actually working on that right now.

That's just it though, they were. But because of the threat gap between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Communist China (about 20 years or so), the US Congress in its usual inability to see past the next day just assumed that the threats to the carrier was gone, and that nothing could touch it as no one had the budget to operate the kind of long-range aircraft, surface ships, and submarines necessary to take on a single Carrier Battle Group. They completely ignored that just because the USSR was gone, that Russia, and all the equipment built for them still existed, and could be bought up by anyone, and China did exactly that. They bought a solid supply of Russian made equipment, and reverse engineered it. Now, the PLAN is bringing online multiple Carriers that they can actually afford (unlike the USSR), they're bringing long-range bombers online with the capacity to launch long range cruise missiles at the carriers, and worse yet for us, they have developed anti-ship ballistic missiles which will for all intents and purposes make going anywhere near their coast in a shooting war a very dangerous prospect. Having the Tomcat and Intruder and their range in the fleet was one of the things that kept the carrier safe. The further a ship is away from the coast, the less likely it is to be located and attacked in such a conflict. And before anyone brings up Satellites, remember that in such a war there's a good chance that most, if not all of them will be destroyed in the opening salvos in such a war simply because of how important they are. This is where the A-12, ST-21, and A-6F projects came in. A brand new attacker, and two evolution's of two existing aircraft (so much so that they'd be entirely new builds!) would've meant that when this threat to the fleet emerged, we'd have been in a position to actually counter it, and force the Chinese planners to start looking for other means of attacking the ships. The Super Hornet, in this scenario, would likely still exist as the Hornet had some issues that would only be solved with the Super Bugs introduction, but if it had come in along side the F-14E and A-6F, the American CVBG would've been a far more capable fighting force then it is now.

And likely only pushed to the forefront because of political shenanigans. It is cheaper and easier to maintain than a Tomcat or Intruder, but at the same time, it's also not as capable of delivering the kind of punch either aircraft can in their respective roles. I think McDonald Douglas/Boeing only really intended the aircraft to be a straight upgrade to the legacy Hornet, but given the hate-boner that... chem... certain individuals had for Grumman, the Super Hornet is pressed into the roles of both of Grummans star products. That's not to say it's a bad fighter mind you, I think we can all agree that it is still an aircraft deserving of respect, but it really isn't a real replacement for the Tomcat or Intruder, and Grumman should've been allowed to build their Next Generation versions of both aircraft unimpeded.

for bigger patches yes. But we have been seeing small fixes roughly every week for the last few months.

That's the kicker. If the USN says no, there's not much ED can do, especially if they're trying to compete for simulator software contracts

No, this is not a thread asking for the TARPS, or when we'll get it, I'm making this thread to discuss how the pod will actually work in DCS. What I mean by that, is that when it finally comes, how will it actually be brought into the game, how will we get to use it, and how immersive will it actually be. Now, I've heard some people discuss the ELINT pods on the Viggen as being able to give data on the locations of radars and radio emissions, exactly how this works I'm not sure... since I do not own the Viggen, but I am curious if something similar will be implemented to the TARPS, where 'footage' and 'still images' will be given a temp file, and then exported to a designated folder once the aircraft makes it back to base (simulating the fact that irl, the pod crew would have to go and develop the film into something usable). Is this something that's feasible Heatblur? If so, do you have any plans to share this with other teams so that more recon gear can be made available? And most importantly, do any mission makers or campaign runners have any intentions to make such devices available to their guys? So, let's discuss what it means to be a:

I mean, with us going on 3 weeks now since our last patch, I suspect that something big is about to hit. More than likely it'll be a bunch of bug fixes, and maybe a few model updates, but I suspect we might see some new toys to play with very, very soon.

That instead of making MAC a separate game (which has been hinted at), they make it just another module for DCS akin to FC3, IE, a pack of planes you can buy that are more complex than FC3 aircraft, but less complex than a full fidelity plane (think like how Grinelli setup the F-22 mod, or how Anubis set up the C-130 mod.) The planes require a proper start procedure for example, but it's a 3-6 step process compared to some FF planes where there's about a couple dozen steps to go from cold and dark to ready to taxi. ( just one example)

As I said before, I personally vote yes to any and all aircraft being available in DCS, even if they can't be 100% modeled to the standards of full fidelity. That being said, this is one of the things I hope happens with MAC, that ED decides "Screw it", and just ties it into the existing DCS platform and give us more options, while also giving 3rd Party Devs more options to make aircraft that we would otherwise never see thanks to the classified nature of some of them.

It would be nice, but one thing to remember is that, at least right now, Servers have to keep track of everything in the air when doing Multiplayer missions, so this would have to be an option that can be turned on or off both in the mission, and in the server. After all, not everyone has a super server box capable of handling even the biggest mission loads.

The key problem to the Super Hornet is that it's a still in-service aircraft, and many of its systems are still classified. ED has even stated that while they would like to do it, they would, at best, only be able to do the earliest versions of the aircraft, as that would be the ones they could get access to the information on. Now, I wouldn't mind the Super Bug being in DCS, but this applies to almost all of the aircraft that have ever existed. However, one thing I will say is that there are some people who need to get off their high horse and accept that for some aircraft to come into DCS, they may not be 100% accurate to the real thing, because there just isn't enough information on it available to the general public. With that said, I wouldn't mind a partial fidelity module. It can still have the clicky cockpits, but not all of the systems and such are modeled, and the aircraft still has a mostly realistic flight model based on both what little information is out there, as well as 'virtual wind tunnel' data. But, when it comes to the bolt counters, if the test reports say one thing, and the game version is only slightly off, they flip their stuff, gripe on the forums about it being .0001% off about whatever aspect they're on about, which ultimately forces the dev team to fix this minor issue and starts a mess of arguments within the fanbase... It's not pretty

There's a bloody good reason for this. The sudden death of hundreds, possibly thousands of objects all within a mile of the impact point has a tendency to crash servers. Don't get me wrong, it would be interesting to have nukes if they didn't cause these crashes, but they do. It very much could be done no problem. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, some B-52s were forward deployed to bases in Florida specifically to hit targets in Cuba, which is merely 90mi (144km) from the southern most tip of Florida, so they very much could take off, climb to altitude, hit their target, and RTB inside of a 500kmx500km map. Funnily enough, the AI B52s already do this in the game, so, again, your argument is invalid.