bartleby

That one's not a mistake ;)

I've actually never seen HUD tape from an AV-8. A couple GR7 videos, but doubt they have the same symbology. Sort of odd.

Alternate use of TOWs.

Interesting. I've seen videos of the mod before and was quite impressed. Unfortunately was not able to try it due to lack of time and not being able to find my WiC discs. Thanks for reminding me to give it a look again.

ever played harpoon? :P

Been enjoying this one as well. Certainly feels more simmy than WiC (which was fun). Haven't done much MP, though.

I should have said "reports," I wasn't referring to any particular one. Just the idea that attention can become focused on particular items in exclusion of other important aspects of flight, and that the brain can get swamped with information. I'm not sure why you'd consider the entire literature on human factors in aviation irrelevant, but that's ok. There are limits to expertise. All I'm saying is that brains have bandwidth limitations and narrowing the flow in stressful situations isn't a particularly radical idea. It's not a trivial engineering task but not a useless one. Anything that decreases a pilot's workload has a direct combat application, insofar as it improves his performance. A HOTAS simplifies the mechanical tasks of weapons employment. Would you say that it is more stuff that might break and has no direct combat application? The same applies to a system to scale information display based on attention limits.

I was referring to the fact that workload (and stress) increases in combat. I'm sure you've read mishap report that refer to someone's scan breaking down. That's a symptom of cognition reaching some sort of bottleneck. It has nothing to do with staying eyes in. I can imagine a fairly basic scheme. A system would keep track of "actions" - switch flips, button presses, pickles, maybe maneuvers as well. Include a basic metric for "engaged" - RWR indications could be a simple one. As the rate of actions increases, simplify the HUD display. Or you could go further and track the pilot's eye movements - fixation might trigger a warning or cause HUD simplification. Make it easy to override with a DMS press (or whatever). The idea is to assist fighting the jet, not dumb it down.

I don't know. Cognition get saturated. It's even worse when people are shooting guns and missiles at you, I imagine. Obviously a different presentation doesn't mean a pilot doesn't need to know what the airspeed tape is, but cognitive support through well-designed decluttering isn't that radical. Or new, even - look at the F-16's dogfight modes. Making more salient information easier to process can only help you fight better.

As an avid tanksim fan, I look at this with interest. I know it's early in the development, but could you post some more details about goals? What level of simulation are you aiming for? How will you differentiate this from, say, Steel Beasts?

Wish I could play it, but the gog version never really worked for me. Looked pretty fun.

Well, there was certainly a lot of fighting in the DCS region during WWII. I was reading a book about the Luftwaffe during Case Blue a while ago and kept saying "hey! I've flown there!" I don't think there were any lend-lease Mustangs, but it's not unthinkable anyway. Expand the map a bit westward to include the Crimea and Kerch and you've got even more to work with.

I know I'd love to see a DCS Goshawk some day...but then again, is there much business in making trainers for trainers?

QWOP minigame to pull yourself out?

Neat. WWII isn't my favorite era, but still ought to be interesting. I'm sure there'll be some strange/fun/amusing missions made for this. Hopefully at some point the Legends line will branch out into the early jet era, too. Maybe we should open a collection for TFC to buy a MiG-21? How much do they run these days, anyway?