Deny777

So for future reference, the problem was my mission started airborne and the throttle was set to idle from the start, now I can land the F15C more often than not, thanks to everyone who replied. Something very satisfying about taxing the plane and shutting off the engines, ATC said something about "proceed and taxi to parking spot", I assume he meant this? :D

Thanks Cauldron, this actually helped, managed to land the F15C for the first time just now :)

I've spent the last 6 hours trying to land this thing, with quick stops to read and watch tutorials (so many of them). I have a mission set up so it's a straight line from airborne to the runway and yet I can't for the life of me land the damn bird. I'll be very honest, I feel like I'm less than a moron, is this supposed to be this hard or do I not have what it takes and should give up and stick to the A-10A (which I am able to land)? Here are my struggles: 1. I'm coming in at around 200 knots, altitude around 1500ft (that's sea level, real altitude seems much lower but unlike the A-10A the F15C doesn't switch to radar altitude for landing). I find it extremely hard to maintain a steady approach velocity, too hot and I crash and burn, too slow and the plane stalls and is unable to keep AoA at 22 degrees. And then I crash and burn. 2. As soon as I deploy flaps the thing drops from the air like a brick. And then I crash and burn. 3. I live in a country where packages take 3 freaking weeks to arrive from a different state, so my HOTAS won't be here for another week and I suspect one of the reasons I'm having such a hard time is because I'm flying using an XBox joystick, which really isn't that bad but not having a dedicated throttle control and having to set speed using the keyboard feels very very wrong. So basically I crash and burn every single time and am beginning to get the feeling that there's no other possible outcome to my attempts. Advice? Help? A shoulder to cry on?

Great tip, had no idea community mods existed, will install asap, thanks! Always learning, that's a motto I live by so I think I'll be right at home with DCS and its users. Plus not being the oldest player around, it would be fun to hear "damn kid, get off my airspace" for a change :lol:

I'll admit my OP was a combination of venting frustration and constructive feedback seasoned with a bit of Johnie Walker Double Black (the real proof that God exists and for some odd reason likes us). In all honesty I was expecting people to jump on me like a pack of wolves and tear me apart, but instead I get... Useful replies? This is intriguing, might have to stick around and see what's that all about. I am avidly looking for as many youtube videos as I can possibly find and watch (there's a 10 part series that's incredibly good), reading threads on this forum and reading the manuals, DCS got me that excited. And honestly I think it's a shame that the steep learning curve probably drives a lot of people away, which could be easily avoided by making the tutorials a bit easier to follow and a bit more progressive. DCS IMHO deserves to be a lot more popular than it currently is. The idea of making my own training missions is interesting but I don't think I'm there yet, I haven't even memorized the basic controls and am probably going to wait for my hotas warthog which will be my definitive control setup along with my tpr rudder before I map everything to the right controls and buttons. One of the reasons for my frustration is that I'm using an xbox controller as flight stick, even though 5% deadzone and 15% curve does help a lot. Thanks for the replies and sorry for venting so bluntly, I "am" going to persevere in DCS and eventually buy some more advanced aircrafts (currently only got FC3), so expect me in a dogfight somewhere in the future ;) Cheers

First and foremost I will say that I'm 51 and belong to a generation that does not give up on things easily, and DCS is clearly an awesome flight combat sim. So I'm sticking around. HOWEVER the training missions have some extremely annoying traits (yes in my opinion of course) that I will list here: 1. The learning curve for some of them is rather steep, and I have to go through them multiple (maybe I'll get to the hundreds) times. Crtl-Z is an incredibly stupid workaround for speeding up the instructions as once you reach the desired point in the lesson you want to go to regular speed there's no way to tell whether or not you have reached 1x speed; 2. Alt-Z is used by NVidia to open the graphics card control panel. Yes I can change it but still annoying, and to be honest I don't want to and will not change it; 3. Why you can't just press space bar and skip the endless talk is really beyond me. It's like the developers paid a lot of money for an American narrator and want you to hear him every single one of the three thousand times it takes to complete the freakin' lesson; 4. I understand you want players to jump (or fly) through hops to get better at it, but why make them do that for every single training lesson? Why not focus on bomb target practice on the damn bomb target practice lessons? You don't even get to the goal of the lesson if you fail to go through the loops, that's annoying and stupid; 5. The sim will never be 100% accurate as it doesn't allow for 3D depth visual cues, and the loops are especially horrible in that sense. There are absolutely no cues for telling where they are and I'm pretty sure 100% of the users who succeed going through them memorize what the path is for each one of the lessons like in a video game. I'd much rather look at DCS as a flight combat sim instead of a video game, and in that respect the flying through loops must do a better job at overcoming the limitations of a 2D representation of a 3D world. If you know what you're doing and know your controls, it should be relatively easy to go through them the first time around, and not have to go at them multiple times to memorize where each one of the loops is and how to maneuver through them. Now I can picture the admins or the developers or even some fanboys getting offended and replying something along the lines of "if you don't like it, don't play it". Yeah right. I understand one of the goals of DCS is making some money, right? Well I've mentioned I *AM* sticking with it, but I don't see how a typical millennial kid would do it for long, given the reasons listed above. Making things too difficult/cumbersome/annoying will draw new users away and prevent them from buying those aircrafts you want them to buy. I am also a software developer and am giving my opinion based on my own experience and the kind of feedback *I would like to hear*. Compliments serve me nothing, I value complains.