Brit_Radar_Dude

The Admiral K can seem a read bad @ss mother to sink. I've tried this with the AI in the past. To overwhelm the K's defenses you need a whole bunch of missiles arriving at pretty much the same time. To do that you need to ensure all the aircraft launch at the same time from the same range. You need a) All your AI aircraft on the same expertise setting. b) Firing identical missiles therefore travelling the same speed. c) Firing missiles that fly really low around 15metres eg Harpoon... d) ...or try having the aircraft flying high and launching missiles that will fly a high profile eg HARM, Shrike, ALARM so they dive from a real steep angle. That limits the engagement range of the K's SAMS e) Aircraft are flying together at same speed and height, so they are all the same distance from the target. What wont work is small bunches of missiles arriving one bunch at a time with several miles between them. Making a number of flights (of four) can fail if each aircraft only carries a coule of missiles as subsequent flights are a mile or more behind the previous one. This leads to a number of small bunches mentioned above. It will work if each aircraft has a large number of missiles, eg 4 or more. Cruise missiles like AGM-86C fly higher, eg 50metres and are easier for SAM's to hit, so use Harpoon, Sea Eagle, Kormoran etc. My personal favourites - 8 Tornadoes with 6 ALARMS each. Not much of a bang per ALARM, but it's like being hit by grapeshot. 8 Tornadoes with 4 Kormoran each. Nice smoke trails.... 8 Turkish F-4E with 4 Shrike is enough to damage but not quite sink it, so follow them in yourself to finish her off with some dumb bombs. Or go heavy duty, a single Ukrainian T-22 with 3 Kh-22, he'll only actually need to launch 2 of them and the K is toast! If you want to use something like F-18 which only carry 2 missiles each, then use the editor to place a bunch of them running parallel tracks so they all lauch at once and then the K will be hit by a wall of missiles all at once.

On my Lockon v1.02 installation, using LOMAN 2.1 I added then tried to remove a MiG-29 cockpit Mod by Mhm..Mhm. For some reason, it did not uninstall correctly and now seems to have messed up the look of some cockpits. US aircraft are fine, it only seems to be Russian aircraft. The MiG-29 seems to be the worst affected (screenie attached), messed up too are Su-25: Pilot legs only, Su-27/33: Pilot legs, MFD frame, HUD frame. I am reluctant to do a full reinstall as I have many tweaks to my setup that would take me an age to put back in again. So I was wondering if anyone can tell me which files (and the folders they live in) are the likely missing or corrupted ones, and I'll have a go at repairing it manually....

A Christmas funny Lockon vid from DPS - loved the reindeer in Mae Wests. Now it really feels like Christmas is just around the corner....

Thanks Buddy!! I was messing around with crazy landings, spiralling down from great heights, so that would explain why it was lighting up......

Was messing about in the Su-33 last night and noticed a warning light just below the Vertical Velocity Indicator. It seems to be present in the Su-33 but not the Su-27. I have never noticed it before. When it lights up Red, it appears to say Vy. I have no idea what it means. Anyone got an idea?

It has been a long time since I made a mission with GCI in it but from what I remember, just place your AI fighter aircraft on an airbase and set its TASK to GCI. If an enemy comes withion a set distance (sorry i cant recall what it is maybe 140km??), then the GCI will take off and attempt an intercept. Just tried it out quickly and you need to place a radar unit on the map to make it work, use 55G6 EWR or 1L13 EWR.

Nice work! The Frecce Tricolori were always one of my favorite visiting aerobatic teams at shows here in the UK. I've seen them do some great displays....

But then of course you would not be able to issue radio commands to any of the aircraft in that 2nd flight. You can only command the 3 wingnuts in your own (1st) flight.

Beofre you run LOFC, did you open some other window first (eg windows explorer) so when you do Alt+Tab, there is something for it to swap to? If you are experiencing fps problems over cities, then I guess your graphic options are set too high and you should dial them back a bit. You have a reasonable specification PC system, but you have to understand that LOFC is not like other games you might have - LOFC is very very CPU dependent. The more units in a mission and the lower you fly - then the harder the CPU has to work. Not many folks have a system good enough that they can set everything on maximum and fly low over cities and have lots of units and still get decent fps.

...or look at it another way, the game was designed for the future. Nevertheless the Sim was flyable back then, but you had to choose which eye candy graphics you wanted to use (but not all of it at the same time). Now with advances in CPU power and Graphics power (or more to the point the reduction in price to a level that normal people can afford), it is possible to run with pretty much everything max'ed out.

Hubman, did you get the E-mail I sent you regarding mission 9 briefing?

One further thing to think about is Time of Day and Weather. Set the time in the Briefing (the button next to the Coalitions). The start times of all the aircraft/ships/vehicles are stored (in the .mis file or .cmp file) as differences from the briefing screen time, so instead of changing the time of every unit (a real pain) if you want to change the time of the whle mission (eg. to make a night mission), you just change the briefing time. Not forgetting that changing the day of the mission on the briefing screen can change the phase of the moon. Lockonfiles has a couple of Mods by TekaTeka that improve how the moon looks in Lockon - just search for "moon" in the Download section. You should mess around with the Time. You can get some great eye-candy effects with before sunrise / sunrise / sunset / after sunset. Try changing the time by 10-15 mins at a time and starting the mission to see what difference it makes. Try from before sunrise, you get a great effect of the sky starting to get lighter a long time before sunrise. Of course you can combine the start time with weather effects like clouds, ground fog/mist, haze. Try a strong wind so the chimney smoke (and burning vehicle smoke) doesn't go straight up, it looks more realistic. Of course a strong wind can change the direction that the ILS will have you land back at base, which can be fun at a couple of bases! For some different fun, consider making yourself a night mission and take along some illumination flares. I suspect that too many folks just make missions that are set at noon with the default weather settings and miss out on just what Lockon is capable of. http://i14.tinypic.com/40cq7uv.jpg http://i13.tinypic.com/4c7nkvs.jpg

bonglander - now that you are hooked (and Lockon is more addictive than crack), you need to get into the ME (Mission Editor) as the FBP is very limited. Trust me, once you get into using the ME, you'll be quickly thinking up idea's for missions and then trying to turn them into reality using the ME. A good idea is to watch the excellent video that IronHand did called Getting Started I (Getting Started II is a video of actually flying the mission). They are near the bottom of the page (link below) http://flankertraining.com/ironhand/flightbasics.htm Check out this site for some helpful stuff on designing missions. http://home.hccnet.nl/hmms.janssen/Tutorial_complex_mission.html What I did when I started messing with the ME was to download one or two missions from the Community, fly them and then use the ME to open them up and have a look at how the mission designer made it work. Or you could even do this with the stock missions that come with Lockon, (just keep a copy of the mission you look at in case you accidentally mess it up). I just put down some thoughts of things that may trip you up in the future, not in any particular order. Assigning unit(s) / group(s) / building(s) as targets using the TARGET button from ATTACK waypoints is what ensures the diamond appears in your HUD. Incidentally this is the mechanism by which AI units are assigned specific targets to attack. But the SUCCESS / FAIL at the end of a mission is caused by having set MISSION GOALS using the icon on the left of the screen that looks like a sniper sight. Having these as seperate actions means that a mission can have SUCCESS/FAIL goals set without necessarily having targets diamond'ed. Two examples - mbot's UrbanThunder which has an attack waypoint, but no TARGETs assigned http://forum.lockon.ru/showthread.php?t=9039 also my Smerch Hunt mission, which has no attack waypoint at all... http://www.lockonfiles.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownloaddetails&cid=61&lid=36&ttitle=A-10_Smerch_Hunt#dldetails Be aware that if you set up some vehicles or ships in a group then the Mission Editor treats that group as a single item when you use TARGET button. Once you target it and then try to target another item in the group the mission editor will latch to nearest thing (usually a building) leaving you wondering what is going on. I still get caught out by this with ships as a group of them by default are quite spread out and they dont look like a group. I then try to target a second time and it targets a building a 100kms away! When you have a group targeted then if you kill the 1st in the group, the diamond will move to the next in the group etc until all destroyed then moves to next TARGET'ed unit/group Set SKILL to PLAYER for your own aircraft (you can only fly the yellow aircraft names) If you want wingmen, add more pilots (not more flights) If the mission designer has set up an ATTACK waypoint and used the TARGET button to mark particular target(s), then you will see the diamond as soon as you change to a2g mode (7). If the target is out of the field of view of the HUD it will have an X through it. If you kill the target and there are multiple targets are set up, the diamond moves to the next target, and finally dissapears when you have killed all the marked targets. Some mission designers might only mark some or none of the targets you need to kill to get mission success, other targets may only be mentioned in the mission briefing. If there are multiple targets in a mission, you can swap the diamond between them by pressing ' key (depends on your keyboard - anyway it is the same key that swaps airfields when you are in nav return mode). Is it necessary to lock on by pressing TAB? All the diamond is doing is showing you where the target is. You still have to attack it yourself with whatever weapon you choose. If you choose a Maverick then you have to lock it on, but if you use gun / rockets / dumb bombs, then you don't. What is this ATTACK point? It is a type of waypoint,shown on the map as a triangle instead of the usual circle, in the ME . As you fly your route it does not appear any different to other waypoints to you as a pilot. But used in conjunction with the TARGET button in the ME, it will cause targets to be diamond'ed. If the aircraft is an AI(computer flown) one, then it tells the AI when to begin an attack. Do you have to reach a particular waypoint before you can lock on? No, but generally the mission designer will have chosen a particular waypoint (nearest to the target) as an attack waypoint. Some missions might have several attack waypoints if there are several targets. Before you fly a mission, look at the map, remember which waypoint is the attack waypoint (triangle) so you know where to start looking for the targets you are tasked to destroy. You might find there are enemy SAM/AAA defenses or enemy aircraft you have to kill simply to be able to get to your actual mission target, keep your eyes and ears open for threats - the RWR (Radar warning receiver) can help. In one of the A-10 training missions there is a nice diamond to show you where to drop your weapons but in the other using cannon and rockets no diamonds As I said above, sometimes the mission has been designed so there is a diamond, sometimes not. As for some more annoying things in the Mission Editor that might catch you out in the future when you are making more complex missions, check out this thread... http://forum.lockon.ru/showthread.php?t=12608

Certainly the opening of the DCS forum took away some posts. Plus the reorganisation of the Lockon Forums removed some stuff from the General forum. But "dead"? I would say that is a bit harsh. I can't recall a time when so many folks were working on new stuff. Just check out the terrific looking Mods that various folks are working on at the moment (for example the AdA mod from the French community and the stuff at sim-mod.com - ground crew, new A-10 model, terrain, airbase). Everytime I see new screenies from those Projects, I'm drooling....

If I had to pick anything graphics related that looked a bit poor in Lockon, it would've been the flames effect. Nice to see folks thinking outside the box and looking for different things to work on and improve. The screenies of your flames look smokin' ;) Sorry couldn't resist....

Nice work Mizzy..... Dirty Decks v1.1 - iVIPER21 is the guy you are referring to I think. He did a real nice C-17 skin too. Not sure if he is still around, he seems to have gone off the Lockon scene about 18 months ago......

It's a sweet skin, but the Scande-wegians would be better folks to judge it...

I just want to fly over that dam, so have 1.13 add the extra Georgia bits of the map and I'd be happy...

Batman and the Penguin? Heh,Heh Mizzy - you're a real joker... Joker geddit? I'm appearing here all week, try the fish..... On a slightly more serious note, has anyone had a Penguin launched from an AI helo actually hit anything? I seem to recall that they always just missed the target ship when I tried it a while ago...

Managed to meet up with S77th_ReOrdain and his son George. They came to see me officiate a game in metro Detroit, we had a burger and a drink after. Had time for a quick chat about stuff and took a few pictures. Will post them once I get a chance to hook up the camera to a friends PC....

Telephone contact established with S77th_ReOrdain, gonna meet up with him next later on this week.

Yeah,I got a coupla other Red vs Blue ones I bought at the same time - a "BLARG" one and a "I hate the bands that you like" one too....

Here's the first video IguanaKing shot, with myself shooting the M-4. Followed by Mike (IguanaKing's brother) putting a .308 round into the center of an empty cigarette pack at 100 yards. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKY3TBWzB9I

Iguanaking and 214th_Hitman have posted some pics on the UBI thread, I'm slowly copying them over to other forums such as this one. They have work / college and I'm on holiday so I have the time to do it Very Happy http://img67.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture057qb0.jpg Left to Right - IguanaKing (Sean), Skopro_PL (Tomasz), Brit_Radar_Dude (Steve), 214th_Hitman (Kevin) and Sean's brother Mike (not a Lockon nut, but helluva good bloke). Picture by Sean with his cool camera with infrared remote control. That is what is in his hand pointing at the camera! Taken at the Rampart Range in Colorado Springs. Skopro_PL (Tomasz) shooting the M4 http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=19211048 Taken on 214th_Hitman's phone I think...

http://pilot.strizhi.info/photos/d/5231-1/IMG_7966_sm.jpg I love that the OSA's driver has customized it with a set of air horns!