Dragon1-1

Now that I look at it, it might be, it doesn't appear to change its angle regardless of its position. That'd be very unusual for a Western aircraft, though, I've only seen linear throttles in Russian jets. Well, it'd work for Hornet and Tomcat, at least. Could also use it to adjust throttle friction. It even had a name, Cyber Taurus.

You don't need to own everything. Start with one module, learn it, see if you can master it. It takes a while. Each aircraft has its own control scheme, its own quirks, and its own way of doing things. It's not like in other games, where you have shared control assignments and all aircraft operate in a similar way. If you only buy things when they're on sale, and spread the costs out, they're manageable.

The penalty is not meaningless, if you pull more than you're supposed to in the RAG, you'll get dinged for it. S&A is a RAG campaign, at least until the point that you deploy, at which point suddenly nobody cares about you over-Ging the jet. Real F-14 pilots said it was indeed like that: they teach you to fly the plane within its published limits, but if you have to trap heavy, or pull more Gs in order not to die, then you do that. Nobody would give you too much grief if you pulled a little hard in regular operations. That said, if you make a habit of pushing the airframe beyond its design limits, you'll end up shortening its operational life. It won't show during one mission unless it was already on its last legs, but if you keep abusing your jet regularly, it's going to drag down readiness rate (because the jets will be spending more time in maintenance), and you're going to get a talk from the CAG. An old airframe in early 2000s will have lower safety margins than a new one in the 80s, but even the former will have some. It would be considered unsafe to fly otherwise.

Plus, there's a sale on standalone (coming soon to Steam), so it's a good time to buy modules you like at a discount. You can save a good bit on the older modules.

I guess we do, I forget about those because they never seem to do a whole lot in DCS.

Computer Pilot is classic CCIP, used for dive bombing. It's accurate, but it exposes you to enemy fire. It also requires you to acquire your target visually before you start to roll in on it. This is not always easy. If you're attempting to bomb something like a tank, it's the best mode to use. Computer Target is safer and less accurate. It has the same disadvantage as CCIP of requiring your to designate the target visually, but it allows you to come off earlier. You can move the designator box around the HUD to enable this to be done in level flight, but it works best on buildings or entire troop formations. For point targets, you can try diving on them, designating, then immediately pulling out. Designation from long distance and a level release will only be good for bombing buildings. Loft bombing works with LGBs and CBUs (which our Tomcat doesn't have). Doing that with dumb bombs will not be terribly accurate. Computer IP is useful when you know where the target is in relation to some landmark, but even less accurate than Computer Target. This would be particularly useful at a time before detailed satellite maps, when charts could have coordinate deviations on order of hundreds of meters. But if you know something like "the target is 1km east from a funny looking rock" (which is relatively easy to figure out with geometry), you can pass this information to the aircrew. Since the IP is a distinctive object that can be designated, and you don't need to see the thing you're bombing, this mode can be quite useful for dropping a stick of bombs on a target which would otherwise be hard to spot directly.

The idea was basically a Shrike for fighter radars. Not stupid or even particularly hard to do in itself, but R-27P doesn't have enough range for an AWACS killer (EP would've been better, but not by that much), and against fighters, the P would've been easy to trash by just turning cold for a while. It could work for tail warning radars on bombers and the like, but this would be a niche use. It's also worth noting that passive homing doesn't give you range, which means it'd have to guide on azimuth and altitude only, reducing range and PK. In the end, the ER version is just far more practical.

Yes, it appeared in videos, but I'm pretty sure it was the FC3 version. I was talking about Wags' tutorials, which would be about the MiG-29, specifically on how to do various things with it.

Not just in DCS. VOG-30 grenades have only 40g of explosive in them. The HEI-T shells from the cannon have 49g of explosive. Of course, the cannon is much bulkier and heavier than the AGL, and so is its ammo, not to mention the AGL has very little recoil in comparision. AGS-30 is a solid weapon for infantry use. In fact, ArmA players will know how quickly one of those can ruin your day as an infantryman. However, their steep trajectory and short range make it a poor helo weapon. Anything it can do, some other weapon in your arsenal can do better.

You want proofreading, just release it in EA and the community will give you an earful about any bad English that snuck in.

It's unlikely that's still the plan, given that Q1 is just about over, and we haven't seen any Wags videos about it. That said, one advantage of the MiG-29 is that it's not a glass cockpit. Like the Hind, the systems are limited to what's on dials and switches in the cockpit. There's no perpetually WIP MFD system with all sorts of obscure pages, the only screen in the cockpit is a dumb HUD repeater. While the HUD can do a few cool things, it's not an MFD.

This is a hack largely irrelevant to what ED is doing. They're reworking the whole rendering engine to be built around Vulkan. We can expect some kind of performance gain purely from tossing a bunch of DX11-based crocks that they no doubt had to put in at some point along the way. It's not a completely clean sheet design, but it's a significant refresh.

It's worth remembering what they've been doing all those years is a ton of code work that'll only sound interesting to graphics API nerds (not that I don't appreciate a technical deep dive). Vulkan is a low level API, and it's more difficult to program in than DirectX, but that's also what makes it so powerful. It's going to take many, many lines of code just to get DCS looking like it does now. When the pictures do start appearing, we'll know the release is basically imminent.

If this was about money, they should have hashed it out well in advance. License expiration is not something that sneaks up on you, you agree on a term at the start of the contract, so you know perfectly well when it's going to be up. The vendor might try pulling a last second stunt, complicating an otherwise smooth process, but I doubt it's that simple here. Unlikely. Link16 is a different issue, namely a subcontractor holding a trademark on a system the Viper uses. It's just a name, though, they can't prevent the datalink from being modeled. This here is the primary manufacturer. Russian flight instruments are shared between aircraft, but I don't think MiG-29 will be in any way affected. It's only JSC Russian Helicopters, not their parent company, at any rate.

He'll do it, but not very effectively. You have to spam them more than he does, you can't really rely on him doing so. R-77 is a good missile, but the Phoenix outranges it. Adjust your tactics. You should not expect a "one shot, one kill" fight with anything that can carry the R-77, but it should be quite possible to avoid being launched at. Pay attention to range and the missile timeout counters. Plan to use at least two missiles per target: one to get it to defend, the other to actually kill it (more if fighting human opponents). Also remember to manage your closure by cranking, flying straight at the target after launching, especially at supersonic speeds, is typically a bad idea.

You'll find that they're not unlike Western companies in that regard. The aircraft name, branding and their systems are company property like any other IP. That's why, in order to make a modern DCS module (or one for any other sim), you usually need permission from the company to use the IP, just like licensing for cars in racing games. Worth noting, racing games go off sale after a period of time if the license was granted for a limited term and it's not renewed. This is unlikely to be what we're looking at here (since if it was, ED would've known that the license term is running out), but it's worth remembering licenses don't have to be granted forever.

Well, hopefully someone less costly than RS, anyway. Plus, I don't like the idea of a linear throttle, the real thing moves in an arc, and that's quite important for ergonomics (your hand can sense grip angle more precisely than position). The original WW Taurus had a realistic mechanism, at the cost of being a huge chunk of hardware.

Well, they've got a pretty nice range of sticks and throttles for fighters already, plus PTO2, the MFDs, and two UFCs. I think that's a good lineup going forward. Right now I don't feel like I need anything more except maybe FFB, but that is extremely bulky and expensive. In fact, if I were to go that route, I'd probably need a dedicated sim station instead of mounting things to the desk, especially since I'd probably want the stick base to be in the center. I'd probably get a UFC then, too, and the MFDs. I hope someone does the F-35 throttle once that's out. It's got a cool shape that looks pretty ergonomic.

Reflected scripted a crew chief for the F-16, seen in the Arctic Thunder campaign. It'd be great if ED rolled out something like this across the board.

You can, but only for radar missiles, flares are your job (the DLC button will release them). Also, you need to defend against the missile yourself, chaff alone won't get the job done. Notching can work, but it's better to defend the missile kinematically, particularly SARH. Look up the F-pole maneuver, done properly, it'll allow you to defeat a SARH missile while still maintaining your lock. That also goes for heaters, BTW. You have to cut burners, turn your engines away from the missile and help the flares do their work.

I think both this and the magic teleport should get commands. "Abort ground crew" and "reset aircraft position" or something. Currently there's no good way of dealing with broken flaps on the F-14.

It's logical. When they update the core, the campaigns often need to be updated to adjust for new features and bugs the code introduces. It seems ED caught on that, so now we get a core patch, and a campaign patch to fix issues the core patch introduced. DCS mission scripting is notoriously brittle, and complex campaigns break at a drop of the hat. Such an approach is practically necessary.

He's a bit more capable than that, actually. Once he acquires contacts in TWS, he will try to keep as many of them as possible within scan zone. You do have to tell him where you want to search in first place, and his way of prioritizing targets isn't always best, but once they're in view, he should operate the radar in a way that makes at least some sense.

It is very much relevant. ED has a team in Russia (which is the one that makes the Russian stuff) and is rather interested in selling their products in Russia. Mi-24P has been released, so the cat's out of the bag on that one as far as Western markets are concerned, but they're not going to develop, say, a Su-25 without some sort of guarantee that some goon won't nix it halfway through just because he wanted a bribe and didn't get one. No, but if the helos are permanently removed, this would reduce the incentive for ED to continue updating them. I don't think they'll be forced to yank them from non-Russian market (if only because Switzerland has little incentive, at that point, to cooperate with Russian legal demands), but you never know. If that happens, you can expect updates not to be too forthcoming.

Regular 4th++ gen ones are getting RAM coating as an upgrade. It doesn't help much, but it's better than nothing, and on a small fighter it does make a difference. Obviously coating a B-52 with it won't help. Fun fact: Mythbusters managed to get ahold of some radar-absorbing paint and coat a car with it. It didn't help them evade a police radar gun, but the point is, at least some materials of that sort are available on civilian market. This is not some exotic tech, I suspect the advances in the F-35 version of the material are more about not making it weigh the plane down than a major improvement in radar wave absorption, due to physics involved (though it's probably more capable in that area than the stuff Mythbusters used).