Dragon1-1

It is, look at shipping costs. When you add it up, it works out to over 1800 AUD (I have no idea how it converts, but Amazon has those cards for 1800 USD). It's a typical way Chinese sellers use to make it seem like a deal. They set a low price, so that when you sort by price, their offer comes up early, and then make up the rest by a ridiculous shipping cost (no, you won't get any red carpet shipping for all that money). It also looks like a founder's edition, these are not typically as spiffy as, say, an MSI offering. I'd say, it looks like a pretty average offer.

You don't fly parade specifically, but you do fly other formations, most notably the one where you're trailing behind the wing with your probe in the basket. The workflow for this case is exactly the same (and with the S-3, the level of precision needed is not far behind). Knowing how the tanker is supposed to look from the cockpit, particularly if there are any good reference spots, would help immensely with learning AAR. I'm good with a KC-130 (it's big enough that putting the gun cross under the pod suffices for horizontal+vertical alignment), but the S-3 is much more finicky. Similarly, at one point you take up a formation on the tanker's wing, and cues for that would not be amiss, either. It's fairly easy to figure out, but when someone is learning that, some pointers would help a lot.

It should go in the box. Center detent is optional, and you don't install it if you're flying an aircraft. It's for when you want to use your HOTAS to play something like Elite:Dangerous or Mechwarrior 5, where you have forward and reverse on the same axis. In a flight sim there's no use for this.

More like companies only button, though I suppose some ultra-rich people (think Elon Musk) could work something out with them. A regular rich person probably wouldn't be worth the trouble of working out the legal stuff. Companies use the quote system because there's usually additional information involved, every installation would be a bit different. In addition to hardware, it also involves installation, training the staff and probably a support contract, too. It doesn't actually have to cost that much to work like this, although it usually does since you can bilk a company for far more than most private customers, due to how business financing works.

Would that be possible to add some more screenshots as illustrations for M2 and M3? In particular, there are materials for sight picture you get when in proper formation with a Tomcat, but not for the S-3D in various phases of AAR. Adding pictures of the tanker with important cues highlighted, just like the Tomcat ones, would make tanking with that particular aircraft somewhat smoother, since without it, you kind of have to figure this out yourself as you go, which is not ideal. Also, do real pilots really fly parade at night just like they do during the day? I find it hard to believe that the ejection seat triangle is, on a low vis scheme, possible to see at night without NODs in most conditions. I guess they have just learned to look at the whole sight picture by the point they're trying this at night, but still, that's a tall order when you can barely see the jet's outline. Isn't there really anything more to say about formation lights and so on? Parade is easier because it's cues are a formation light and an antenna which is easy to see in a silhouette.

We could use a USAF-style B-course, actually. Might be with the Phantom, it's a more interesting jet and it has a backseat, unlike our other USAF fighters. It would be interesting to compare the training styles between USAF and USN.

Honestly, if you can get anything above unsat on formation flying, AAR shouldn't be that much of a problem. The tanker does not have the ridiculous roll rate you have to somehow keep up with. Also, try practicing in the IA mission. The S-3 tanker is hard. Better learn on something like KC-135MPRS in the IA mission, then you should be able to plug into the S-3 well enough for the mission to accept that. Ideally, practice on KC-135, then move onto S-3 (not sure if there's a pre-made mission where you can quickly jump to it) and then do the 2nd mission. You have to fly a tight formation and fit in the tight box behind the S-3, which isn't easy, but it's doable.

He calls out what he sees on the RWR. So if you've got a lot of Hawks around the airfield, you can ignore it. If you're playing as US or Israel against Iran, which uses the Hawk and its derivatives extensively, ignoring it is ill-advised, although it also depends on context. If you've just taken off and have Hawks on your own side as well, you're probably fine. If you're over Iran and a Hawk pops up, it's probably not going to be friendly.

The problem with Force Feedback is that I haven't seen any system strong enough to truly emulate a hard stop. A mechanical stop has a distinct feel and it can't just be pushed through. To emulate that, the motor would have to be able to resist an enormous force. Of course, there's also the possibility of a bolt-on physical stop that you can attach and detach according to what you're flying, like with detents on the Winwing throttle. However, the motors would need to be aware of the stop, to avoid damage.

Finally did it! Below average, but TBH, I'm happy I passed at all. Seeing as every task that didn't involve holding hands with DCS AI in close formation came out "Above Average", quite a few on first try (of course, I'll wait with bragging till we see the final grade sheet ), I'd say it's the AI not my flying skills. My AAR is rusty, but I was so tired and stressed after all that formation flying, that I decided to practice it in some other mission and maybe come back and refly this one. Or maybe just fly a little, get better at plugging, and then try to get a good grade at night. I came out of this firmly convinced that the problem is roll rate. The Tomcat, if it wants to, rolls fast. Unannounced turns of any kind simply give you no time to realize the lead is doing something and react to it. Doesn't really matter how much angle of bank he ends up at, it matter how fast he gets there. I'm sure if you ask Paco, he'll admit he wouldn't just slam the stick to port or starboard without warning, like DCS AI does, and expect the hapless trainee to keep up. This is made worse that when lead rolls, the wing has to move up or down, which needs to be done in a controlled manner, which is hard when you have to do it fast. ED needs to be pushed to implement a roll rate limiter for such (and many other) scenarios. Now I just have to do more or less the same thing, only at night... At least there's no tac turns, so it'll go faster. Hopefully.

Just finished M2, and man, flying formation on DCS AI is a gut-wrenching experience (the tanker, with its weaving back and forth, was actually the easiest part...). However, I'd like to report a grunt walking along the flightline and through my jet, multiple times, as I'm starting it up. He's lucky DCS doesn't model sucking fools like him into a jet engine, or I'd never be able to get the thing started safely... It'd be nice if he could be sorted out in the next patch.

In fact, they should essentially be special threat steerpoints, that's what they are internally in the real jet. Hopefully when we get the DTC, this functionality will come with it.

The latest versions do have it, but early models (the ones we're the least unlikely to get in DCS) didn't. They just had ACL system for Case III, not unlike the Hornet. Why do you think my favorites are the Tomcat and the Phantom, with MiG-19 also up there? That said, I do have a soft spot for the Viper, despite it holding your hand plenty in a fight. That said, I'd like the Jaguar and the F-111 more than another 4th+ gen jet. Physical interfaces will always be there, for the simple fact that gestures and thoughts are messy. With a stick and throttle, or at least the thumbstick on the latter, there's no doubt what you're telling the jet to do. That said, they might switch to fiddling with the tablet full time.

I think the suggestion is "don't announce release dates", but they're already announced on a short notice, and not doing that at all would be annoying, too, particularly for people who don't have a fast internet connection that can download a 100GB patch in a few minutes (which is a lot of people around the world, particularly outside major cities).

Another reason not to want the F-35 in DCS. Where's skill in that? Put the FPM on the 3-wire marker, flip the PLM switch, watch as the aircraft lands itself. When you do an SHB in a Tomcat, dead on the numbers (because otherwise you won't make it down), that's legitimately impressive. The Hornet takes plenty of skill, too. It sounds like the F-35 largely trivializes even the SHB, nevermind a regular trap.

That only shows that the problem goes really deep. There's no reason for the operating environment to change on a regular (not daily) basis. That we were only doing computing for just 80 years is not the problem (in fact, most of modern engineering is not that much older). The problem is that for most part of those 80 years, we were doing it wrong, and we still are. Consider two things: 1. Much of modern computing world is based on what started out as an ad-hoc OS to play games on a spare computer one guy had laying around, and had since been modified and expanded by everyone and their mother. 2. Fans of said OS will tell you that this is a very good thing. Have you considered that it's extremely expensive, and not usually done, because our software development culture had made it unusual, as opposed to mandatory? "Move fast and break things" is has been established as the way to be "innovative", but all it does is build technical debt. Consider this: had Windows been created, on the architecture level, to be secure against intrusion, it wouldn't have needed a security patch every month, because most of those exploits would not be possible in first place. There was actually an OS that did just that (Multics), but it didn't ship with IBM PC. It could also run for years without being restarted and hot-swap everything including CPUs (not its last one, of course, as a mainframe OS it usually had several). That you can't just pull a GPU or an SSD out of a running PC and insert another, and that you have to reboot it every so often, is not a law of nature, but a deeply embedded design flaw. And don't even get me started on a crock that is the internet.

It's not. They have until 01/01/2025 to notice the time bomb (because if it's anything that specific, it won't be an accident) and remove it. Hence, it does not meet the definition of showstopper. Generally, outside the circumstances such as the infamous millennium bug, or the upcoming Unix time rollover, computer programs act the same no matter on which date they're run, unless they have been programmed to check the timestamp. So, while it's difficult to "prove", it's a pretty unlikely issue in any case. A showstopper is generally something that breaks the game for a lot of people, so it's reasonable to expect QA to spot it. Computer programs are not magic, though it might seem that way to uninitiated. They are, in essence, very complex mathematical expressions, written by humans, and are perfectly deterministic. In civil engineering, for example, a bug would be called "human error" and the originator likely persecuted after, say, the bridge he built collapsed. And just like it is possible to design a bridge that doesn't spontaneously collapse (how would you prove it won't collapse after 01/01/2025? Well, there are entire companies making tools for that), it is, theoretically, possible to design a program, even a complex one, without any bugs in it. It's just harder and more expensive, and not helped by the thinking that permeates the consumer programming community, that treats the presence of unintended behavior as a law of nature. Go into embedded programming, especially serious stuff like trains or spacecraft engineering (outside a certain well known company, that is), and you'll see that's exactly what they do. If cars were designed like computer programs are, well, see Tesla, especially early on.

I do remember it being this bad once or twice in recent years. Usually that got patched quickly, and it didn't completely block the game for everyone, but they broke features a few times that basically made it not worth playing until the hotfix. This is what we call a "non sequitur". No bugs=/=no showstopping bugs. The latter is quite possible to prove, and tends to be quickly found out by community. A rivet being two centimeters off to the side, with AO for the corresponding hole visible nearby, is a bug. Game crashing when a certain module's wheels leave the ground is a showstopping bug.

Except sometimes, a bug sneaks in that basically breaks the whole thing. Every time such a howler makes it into the patch, the community cries out (rightly) "How did it make it past QA!?". Well, now it didn't, they caught the potential howler in time. Myself, I'm glad that they caught it before it made it out.

The responsive handling is what many people like about the Huey. The Hind is a chonker of a helo, and so is the Blackhawk. There are several conditions at which a fully loaded Hind needs a runway to take off. Huey? There's a reason they never bothered to give it wheels. It's just a matter of practice.

What I was saying was that it's possible not to lose tally during a typical merge and a turning engagement that follows, without any additional tricks. We need to separate two issues: spotting distance and seeing through the canopy walls. Yes, MiG-21 should have worse SA, but that's beside the point. This discussion is about seeing the bandit from a long distance, where it's just a silhouette, and that silhouette would sometimes disappear. That I have not experienced, in that when I have tally, I can usually keep it. At least in my headset, even during a two circle fight, you don't go out as far as for the bandit to become too difficult to see.

It was actually called that in development, you can still see it in some of the internal names. Someone in marketing likely thought it'd sell better under the current name, but it is very much a Hormuz map. As for why modern, they presumably didn't think a Gulf War version would be popular. In fact, I suspect they simply looked at Google Maps for references, and modeled it more or less as it looked when they started development. It's one of the older maps, back then it probably didn't seem to matter, and we had much fewer vintage aircraft, anyway.

TBH, the word "tarmac" does serve an useful purpose: it means any paved part of the airport that's accessible to aircraft. So you know the passengers were stuck near where the aircraft are, and not, say, in the parking lot, which tends to also be paved with asphalt or concrete. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some people didn't even realize it originally referred to a road surfacing material, as opposed to any kind of airport pavement. Seeing as the use of actual tarmac has pretty much passed into history, we might as well reuse the word. Real Tomcat jocks use "Turkey" or "Tomcat", and that's flair enough. Not that it stopped Bug drivers from coming up with other names... This is actually a common myth. NASA did not invent the second meaning of "nominal", it existed before, though it was quite more specific than simply "normal": it meant (and still does), roughly, "related to the value the property is supposed or expected to have". You can have a battery with nominal voltage (in other words, the one written on it) of 1.5V, and the actual voltage (as measured by the multimeter) of 1.45V. The NASA usage is exactly this - if the measured voltage and the value on the label match, you say that the voltage is nominal (and if a spacecraft battery shows 1.45V when the nominal value is 1.5+-0.1V, this is a cause for concern). It's not a huge leap to generalize it to "normal", particularly when dealing with such a numbers-bound discipline as spaceflight. Outside it, I guess an off-nominal value could be normal, but it usually does indicate something has degraded.

No, which is why we can't fly around the globe in DCS. Yet. DCS works in a specific way, it's not the only way to accomplish what it does, but it's the only way DCS can do it. How it works has been explained on the forums in the past. The system, as it was written, has certain limitations. To get around those limitations, a new system needs to be written. This is not a trivial task, but the idea that you'll one day be able to fly to Afghanistan from mainland US is being worked on. Every complex issue has an answer that is short, simple, and wrong. In this case, this would be that answer. ED would have added the coastline if it was worth the effort and (considerable) resources to do so, especially since a big selling point of many modules is carrier operations. If they are not included, there is probably a good reason, and that reason is, is the coastline is not feasible.

No, cold hard facts about how computer graphics work. The more pixels per meter you have, and the more meters you have, the more pixels there are to be processed (illuminated, rendered and displayed) by the GPU. That number is what's important for GPU performance. Look, it's going to be taxing no matter how hard you wish it won't be so. Big map, lots of details, complex terrain. Yes, your 3060 will cry. ED will hopefully make an effort not to make it cry too loudly, part of which is not adding pointless low detail extensions.