Jayhawk1971

Finished the mission yesterday. Great experience, and taught me a lot about the module! My approach is "learning by doing" rather than memorizing manuals, so in this mission whenever I came across something I didn't know yet, I looked it up and went back to the mission. One thing I was unclear about, which I will put in spoiler tags: If I'm imagining things, please disregard. Do you have plans to flesh this out into a campaign or mini-campaign? IMO you certainly should think about releasing a payware 3rd-party campaign. The quality and attention to detail is absolutely there!

I ran into the same problem earlier this week. In my case it was the F-14, the F-15C (not FC3, the "standalone"), Nevada and Persian Gulf. Turned out these are modules that I had bought via Steam and "transferred" over to DCS standalone. Presumably, the Steam server must have had a hiccup. I fixed the issue by reimporting the serial numbers via my profile on the DCS website. Hope that helps.

I find the F-15E to be very easy to land and to handle once on the ground. Maybe a controller input issue? Axis spiking? Something like that?

No, that is not the case. It's like you ordered a "tuna" sandwich (wasn't there a scandal that when tested they didn't find any tuna DNA on that sandwich? But I digress.), but there's too much oil in it for your taste. Subway says their SME (sandwich matter experts) confirmed that this is absolutely the right amount of oil. You want your tuna to be less oily, so you ask for an optional "downgrade" on the oil front. Subway is a fast-food chain with strictly defined processes, so it's not that easy to implement. Most of the other customers are either fine with or indifferent to the amount of oil, and even though some TSP's (tuna sandwich purists) demand that none shall tinker with it, most would agree that if Subway offered an optional TLO (tuna, less oily), they would be fine with it. As long as it doesn't affect the original sandwich. And there's the rub: the original sandwich is still in early eating access, and needs a lot of work as it is. Once the sandwich is (close to) feature complete (tomatoes have been added), no one would have a problem with an option. (first draft had "pepper", but I remembered that salt and pepper are being treated like optional condiments at Subway. I haven't been to any fast-food chain in a very long time ) If it were truly unbearable, everyone would complain. From what I've seen here and on discord, that is not the case. I'll give you inconvenient, annoying, distracting (objectively speaking). I personally don't mind, as I've been desensitized by the Tomcat's ECS.

Thanks Sedlo! Looking forward to playing the mission tomorrow!

If you "crash" in a military grade simulator, you also can "hop into the next jet and take off again" (after a very lengthy and thorough debrief). Yet those things still try to simulate the aircraft to the best of their technical and budgetary capabilities. And I bet "alleviating pilot inconvenience" is rather low on the priority list. Hyperbole. If RAZBAM's SME's deem the in-cockpit sound to be realistic, so be it. It's not unbearable in any way, shape or form. OTOH, if RAZBAM is willing and able to allocate resources and dev time to implement a volume slider under the "special" tab - without interfering with more immediate and pressing issues (like fixing bugs and implementing promised features) - I don't see why they shouldn't add it as an option. Options are good. It's all about priorities, though, and IMO, "quality of life" features that don't add to the module (actually take away from authenticity in this case) should have a lower priority than, for example, game-breaking bugs.

Thank you, Sedlo! Much appreciated! I very much enjoyed your previous Red Flag missions.

Cue Tropic Thunder.

Maybe one day, whenever I have (a lot!) more free time on my hands. Or, once someone finds a way to create an interface between the DCS ME and some "image-generator" like AI, where I can describe what I want a mission/ campaign to be like, and the AI creates it in the mission editor for me. That would be perfect, and probably a lot less "futuristic" than one would assume (or would have assumed even a year ago).

I meant payware 3rd party campaigns. I do like story-driven content. Sandboxes, not so much. I don't have enough free time for DCS as it is, never mind spending additional time learning the mission editor, then even more time building missions that I know how they'll play out because I've built them. At the moment I can get in two or three hours a week if I'm lucky. I'd rather spend that time in a cockpit. Instead of spending time with an activity that I'm not good at, and which will cause a lot of frustration, pulling of hair, shaking of fists, and smashing of keyboards, I'll instead purchase the excellent work of the ever growing lineup of content creators whose skill with the editor I will never, ever be able to match. The Sinai map doesn't go anywhere, so I'll purchase it whenever I feel the time is right. I did that with every other map I own, and so far haven't had any regrets. YMMV. Edit: Please nobody get hung up on the term "decent". I did not mean to say that non-payware missions/ campaigns are not decent. I was trying to express - apparently in a too hasty way - "decent amount of content that is entertaining to me". For example, I did enjoy Sedlo's freeware Red Flag campaigns very much!

Until there's some decent SP-content for Sinai, I will hold off on purchasing that map. No reason clogging up my SSD while at the same time needlessly freeing up space on my bank account. (should be the other way round!). Once there's quality content for some/ any of the modules I own, I certainly will pull the trigger, as the map does look great.

I'm hoping ED has finally (!!!!!!) fixed this highly annoying AI bug - preventing AI from detaching from a tanker. This bug ruins a good chunk of otherwise perfectly fine campaign missions.

My 2 cents. As far as I could piece together from Discord, the F-15E was supposed to be released "early June" (internal EA release date), also made apparent by the start of the pre-release marketing campaign, which was pushed to the 9's ("imminent", "beware the pre-release discount", and sending out EA copies to every YouTuber with more than 10 subs ). Only for - allegedly - ED asking RB to push back the release date to July at the 11th our, with, according to some mods on the Razbam discord, the F-15E module itself not being the issue. Should that be the case, there must have been something from ED's side, which we can only guess (like they might want to get another patch in, which would be good, or they want to give another 3rd party module the limelight without it being drowned out by the Strike Eagle release, or, or, or.....) Apparently, last night some people affiliated with RB "spilled the beans" (presumably out of frustration over this last-minute delay, and completely underestimating the <profanity>storm this would trigger), hence the already rather volatile part of the "community" (I hate that term) was being made aware of the "missed opportunity". Without those "whistle blowers", no one would have been any wiser, albeit some being annoyed that "influencers" get to play with the module publicly, while they have to wait (to which I could only say: start your own popular YouTube channel!). My unsolicited advice to ED would be to recognize that the cat's kinda out of the bag now, and communicate the reason(s) for this last-minute delay to the "community" (again, hate hate hate that term ). Otherwise, conspiracy theories will inevitably pop up (already have), and many will be left in a negative mood. For example, it would be quite reasonable that ED would want to wait for some core engine patch or fix to be ready pre-release, or wait for another module (Sinai) to be ready for EA. Strike Eagle + Sinai would make for a nice "bundle" release. So no shame admitting to that if that were the case. In any case, personally, I can wait for another month; got enough on my plate as it is. BTW, I finally pre-ordered the Strike Eagle last night. Just to be contrarian.

Corsair or Hellcat? Or both?

On a positive note: mission 6 worked well and I had a good laugh, because I had heard of the real event that this is based on. I even managed a very good 3 wire trap (despite - or maybe due to - the circumstances ). (Forrestal's IFLOLS is still a mess, though: completely unreadable because it's way too bright, blindingly so, at least in VR).

Mission 5 had two issues (playing on Multithreading exe): 1. After takeoff, the flight stays very low and slow, extremely high AOA with burners, weaving back and forth. After a while I left them there, climbed and flew to SP 1, where I planned to circle and see what'll happen. Suddenly the flight was ahead of me and I had to go full burner to catch up. 2. I chose the "engage" F10-option after the bombing run, but the Migs seem to be broken, like in Mission 2. One seems to be circling over their home base, the other is crashed on the runway with the ejected pilot standing next to it. I shot down the circling Mig and strafed the crashed one, but mission didn't progress. I found the tanker, refueled, RTB'd but got no further messages, and no "mission complete". Refueling was actually pretty cool, because the whole Tornado flight was in the process of refueling. Which was very immersive. The last Tornado was in left observation position, awaiting his turn, so I joined on his left wing. As he slid into position behind the left drogue, I went to the right one. Really immersive. Mission 4 (MT): Jester missed the outpost with the GBU-12, despite me dropping within parameters, in a gentle right-hand bank after pickle, just like before. Mission kept somewhat progressing due to the convoy keeping on moving, but it seemed out of whack so I quit at that point. First drop went well, despite a comms issue: I pickled only once, but got Jester's scripted "drop message" twice.

Yup, can confirm. I joined up on the Vipers instead, but the mission didn't seem to progress after reaching the tanker track waypoint.

Sounds like the mission is indeed broken. Oh well, that's why ED added the "skip" function I suppose.

How did the mission play out for you up until that point? Both Wavehopper and me seem to run into the wrong trigger right from the beginning of the CAP. Despite flying the planned route right behind the other Tomcat flights. I took off last and cruised about 8-ish miles behind the other Tomcats. I saw them peel off to their respective CAP stations, then got the dialogue concerning our CAP procedures. Very shortly after I turned towards SP 3 I got the message about those MiG-29's, same as Wavehopper.

Same. To add insult to injury: the MiG-21's completely ignored us and merely blasted right by at ludicrous speed.

How long did you wait? "Never" is a very relative term. It's called "Alert 5" for a reason. I've played this mission 4 times now (probably my favorite out of the Marianas part of the campaign), and I launched every time. Twice with MT. It just takes a couple of minutes from signal to actual launch. After the helicopter takes off, the launch sequence starts.

Oh crap, I realize I never got around to trying this mission again (contrary to what I announced so boastfully ). I guess I was way too curious to see where the campaign was going, and after the next couple of missions, I promptly forgot about it.