The Gray Weasel

I did several air starts to try to pin down exactly what the problem is. Tracks attached. In all cases, although I have turned on the option to match the aircraft controls with the HOTAs position on start, the throttle begins at about 90% dry thrust during the air start regardless of the throttle position. That's why the aircraft throttle "snaps" to another position as soon as I move the HOTAs throttle a little. In all cases, engine temperature and fuel consumption spike really high in the first few seconds of an in-air start. If the throttle is placed in idle, or even in full military power, the engines sort themselves out and start behaving normally after a few seconds, and afterburner can be selected without problems. (FullMilPowerAtStart.trk and IdleThrottleAtStart.trk.) However, if the throttle is immediately advanced to afterburner during air start, or if the throttle is advanced to afterburner during the first few seconds after air start, then engine temperature spikes way past the redline, fuel consumption increases without the AB lighting, and engine thrust output hangs at about 86% mil power. (EngineOverspeed1.trk and EngineOverspeed2.trk.) Once that happens, there is no way to get the engines working properly without shutdown and in-air restart. EngineOverspeed1.trk EngineOverspeed2.trk FullMilPowerAtStart.trk IdleThrottleAtStart.trk

Happens to me, too. Every time I start a mission with the F-5E already in the air, the engine RPM immediately shoots up to something like 184%. I can bring the RPMs down and get the engines to respond to throttle input if I immediately pull the throttle to idle upon mission start, but if I do not do that very quickly, then the engines will become stuck in that overreved position and the only way to fix them is to shut off fuel flow and then air-start them.

An F-5 scenario in the Marianas? Yes, please!

You still need help with this? I'm currently recovering from a cold so my voice will be off for another week or so, but other than that I'd be willing to help out. Give me some sample lines to read and I'll send you an "audition tape."

Probably not too many people will complain if you make it easier to win At any rate, thank you for listening to feedback and being willing to tinker with the mission to make it better.

That would be much appreciated. Right now, it seems like the player needs to follow a very rigid script to have any hope of success. A little more leeway for the player to tack to the right to avoid the MiGs and lead the bombers for intercept would go a long way. Finally beat the mission on the eighth try, following said very rigid script. Only damaged the third bomber and had to follow it all the way home to its base and gun it down on final approach to get the victory cue voice message. It would be nice if victory could be achieved by forcing the bombers to abort their attack - not necessarily kill all three - but I don't know how feasible that is in the mission editor.

When I hit waypoint 3 over the lake, I'm at full mil power and doing about 500 kts. When I get the voice line to turn 090 and intercept the bombers, I jettison my tank (and order my flight to do the same), push to full AB, and start heading 090. I accelerate to Mach 1 before beginning the climb. So I'm going as fast as I can with as little drag as possible when I begin the climb. At that point, the RWR shows a "6" at 12:00 and a bunch of "23"s at about 11:00. Breaking through the clouds, I can see the contrails at about 11:00 high, heading from left to right. Now here's the dilemma: if I bank left and fly straight toward the bombers, I'm heading straight for the MiG-23s and I'm going to get an AA-7 to the face on my way up. That happened twice. If I continue heading 090, aiming ahead of the bombers, that takes me straight over the SA-6 site and I soak up an SA-6 on the way up. That happened twice, too. If I'm lucky enough to avoid getting killed by a MiG or the SA-6 on the climb to the bombers, now I'm slow and I'm guaranteed to have to slowly chase at least one bomber down so I can gun it. By the time I get within gun range of the last bomber, I'm right over the SA-3 site and I eat an SA-3 shortly after gunning the last bomber. That also happened twice. Once, I thought to myself, "maybe you're not supposed to go after the bombers until you deal with the MiGs." So I ignored the bombers, went straight for the MiGs, and killed two. Wingmen 2 and 3 managed to kill two of the bombers, dying in the process. After the fight I managed to locate the last bomber in the distance through a combination of AWACs, seeing its jamming on my radar, and its contrail. I went to full AB again and chased it down veeeeery slloooooowwwwly as it flew along the coast toward Sochi. At that point I was actually beyond all of the SAM sites on the map. Caught it and gunned it down with about 500 lbs left in the tanks. Ran out of fuel on the way home, flew near an SA-6 site and got no RWR warning because without the engines running the RWR had no power, and ate an SA-6 with no warning. Like I said: extremely frustrating. I do not understand how you are not having the same problems when you fly the mission.

I'm replaying the campaign again after a year. Missions 1-8 went fine, no problem. Mission 9 - the one where you have to intercept the 3x Tu-22 bombers escorted by 4x MiG-23s - BAM! Brick wall. I've replayed that mission seven times so far, and I always get killed. Usually by the SAMs. It is extremely frustrating. Before you reply: yes, I read the other threads in this forum about that mission, and yes, I kept in formation with my wingmen and yes, I ordered them to "cover me" so they would go after the MiGs. The MiGs aren't really the problem. It's the SA-6 site you have to overfly on the way to the bombers. And the SA-3 site they overfly a little way beyond that. And you always have to chase at least one bomber down to gun it (because you only have two missiles), all the while you're high up in thin air with SAMs shooting at you. If you're lucky enough to gun down the last Tu-22, you're seconds away from dying to a SAM. Why is the player even "intercepting" Tu-22s that are obviously flying back toward their own lines and over their own SAM coverage? They're heading 210, down the coast, like they're already done with their mission and they're going back to Sochi to land. If the mission is to intercept the Tu-22s before they bomb the blue force, then they should be heading 270 or something like that when they appear. You know...toward the area where the blue forces are?

UPDATE 2: Making sure the Temp and fxo folders are empty before starting DCS, and taking a detour through Settings between missions, stopped working for me last night. I do not know why. The change happened after I exited from DCS, and then started it again several hours later.

UPDATE: tried repeating the workaround of going into Settings, clicking "OK", starting the second mission...this time, it didn't work. Crashed when mission finished loading, like it usually does. Tried it again and it crashed again. Then I deleted everything in the AppData/Local/Temp/DCS and Saved Games/DCS/fxo folders, and tried it again (going into Settings after a mission, clicking "OK," then starting the next mission). This time it consistently worked: five missions in a row, no crashes. It seems like the combination of having a clean slate in the Temp and fxo folders upon launching DCS, plus tricking DCS into thinking I've reset the graphics settings before launching the next mission, is doing the trick. Separately, neither worked, but together they seem to work. I'll keep trying it. ...I should add that my wife views this bug as a feature, as it cuts down on my DCS time.

In my case, going to the settings page in between every mission and clicking the "OK" button worked to avoid the second mission crash where nothing else did. I just flew four missions in a row with no second mission loading crash, including a particular mission that has always crashed on second mission load in the past. Ran that one twice in a row, no crashes. Prior to this, the second mission crash happened 100% of the time for me (with one exception, discussed below). I understand that no workaround has been 100% reliable so far, so I'll cross my fingers for now and will post an update in a few days. I'm running the latest version of Windows 10, but I'm not running any special preview versions or anything like that. I've got the latest Nvidia drivers for my graphics card. I previously tried deleting my TEMP, fxo, and metashaders folders, but that alone did not help. A quick check of those folders just now shows the TEMP and fxo folders have files in them, but the metashaders folder is still empty. One more thing that seems relevant: there has always been one mission that reliably did not crash DCS, regardless of how many times I ran it: a custom mission I wrote a long time ago, a simple F-5E vs. MiG-21 dogfight over the Caucasus. It's a favorite of mine, and when I upgraded to version 2.7 the very first thing I did was load that mission into the editor and play around with all the new weather permutations. When the crash bug started happening, that was the one mission I could continue to run as many times in a row as I wanted without crashing DCS. I have a hunch that it has something to do with the fact that this was the very first mission I ran after upgrading to 2.7, rather than anything particularly special about the mission parameters themselves. Still, if anyone wants to examine the mission (or, hell, play it: the F-5E mod needs a good instant action dogfight against the MiG-21), I've attached it. F5E v MiG21 Caucasus.miz

Many thanks!

Did the mission again. All the MiGs dead, returned to base, landed, turned on the ground power, set the time acceleration to 20x, sat there on the ground for half an hour of simulated time monitoring the radio and watching the blue forces. Eventually they all stopped moving or doing anything, and I did not get a mission completion message, a radio message about capturing Ubinskaya, or anything else. Still counts as failed and cannot progress. Now that I've played the mission a few more times, another item: the player's missiles in this mission are the rear aspect only AIM-9P missiles, not the all-aspect AIM-9P5s the player has become accustomed to having over the first 15 missions. That's a big change, especially since this is an air to air mission, and it's easy to miss because the mission briefing doesn't highlight it. Unless you read the mission briefing very carefully, it's likely to be a rude surprise when you encounter the MiG-23s and find yourself wondering why the damn missiles aren't getting tone. If giving the player the less effective missiles was intentional, you might want to highlight that in the briefing, something like "Hey, we ran out of the new P5 Sidewinders, so you'll have to be equipped with the older rear-aspect P Sidewinders for this mission."

Mission 16 seems to be having the same problem as Mission 11, where you do everything right and seem to complete all of your objectives, but it still counts as a failure. In my case, the blue side intercepted and shot down all 8 of the red airplanes before they could attack any of the helicopters, but it still counted as a loss. I noticed the blue AH-1s were getting shot down by ground fire from the red ground forces they were attacking. If the mission requires a certain number of the helicopters to survive, then that's likely what's causing the problem. Also, there is way too much going on in this mission and it's causing my (normally okay) framerate to barf. Please consider removing some of the AI units to improve performance.