ASAP

The CBU-97 is more accurate with a CCIP drop because it doesn't have the WCMD tailkits helping it steer to the desired point of function (at least in real life). In game I think you can get "good enough" with CCRP but you could still be more accurate with CCIP and I like to do it because I think its more realistic. Also if you ripple 2 you'll get much better target effects because of higher bomblet density (but that's beside the point). The trick with these like Yurgon said is that because they have so much more drag and the weapon functions above the ground the CCIP solution will be closer to the bottom of the HUD, and you might have to drop it consent to release. That means when you roll out on final you will have a much higher aim off angle and a further aim off distance from the target. That requires you to adjust your base parameters from where you would normally want to roll in with dumb bombs. I find that adjusting your base position in like a half mile closer to the target before rolling in helps alleviate a lot of those problems and helps keep the dive angle reasonable.

5 miles is actually a very long shot for a maverick IRL... try pushing it in to more like 2-3nm and see what you can get

One potato, two potato. Then look over your shoulder. There is a bobweight on the speed brake, when the stick is neutral the bobweight will be half way between the top of the speed brake and the wing. That is the no kidding 40% position (or close enough). In reality the 1 potato 2 potato method is pretty much good enough

Or you could just save yourself a bunch of time and just use your right index finger to toggle the weapons mode to CCRP and use your pinky to turn the laser on.

Pile on to my previous post >> That's why fighter pilots don't fly alone. You have a wingman/flight lead for a reason. If your jet is broken somehow you can let the good jet navigate and the bad jet can stay on their wing to follow him home. You can even do the entire penetration, approach, and landing in fingertip if weather sucks.

The A-10 cant use a VOR at all. VORTACS yes. You can get vectors to intercept an ILS approach course without needing a TACAN. As long as you have a functioning radio you can get vectors to get to the airfield. As far as the approach, hopefully there is a close enough airport that can do a PAR or an ASR approach. Basically the radar operator talks you down through the weather. They are not very common in the states though. I think Europe still uses them a lot. In reality these are all things the military would think about before sending an A-10 into harms way, and they'd make sure there are available navaids to get you home.

It would be sweet if the gun gas actually builds up on the windscreen too. They'd have to model the window wash feature to go along with it.

LOL I had a similar experience doing my GA training. Like most things, fighters do it different than most. Sure, when doing an approach down to mins through the weather they stay on glidepath and aim for the aimpoint as well. During the day-time VFR conditions all that gets you is 1000 feet less runway to stop in. In UPT if your wheels are not on the ground by the time you pass over the captains bars, it's time to go around. They are graded on their ability to land in the first 1000 feet of the runway. I found a few cool videos that illustrate what I'm talking about if you're a nerd like me and like watching that kind of thing. (None of this is intended to throw spears at SmilingBandit. He absolutley correct about backing up straight in approaches with the ILS. I'm diverging into irrelevant but cool military flight-isms at this point.) Here's a good video of a T-38 doing an overhead pattern you can see his aim point on final at the 1 min 45 sec mark. The second video is how they do it in T-6's at UPT. Its a video of a guy doing a visual straight in and the landing is around 4 min 45 sec. Best of my knowledge there's not an ILS at Kegelmen aux field in Oklahoma. At UPT bases though they are also starting their the straight in at 500 A because they are staying beneath the overhead pattern at 1000, so they are also probably too low to get much use out of the glide slope anyway.

Yup totally agree, at night especially I always back up the visual with the ILS. During the day, maybe, maybe not, the ILS guides you on a 3 degree glide path to the captains bars on the runway which is long of where fighters are normally going to land. Fighters typically aim for the runway threshold on final and flare to touch down short of the captains bars when they are flying in visual conditions which would give you slightly below glideslope indications and three red one white on the PAPI. In real life, you'd get the ATIS and be talking to approach and tower and it would be abundantly clear what the runway in use would be and if any of the navaids are not working/turned on there would be a notam for it, and it would probably be mentioned in the ATIS. Even if the winds favor the opposite direction, I'd still expect the ILS to be operating for a given runway unless it's notam'd out. Fighters occasionally do have to make landings opposite the normal traffic flow for abnormal situations like hung ordinance. All I meant was that the pilot having to guess what approach to use based on winds and what navaids are turned off and on in calm wind situations is purely a game-ism from DCS.

I had the same issue. I flipped the switch out of man reversion and back to man reversion and the crew chief woke up and started going again

Yeah, I didn't think about the system just being turned off, but that would certainly do it too. As a pilot, unless the ILS is NOTAM'd down or out of service my assumption is that it would be on, even in perfect blue sky/calm wind conditions.

Sounds like the ILS freq is either wrong, or not working correctly. You can have TACAN and ILS selected at the same time. In fact its required for a lot of approaches. Having TACAN selected gets you the DME and having ILS selected gives you the needles to fly. What you described sounds like the ILS was not getting any signal which is why it was showing the red flags. When you deselected the ILSe, the steering bar that came back was for the TACAN. Double check frequencies, that the ILS receiver was powered on, and that you were in range. I wanna say the range is like 18 nm for the localizer and something closer to 10 nm for the glide slope. If that was all correct it's probably a game/frequency issue.

Tip: Before doing all that, create a mark, make last mark SPI with TMS RIGHT LONG and then when it jumps off you can china hat forward long to quickly recage it on the last target. Its a good habit even if they do fix the bug. I know I've accidently bumped the slew switch a lot. Even when the sensors are working perfectly I screw myself up.

Probably the best improvement from a user interface standpoint is the ability to change frequencies using the UFCP. If you want to change your front randio to the frequency 228.5 for instance instead of messing around with all the little nobs on the radio control nugget you can just punch 2285 on the UFCP followed by the COM1 button. It will also display on the HUD what your front and aft frequencies. Same for preset frequencies, push 4 followed by COM1/COM2 to got to preset 4 on the front/aft radio. For a FM freq you'd put in 0514 to go to 51.4 MHz.

Quick rant on that... I've seen this a couple of times, and I'm curious if anyone actually does this. It always sounds like people spitballing possible uses for IFFCC SPI, and saying how it might be useful. It just seems really far fetched to me. Does it work? I would argue this technique is massively putting the cart before the horse. While flying down final the pilots attention should looking outside and putting the CCIP pipper on the target. If you can't see your target accurately enough by looking outside to put your pipper on it, you're probably opening fire from too far out, or you should have done better target correlation before rolling in. Even against a tactical sized target like a tank, it should be big enough to just "put the thing on the thing" in the HUD. Staring at your TGP down final seems like a great way to 1) not be able to see/react to things shooting at you, 2) not be able to monitor your parameters like dive angle, asnd airspeed , and 3) blow through abort cue and floor mort yourself. If you are not able to see the target you are strafing (like at night) put the TGP on the thing you want to shoot before you roll in, then roll in and strafe the IR marker, or TGP diamond in the HUD. That way you know the HUD is stable on the target so you have something to aim at. Using IFFCC SPI to "fine tune" your aim sounds more to me like searching for a target down final. If you have time to actually use your TGP slaved to the CCIP pipper to line up a target like that, you either have a super human fast OODA loop, or you are spending waaay to long on final and just asking to be shot. Edit: I could be totally wrong. Use whatever technique works for you. As the old saying goes "if its stupid and it works, it's not stupid". I'm just curious if anyone REALLY does this. If you do and it works great, let me know. Better yet, link a video. I'd love to see it being used effectively in action.

Pretty sure the TDC does move as well when you slave all to SPI. At least it used to, and I'm pretty sure that's what happens in the real jet. Don't know about the HMD, I rarely every make it SOI or designate stuff with it. For someone trying to learn how to do bombing my advice is to chaff off the IFFCC SPI thing. It doesn't do anything that you can't do (at least in my opinion a lot easier) by using the other SPI modes. There's a TON of misconception about what it actually does for you, and I've yet to read anything that makes it uniquely useful. AND talking to the hawg drivers I know, it sounds like it is pretty much never used (one even said he couldn't remember how to get into it, and if he accidently did he'd get out of the second he realized it).

That's normal JDAM behavior/symbology. I can't tell from your question if you don't know how it works, or if you do know how it works and for some reason you're not getting what you expected. I'll try to answer both, sorry if I'm telling you what you already know. Just trying to be helpful. I'm assuming your talking about using GBU-54s since you said you are lasing? The HUD symbology and behavior of the 54 is the same as the 38, the laser just updates the coordinate the JDAM is flying to as the weapon is in flight. For JDAMS you'll get an azimuth steering line but you wont get a carrot that falls down that line as you approach a specific release point like with the GBU-10/12. Instead you get whats called a Launch Acceptability Region (LAR) depicted on the left side of the HUD. It looks like bar along the left side with a little bar inside starting at the bottom, and a range carrot that moves down the left side of those bars. If you are not seeing the LAR on the left side of the HUD, it most likely means you are too low or not pointed well enough at your target for the jet to calculate a good LAR. Try flying higher toward the target, I aim to be above 10K normally, but you can certainly go lower, you'll just have a smaller LAR. the ASL should be centered in your HUD (not between the pitch latters if there's a high wind) to give you best range bomb. Also, the LAR is calculated off of your SPI, so make sure you check that in the bottom left of your HUD. If you are trying to drop on a steer point directly in front of you but you have TGP LOS SPI and your TGP is looking off to the side, the jet wont give you a LAR because it thinks you want to bomb what your TGP is looking at. Unlike GBU-10/12s where there is one optimum release point, you can release the JDAM anytime you are "in LAR" denoted by the where the carrot is in relation to the bars on the left of the HUD. The big bar means you are in range and the bomb will have the energy to make it to the target. The smaller bar at the bottom of the LAR means that the bomb can make it to the target with the dive angle the weapon profile has set in the DSMS. I hope that helps. If I completley missed the mark and didn't answer your question, let me know.

On the topic of learning your weapons step by step, I recommend learning to use the gun first. It's by far the most flexible option and has the lowest learning curve. Using it will also teach you the handling characteristics of the jet. Once you get comfortable rolling in on targets with the gun, it will be easier to translate that to CCIP dive bombing.

Thats realistic. In the real jet boresights are not perfect, although in DCS you can get away with it pretty often. Slave all to SPI gets you close but not 100% of the way there. You'd still have to slew the maverick onto the target to get it to lock on independent of the TGP.

When lasing to get coordinates aim at the base of the target not the top to minimize elevation errors. Also its always preferable for a bomb to fall slightly short rather than slightly long because it will throw all its frag in the direction its traveling. Force correlate is a real thing but its to pick an exact spot on a non-tactical sized target, you would still need there to be good contrast to use it though (something like the span of a bridge, or a specific window on a building). Like Yurgon said its not a long range sniper shot, it's just a different method of locking up a target. Once you use your TGP slave all to spi magic to get the maverick pointed at the target you still have to manually make sure the maverick is locked onto the target, don't assume that it locked onto the same thing your TGP is looking because it often isn't.

Like Paganus said, its tough to help with limited info... Here are my thoughts on CCIP/CCRP. CCRP - Remember that in CCRP the jet is always givin you a solution cue to drop on your SPI. You can tell what that is by looking in the bottom left corner of your HUD. It will say Mark, Steerpoint, TGP, or Hook. Tripple check that before you drop because it is easy to mess that one up. Also when you have TGP as SPI your SPI is wherever the TGP is looking in that instant, so if your TGP wonders off the target before you release the weapon, its going to go to the wrong spot - GBU-12s - You can drop these steerpoint, mark, or TGP SPI, but once the bomb is off the jet its going to try and guide on where you are lasing the bomb. What SPI you drop on is important because the bomb has to be able to find the laser energy while its falling, if your intended impact point and the laser aim point are off by too much it wont ever see the laser and fall ballistically. The simplest way is to drop in TGP LOS SPI. Put your TGP on the target and line up the HUD symbology. I start lasing just prior to pickle around the time the solution cue starts falling down the line toward your TVV until I see it impact the target. After dropping the bomb, make an aggressive check 30-45 degrees to the right and then level out and make sure your laser is firing and on the target. Big gotchas with GBU-12s: Laser code on your TGP has to match the bomb or it will ignore your laser (check the GBU-12 in DSMS matches whats on the laser control page). The laser has to be firing, you should see a flashing L on the bottom of your TGP page. Its possible to mask your laser, even if you can still see your target in the TGP. you'll know your masked if you see an M in front of the L and the L stops flashing. -GBU-38s - These are really simple. They are going to go to your SPI once you release them. Either make a mark on your target and drop last mark SPI (TMS RIGHT LONG) or make a mark and turn that into a steerpoint (On the CDU press the line select key next to the #? put the markpoint into your next available mission waypoint). Make sure you are firing the laser when you take your mark, or if you are dropping TGP LOS SPI because it will give you the most accurate coordinates for the weapon to guide too. With TGP LOS SPI the bomb is going to guide to whereever the TGP is pointing the instant you press (and hold) the pickle button down. -GBU-54s drop like GBU-12s with the HUD symbology from GBU-38s. If you don't lase them they are the exact same as a 38. CCIP - This is where skill comes into play. In real life weapons officers and some really smart people do a bunch of weaponeering to figure exactly what dive angle, airspeed, weapon time of fall and altitude you want to be at when you release the bombs to get the right weapons effects. Then they go and do a bunch of trigonometry to figure out how high above the target, and how far away from the target you need to be before you roll in and point your nose at the ground in order to put you on the correct "wire." This then gets turned into weapons profiles and pilots practice very specific diving deliveries (45 High Altitude Dive Bomb, 30 Dive Bomb, Etc...). If it seems way to hard in DCS, its because we don't have any of those smart people to help us out. As a general rule of thumb, when you roll in make sure you point your TVV long of the target, place the target on the green line coming up from your pipper, and hit the pickle button as the pipper passes through the base of your target. I find a good dive angle is somewhere between 30-45 degrees. Play around with different altitudes and distances from the target to roll in at. I try and drive to a point 90 degrees off of where I want to roll in (heading north for a west roll in). Just before the target is directly to my west in this case, I roll and pull my TVV long of the target. Then I line up the line like I said above. With guns its easier because you can just point your gun cross straight at the target get to within about a mile and a half and open fire. Hope that helps a little. If you have more specific questions I might be able to help

Correct in DCS. AFAIK its not realistic to the jet. Im pretty sure there can only be one hook in the real jet and it's shared between both systems (i.e. you hook something on the TAD your HMCS will show a yellow line to get your head pointed at it, hook it with your HMCS its also hooked on the TAD)

The video shown with the big ship was of a "Red carpet" sim sortie. Thats what they set up for friends/family/non-pilot guests who want to try flying the hawg. It's a pre-built sortie with nothing classified and targets that even someone who's never touched an airplane can find and shoot.

It only goes over the right eye, there is no left eye option in real life.

I know this is an old post but I'm curious how you were handling the aircraft when it happened. In the real aircraft If you are pulling hard on the stick and getting the chopped tone above certain airspeeds, especially if you are yawing the jet its possible you could have been in the engine distrubance envelope. That could lead to compressor stalls/fires/flameouts. I have no idea if that's simulated realistically or not. It would be really cool if it is.