Gearbox

Wing loading is the term you're looking for, it's the ratio of weight to lifting surface. The Tomcat is heavy but its lifting surfaces are huge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_loading

Don't overlook RAM. Someone did here did some benchmarks a while back that showed RAM clock speed was worth a few percent on FPS. A few percent doesn't usually matter on a monitor but it can be the difference between falling into ASW or not on VR. I got some fancy DDR4166 for my build for that reason, didn't increase the overall cost too much. I haven't done any benchmarking though.

That's the problem with this hobby, it's made of so many sub-hobbies that eat away your time and money... Computer building Cockpit building Cockpit subassembly creation Software writing Systems integration to make them all work together Forum posting Reading tactics and operations manuals Actually flying the stupid thing

Controllers are usually USB 2.0. I actually had trouble with the microstick on my warthog when I plugged it into a 3.0 port.

I used to use an Xkeys device as an F-16 UFC and some other commonly used buttons. It shows up as a keyboard to the OS and you use their utility to map the buttons to be whichever key or macro you want. Bonus is the the clear keycaps so you can print out nice labels for all the buttons. http://xkeys.com/XkeysKeyboards/index.php

Only drawback of this approach is that now the fuel tank isn't considered an easily expendable item.

What if we just stick the TGP inside the fuel tank? (actually it's an IRST pod)

You have to mount the camera well off-center and this problem is resolved. The clip is still a flimsy POS, I'll give you that.

Just get another one, they aren't super expensive. Do you have screens behind them?

What's the word on multi GPU support for VR? According to nvidia it shouldn't be that hard to implement since DCS is DX11 now (caveat: I am not a software dev) https://developer.nvidia.com/vrworks/graphics/vrsli

Interesting tidbit on that... in the days when it was created (late 70s!) they realized it was more computationally feasible to engineer a weird slab-sided shape to be able to fly than it would be to make something smooth and curvy and aerodynamic to be stealthy. I didn't realize it had no RWR, did some searching real quick to confirm that. Microprose F-19 and F-117 were my into into combat flight sims, in those you had a cool dynamic RWR system that showed your current relative RCS based on flight attitude and plotted the enemy signal strengths on it. While looking for that I found this fun story about the bad cockpit ergonomics:

Correct. In a FBW craft when you pull the stick you aren't even telling the computer to move the elevators x degrees, you're telling it to give me x percent of the currently allowable pitch rate and then the computer moves the elevators to a deflection to produce that rate.

Something similar happened to me, I never got the firmware updated but by using a USB 2.0 port on my motherboard it started communicating again and is still functional. I forget if it was the throttle or stick but I imagine the process is similar.

I always wondered about this since your arm is way stronger moving towards the center of your body than it is moving away. Makes sense that it would have this available.

If your setup makes use of TARGET will it be able to interact with those bases?

Ah, that's probably what mine did and putting the plane into AIM-7 mode made the radar the SOI.

Probably. Before I got a proper seat base I velcro'd my pedals to a big piece of half inch foam core art board and sat my chair on it. Worked great for rudder pedals and driving pedals.

I've only played with it a little but the cursor wouldn't move for me until I hit the select AIM-7 button.

Can TARGET control the Thrustmaster gearshift lever? I had the idea of using it as a landing gear lever and if TARGET can control it, it would be possible to integrate it into your landing gear position logic that's used with the china hat switch.

https://dofreality.com/

You can probably use TARGET to assign the paddles as "if pushed past x%, do this button press" but you'll have to delve into TARGET to figure that out.

Obviously the CIWS is detecting you as an enemy aircraft and dumping 100 20mm rounds on you.

I haven't tried to set up the hornet yet, but I noticed that the slew nipple on my warthog freaked out and didn't work correctly when I had the throttle plugged into a usb 3.0 port on my mobo, had to plug it into a 2.0 port to get it to work.

This thing will let you toggle the meltdown and spectre patches for testing and/or getting max performance when running trusted apps: https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm

I don't think the helmet blocks much if anything. It's been a while since I wore an HGU-55 (At Air Combat USA) but I don't remember it being intrusive. The helmet is designed for flying a fighter plane after all.