Gearbox

It is actually possible to land an aircraft that has lost all other control inputs this way, though it's not easy and has only been done successfully once: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Baghdad_DHL_attempted_shootdown_incident Another one, the plane broke up on landing but most of the passengers survived. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232

I haven't gotten as far as playing with the radio yet so I don't know if this will work, but the way I used to have my pit set up for Falcon was that my ICP (which was made from an x-keys pro 58-key) numbers were the same as the radio item list numbers. So I'd call up the radio menu and then hit the button on the ICP, whose keystrokes were intercepted when the radio menu was up.

A-10s bagged some Helis in gulf war 1, flying low and slow might make it easier against such a slow moving target. Most likely they were the closest asset at the time though.

That's the one. Little more impressive on a 60' screen though :)

Speaking of which, the IMAX Red Flag movie is worth watching, even though it has some hokey and unnecessary special effects.

You should get rid of vista for plenty of reasons. I don't think OS bits matters for TrackIR. I have Win7 64bit and it runs just fine, but for TrackIR to work I have to run the 32bit DCS exe. Hopefully TrackIR will get their 64bit version together soon so I can use the 64bit exe (main advantage is it can access more RAM)

Can your mobo support crossfire mode? You could get another identical card for $99 and get a good boost in performance. Still if you're buying it for DCS I'd wait till it's out of Beta. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150436&cm_re=4870-_-14-150-436-_-Product

By "they" I meant the current UAVs.

They have a long loiter time but they don't carry that much ordnance.

If nobody is shooting back it could work. Don't they take old B-52s and stuff them to the gills with JDAMs and GBUs?

I used to fly a lot of Falcon 4 AF, and now I'm getting into DCS A-10... so far it seems to me that the avionics and systems in the A-10C are a lot more complicated, and it doesn't even have a radar to deal with. There's a lot more crap on the HOTAS for one, yet I could easily and quickly operate all the F-16 systems on the Cougar HOTAS. It's likely that some of that is caused by DCS modeling the systems with more fidelity, but I don't know. I still need to finish reading the manual and doing the tutorials to boot.