NoJoe

Lonecrow, I have an X52 also, and I've used the pinkie button on the stick as a modifier. For example: - POV hat is POV; with the pinkie switch it's Trim. - The "Castle" hat on the stick is TMS, or DMS with the pinkie. - Throttle slew hat is slew; with the pinkie it's the Coolie Hat. And so on and so forth. I have a picture of the stick/throttle with the functions labelled. If you'd like I can post it here when I get home from work (:music_whistling: I'm on my break right now). It might give you some inspiration on how to efficiently set up your own HOTAS. --NoJoe

I agree. Take the game Arma, for example. It's got a good sound for the AK-47, but have you ever fired an AK (or any gun) in real life without earplugs? They are LOUD!! I'm certainly glad Arma doesn't simulate that particular piece of reality... On the other hand, I also agree that the A-10 gun in DCS sounds very strange. Like Aphelion said, it's like some old 80's electronic arcade sound. Like an 8-bit siren. --NoJoe

Heh, okay, you are right that a compressor stall "engine stall" is actually an aerodynamic stall of the compressor blades inside the engine, etc. etc. But you see my point about it being a misnomer. :P --NoJoe

Just to clear things up, maybe a bit: An engine stall and an aerodynamic stall are very different things that have nothing in common. An engine stall due to gas ingestion is like a "stall" in your car: it's when the engine stops working. In this case, it is due to the gas and gunpowder mixture from the gun being sucked into the engine instead of the normal oxygen-rich air. When that happens, the engine may flame out (literally, the flame inside stops burning). Thus the engine stops producing thrust. An aerodynamic stall is completely different, and is simply the loss of lift that occurs when the airflow over a wing is at too high of an angle relative to the wing. The air can't "make the turn" over the wing, so the airflow stops flowing smoothly over the wing, which destroys the wing's ability to create lift. So the wing loses lift, and the plane is said to have "stalled". You'd most likely encounter this if you get the A-10 too slow (due to the recoil of the gun, but that's a myth, as mentioned before), and pull back too much on the stick. Eventually the nose will drop suddenly, and usually one wing drops too. This is an aerodynamic stall. tl;dr: Engine stalls and aerodynamic stalls are different things. :D Thanks, back to the debate! :smilewink: --NoJoe

As far as I know the JTACs only give one point at a time. Usually this point is marked visually somehow (smoke, laser, IR pointer, etc.), but if the JTAC is getting their info from a Predator or other observer they will give a position in UTM coordinates. But I don't think they would give a whole flight plan or multiple points at once. All that is for the sim; I have no idea what is possible in the real A-10C. Like you said, the avionics are impressive! :) Hope this helps some. :( --NoJoe

You're welcome, and thanks! It's always really fun to apply my job to bombing simulated things, and not just to goin' places. :D And yes, the "short-manual-eng.pdf" in the Docs folder of your A-10 install is very useful! It should have come with the beta. --NoJoe

If you can stomach it, you might try reading clear through the manual once before you dive in and try flying. That's what I did. It took me about a week, but it was great to have things feel familiar to me once I got into the cockpit! :pilotfly: As you read the manual, right down all the acronyms; you'll need to know these! I'm a civilian flight instructor in the real world, and if I were training you in the A-10 I'd have you start small: 1. First, sit in the cockpit with the power off and just look around. Learn where the electrical panel is, the fuel panel, the radios, the CDU, the MFDs, the UFC, and all the other acronyms. :smilewink: Just sit and take it in. If you've done a read-through of the manual things should look familiar when you take a close look at them. 2. Learn the CDU and MFDs by sitting in the cockpit, turn on the battery, inverter and AC Gens (left and right). Start up the APU, then turn on the APU Gen. Now you can turn on the CDU and the MFDs (CICU switch) and click through the pages, set up waypoints, etc. etc. Go through each and every MFD page with the help of manual. Do the same with the CDU (and note that you can mirror the CDU onto the right MFD). Learn to use the UFC with the CDU. 3. Once you feel comfortable with all the MFD pages and the CDU, now you're ready to try flying the airplane. You can't do combat effectively without knowing how to work the avionics, and if you're like me you won't be able to make yourself sit down to learn them once you start flying and shooting stuff! :D So learn it now while you have the self control. :P When you get to flying the plane, I'd learn the startup and shutdown procedure first. Print off the checklists. Just start the plane up, get everything going, then pull out your shutdown checklist and shut it all back off again! Your next series of flights should build on what you learn previously. Do each flight as a ramp start, and finish it by properly shutting down the plane on the ramp again. 1. Learn to take off, climb up, and just fly the plane for a while. Do turns, climbs, descents, maybe a stall or two to get the feel of it. Then go back and land. 2. Practice taking off, flying the pattern, and landing again. Over and over. :D 3. Load up your plane with fuel tanks and travel pods and do the same takeoff and landing practice with a heavy airplane. 4. Now do the same thing with a bit of wind, then with some crosswind! 5. Go out and practice running through some of the emergency procedures. Do it over and over until you can practically do it in your sleep! 6. Set up a bunch of waypoints and go practice navigation out and back to the airport. (be sure to refresh your memory with the manual first). 7. Set up a cross-country flight from one airport to another that's somewhat far away. A couple times. 8. Set up an in-flight refuelling mission to practice that. 9. Now do one of each of the above at night.. 10. Now you're ready to start playing with the weapons, one at a time... :P Of course, most people aren't going to go through all that... But that's my recomendation to you as a flight instructor. :thumbup: (and yes, I flew this sim for a month before I ever dropped a single bomb or fired a single bullet) :D --NoJoe

Yeah, I get that too. Try approaching from each of the cardinal directions (North, South, East, then West) and see that the markpoint is always created on the same side, regardless of which direction you approached. Other people have mentioned this too, so hopefully it's a known bug? (or undocumented feature :P ) --NoJoe

Left Control, F16 (is that Pause? I have a Mac keyboard. :P ) --NoJoe

He's not saying JTAC will never be included in MP. Just that it isn't in there yet. Remember this is a beta, so not all the features have been implemented yet. We all hope it will be! :thumbup: --NoJoe

That's true: notoriously difficult to diagnose. But not impossible. I got to do an altitude chamber trip down to Peterson AFB in Colorado Springs a couple years ago and experience a pressure altitude of 25,000 MSL. It was essentially a pretty fast decompression. We were given little sheets to work on that had things like simple math problems, word puzzles, and the like. Most of us were able to recognize our personal symptoms and then put the oxygen mask back on. I lasted around 4 minutes before I realized I couldn't subtract 5 from 7 and figured I'd better put that mask on and turn on the O2! (interestingly, we were using the exact same panel that's in the A-10) :D There were several people, though, who got to the point of no return (past the "Time of Useful Consciousness") before they could recognize and react to the hypoxia. One of them (our teacher, nonetheless! ) was unable to even follow the direct instructions to put his mask on, and had to be helped. That was pretty interesting! So yes, while it is difficult to recognize the symptoms (especially if you're not expecting it, and history backs that up with multiple crashes), it's not impossible, and probably not as hard as most would expect. It certainly helps that I now know my own personal symptoms, and can recognize them early. And for what it's worth I'm a civilian flight instructor, flying mostly single engine non-pressurized Cessnas and the like. --NoJoe

You might be better off using Bootcamp (or just a separate partition) and installing Windows on that. I'm running a 2nd gen Mac Pro with Windows 7 on it, and DCS A-10C works just fine! When I want to switch operating systems I just hold down Option on startup, and choose either Windows or Mac from there (this is dual booting). The other issue may be hardware in your iMac. Depending on the built-in video card/device you may have some performance problems. I've stuck a PC NVidia 9800GTX in here (512 MB VRAM), and it starts to have performance issues if I turn the settings up. But, try using Bootcamp to install Windows 7 on a separate partition if you've got the hard drive space to spare. That's probably the best and most compatible way to do this. --NoJoe

At first I thought you were saying you were flying the A-10 in Blackshark.. I thought "But... how? They released a patch already??" I get it now. :doh: I really really want to get one of the TM Warthog joysticks! I'm using an X52 Pro right now, but it feels kinda ... cheap. The axes are getting noisy, the stick itself is getting loose, so it doesn't center well any more. And I've only had it for a few months!! Yep, I really want to get that Warthog stick! --NoJoe

Tony, it sounds like you've got it sorted out. :) But just in case, here's for anyone else who is still confused: I think the confusion is that the manual calls it one way, while the ingame control settings call it another way. The manual refers to "TMS Forward" and "TMS Aft" (page 85). The In-game controls refer to "HOTAS TMS Up" and "HOTAS TMS Down". Pressing the button assigned to "HOTAS TMS Up" does the "TMS Forward" command from the manual. Pressing the button assigned to "HOTAS TMS Down" does the "TMS Aft" command from the manual. (Up/Forward, and Down/Aft) I hope that clears it up a bit. :thumbup: --NoJoe

For the TMS: Forward is Up Aft is Down You're correct in regards to the short/long (I think I remember a Long press to be 1/2 second, but I have no reference for that). --NoJoe

It's "HOTAS Left Throttle Button", or Q by default. I had the same problem as you, and got tired of trying to look down and hit that little button while flying! :) --NoJoe EDIT: Wow, double sniped! :O

I've been doing fine running on Medium settings, getting around 30-40 fps. My set up is: 2x 2.66GHz Xeon (4 cores, total) 4 GB of slow ECC RAM. 9800 GTX w/ 512 MB of VRAM Windows 7 64 bit ... other things too... The main bottleneck I've noticed is my videocard. The sim is very stuttery and gets around 20-25 fps with the Textures on High. If I turn Textures down to Medium it runs very well! My conclusion: I'm probably running out of VRAM. I experience similar things in FSX and X-Plane if I try to max out the texture settings. :music_whistling: So while CPU is very important for a sim like this, so is the GPU and GPU VRAM! --NoJoe Also... Wow, this sim is awesome!