markom

Oh, I am 100% positive the hardware is centered and I get it not catching *all the time*. I suppose it's time for a track...

I could be wrong (mostly because I never flew real F/A-18, nor read the real manuals), but most autopilots I've flown IRL will not altitude hold if your VS is beyond some value close to 0. In my little time in DCS's F/A-18 this seems to be the case as well. It won't hold for me if my V/S is beyond something close to 1% of the altitude where I am asking it to hold. I usually make sure my plane is stable and trimmed at altitude and only then tell it to hold. Works every time that way. If plane is climbing or descending, about 50% of the time, I'll get AUTO PILOT warning. I am not sure if this is correct behavior or not, auto pilot is not magic. It won't "stabilize" an "unstable" aircraft for you. That's pilot's job.

Can your monitor do 120 Hz?

Correct. Now, keep in mind you are given the "bottom left" coordinate of the grid square, and not a pinpoint location of the target.

Yup. Learned all this literally yesterday, as I was wondering why the f. is my pod looking one hill over from the actual target. Sharing the things we learn is great :-).

Yeah, I watched the video. So, say you have an actual location of AA 12345 67890. This is where object actually is, not given to you by JTAC. JTAC will give you: 12346789 You can enter this into Hornet's WP as a grid in two different ways: - Regular (6 digits): 123 678 - Precise (10 digit): 12340 67890 In the video, you were doing something else. You will, obviously, observe how this doesn't give you a precise location, and how information precision and accuracy at every step is lost, but this is working as intended.

So... this is now where it can get tricky. While I will never claim I am an expert, or even that I know what I am doing half the time... I could swear that I had a situation yesterday where: I had WPDSG selected. TGP (LITENING) was looking there, but this is not what I needed to hit. I slew my TGP to a point where I needed to hit, and castle-switched the pod to AREA. Switching to MAVF, and uncaging, slaved it to the originally WPDSG point, and not the new area where I slew the pod to And no, I do not have a track for this, I am sorry.

Yeah - you are trying to enter an 8-digit grid into a 10-digit field. That is not going to be interpreted the way you want. Look at the post I linked above for why I also found this useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System

I found this post incredibly useful to understand what I needed to do:

Yup, I figured as much! Don't get me wrong - I love the missions and the campaign, but... once a frustration sets in, it's better to treat it all as a game, than stew in being stuck. I decided that my unlicensed equipment supplier was the way to go in those cases. Seriously though, aiming those IR Mavericks is not something I enjoy doing!

Isn't `undesignate` supposed to switch to a different target on Hornet? If you want to undesignate, I believe you need to click the button on the MFD.

It may help here to consider that, from what I understand, F/A-18 doesn't seem to have the concept of SPI, in the same way F-16 does. I still struggle with this :-).

Fair enough :-). Regarding enjoying the campaign. To be honest, not as much, but it's not that I hate it. I'm just not too good at it :-). I needed to cheat a few times (I obtained TGP and AMRAAMs through my outside-the-navy contacts, but don't tell the boss).

Yeah, like I said -- contacting them only and only 20 miles out worked. However, what causes the problem is if someone contacts them earlier. That's a bug. It's OK if they don't respond 80 miles out, but they SHOULD respond 20 miles out. If one contacts them before, they never ever respond after <- bug

Alright. More details, and I think you have a genuine buggy behavior. I played the mission a few more times last night (unrelated: I'm beginning to hate your twisted mind, and can't wait to see the lion). In all cases I was able to contact JTAC and do their bidding. Difference was: When it didn't work, I was way out, 70 or so miles when I made the initial call. After that, no matter what I tried didn't help. I was just stuck flying on my own. Now, I think it's OK that JTAC doesn't respond that far out, but once we get within their range, they should be able to respond. On another note: you say you were at 15000 ft -- mission instructions and ATC call for 10 :-).

Just to add here - similar issue with JTAC in the mission right now. No response on COMM1 133.0. I tried several times and no dice. Easy comms are off, I tried both radios 1 and 2, as well as setting the frequency manually. No response from JTAC. I did bomb all the houses in the area and managed to damage them both 1%... If only I didn't have to like fly 15 minutes again to hit this bug again

In my case it's the exact opposite. When these values are set to 0 (which, SimAppPro resets on every launch), I don't seem to be having a problem. Once they are non-zero, I do have disconnects. Note, though -- I am not suffering from FPS hit as-is, just random disconnects between DCS and SimAppPro -- a different issue. So, I'll respectfully step aside to not hijack this thread :-).

I am not sure these two are related. I recently got combat and takeoff panels, and I am suffering with the sync issue intermittently. I opened a case with WW, but so far not really getting anywhere. I came to this thread to seek hints.

FWIW, I map those two additional positions to "Hornet Ball" and "Ready Pre-contact", because those are the times when I really don't want to fiddle with menus

Thank you all for great advice. Just 5 minutes ago, for the first time, I landed my F/A-18C with more fuel than I had at takeoff. It's amazing how one problem easily transitions into another. I struggled for weeks to just plug in. Today, after I did that for the first time, repeating it was becoming less and less of a problem, but staying plugged in is the challenge. Onto practicing that. My takes: Whoever (sorry, laziness) came up with the idea to use A/P ATTH needs a cold beverage. This is golden advice. Perseverance pays off. I followed another advice from the forum here, and did 10-15 minute exercises, and no more. Today was the day of success. Having a simple dedicated mission that I could just jump into helped a lot. That way those 10-15 minutes are spent on the task at hand and not frivolous setup for it In my case, it's 5000 ft over Las Vegas (which can be loads of fun when it translated to 100 ft AGL, but that aside -- fixing that now) Make sure your tanker(s) have 10-20 miles of straight run, but do have them turn - it will make you better. 20 mile race-track orbit does the trick. Add TACAN to the tanker, just for when you lose it in the sky. If you do, make a nice long loop, give yourself space to set up. Again, thank you all!