Weta43

If, as it says in the manual: "When a helicopter is starting from a “cold” state at the beginning of a mission, it is already connected to external power supply by default. Therefore, there is no need to explicitly request to connect to it." Then if there's a reasonable possibility that an aircraft will have to 'scramble' in a hurry, shouldn't it - wouldn't it - be possible for systems that take a long time to initialise - like the full INU alignment - to have already had this done & be sitting hot running off ground power while the engines are cold ?

Perhaps it's from that early radar receivers use oscilloscopes screens that literally gave you a 'spike' for a radar target: Figure 3: Circular display of German Wurzburg radar; AT marking target ‘blips Figure 2. Screen display of British 1940 ‘Chain Home’ radar, showing four aircraft represented by downward-pointing ‘blips’. The upward-pointing trace is a marker which can be moved along by turning a pointer moving over a scale which shows the target’s range. (Image credit: Plate V, J.G Crowther and R Whiddington, Science at War, London: HMSO, 1947; Crown Copyright now expired) Dreams and Visions: The Development of Military Radar Iconography and User Reaction, 1935-45 – Technology's Stories

Oh, and did I mention that under the nose cover of the Ka-29TB is the same steerable YAKB-12.7mm 4-barrel HMG used on the Mi-24 D/V ?

Been mentioned before, but Ka-29TB - pretty much the same weapons as Ka-50, but a 2 seater with troop transport / cargo capabilities - and more than half a dozen built Could serve (as a variant did) as data-linked C&C for Ka-50's Maybe even

Don't changes to missile FM/guidance/etc. testing always start with Red? Or is my memory playing tricks on me?

Track of the PS's 2017 vintage TV targeted, laser rangefinder equipped AK-176MA 75mm naval gun being out-ranged and sunk by a 1927 vintage mk1 eyeball targeted Type 88 75mm AAA battery with the patrol ship never getting a shot off (The P22160 won't actually fire until 4.5km. The Oliver Perry - with the same sized gun - appears to have the same wildly sub-par range issue) AK-176 shell weight 12.4kg, muzzle velocity 960 m/s Type88 shell weight 6.6kg, muzzle velocity 720 m/s same caliber - no way the Type 88 can out-range the AK-176 project out gunned.trk

The Project 22160 Patrol Ship in game has a maximum engagement range of ~ 6km The vessel in reality is armed with the AK-176 76mm Naval gun which according to a variety of sources has an effective range of 10km and a maximum ballistic range of 15km - 17km No sources cite 6km, some cite significantly greater range than 15km for the AK-176M fitted to the vessels in game.

Oh, I agree, the map's looking very good, but some dev news would stop me feeling like a mushroom.

LOL 8 months now even by your reconning...

Then they did a nice job, because the 'moving camera' casts the shadow of a head on the aircraft as it climbs up & of a body & head once it's on the wing.

Loving the run to the cockpit & climb in feature

Haven't tried it yet but if that works, you're a star

As the title says - a dialogue box at the bottom of the ME that let you enter coordinates then jump to the point would make going to RL places of interest much easier. (For instance to find the Kokari-Sharshari fortified area) Watching the long/lat numbers change as you move the cursor is not a user-friendly approach.

LOL - When I first read that I thought you meant "IRL" & I thought to myself "Should you be telling us you were flying in an Apache 38km inside Afghan territory a few weeks ago ?"

I's a beautiful map - pretty much all I use now. As Tomcatter87 said, there can be times when those beautiful mountain ridges resolve into sharp meshes when you get very close, but that aside, it is a very convincing bit of real estate to fly round in (If only they would finish the North!!!)

It's funny how some people fall obsessively in love with DCS, and then something that was there all along becomes too much for them to bear and causes them to cast it aside - and they become like those people who've divorced their partner, but the anger still dominates their consciousness. They can't let go, and instead their energy goes into persuading everyone they can that their one-time love is the cause of all the ills in the world.

That's a bit unfair - You've never read that it's implemented, and only ever seen it in that one video where it has "EXPERIMENTAL" written across the screen every second it's in view - I would read that without ambiguity as its' experimental and not a standard feature... When you next hear Wags saying "what's that Eurofighter doing there", that doesn't mean the Eurofighter is already in game....

Comms E.D. ? Once again a month passes with no communication regarding how (- or if) work is progressing on the N Afg. module that some of paid for on the back of an E.D. provided ETA of late 2024. No screenshots, not even a single line saying 'we haven't taken all resources away from this map to concentrate efforts on more popular & better selling maps' - or for that matter to say 'we have but will come back to it.' I realise that E.D. probably had to spend more on the map than they expected (the re-work was very well done & it's the map I use the most), perhaps sales weren't as robust as they expected, and E.D> have to maintain a positive cashflow - so maybe downsizing the team &/or delays are understandable - but Northern Afghanistan hasn't been delivered 15 months after we paid for it and nearly a year the ETA we were given when we bought for it. It's not a case of a module having being delivered in a useable state but still in EA because it's still missing a few features, North Afghanistan simply hasn't been delivered. What was the last feature added internally ?

The point wasn't that the US doesn't or can't use GCI, it's that US planes were designed to be able to operate autonomously WRT target aquisition in the first instance, and could be supported by GCI if available, whereas Soviet aircraft were designed to not work autonomously, but instead be the sharp end of an integrated system starting with EWR systems. it comes back to the force projection / home defense doctrinal approach mentioned above. If the purpose of an aircraft is to fly deep behind enemy lines to attack the enemy at its heart, then the aircraft has to be able to find and prioritise targets itself - if it's in a position where it can be supported by other assets (AWAC / GCI), then of course you do that. Why would you not? (& as you said, if you're tasked with a mission by a central command, that's what you do, not head off at your own whim) Flying deep into enemy territory was never the intended mission of the MiG-29. Think about how short its legs are. It really is just there to quickly get missiles to where the GCI intends them to be - which is why there are better radar scan rasters available to GCI operators on the '29's radar than to the pilot themselves...

Like cold starts ?

Personally, I think it's a great idea. If I were doing a cold start or hot from ramp I'd rather walk up to the aircraft than just appear in the cockpit (I might assume someone else had already checked the airworthiness though). We have amazing airbases / terrain getting dropped near / walking to the aircraft has to be more immersive. (I imagine it would go down pretty well on the carrier ops) OK - feedback - I do. Maybe a poll would be a good idea (headed with a slightly longer video?).

No comments on the FP pilot entering the aircraft in the MiG-29 EA release video from 1:49 ?

I haven't bought it yet, but it seems your guess might have been wrong ?

Not in the USAF sense anyway - US aircraft are designed to operate independent of GCI because they were designed to be able to penetrate the airspace of other countries. To do that they had to be able to act autonomously. Soviet expectations at the time the Su-27 & MiG-29 were designed was that combat would be in Soviet airspace repelling invaders, so they were designed to be integrated into the existing well developed static EWR / ground-based GCI systems. (Same reason the USSR didn't really have carriers - their military was designed to operate in the immediate region of their homeland [GLONASS originally only covered the USSR & a small amount of territory around it], principally in a defensive mode, while the US military has always been intended for force projection) The problem we've always had in DCS is that the radars of the RedFor aircraft modelled were designed to be supported by GCI, but the GCI has never been properly modelled - so ReFor has always fighting with its hands tied behind its back. It's a huge 'nerfing' of RedFor aircraft, almost as if ED had said there'll be no active seekers modelled in game, but in this case no-one complained because no-one in the audience knew how active seekers were designed to be used. Post Soviet Union the doctrine changed, and modern Russian aircraft are intended to be more autonomous (at least in part because GCI is in this day and age much more vulnerable), but we don't have those aircraft modelled.

...But for a given size monitor scale is simply a function of FoV and magnification & is the principal determinant of whether something reaches the minimum resolution angle of the eye / covers a pixel. If something doesn't do both those things, then you won't see it without a spotting aid. If you can't see it without a spotting aide when in real life you would be able too, then a spotting aid is functionally more realistic than not having a spotting aid - even if it looks more gamey &/or feels like a cheat I play on a vertical orientation 32" screen at 2160x3840 - it provides both a realistic (vertical) field of view and a realistic scale for observed objects (both of which make it quite immersive). but it sacrifices horizontal FOV to achieve that & still doesn't have the spotting resolution your eyes do. Both those first things make the sim more immersive (look ahead of yourself now - we are more aware of the vertical slice of the world in front of us than the equivalent in horizontal degrees (presumably so we are aware of what we might trip over or bang our head on.) Regarding the second though - The desire to have realistic FOV + realistic scale of objects in view + realistic acuity (spotting ability) without additional zoom or spotting aids is - in my opinion - a fantasy until we have screens that have a similar pixel per degree to the human eye and present a similar total degrees of vision spanned. (So ~95 pixel per degree1 for 210° x 150°- or a 19,950-pixels x 14,250 pixels screen that's big enough to be set at a distance where the pixels subtend 1/95th of a degree while still being at a distance at which it is able to be focused on. That might be quite small physically for something like a VR headset, but for a 2D panel it's going to be a big-ars3d screen. (of course, with eye tracking, the whole image doesn't need to be at that level of detail - most of it wouldn't even need to be rendered in colour, but it all needs to be able to display that resolution everywhere.) Below that resolution & FoV coverage, everything is compromise & what the 'best' compromise is - is monitor + viewer dependent, & in the end just personal preference. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 1 Resolution limit of the eye: how many pixels can we see?