Chief Instructor

Yes, as long as the other units have the option "link to unit" ticked, and the unit name selected is the Stennis (or whatever you've called it) then the whole lot can be dragged around the ME map with ease. Although less than ideal at the moment, with a bit of practice it's not too difficult to place and align statics on the carrier.

With clouds set at 7/10 for example, after 20 mins of flying around, they all seem to disappear, leading to clear sky. Haven't tested this on other maps, so am I missing something? I recall that previously, with static weather set, the clouds set up in the ME just remain globally for the duration of the mission?

Remember, if you set up the carrier course for your carrier TACAN that the runway on the carrier is offset about 15 degrees nose left, so the carrier course if followed, will never properly align you with the centre line. The arrow and dots in the HUD represent the carrier (or general TACAN) course as entered by you. The dots each side of the velocity vector (small circle with 3 short lines extending from it in your HUD) represent your position in terms of deviation from the chosen course line. I think off the top of my head it's 2 & 4 degrees respectively. So, if the arrow is pointing exactly forward and perfectly in the centre of your VV, you're on the correct course line. Remember that course and heading are not the same thing. Course is the desired track line to the TACAN and your heading is the direction that your aircraft is pointing in. The direction that your aircraft is actually travelling across the ground or sea may vary from the heading if you have a cross-wind component.

A few discussions on this forum seem to suggest that it's a bug causing the loss of wingtip vortices.

Over wing condensation is only produced at very high alpha as it is caused by a very low pressure area over the upper wing surface. You are only likely to achieve high enough alpha at slower speeds with sudden pitch increases. At higher speeds you're likely to reach your G-limit way before you achieve sufficient alpha to trigger the effect...

Interesting question. I played around with the original carrier takeoff mission and managed to get a few additional aircraft on deck and it looked good. However, I noticed pretty quickly that I started getting a lot of crashes/blue screens with that mission. As soon as I removed the additional assets, the crashes stopped. I also noticed very high CPU utilisation with the unstable mission. I suspect that we're just going to have to wait for DCS to develop this in their own time, as "hacking it" may end up causing more problems down the line.

If you position yourself at a cat on the Stennis, with the launch bar retracted, it automatically extends if you press "u" to hook up. Not a problem, but the selector switch in the cockpit remains in the retracted position...

For what it's worth, I had a similar problem last night. I had spent an hour firing off missiles at various unsuspecting transport aircraft before deciding to have a little sport with the locals on the ground in Dubai. After selecting A/G and setting everything else up, I could no longer select any of my A/G weapons on the DDI using the OSB buttons. After a few passes of the "Gushing Oil Derrick" stripper club in downtown Dubai (my intended target) and lots of button mashing, they eventually selected and fired OK. No other system config changes were made during the several attempts - it just started working on its own.

The problem is... even the low resolution we have now is performance limiting for 99% of even top-end PCs. How on earth is our current hardware going to drive even more pixels and remain even vaguely playable or enjoyable?

+1

Is this an early access limitation, or a RL situation?

Using TIR, I've noticed that this banging sound seems to tail off or disappear if I raise my view position higher after it starts - the sound seems to be influenced by the pilot's eye position. Strange but true...

There are quite a few good videos on YT. See these for starters: CI

I'd like to know more about this too. I had my VR rig working really nicely prior to the latest updates but now, as you say, sharpness is degraded and overall picture quality has gone backwards to the point where I simply can't get any kind of sweet spot between clarity and smooth performance. It also seems that we have such limited adjustment options as Nvidia Inspector no longer does anything nor does the Nvidia CP. I know that a lot of people have been complaining about this. I accept the need to move to DS and in 2D it looks really nice. In fact, in 2D I can run everything maxed out and get a silky smooth 60FPS (v/Synced) on all of the maps. VR is horrible though. Stuttery and low frame rates all the way and very little improvement with settings adjustments. I'm so frustrated with it that I've even dusted off my old Track IR and have reverted to 2D flying for the time being... something I swore I'd never do again. :-( I really hope that ED have some love left for VR in future updates.

Are we going to be getting AWLS channels updated for the Persian Gulf?

I couldn't disagree more! Everything about aviation is intrinsically linked to weather, atmosphere and the understanding of it. A flight simulator which models aircraft in great detail is nothing without an accurate or realistic model of the atmosphere. It's like making a racing sim without proper tracks. For DCS to be a truly great simulator experience, I'd like to see more priority being placed on getting the environment modelled more realistically. We already have plenty of pretty scenery, which is nice. We have high fidelity aircraft which is also nice. However, atmospherics, wind, cloud and density are and have always been very lacking which I think is a massive oversight. My concern for the last few years is that the whole package may have been spread too thinly in the pursuit of diversity and a wider appeal. Of course, I'm all in favour of broadening the appeal but not at the expense of authenticity. I expect the need to attract revenue through regular module releases is a strong driving factor which, to some extent may be unavoidable, but despite the excitement of the latest modules and in particular the release of the F-18 and Persian Gulf maps, the whole package feels very much like a growing fortress built on sandy foundations. I look forward to seeing improvements in the future, fingers crossed!

+1 Shadows overall are really letting DCS down at the moment. Both in cockpit and on the ground they are ugly, shimmering and distracting.

+1

Why is there no sale price on the Harrier? Details of the sale say "50% off ALL other modules..." yet the Harrier is full price still.

See my signature. My system is running DCS with VR very well indeed. :-)

Where power-off approaches are perfectly possible, it is not necessarily best practice! Maintenance of an approach power setting during the approach in all aircraft (except gliders) is determined by the level of both form and induced drag in the landing configuration. Maintenance of the correct power setting to over come the drag in turn has a stabilising effect on the aircraft through increased airflow over the wing inboard section, vertical and horizontal stabilisers - always a good thing in an aircraft which is slightly unstable in the lateral sense. Other benefits include engine warming and importantly, engine mass momentum is maintained, meaning power is available much quicker on demand during a go-around or baulked landing. Of course, it's good airmanship to practice simulated power-off landings regularly enough to maintain your proficiency as a pilot, should a real engine failure occur necessitating a forced landing. The best way to practice this is to position yourself over your chosen landing site at approximately 2-3000', then fly a descending turning pattern down to your base leg, (a bit like a wide slow spiral) maintaining a constant sight-line angle (CSA) to your intended touchdown point on the runway. CSA means that as you turn and descend to position for a base leg/final, you are gradually reducing your lateral distance from the touchdown point, and therefore, as you descend, your sight-line down to the touchdown point remains constant (not steeper or shallower) as you descend. Aim to be turning final just outside the boundary at the approach end at about 600' (ish). Don't try to stretch your glide, and make a point of lowering the nose by 10 degrees or so as you turn final to keep your speed constant and to avoid increasing your alpha.

Ah, great catch Kayos! It was just posted shortly after my post :-)

Can anyone confirm if the ability to disable ASW is also gone, either via registry and/or Ctrl_KP1? I am trying both yet ASW seems stuck on for me whatever I do...

Thanks but from what I'm reading on the dev forum, this no longer works? It's difficult to get a definitive opinion on this!

Hi Guys, Has anyone else encountered a problem with the Oculus SDK in the last few days? I can no longer run either 1.11 or 1.12 of the SDK because it returns a message saying "Unable to connect to service, or an HMD isn;t connected". Without the SDK, there seems to be no way of disabling the incredibly annoying ASW. A quick scan of the Oculus developer forums seems to suggest that there was an Oculus home update recently which has prevented the SDK from working. See here: https://forums.oculus.com/developer/discussion/49800/oculus-debug-tool-cant-connect-to-service-hmd/p1 I'm completely fed up with Oculus playing around with this, particularly as they are now forcing us to use ASW. I note that an Oculus Dev has posted in their forum stating that there is no current way of disabling ASW - even by editing the registry. Does anyone here know of a workaround? :mad: