Tomsk

It seems there's quite a bit of work needs to be done by ED to calibrate pipers for different munitions. For example it's well documented that lofted Mk82s will go long, Mk84s will fall short, and on hot days bombs go long, and on cold days they fall short.

Yes the flight path marker, it does also get called the meatball. This is of course in contrast to "the ball", which to my knowledge does not get called a "meatball". This may work on a screen, but I fly in VR and it's not really possible to see the ball clearly enough for that. In the end I guess people needs to find what works for them :)

There are several reasons you might have trouble with Mavericks. Did you warm your mavericks up first? Otherwise you will get TIMING and a countdown in the top left until they wake up. Did you use the castle switch to move the diamond into the Maverick sensor? Easy to forget to do and if so you can move the TDC all day long and nothing will happen. Sadly this is a really non-obvious state in the Hornet, unlike the F-16 or A-10C where the 'NOT SOI' over the display makes it pretty obvious what is happening. The cage/uncage mechanic can be a little counter intuitive. When the maverick is CAGED (as shown in the top-right of the maverick display) the maverick triangle will stay stuck pointing near the nose of the jet. If you try to slew it when it is caged, nothing will happen. You first need to UNCAGE the maverick (using the cage/uncage HOTAS button) and then you might be able to slew it around. Just to add to the confusion, it seems that in some situations the maverick will UNCAGE itself, which can lead to the seeker head pointing nowhere near where you want. I've found that generally the best procedure is to keep it CAGED until the nose of the jet is near the target, then I UNCAGE and slew. If you have have a waypoint designated (using WPDSG on the HSI) then the maverick triangle will stay pointing at the designator diamond when UNCAGED, and you will be unable to slew it around. When CAGED it will of course point near the nose of the jet. In order to slew away from the designated waypoint you'll need to undesignate the waypoint (with the NWS/Undesignate button). To actually do the slew you need to hold down the TDC depress whilst you are slewing. This is the same button you use to lock radar contacts. If you don't hold TDC depress the seeker won't slew anywhere. Additionally I have found the maverick slew does not work properly with the Warthog Throttle TDC nipple: it will only slew along the diagonals. The TDC cursor does work properly in other contexts (Radar and HUD slew) and so this is presumably a bug. Using a 4 way hat for the slew does work okay. Lastly even once you've got it to slew the seeker okay it can be fiddly to get the maverick to actually lock. You need to be close enough and you need to have a good contrast. This is probably not a bug and is likely simulating something close to real maverick behaviour. It's complicated enough that I actually have a little checklist that I run through in my head before using mavericks. I find the BARO autopilot is extremely finicky. You have to get the plane absolutely level before engaging it, and even then you might have to jiggle the FPM above and below the horizon a few times to get it to stick. Otherwise it can get itself stuck in this weird mode where it is sort of doing a BARO hold .. except it will continuously lose or gain altitude. I think it is fair to say that it is buggy.

I find AAR is actually a lot like maintaining a hover in a helicopter. After you've practiced it enough, you can do it without thinking: the correct movement just happens. Carrier landings, however, require a lot of concentration.

It is insanely hard, far harder than AAR or hovering in a helicopter, but a few things that have helped me: You can set the trim so the plane will hold the appropriate AoA, which means you only really need to worry about power: AoA will then take care of itself. After you've done the break and lowered gear and flaps I've found you need to trim a few clicks "nose up" to get it trimmed right for AoA. You can tell it's right when the meatball wants to sit in the middle of the bracket. Then it's just a case of power for altitude, pitch (and hence trim) for speed (AoA). For big corrections I sometimes anticipate what the throttle is doing with the pitch, but only very gently, the throttle needs to do most of the work. I've found constantly moving the power back and forth, also known as "rocking the throttle" makes it much easier not to over correct. I try to keep up a "back, forth, back, forth" throttle motion all the time. If I want to go lower I do a bigger "back", if I want to go higher I do a bigger "forth", but I keep the rocking going. When rolling out of the turn into the grove, the plane will suddenly need less power because it doesn't need to turn anymore. You need to anticipate this by dropping the throttle as you level out or your final approach will be all over the place. You need to come out way more to the right of the carrier than you would expect. The line-up is actually quite a tricky thing to get right. I've found using the ILS can help significantly with getting the right line-up. The common advice given is not to "spot the deck", which is where you put the meat ball on a specific place on the deck, but instead "just fly the ball". However, I have honestly not had much luck with following that approach too religiously, even after many many attempts. The ball only tells you if you are too high, it doesn't tell you if you are getting higher or lower. As a result I found just flying the ball I had a lot of approaches that were absolutely perfect on the ball, until the very last second where they suddenly went too high or too low far faster than I could correct for, generally resulting in a bolter. Instead I've found it useful to use a certain amount of "deck spotting". The approach I use is to very much fly the ball, however, I can tell whether I am rising or falling by looking at where the meatball is on the deck. If it above the crotch of the ship you are rising, if it is below you are falling. You can also tell how quickly you are rising or falling. I've found trying to land reliably without this information is very difficult, perhaps in real life you can feel it "in the seat of your pants", but in a simulator there seems to be no other way to know if you are rising or falling reliably.

A little feedback on the Hornet over Persian Gulf: First of all love the campaign overall, really nice to get to fly the hornet on a carrier in the gulf map, totally awesome. The only complaint I have is that Iran doesn't seem to put up much of a fight, especially in terms of aircraft. Pretty much every strike mission goes totally unopposed, even those that are directly over the Iranian airbases. I've checked the 'oob_air.lua' in the 'Status' folder, and they've hardly lost any aircraft, so they have tonnes left, they just don't seem to be launching any of them. I remember it was very different in the Desert Mirage 86 campaign (which I also loved), as there you were being constantly scrambled on. If there is some setting I can change somewhere to make the AI schedule more intercepts and CAPs and such like, I'm happy to change it myself.

Same problem: using the TDC axes assigned to the TM Warthog Throttle nipple I can only slew the Maverick along the diagonals (up+left, up+right, down+left, down+right) and not directly up, down, left or right. Slew works properly in other screens (radar, hud etc.)

I don't have that, but I do have a script that does the same thing (improves the FPS). https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=3525106&postcount=753 Also working on porting the M2K over Hormuz to the F/A-18C, for those interested in that.

Ohh awesome!! I'll mod it to work with F/A-18C instead of Mirage as well. I'll also plug my pruning script again, works just fine with this campaign and greatly helps with the FPS problems: https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=3525106&postcount=753 EDIT: OMG those F-14s are lethal with those AIM-54s!

Oh awesome, I will raise a ticket with them :)

No I didn't bind mine, I just bough it and immediately gave the key to someone else. They couldn't activate it. As far I can tell the information on this forum post is wrong, you cannot gift keys. CORRECTION: So it seems you just have to raise a ticket with ED and they will do it ...

So I just bought the helicopter pack and tried to gift the key to someone and it wouldn't let the person I gave it to activate it. I could send him the key, but his DCS told him the key was bound to me and that he couldn't use it. I definitely did not activate the key anywhere, I'm guessing it was just bound to me because I had bought it. I would suggest people do not buy the helicopter pack if they were expecting to share some of the keys with others, looks like it's not possible.

This is my question also. I have the Huey and Ka-50, I'd like to pickup the Gazelle and Mi-8. So can I gift the extra keys for the Huey and Ka-50 to people in my squad, or will the keys end up locked to my account and go to waste?

So I made a mod for the MBot campaigns that fixed this issue for me, it works by automatically pruning the missions to temporarily remove units you are very unlikely to encounter given the mission flight plan. https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=3525106&postcount=753 Personally this took me from an unplayable (in VR) framerate of <20 FPS up to a solid 45.

Yes another MS FFB2 user here, I'm sort of hoping that it should just fall out of the flight model as I'm guessing they'd be modelling stick forces anyway. Although using the MS FFB with a jet is always a trade-off ... love the FFB, but just doesn't have enough buttons.

As I understand it ALCS wasn't used that much by real pilots. ALCS doesn't always work, and landing on a carrier is a skill that needs constant practice to stay sharp.

This is because the script override isn’t installed properly (as described in the README). It needs to be re-applied after every DCS update as well.

^^^ you can also just use SkipMission.bat if you are mid-campaign.

Hello, Is there a way to change the size of the NVG Oval in VR, so that you can still read the instruments? I was using Frenchy's mod for the NVGs for this, however, this mod seems to have stopped working and I was wondering if there was a new option for this? Thanks Tomsk

Also +1, the capability to plan multiplayer missions collaboratively would be a huge win for DCS.

So I finally got time to implement a proper parking assignment system, it's working well for me, no more explosions. Parking assignment by itself seems to do nothing for the framerate, however the 'pruning' script I mentioned earlier does improve things dramatically. Here's the file you'll need, it includes both fixes (parking & pruning): https://drive.google.com/file/d/12bRwzZ0mBztqAgqH1mEf9-x4fvlU6gkY/view?usp=sharing And the description from the README inside:

So I finally got time to implement a proper parking assignment system, it's working well for me, no more explosions. Parking assignment by itself seems to do nothing for the framerate, however the 'pruning' script I mentioned earlier does improve things dramatically. Here's the file you'll need, it includes both fixes (parking & pruning): https://drive.google.com/file/d/12bRwzZ0mBztqAgqH1mEf9-x4fvlU6gkY/view?usp=sharing And here is the description from the README:

Personally I shaved the corner off the insert of my TM Warthog throttle. That way you can feel the stop at full mil, but then "push through" into afterburner.

The less effort way that I used was to just move the player plane into a known slot, but ignore all the others. Seems it doesn't matter if the AI clips with each other ... doesn't cause any explosions or anything. I sometimes had to have more than one go to find a slot that never got filled, for Kutaisi I seem to remember Slot #15 worked well for me, and was usually near the active runway.

That's a good idea, should be easy to provide a repeatable test case: after all just take one of the MBot generated missions. That said ... I'm not expecting it to get fixed all that quickly. It only affects certain missions, in certain cases, and there is a workaround (edit the mission and place the player plane manually). Classic "low priority" bug. I should get some time on Saturday to have a good look at this. I think placing the units in assigned slots would have other benefits, squadrons could end up together which is pretty useful for coop play.