Zimmerdylan

I have been setting up a lot of missions with the A-10 lately. I usually have my flight of 4 planes, and at times I'll have a second group, depending on what kind of air support I need to set up. My question is: I can get my targets acquired via the TGP from many miles away. But it's getting my Mavs to lock at any distance more than 4 to 5 miles away. It's only a real problem if I am trying to take out a SAM or something. But I'm a little miffed because the other 3 AI planes in my group are accurately taking out the same targets from up to 10 miles away. That's great for SAM sights, and it would be great if I could also do this. Is this just another instance of AI having no real limitations, or am I not doing something that I should be doing? I have actually talked to an A-10 pilot about Mavericks and what the advantage of the TGP is to it. And he (and 2 other pilots I know) all say that the TGP doesn't really add range to a Mav. Only early awareness to the pilot. Mavs are actually limited mostly by the battery they carry. It's a very high output battery that doesn't last too long. However, I'm not too sure what the actual range of a Maverick should be. The pilots that I know have all told me that the A10 pilots do their best to just avoid SAM sights altogether. It's a very risky proposition to try and take out a SAM with an A10 and it is to be avoided if at all possible.

Some time ago I flew on the server with these gents. It was a lot of fun. I usually don't dogfight the F86 as it's just silly due it's many shortcomings compared to the Mig. But on this server, it was pretty evened out. Lot of fun!

I personally have been beaten down pretty badly by the 109 at 22,000 ft. I see no difference in the P-51's performance at those altitudes. The only thing that I find about high altitude fighting in the P-51 is that when I bleed my energy, I can just dive to recover a lot of it back. But it still doesn't match the 109 at those altitudes. As far as the climbing to 20,000. I know many people who have just given up on getting the plane there. I have had mixed success with it. I have tried to make videos of it but as we all know, the tracks aren't worth a dime. And Nvidia got rid of shadow play for some ridiculous reason. But I have tried to make side by side vids of the P-51 climbing to 20,000 ft. And in some cases, it would just easily make the climb up with no problems whatsoever. And then I would do it again and the plane would lose speed, power, and struggle to keep from stalling. In each case, I handled the plane exactly the same. I made everything I did as consistent as it could be. My issue is that if the 109 and 190 are not as good as high alt. fighters and the P-51 is, how is it that I can climb either one of the two German planes to 20,000 without ever having to worry about it. I can dilly dally around all the way up, but the P-51 treats you like crap anywhere over 12,000 ft to 20,000 ft. Makes no sense. I also have to look at the AI side of this. If the AI can take full advantage of all of it's resources and use the plane to it's fullest extent. Then this is pretty much solid evidence for the P-51 being underpowered and much less maneuverable than the 109, and 190. If I am fighting the 109 AI, there is no way that I can beat it. I have shot it down maybe 2 times out of the many I have tried (AI). I could chalk that up to my lousy piloting skills but it's hard to do that when I get into a 109 and endlessly shoot down P-51 AI's. If the P-51 is using it's max ability in AI, and I am not really good enough to get the max out of the 109 (and I am not because I'm not the computer) then the P-51 should at least give me a better fight than it does. In many cases it just slows down so slow that it's hard to stay with it long enough to shoot it down. It's similar with the 190. Again....I'm happy that some of you have great success with the P-51. But to me, it's just a toy out of the 3 planes. It just doesn't perform well. Is this realistic? I honestly could not say because I have never flown any of these planes. According to everything I have ever seen and read, it's not at all realistic. But that's not anything I really care abut. I do not think that anything about any of this is particularly realistic as it is for all purposes, a game of sorts. I'm just stating that the P-51 is not all that great against the German planes. It is most very certainly the weakest of the three. Therefore I use it only in ground support roles. Please guys, I'm not trying to be stubborn or argue over it. It's really not a very big deal. I just completely understand when people post that they're having performance issues with the P-51.

About the only time you will shoot down a 109 in MP is when you find a pilot who doesn't know how to fly it. The P-51 lacks in so many ways when held up to the 109, and it's not too much better against the 190. For me, the proof is in the pudding. If I fly the P-51 in MP, I get totally shut down by the German planes most of the time. Same with the AI fights. But if I'm in a 109, I can pretty much dominate most battles with the P-51. I do get shot down, but not nearly as much. The 190 is a bit more challenging to take down the P-51 in but you can clearly feel the difference in the agility between the German, and American planes. While true, the German planes are less forgiving of mistakes, their superiority over the Mustang more than makes up for that. If you lose energy in the P-51 in a dogfight, more often than not your going to get shot down just trying to recover it. When I find that I'm getting low in the German planes, recovery is so much easier. The power of the P-51 is just undersold in DCS. I mean....this is a high altitude plane. But when you try to get it up to 20,000 feet, you have to baby it and struggle in many cases just to get it there. I have posted this issue on the forums and seen a lot about it and the advocates always say that you can get it there, but you have to pretty much baby the plane. But with the German planes, you can treat them any way you like and they'll go to 20,000 very easily. The P-51 has become the only DCS plane that has become a continuing disappointment for me. While you are in the servers, you may want to go on TS and ask people what they think. I find the feedback I get there is much more in line with what I actually see in the module. And in the defense of the Mustang, there are a lot of people who really hate to fly the German planes because of their lack of certain features and the difficulty in taking off and landing. But still....many people won't fight in the Mustang for the same reasons that you are posting about. Many people will argue this point and the argument has pretty much been pounded into the pavement. But I completely agree with those who think that the P-51 has been undersold. This does not mean that I am putting down ED, or that I do not enjoy the P-51. All it means is that I find the P-51 to be the least likeable of the 3 WWII planes.

I get it. It's just my opinion (and a ton of on line fliers on TS), but E.D. sold this plane short. I never use it for anything but single player ground attack. Anything else is just suicide. It's fun to fly, but not in any situation where you have to push it. It's pretty useless at that point. Power problems, maneuverability issues a lot of the time. And after watching some others do it, I can only get this plane up to 20,000 ft. about 50% of the time. I would gladly post track of this problem if only ED would fix the Track issues. Every time I record it and look at the track, the plane just goes into the ground or whatever, I gave up on actually trying to make this module act like everything I have seen or read about the P-51. I have been pretty happy with almost everything about DCS to this point. The P-51 however has been a major disappointment for me. Some others seem to have better experience with it.

Looks a lot like this guy is flying in and around the Siverbelle mountain range NW of Tucson. Makes sense as there is a training facility there that trains spec. Ops guys and foreign special forces. I get to see A10's all day and night where I live. I live a very short distance from DMAFB. I love to see them playing around at night. The flares look really cool. I actually have 2 music students that are currently A10 pilots, and one that's a retired instructor for the A10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0Iu937_pR8 Wow!!! This looks kind of like it's from the same footage.

Did you not read my post: + adds collective and - lessens collective.......

All I can tell you is that it is very difficult to fly any heli on a PC without a HOTAS setup. In a perfect world you will have your collective assigned to a slider of some kind. Without that precise control, it's not so easy to fly. The collective does move up and down, but not like the joystick. As the stick moves up, it gives the heli more lift. As it moves down, it drops the lift. It has to equal out with your rudder control. As the collective increases, it pulls the aircraft to the right. You have to use left rudder to counter that pull. You are always adjusting your collective while in flight, and as a result, you are always using your rudder. That's why its easier to have them all assigned to a HOTAS and rudder pedal setup. It's very hard to fly any heli in any sim without a full stick, throttle, and rudder setup. The keyboard is just too much work. Although I know people who can do it, it's not the preferred method of flying helis. When you hit the +, you raised the collective. That is why you took off. The minus lowers the collective.

rrohde: "Exactly. Every time I read about "balance" regarding DCS I cringe. Those who want a balanced MP experience should look into *games* like Mechwarrior Online, War Thunder, etc." _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ My thoughts also. I learned long ago to accept these AC for exactly what they are. And to think that any of them could "in any reality" be accurate to their real world counterparts is just a fantasy. I watch all of these graphs, FM's, and documents get posted constantly that are meant to get E.D. to make them more accurate, and it just makes me chuckle to myself any more. D.C.S. is no more reality than Battlefield or C.O.D. And in all of these games, there are a majority that just take it all in as it was reality. It's all just for fun.

Have the Tracks been fixed? Does anyone know if the tracks still have play back issues? I want to post a few tracks but it's kind of senseless if they are still broken. Until this last update, you could use the Nvidia software "Shadowplay" to record tracks, but they have seen fit to toss it and instead have you record tracks that go directly to some online deal. The problem with this is two fold for me. I'm not into posting everything I do for them to exploit, and....It doesn't matter anyway because you can only record on the new software if Gforce recognizes your software as a game that they support. And well.....They do not support DCS. So I'm back to having no recording ability. That is unless E.D has found a fix for the tracks.

Perhaps my description is a bit vague. The choppers are flying into McCarren from Creech, picking up troops, and flying back to Creech. My problem is that I set up embarking for both choppers and troops, however, the choppers won't land. I cannot set the "Landing" option and then embarking because the ME won't permit me to set any other waypoints after the landing. So the whole thing is set up as a rescue mission. The choppers fly into the LZ but then just proceed to the next waypoint without picking up the soldiers.

I was just creating a mission in the M.E. that centered around A10s providing CAS to 3 Hueys out of McCarren. Everything seems to be kind of working ok but I cannot figure out how to get the Hueys to actually land and extract the troops. I've tried to have them land, and then embark but once they land, you cannot assign any further waypoints to get them out of there. Does anyone know if you can assign the embarking command to AI Hueys? I have tried several approaches and am having no luck. Thx!

Absolutely. I get the whole restraint thing. You are buckled in and have limited movement. However, I believe that taking into account that in the sim, you are limited in your field of vision, visual range, the track IR is limited, you have no sense of feeling or perception of what any given aircraft is doing physically until it becomes visual. You do not have the luxury of just moving your arms and hands around to do tasking, but instead you have a mouse cursor to do what your hands would otherwise be doing,and you are relying on a computer keyboard (with key bindings much of the time). None of these things are purely natural, or second nature, nor are they realistic. And I understand that this is certainly the nature of this beast and have no complaints about it. But surely, giving the user that little edge to make up in a small part for all of the other abilities and senses that they do not have isn't asking much. It certainly isn't unfair. Kind of like using labels to spot ground objects. In DCS it is nearly impossible to spot anything on the ground (double for the NTTR map). This is very unrealistic as I have been in aircraft spotting military equipment and vehicles and it is certainly not all that hard to do, even when things are covered in camo nets. So I feel that labels are far from cheating. They just make up for the lack of eyesight in the sim. Again, I understand that this is a problem that comes with the sim. So it is not a complaint. It's just something that most everyone here can sympathize with.

If there is one thing that I have learned from DCS and my own experience with real pilots of any kind it is that you can sit one guy down who has flown an AC that's here and he'll say one thing about it. You can sit another guy down and he'll contradict the first guy. Both in his opinions of DCS and the performance of the A/C. I have had 3 Huey pilots come to my house and fly, or watch me fly DCS (some pilots won't do it). All 3 had different takes on it. At best 50% of their opinions actually matched with one another's on the actual sim itself. I have a music student that just retired from the Air Force last year. He was an A10 pilot with years of flying the A10. He retired as an instructor from D.M.A.F.B. here in Tucson. He would not actually sit down and fly the DCS A10 but he agreed to watch me do it. He told me what seemed more accurate, and what was not accurate. He tells me about procedures and things that he taught about the A10. And there is another guy that I went to college with who was a retired A10 pilot. He likewise sat with me and DCS, he had some different accounts of the plane. I started posting the things that both pilots were telling me on these forums and there were guys who attacked what I was reporting saying that they knew from experience that all of it was completely a$$ backwards. I do not solicit the advice or responses of pilots or whatever any more. And I'm even less inclined to report anything I see or learn because many people here seem to know much more than the people who I know I have seen fly some of these planes. The bottom line is that it is a simulator that's this side of being a game. And unless it is the actual aircraft, none of it is going to be 100% accurate. So I quit trying to find that middle ground and I just take it for what it is. Too many people take it waaaay to seriously.

LOL...........

Thanks so much for sharing this video!!!

My sentiments exactly. I fly DCS as an hour a night hobby. I have already put a lot of $$ into it as it stands. It may be worth it for these guys who put a lot of time into it, but to a guy like me, naaaa. I'm not even a little curious about it. I've heard the negative and the positive, and it's just not worth it at this point.

It is my experience and the experience of countless others that the Madcatz software is pretty counter intuitive, and setting up elaborate profiles with the editor is pretty much a waste of time. I understand that there are people who use it. I have no problems with that. One man's food is another man's poison. But I'll wager that a vast majority (myself included) have found no use for all of it's overly complex, unneeded and unwanted features. This has been the center of many, many debates about using Saitek products. If you go to their web site, it is the most common complaint they get and it's also a hot point for many of Saitek's customers. They simply don't use it. Even the reviews of the software are not very kind to it most of the time. It's always: Saitek! Great hardware, terrible software. And I completely agree with that sentiment. I have never used the Madcatz software fully. Only because it's so user unfriendly. The tutorial is a simple way to gain functionality in your X52 without having to fiddle with a profile editor that doesn't seem to like to be fiddled with. It is the best way to go about getting all of the features that many do not know how to access, without having to set up complex profiles. I, like many others, are happy just using the DCS settings. This tutorial will get you there if that's your fancy. As per usual, this is my opinion. I can fully appreciate that you use the software and enjoy it, but most of us do not. I have been in countless conversations about it and about the software. So those who know and understand the post will certainly appreciate it.

For the last several years, I have wondered why this damn X52 was never fully functional. No pinky button, and the seemingly useless mouse switch and the corresponding button that had no purpose (in my mind anyway). The rotary wheel that's right next to your pointer as you grab the throttle on the HOTAS, and its center button also seemed pointless. None of this made much sense to me and whenever anyone (and there were a lot of anyone's over the years) would ask about the lack of functionality in any of these switches, no one seemed to ever come up with an answer that actually fixed the issue. Well!!! Today I stumbled upon the solution to all of this and it will give your X52 a brand new life. I promise. I now set my X55 aside and have gone back to my X52 because I have 7 more buttons to choose from. I have to say.....I'm shaking with happiness at this discovery. It's like I got a better HOTAS and stick today. Now! Those of you who are already privy to this seemingly top secret solution. Please don't respond with the old “Yeah well.....Duh!” because if you did know it, then you should have shared it on all of the endless posts from countless frustrated noobs about it instead of holding your tongue. Now, I know it and will share it. Often!!! To get functionality in all of the switches that have none, Follow these instructions: Open “Profile Editor” >>> “Programming” >>>>>> Views (on the top left side)>>>>Grid View You should see sets of columns with: Mode 1 , Mode 2 , Mode 3, Mode 1 + Pinky....etc. At the top right of each column you will see the X option to delete that column. Leave the far left column (Mode 1). Do not delete it! But....delete all of the other columns. These are all shift states, activated by the pinky switch. You don't need them. I should add that you can go to the top of the column (Mode 1) and name it. Right under the Mode 1 window, there is an empty window where you can type any name or whatever. I do not think that it's really important but it was in the tutorial that I watched. Go to your X52 and push the pinky switch. A box with “Pinky Switch” will appear in the column. It will turn blue when you hit the switch. Scroll your cursor to the box. In the upper right corner, put your cursor on the black arrow. Left click and a menu will down. It will read: Latched, Unprogrammed, Fall Back, Button.......etc. Set the Pinky switch to “Unprogrammed” and voila!!! You can now use the Pinky switch for whatever you like. It is completely programmable in DCS. Whatever other switches that you have that do not function in DCS, this works for all of them provided they are not broken and show up in the editor when you hit them. You have to be careful however because some of them are just a little tricky. The wheel switch on the throttle grip of the HOTAS right next to your pointer, (Wheel button R Mouse) , (Wheel Button Scroll up, Wheel Button Scroll Down) are pretty much 3 different buttons and can be programmed as such. So you can have the scroll down be a button, the scroll up another button, and the push in the middle, yet another. It's pretty friggin cool!! You can do this with any buttons that do not work. There is also more stuff in there that I did not fool with, only because I just was so happy that my buttons and switches all worked, that I didn't bother. Make sure that when you are done, go to the save menu and save it as a profile. When you go to the profile editor, you can just open that profile and always have full functionality in your X52. How cool is that!!??

Exactly lol. I have blown off both ailerons, an elevator and made that Mig look like Swiss friggin cheese and it still came back and shot my a$$ down. Frustrating! This is why I'm very apprehensive of buying the new campaign. If those two planes are going head to head in the campaign....I don't see the point in it.

One very important thing to keep in mind that no one says to do because they're so use to doing it and forget that it's happening is that if you move the collective at all, you need to counter that move with the rudder. So the movement of the pedals and the collective should become one simultaneous movement. It's like an orchestrated dance. Once you get that into your mind when you fly rotocraft, it makes things less of a wreck and makes everything flow a bit better. Just remember, you change the collective, you move the rudder at the same time.

From my experience with other sims touting this feature. It's never accurate, and it is just another factor to deal with. I think that the weather for DCS is great the way that it is. It could be snowing on the equator as far as I'm concerned but it doesn't matter in DCS. Since no one here (or very few anyway) is able to fly in their home area, the weather thing seems pointless really. The weather in the NTTR map seldom changes. The Nevada desert stays pretty much exactly the same for 300 days of the year. Just seems like a lot of extra effort for a very small return in benefit.

Thx guys

I'm finally getting around to asking this question. I recently purchased the CH pro rudder pedals. Is there no way to assign the left and right brakes in the 109 or 190 to the CH toe brakes? Doesn't seem to give you the option in the controls assignments.

I have no doubt about that whatsoever. :thumbup: