ET1

Aha, I believe that's it! What was confusing me was that the "M" is fairly restrictive, i.e. sometimes even when you can still just see the target, the pod considers itself masked. Having played around with it some more after reading your post, it does indeed seem that whenever the "M" is gone, one can switch modes no problem. Thanks very much! Alright back to the training missions. I believe guided bombs are next on the menu... :punk:

An alternative I've found that works well, at least for me: Map a key (or better yet, HOTAS button) to toggling the TrackIR on and off. Then I just manually point myself at the MFD (or HUD, or some corner of the control panel with lots of fiddly little buttons), flick off the TrackIR, and I can look at it in peace and quiet without getting a crick in my neck from trying to keep my head still :smilewink:

To preface my question: Just bought A-10, and after many years it has rekindled my love of flight simulators! Truly a fantastic piece of work, and by far the best sensation of actually sitting in a cockpit I've ever experienced from a PC simulator. Now my question: I got as far as the LITENING pod training mission, and then hopped into Instant Action to practice my newly-acquired skills. But, I'm befuddled by the behavior of the pod, specifically after commanding the TGP to slave to the current steerpoint (China hat aft long). This puts the TGP in intertial (INR) mode. Typically, I then want to switch to POINT mode to lock onto, say, a vehicle near the steerpoint (TMS forward to toggle track mode). But most of the time when I try to do this, the pod just stays in INR mode. Meanwhile, if I manually slew the pod, it has no problem toggling from INR to AREA and POINT. I've also tried slewing the pod a bit after slaving it to the steerpoint, still no dice; it usually refuses to leave INR mode. I say usually, because confusingly, SOMETIMES it works. I just haven't been able to figure out the conditions under which it works. I've read the TGP part of the manual in detail, and tried doing the training mission a couple more times, but just haven't been able to figure out what I'm missing. Would be very grateful if someone could enlighten me! ...or en-LITE-en me, as the case may be :doh: