Frostiken

At this point in time, releasing a WW2 combat flight simulator is like releasing an FPS game set in the near future where everything is brown and smudgy and you get blood on the screen when you're shot. Versus

Hey, I asked our pilots today - turns out I was both wrong and right. The GBU-54 does have the manual code dials on the side just like the PAVEWAY II packages, but it can also have the laser coding changed from the cockpit - of F-15Es, at least. If the PAVEWAY package has a fault, the bomb will default to the laser code dialed in to the side, so if push comes to shove, it will function like a very expensive GBU-12 if it has to.

.50 cals would tear an A-10 apart. What armor? You mean the titanium tub the pilot sits in? Unless the Mustang decided to shoot upwards at the A-10's nose, there's really no armor anywhere else. The engines are durable and it has many redundant systems which help its survivability, but a .50 cal is going to punch a hole through the wings and will bang around inside the fuselage all the same. Modern aircraft aren't designed to survive enemy weapon fire from above / behind, because it's pretty much impossible to armor against 20mm or 30mm HEI cannons spitting lead at 100 rounds / second, so what's the point of even trying? There's a reason why in Red Flag exercises, having your enemy in your gun pipper is enough to count as a kill, even if just for half a second. The A-10 is no exception. The Ti tub is to protect the pilot from small-arms ground fire, and generally speaking small arms ground fire doesn't come from above. All things considered, the A-10 will be about as durable as any other WW2 aircraft. That's actually a good question, I've never seen anything that really rates the M2 against vehicle armor - were aircraft able to employ the cannons against tanks with any effectiveness? Because I doubt the top armor of the Shilka is honestly that much better than the armor of a Panzer III. Did they use armor-piercing .50s in WW2 or were they just full metal jacket? At any rate, I don't think one M2 is going to do much against vehicle armor, but six of them blasting away with modern HEI / API would probably blow it to pieces. But no really, give it a couple AIM-9s, a couple Mk82s or some old Rockeyes :)

Actually it might not do too bad against a Shilka... would be harrowing at any rate. Would be cute if they 'modernized' it, allowing it carry a modest modern arsenal... sort of like the AT-802 :D

Yes, but as we've all learned from Hollywood, those only work after you nervously tap on them a few times under situations of duress.

Couldn't tell you, I've never seen one IRL. I will say it's extremely unlikely though, due to the simple fact that removing the manual laser coding would make the weapon unable to be backwards-compatible without an avionics operational flight program rewrite to support it. If you leave the laser coding to be manually done and assuming the guidance package is basically the same as in the regular JDAM, then any aircraft that can carry a targeting pod and drop GBU-38s would automatically be able to carry GBU-54's without any further changes.

Because it's conspicuously absent in the DCS products?

To be fair, the P-51s avionics could be modeled overnight. Hook up the radio. Uh, done. :D

I also support NLIPS, where units don't get quite as small at distance as they really would be, to work around the fact that in real life, you can see a lot more finely than your screen pixels will allow.

They're given unique codes on a per-aircraft basis, but on the individual aircraft, no, they're all the same, simply because having LGBs set to different laser codes would create an extremely dangerous situation, especially to ground forces. While measures are taken to ensure that friendlies aren't going to be put in danger by bomb drops in case something goes wrong, you would still have a very expensive Mk82 now free-falling with zero guidance and who the **** knows where that's going to land... all because the WSO dropped the wrong bomb or forgot to change his laser code. It would definitely make sense that you can set this via DSMS given our limitations for exactly what you mentioned. I completely forgot about the CBU settings, but you're right, they're roughly the same thing - the HOF and all that are set on the ground, not in the cockpit.

I can't find any pictures of it, but the laser codes for PAVEWAY II are dialed into the seeker head on the ground. Pilots set them before they fly. Come to think of it, the PAVEWAY IIs don't even plug into the jet in any way. The release is all lanyards - one to pop the tail open, one to turn the seeker head on. EDIT: Here's the best I can come up with. The three dimples on the side of the fat part of the seeker head are the laser code settings. You can see the lanyard that turns power on to the seeker once it's dropped.

Wouldn't buddy-bombing in this manner require someone crawling out along the wing and dialing a new laser code into the LGB seeker?

I have annoying problems with TrackIR I've never been able to sort out. There's like a "drifting" I experience, where if I look around the cockpit, when I look back to 'center', it's always a bit off and I have to hit the recenter button. Sometimes it's like there's a groove in the tracking that it falls in to, where it ignores (or suppresses) other axis inputs while sliding around in this groove. It's really much more annoying than it sounds, and I've never found a profile setup that mitigates it. Also, when I look left and right, the camera moves in a noticable arc, rather than just straight left and right. I think it might be related to the fact that my TrackIR sensor has to sit on top of my monitor which is extremely huge, so it looks down at me rather than straight at me. Unfortunately there's not a lot I can do about this short of sitting on a giant stool.

"Epic"? *twitch*

This is a hardcore man's simulator, not Call of Duty.

1) Before anything else, realize that his post is spam. On any other forum you'd see this locked because I don't see why ED resources should be used to help this guy make a pile of money from people with more money than sense, and it's not like he's even passing money on to ED, despite the fact that the program is completely reliant on ED code. Yes, they made that code for the purposes of exporting information, but to then go ahead and use it to make money almost seems lawsuit-worthy. There's an entire section of the EULA that says that nothing you create for personal use that uses anything provided by the program (in this case, I would say export.lua counts) can be used for commercial gain. But I digress: with that in mind, if you feel compelled to post advertising for an overpriced app, I am well within my rights to respond to advertising. 2) I honestly don't care how much or how little effort it took. All I know is that this app is more or less totally identical to software that already exists for free. The only difference is iPad exclusivity which translates to a captive market. There's nothing illegal about selling software you made, but the problem I see is that the creator(s) of Helios have no problem working on their project for the community for free, this guy wants an exorbitant amount of money for it. That just makes him look bad. If Helios never existed and this was a one-of-a-kind product, I probably wouldn't even be having this conversation because this would be amazing, but it's not. He saw Helios, essentially copied the whole idea, made his own version of it, and is profiting from it. 3) Whether or not I can do something is totally irrelevant. I can't build an airline company from scratch, and neither can you, yet I guarantee you you've complained about fees, lines, unhelpful people, etc. I also don't own my own milk cows, does that mean I can't complain when Tescos hikes the price of milk and then immediately discounts it to the original price and acts like it's a sale? 4) $30 isn't unreasonable? Says who, you? The economies of scale barely even apply in the world of home-grown software. With physical goods, you raise prices on goods that won't sell very much because you need to pay off your overhead before you make a profit, and with small batches that cost gets translated into fewer units equating to a much higher price. For example, military aircraft computers... Honeywell may only sell 200 F-15 ADCPs, so they have to factor in the cost of R&D, testing, tooling, manufacturing, and supporting the product, with all the salaries of everyone involved, and a profit, which is why they cost half a million dollars each. In the case of this, he has $100 overhead for the iOS SDK. That's it. 5) Sense of entitlement? Seriously? First, his product is in direct competition with something that's currently free, so a sense of entitlement (in this case, expecting it to be not-overpriced) is actually justified. Second, it's a PAY-FOR PRODUCT. How do you get a sense of entitlement from something you'd be paying for? Finally, people are asking him to try to make one for Android. Whether or not that's possible is irrelevant, they probably don't know how much work it is, you being a douchebag about it helps nothing. Finally: People who bitch about other people voicing opinions they disagree with, while simultaneously spewing their own garbage out of both ends as if it were the word of god rub me the wrong way....a lot. By the way, understand that if his software utilizes ED's code to function (hooked into their exporting code, which I have reason to believe it is), it may even be illegal to sell it under the language used in the EULA. Frankly, despite what you may think, most of this I don't really care about. This rant is simply me laying everything about this app on the line. I don't care if this really does violate the EULA because I'm not the ones losing out on anything. It's not my job to care, I'm not here to armchair lawyer on behalf of ED, and I'm also not telling him his product is shit and he should feel bad. I *do*, however, care about how similar this is to Helios and how he's basically exploiting the community with an idea he didn't even have on his own. Is that capitalism? Sure it is. Does that mean it's morally just? That it forgives everything? We as gamers get angry when companies do less - with their OWN products - and charge money or exploit their customers... just because this is an individual doesn't mean he should be free from the same criticism. So there it is: I think it's morally wrong to repackage an idea the community created before and not only sell it simply because you can, but to sell it for such a hyper-inflated price is just rubbing salt in the wound.

Yes, but suppose they're working on the F/A-18 right now. ED tells us nothing. In the background, they get denied to release the civilian simulator. ED tells us nothing? F/A-18 simulator gets released for the Navy. ED waits for another contract. ED picks up the F-35 simulator contract. ED tells us nothing? ED gets permission to release the simulator for civilian markets. ED tells us! Unfortunately it's now 2026. Unless they aren't telling us for contractual NDI reasons, I don't think complete tight-lipped secrecy is going to do anything better for you, except end up with the forum being clogged with "It's been 8 years since DCS: A-10 what the **** are you doing".

Meh. More RAM won't do much for the game - but it will do stuff for everything else running in the background. RAM is still shared and if you're a slob like me you have all kinds of crap going on (at some point I alt-tabbed out of a game and forgot about it and was playing a second game with the first still in the background and didn't even notice). 16GB isn't even that expensive. If you have spare cash I'd say why not. If you don't, you wouldn't actually miss anything either. It's a convenience, nothing more. It is,

I doubt that. They may not bounce much for other factors, like the fact that the majority of the ordnance is carried on the wings themselves which distributes weight a lot better. All wings flex and need to flex to some degree... flexing wings means the forces are being sent around the wings and through the superstructure, whereas extremely stiff wings would translate most of that force into the fuselage itself which would undoubtedly cause wear issues over time. On an aircraft with stubby wings (pretty much all fighter-sized aircraft) they can obviously be stiffer, but with an A-10's wingspan I think that would cause problems. Generally speaking, bendy wings are happy wings! Unless they're doing this: Yes. Those are the wings up there. EDIT: In retrospect, you might be right - the A-10's wings might not be very bendy due to stiff construction. This would actually explain why all the wings on A-10s are breaking apart and they recently had to restart production for them. Maybe they should've been more bendy! :D

To back this up: http://science.howstuffworks.com/question491.htm

I find the $30 pricetag morally questionable. Would this even have been possible if ED didn't do all the exporting work for you already in their software? Fundamentally what you're doing is charging $30 to plug Helios into a touchscreen. Pass.

What's the "limit" in the bottom right?

By the way, that picture of Georgia has definitely been color-adjusted. I agree that DCS appears a little washed-out, but that comparison isn't terribly fair. Pretty sure the entire thing has been enhanced across the entire spectrum, which is why the shadows appear overly-blue, the reds stand out so much (in reality with that much blue, red would appear washed-out). The reds are so intense it's nearly neon.

You could mostly relicate that by rebinding your mouse buttons in whatever software it has for DCS: A-10, so MWheel up simulates a right-click, MWheel down is left. This would sort of be confusing on toggles but...

I think I'll try playing with the Vividness turned way up on the Nvidia Control Panel.