Frostiken

Hit it with a Hellfire? That tends to ruin people's days. Anyway, the point is the biggest failing of both AIs and retards in the gunner position (see: Battlefield games) is that they're morons. Whether they open fire on a tank at maximum range with the cannon and have no hope of destroying it and give away your position, or simply get so focused trying to get one more kill they completely overlook the guy with the missile launcher, it's a real ****ing bummer to see a target, want to kill it, but you can't get the numbskull in the front to do it, which is where an AI gunner would be total fail.

How would you get the gunner to shoot what you want him to shoot and not, say, start plinking away at infantry with the cannon while a Shilka rolls out of the trees?

I agree! That it's your fault, I mean.

Booger, one word: Brevity. I would love to respond, but I honestly don't even understand your point, you randomly jump from topic and topic and never seem to once actually explain what you're getting at. And please refrain from quoting Sun Tzu, it really just comes off as pretentious and extremely patronizing. Your passive-aggressive tone doesn't help anything either. I don't even know how you can compare WW2-style bombing raids to modern day - do you even understand why B-25s and the like had to be used? Or why they *did* fly into the teeth of enemy air defenses? I can't even wrap my mind around why you think that compares, or why you think the type of intelligence techniques we had in WW2 can even compare to what we have today - or hell, even what we had in the 60s: U2s, SR-71s, spy satellites... do you think in WW2 they would've found those missiles on Cuba? Doubt it. Technology has given us thousands of new ways to secure our data, and ten thousand ways to have it compromised. If you wanted to know what was going on in the enemy territory, you had to send risky recon flights armed with a terrible camera and the Mk.1 eyeball or set up spy rings and the like. Nowadays you send a cheap, disposable RC plane over, bristling with technological doodads that nobody even could dream existed back then. I would also like to point out that any argument you have regarding bombers vs. air defenses and enemy CAPs is utterly negated by the fact that this is an A-10, not an F-22 sim, and just like how in real life you're not going to send A-10s on a deep-strike mission into enemy airspace because they would all get shot down in a matter of minutes, any kind of dynamic campaign made with the A-10 in mind has to operate under the assumption that I won't be flying into god damn MiG Alley. Even air defenses need to be somewhat under control. One thing I would also like to point out - with the whole Iraq armor / senators thing - it took months and months to get all that equipment out, and we're talking bolt-on steel plates for HMMWVs and small ceramic/kevlar plates that fit inside pockets. It took at least five YEARS (you know, more time than all of the US's involvement in WW2) to design and field an MRAP - and it's still cost-prohibitive.

The big long skinny thing? I assumed that was an actuator housing for the leading-edge flaps and the "ramp" (or 'lerxlerons'... or whatever). You can see the same style housing on the flaps and ailerons... that's for the actuators... but none exists for the leading-edge flaps. Obviously something has to drive it... and the fact that it just happens to butt up against the corner of the ramp seems awfully convenient. It is unusually big and long for just an actuator housing, but it just doesn't seem big enough to properly house a legit air-to-air missile. If it really does, I can only picture it working with a very short-ranged LOAL missile. Pop-out fins and the like.

It does? I don't really see anything big enough to even fit an AIM-9 in, but it's hard to tell what I'm looking at. The things that do look like weapon bays are the landing gear.

Yes, well the Raptor is also the fat kid of the fighter world... the thing is pudgy all around specifically for the internal weapons bays - this thing looks pretty slim. The F-22 has two bays for missiles on the outboard sides of the engines, this doesn't seem to have anything like that - only a small bay between the engines, and it doesn't look very deep.

I find it interesting that it's supposed to be "stealthy" (or at least a complete F-22 knockoff) but they didn't do anything with the inlet ducts. Fanblades are one of the the biggest and most obvious radar reflectors on an airframe. They're literally straight tubes, unless they put an array of baffles or something inside, which would seriously compromise its supersonic capability. That means that if this thing is flying in your direction, you will see it on radar. Hell even if it's flying away from you you'd see it even better. I don't like it. The overall design is quite obviously lifted straight from the F-22, while the engines with that moronic rear-facing radar spur looks as bad as it does on every other Russian aircraft. I also hate the F-14 look with the engines wildly displaced apart from each other, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense from a design perspective either - there's not much to be gained from doing that and, in the event of an engine failure, it makes the aircraft extremely difficult to control. I'm highly skeptical of its stealth capabilities and, considering it's Russian, its avionics package as well. Does anyone know if this is *really* stealthy, or is it like China's stealth fighter where they just put angles on everything, copied some pictures off the internet, and hoped for the best?

I don't know, I think you're really underestimating the impact a well-coordinated air force can have especially on modern operations. First, you mentioned 'simulator-level kill-counts'. To that I say: 492nd Fighter Squadron, Operation Odyssey Dawn: 477 munitions employed, 407 targets destroyed :) I think drawing parallels to WW2 is less than fair for a few reasons - the first being the overall lack of effectiveness air combat generally had due to technology limitations and lack of intelligence. You would send two dozen bombers to hit a tank tread factory, they'd drop 100 bombs and blow up everything but the factory, then they'd go back and try it again. If an F-16 pilot flies in and employs a HARM against an SA-11 radar site, he's punched a huge hole through their air defenses with the destruction of a single target. Consider the employment of A-10s in Afghanistan. Given the specific mission "take this town" or "defend this base", having an F-15E or A-10 in the area will MASSIVELY swing odds in your favor. In a dynamic campaign, it could singlehandedly affect what ground you've managed to hold. WW2 was a different animal and comparing it simply isn't fair - in WW2, military forces were considered extremely expendable. Planes were rolling out of factories on a daily basis, and the ease of manufacturing things due to the complete lack of technology they incorporated meant you could retool just about any metal foundry into something to make tanks since all you needed was enough steel and a diesel engine. To compare to modern-world, the Air Force never even had enough TPods in its inventory to outfit all the F-15Es - they still don't, as a matter of fact, in order to get a TPod on every aircraft we have to mix LANTIRNs and Snipers. I doubt anything like that would be possible these days. It takes months for St. Louis to roll out a new F-15 and while I have no doubt that they could get a frame thrown together even at multiple factories consider the avionics that have to be put into each one, most of which were made by companies that went under decades ago. You'd then have to flight test each one, a process that would take even longer, since pilots are a lot more valuable than they were back then. So yeah, bombing tanks in WW2 didn't really matter, because for every tank you bombed, three more rolled out of the factory - but that isn't true anymore. No military today has force levels even approaching what any single country had in WW2 in terms of number of tanks, planes, etc. and I don't think it would ever be economically feasible to build up to such a level. You could loose a hundred aircraft in a day and it was considered too bad. You can park your aircraft inside a hardened concrete structure. In WW2 it would take hundreds of bombs to land enough to collapse it on the aircraft. In the real world, a single F-15E carrying small diameter bombs can destroy twenty in a single sortie. In WW2 you'd see fifty thousand infantry on each side in a single battle, now we use that same number to hold an entire country. So yeah, stop comparing WW2 to modern day operations.

To be fair, life would be pretty damn unpleasant inside a tank that just had 200 grenades land on it. Actually, I honestly don't even think dropping a CBU-87 at that altitude would even do anything - the bomblets have to experience 6G of decelerating force to arm themselves, and I don't even think there's enough fall height before it opens to get it up to much more than 120 mph or so. By the time it opens, they spread out, and they deploy their drag chutes, I think they'd hit the ground and dud.

At only 800 feet, a CBU-87 wouldn't generate enough spin to spread the bomblets out, and 300 feet is hardly enough to help. While it's not really modeled in the sim, in reality they'd all land in a big exploding heap.

The reason for this is that the ECS system in the A-10 doesn't generate shit for bleed air when the engines are operating at low power, so little that they don't even get airflow to the cockpit. The reason they taxi with the canopy open, and crack it open right after they land is because it gets hot as hell in there with it closed. Well my stance on this is that not everything pilots do is right, not all checklists are always the best thing to follow*, and like all pilots, you should have your own way of doing things. Some people seem to be under the impression that a startup checklist is some sort of Biblical text and must be adhered to, when real life pilots do all kinds of their own shit. Really, these are pilots we're talking about - You shouldn't always think that what you see a pilot do is the correct way to do things, or that they always know exactly what's going on. Case in point, I just got back from a TDY and had a few beers with the guy who turned this into this. PS: Check out the ICMS system - the Band 3 C/O standing upright, completely beat to crap, and the Band 1.5 C/O ballast, totally unscathed next to it :D * By this I mean you can infer a lot from the steps a checklist is ordered in, but it's not always correct to assume. Many times steps are simply placed ambiguously. As a more trivial example, you can uncage your SADI the second you get in the cockpit, it really doesn't matter when you do it.

APU is running - look at the gauges. And no, it doesn't mean 5 minutes have passed - in real life startup procedures tend to be a little slower than how fast you can blast through it in the sim - the crew chief has to check for various serving on the engines and such. So 4.1 minutes, minus the time for engines to spool up since you can power it all off the APU gen alone. Regardless, there's a couple reasons real-life that this could've happened, most notably a redball for something that delayed the second engine start. Mostly what I'm curious about is who's standing in front of running engines snapping pictures over the top rail of the A-10? It's not like it's low to the ground and you can just lean over. IIRC the ejection seat is inoperative while the canopy is open. The canopy simply doesn't jettison right when it's open, not to mention there could be a canopy brace installed as well, so either way you're going to get your shit ruined by hitting the metal frame. Don't quote me on this though, just something I've heard (and it makes sense).

Yes, well in the case of the OP, being the particular shining example of the advancement of the human genome has descended far below wearing a mere hat. Appropriately dubbed the "Shame Antenna"

Well this is like the third thread about this in only a week or so, so who really cares?

Yskonyn, I actually think most "sim" developers stick to WW2 or WW1 mostly because it's really, really easy to make a sim for these old aircraft. For one, you have almost total freedom to make up what you want since only a scant handful of aircraft from that era survive, and there's probably fewer pilots even still alive. And I've honestly never found the clickable cockpit (or rather, the lack thereof) much of a technology thing, but more of an 'ease of implementation' thing. To be fair though, cockpits weren't exactly complicated - the avionics suite practically consisted only of a pneumatic altimeter, an ADI, two fuel probes and maybe a radio.

DCS's flight model was signed off as realistic enough by actual A-10 pilots. ROF and IL2, in fact just about all WW2 'combat sims', are really just based on wikipedia and how the designers feel about it. They certainly didn't hire SMEs for every one of the 3 dozen aircraft you get to pick from, and it's one of the reasons I find WW2 flight sims a joke, because every aircraft is usually indistinguishable from another with a tiny handful of minor exceptions. So given the volume of aircraft available to you and the lack of real-life SMEs for them all, ROF / IL2 can vary between 1 and 10 just on sheer chance.

Well no shit - the F-14 and F/A-18 have a maximum G-limit of 7 - the F-14 might be even lower. 10Gs is well over the design specs and most likely *did* cause severe damage. A Level 1 Over-G isn't bad, you just have to inspect a few things, but a Level 3 Over-G (which would be the result of 10Gs in a Navy airframe) means the jet basically has to be dismantled and go to NDI. It's not flying for a very long time. In fact, 10Gs on a 7G airframe could result in the entire thing having legit damage on longerons and being scrapped. Someone pulling 10Gs may have done as much damage as far as the Navy sees it as simply putting it in the dirt. So I think just about every Navy aircraft is limited to 7Gs because that's the structural limit, so saying they shouldn't exceed is logical. Don't Over-G your jet (which is what 7+ would be, a legit Over-G event). But this is patently untrue for the USAF and wouldn't even make sense. The airframes are rated much higher, up to 9Gs, so saying the Navy can fly their aircraft to 95% their G-load while the USAF can only fly them to 70% is moronic. Secondly, your G-limit, especially in 'wartime' is going to be a lot lower than 7/9, because lots of fuel, external tanks, missiles, bombs, pods, etc. all reduce your G-limit. A fully-loaded F-15E could Over-G by pulling 4Gs, so saying they're artificially limited during peacetime to a rating that would NOT cause an over-G event is stupid. Doubly-so, the only way to measure this would be the honor system, since the only time pilots report over-G events is when it's a legit over-G. Pulling 6-7Gs in a slick F-15 wouldn't register an over-G event and therefore... it doesn't count. So finally, with your theory in tatters, let me finally add that the F-15 has a G-counter inside door 6R that charts how much time was spent at how many Gs. Every aircraft has spent more time pulling 7+ Gs than 6-7Gs. So unless the system is lying to us...

Since when is that their goal? ED's goal is to make money and I can tell you right now a Blackhawk sim wouldn't move many copies for precisely the reason I said unless there was something extremely special about it - and I'm not thinking 'special' in the realm of simulated reality. Special as in the only way I can imagine your average sim consumer seriously wanting to spend money on it would be to greatly dramatize the entire thing (think Black Hawk Down). Additionally the problem with any infantry-centric helicopter is the fact that DCS's implementation and handling of ground combat is not its strong suit. A simple helicopter like a Blackhawk might be "quick" to implement, but I doubt that - there's still a ton of research and even something crude like a Blackhawk has several dozen switches to flip and its own avionics suite. Additionally, to implement something that literally does almost nothing except carry infantry around without greatly improving the entire 'ground' aspect both in terms of visual fidelity and infantry would just make it feel soulless. Compare flying a helicopter over Chernarus in ArmA2 to the KA-50 and you see what I mean... WWyyiLFRTN4 xR5tEFBkeZw

^ Also a yo-yo.

I think this has more to do with the fact that we don't have DCS modules for 10 different aircraft, and even if we did, you're still relying on stupid AIs to do a lot of lifting. In Red Flag, you have EA-6s flying around doing whatever electronic warfare crap they do, you have F-16s flying SEAD while F-15s are flying CAP missions against the aggressors, etc. Even the F-111s from Australia will get a piece of the action. This all makes for a much more realistic scenario involving multiple people doing different roles (flying escort for bombers, for example) rather than, what - 8 A-10Cs all shooting at tanks? Seriously? How is that good for anything? You seem to talk like a fighter pilot (I'd be interested to hear your qualifications here), then you'd know that combat missions are two-ship affairs. Additionally, Red Flag, in fact just about all training flights, you're operating within a set of rules as well, rules that may or may not exist in wartime. The rules are there for several reasons - to keep a modicum of safety on the whole thing, to see how they operate in set parameters, hell there's even an entire region out there called "the container" that pilots have to avoid. Additionally a problem with human-generated missions is that they take rather large amounts of time to make, especially to accommodate a large number of players, specifically to avoid the cluster-**** of A-10s all trying to perform the same tasks. This also means that whoever makes them and whoever's played them before is going to effectively be cheating. The Smerch Hunt mission might be fun a time or two but eventually you remember that there's SA-18s scattered around in a few places and you work off that knowledge to avoid them. A dynamic campaign is primarily to present largely unknown factors to the whole thing. Finally, I don't want to join a VFS, and you may say it's a dumb reason, but I've had this experience in many a game before whether you call it a clan or something else. See, the people in a VFS are going to know a lot more about flying than me, because some of them take it far, far more seriously than I do. Note that in a sim game, this doesn't mean I just **** around and goof off in the A-10 - in the world of simulators, there will *always* be some 45 year old nut who's playing out his mid-life crisis and trying to live out his unrealized dream fantasy of being a fighter pilot. You know, the kind of people who have this in the garage. But anyway, if I had joined a VFS when the game was brand new, we'd all be on the same foot, nobody really knew dick about it. If I joined one now, ages after most of these people started playing, I'd be subject to some moronic 'entry test' where I'd be treated like a little kid, I'd have to fret over silly mistakes because I have to prove myself to a stranger on the internet, and whether I do or do not get in, someone whom I don't know and have no reason to respect is going to be telling me how I *should* be doing things. I had a lot of fun with Tactical Gamer playing ArmA, up until they started taking it a bit too seriously and would chew you out for not talking like a pretend infantry-man on the radio. I'm not saying I was shit-talking and goofing off, but rather there was a page and a half long printout I was expected to memorize for how to call for artillery, and if you deviated from it, someone would get upset.

A Blackhawk? Not really sure how much life you expect to get out of a helicopter sim that's pretty much based completely around ferrying stuff from point A to point B. Maybe fly circles around while an AI guy that you can't see shoots stuff out the sides? The problem with helicopters is very, very few exist that are single-seaters, even non-attack variants. If the F-15E is unlikely because it's a two-seater, it's still mostly redundant in both cockpits - something with very exclusive controls like an Apache or a Cobra are pretty much totally out, since you wouldn't be able to do anything in the opposite crew station. That said, if we were to get any on this list, I think the Supercobra would be a blast. I tentatively pick it over the Apache. They both almost serve in the same roles, but the Supercobra's a lot more nimble. If it were a Longbow, I'd go with that, but the Army treats the Longbow like it's more secret than the arc of the goddamn covenant so I don't think I'd really want a dated Apache...

Well there's 'stick to trimmer' mode, isn't there?

Whoever told you that lied to you...

Additionally, it probably doesn't even have the pylons on. For the real demonstration aircraft ie: the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels they're missing a lot of innards too.