Frostiken

What a clumsy-ass takeoff. By the way, he's flying completely slick - don't expect to pull maneuvers anywhere close to that in "reality" :p What I found interesting is that the cockpit is modded for JHMCS but he doesn't even have a JHMCS helmet. Not that he'd need it for an aerial demonstration, but wouldn't all their helmets be modded for it?

This has been bothering me since KA-50, and I completely agree. The switches are designed specifically so there's power states you have to go through before you can turn something off - for example, a radar power switch/knob will have 'Standby' before 'Off', so you can't just slam it off. I brought this up before regarding the emergency handles and I got a lot of criticism for it and I still don't understand why. Here's how I think the cockpit interface should work: All emergency handles and controls (specifically the emer jett, fire handles, canopy jettison... maybe not the emergency control panel) are only actuated by right-clicks, specifically so an errant left-click doesn't immediately blow your canopy off, or shut down your engine, or something. It's happened to me before while messing with the UFC, an errant click and my left engine has no more fuel. This can hardly even be claimed to be mere user error, as the specific design and pull tests of all of these handles is done specifically so that a real-life pilot cannot accidentally actuate them. Many emergency handles are double-actions and you have to rotate them after you pull. It's also kind of ridiculous to simulate stabbing a button with a finger and grasping an entire handle and yanking it with the same button, right next to each other. All switches and knobs should have their 'stops' modeled as mentioned in the OP. I also personally think the radio knobs need to be changed to operate clockwise / counterclockwise as they should, to be consistent with every other knob in the cockpit. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, right-clicking a knob (say, the IFF mode select knob) will rotate it cockwise (the top goes to the right), and left-clicking will turn it counter-clockwise. This is consistent with every knob in the cockpit except the radio frequency knobs. In real life, you turn these knobs counter-clockwise to advance the frequency, whereas in the sim, you inexplicably right-click the knob (which should turn it clockwise) which causes the knob to rotate in the opposite direction (counter-) and advances the number on the dial. This is incorrect. Finally, in the spirit of fidelity and preventing accidents, I personally think the switch safety features should be modeled as well. If a switch has a spring-loaded cover (such as the engine masters on the F-15), you should have a limited time to actuate the switch before the cover automatically closes. If the switch has a built-in stopper (in the A-10, on the IFFCC switch) you should have to hold the 'click' action on the switch for about half a second to lift the switch over the stop. In the case of the IFFCC, I believe the stopper allows a smooth action from 'OFF' to 'TEST' (no lifting required) but to move it from 'TEST' to 'OFF' you have to lift it up (this is because there's no harm in accidentally turning it ON). These aren't features because I'm a spaz and mis-click, these are real life safety features specifically because the USAF doesn't want a pilot to mistakenly turn off his IFFCC. If a real pilot can somehow accidentally move his hand over to the control panel and pop the switch off, it's not unreasonable that a mistake like that can be made in the sim, and as such modeling the switch stoppers would add a little bit more fidelity to the game as well as prevent accidents. There's been a couple of times I've flipped a switch because it was hard to tell if the switch was actually in the center position or not. Anyway, that's my take on it.

Anything that can fly a combat mission more than 400 miles away without being forced to tank twice or risk running out of gas. Anything with a thrust-to-weight ratio greater than 0.9. Anything that can drop more than four bombs without having to immediately turn around and go home. Anything that has actually played a pivotal role in even a single conflict to have occurred in the past 20 years. :] Look, I understand that odds of getting an F-15E is extremely low. And I really don't want to see the Mazda Miata of the US Air Force, the F-16, be romanticized and over-glorified even more than it already is. So I secretly know that we're probably going to actually be getting an F/A-18. But I do think that the C-model over the Superhornet is kind of stupid, and I've always hated that aircraft because it's so yawn-inducingly underwhelming at everything it has ever done. The only purpose the F/A-18 ever had was serving as an example for McDonnell Douglas to fix all the lackluster performance and flaws in the F/A-18 and make a far superior aircraft in every aspect by taking the already venerable and storied history of the F-15C and turning it into the most capable deep-strike multi-role tactical bomber the world's ever seen. You're comparing an aircraft that isn't even rated past 7Gs to an aircraft that could strap a combat-loaded F/A-18C to its underside and carry it into battle. I will still buy DCS: F/A-18 and carrier ops should be fun (for a while at least... not really the deal-maker for me that some of you make it out to be), and yeah, it at least has some power, good speed, and performs radically different from an A-10. But I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly want the F/A-18C over even an F-16 (objectively speaking, let's pretend the F-16 hasn't been so widely popularized), when it's so completely inferior in every regard, to such a degree that the Navy literally settled for second-best by picking the YF-17 over the -16. The very reason the Superhornet even exists was to try to fix the legacy F/A-18s many shortcomings. I guess most civilians are probably going to like a particular combat aircraft for more superficial reasons than practical one - they like the look, maybe they heard about it a lot as a kid, it was in a movie, etc - but of the four aircraft we could pick from - F-15E, F-16, F/A-18 Superhornet, and the F/A-18C, the -C is literally the worst one you could possibly chose from that list. So with that in mind, I'm honestly baffled by how excited people are getting over an aircraft that deserves to be hated. At least admit that based on purely logical reasons the legacy F/A-18 is a terrible, terrible aircraft. Some people really like having roadblocks in their way, I can understand that challenges are what makes a game fun - but I really don't want to see my sim flying spent mostly on flying to and from the AO, and having a loiter time measured in just a handful of minutes. Taking off, flying over empty ocean, tanking, reaching the target and having only about fifteen minutes to find and prosecute targets with my scant handful of munitions, flying back, maybe tanking again and once more flying over empty ocean to land on a carrier just sounds like a lot of time spent not doing the combat aspect and would wear on me. Then again, I'm not one of these guys who likes to play FSX so I can fly FEDEX packages across the Atlantic. Besides, the F/A-18 is ugly. Move the verts back thirty five feet so they're over the stabs where they belong and we'll talk.

More like a Davis-Motham map so you can park that obsolete underwhelming piece of crap in the desert where it belongs :D

CH has a reputation for ruggedness and reliability. Pricier than Saitek but with Saitek you get what you pay for.

Man I love the Japanese paint schemes on the F-15s. They look totally useless as far as actual camouflage but look really sick on the Eagle. Meanwhile the USAF just wants everything two shades of gray :(

There's a difference between two monitors (which I even have) and actually stretching the game across three or more. The most effective use of two monitors seems to be to put the game on one and Helios, MFDs, or typically non 'game world' stuff on the other. That's what I do. That still means that it's useless for the purposes of the OP. Sorry for not being clear on it.

Fun fact - a lot of A-10Cs don't actually have the cameras installed. It's sort of like how a handful of F-15Es don't actually have Band 1.5 ICMS since there were supply problems.

Shouldn't have developed an aircraft that uses it then :P

yet I actually mentioned the GBU-10 over the 31 mostly because against something like BMPs, impact with the ground might give you the best results. I have absolutely no idea what an air burst would do to an APC but I imagine flipping the whole damn thing over by leaving a crater the size of a block of flats works all the same. To say nothing of the unfortunates caught within...

Yep :) Plus, if we ever get the supply system / dynamic campaign, these babies are going to be rare and extremely cost-prohibitive. Though honestly against three vehicles, say they're pretty close together and they *aren't* MBTs (though even if they were...) your best weapon would probably be a GBU-10. Much more cost-effective. In real-life at least. Such a weapon would most likely flip a convoy of BMPs completely off the road and cause severe damage to just about everything. The entire reason we carried GBU-31s into Libya was to knock out groups of vehicles. Ah, but that should be the goal of the next DCS module - integrate ground vehicle physics and give us much better simulation of damage on vehicles, to say nothing of better modeling of explosions, including the shockwave bounce thus giving purpose to air-burst JDAMs :D

Well hopefully the ME will get a UI overhaul at some point that will fix this amongst other issues, as well as give us the option of all the data fields being consistently in Imperial.

That actually depends on the kind of NVGs they're using and how far into NIR they can see. I would assume yes, if only because they have to see their own IR pointers...

Well I didn't mean under it - I mean let's say you're using the CBU-97 on a single vehicle. Since the skeets are ejected 90 degrees in four directions from the carrier, that means 3/4 skeets are NOT going to find anything to hit. This isn't to say that the single vehicle would be safe, quite the contrary, but it wouldn't be 40 skeets trying to find one vehicle, it would be at most 10. Due to the positioning, a convoy of multiple vehicles on a road would be a bit 'safer' than a cluster of vehicles in a defensive formation would be. The promo video for the CBU-97 showed the search areas for the skeets when they leave the carrier and for a single carrier there were some pretty big gaps in the coverage. It's made up for by the fact that there's 9 other carriers launching skeets randomly around the place, but I wouldn't expect a CBU-97 to hit every vehicle arranged in a line. If they were positioned randomly (like the defensive formation the tank convoys go into after you attack them), hell yes it would tear them apart.

Yes well, keep in mind that the skeets are thrown out at 90 degrees to their carrier, so if it's a convoy the majority of the skeets will be hurled away from the vehicles. Due to the way it spreads out though the CBU-97 would ravage the shit out of everything around if you dropped it in the middle of a defensive formation.

In that case you better be three sheets to the wind well before you even crank. I've had a pilot thank me for a GAB because he was so hung over.

I think what he means is that the FOV is wrapped and scaled properly so that you can actually look to your right and see out the right side of the jet, whereas just stretching the FOV gives you an intense fisheye effect - even with just three monitors the edges of them start to exhibit this effect. Honestly I don't see the point of investing resources into this. The number of people who use multiple monitors dwindles exponentially with every monitor you add. Everyone has one monitor, a handful have two, a minute number have three, an insignificant amount of more than three and so forth. Investing resources so that a couple dozen people with $10,000 to blow on an elaborate setup of 5 good-quality projectors (figure $6-700 apiece) and the triple-SLI'd bleeding-edge computer you'd need to even run A-10C at anything even approaching a playable framerate at that resolution (figure another $3k)... what's the point? Probably less than a hundred people have that setup. In the world of flight sims, you will always have the obsessive fringe nutjobs who will want to take it to a disturbingly high level - I'm talking about the kind of people who fly a DC-10 of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong to New York in real time. At some point you have to draw a line, and I think supporting the insignificantly small number of customers who have invested more money than they do their car into living out their unrealized flying fantasies has kind of crossed that point.

I don't really understand the appeal for an Afghanistan map. Okay, I can sort of understand that you want the 'realistic' terrain and don't think Nevada can act as a compromise. What I don't get is why it would be unrealistic to pretend that the dusty desert and rocky hills and valleys of Nevada is Afghanistan, but it wouldn't be unrealistic to put modern Russia in Afghanistan, unless you just planned on flying around shooting at infantry which might be the textbook definition of '****ing dull'.

FSX completely blows DCS out of the water graphically, this is known. I really wish DCS looked like it, as well as the fact that they have pretty much the entire world available...

After the mission ends you get to play a minigame of trying not to lose all your money downtown, and then you have to stumble your way back to the airbase drunk.

No, the right side of the screen is because of wind.

If you think that's bad, you should've seen the Air Force supervision (E-7+) response to when Bagram came under direct assault. Seriously, we're the most retarded branch of the military if it came to waging war. Even the Coast Guard could've probably handled that better. One guy comes out screaming that we all need to get into the bunkers (which are like 300 yards away OUTSIDE... oh yeah and they could, at best, hold half of us), and ten steps behind him another guy is yelling that we all need to stay put, which meant the guys in the smoke pit couldn't even go inside and get their IBA on. Of course, compounding their bewildering contradictory orders was the fact that we needed to scramble air support to bomb the shit out of the Talibs shooting the place up. So everyone was scattered all the **** over the place and had no idea what was going on. Naturally we go outside and find the pilots standing on top of a bus with cameras filming the Apaches shooting everyone they could find. This supervision consists of the same idiots who, when a mortar dudded in a yard across from our dorms, made us leave the safety of a solid foot of reinforced concrete and cluster**** around in a dense, freezing circle outside. You know, where the mortars were landing. And where the UXO was. We find out at some point that a guy had ordered half the building to lock-and-load and in true Air Force fashion some of the weapons troops (why is it always weapons?) were walking around for a few days with live rounds in the chamber. Oh and a bunch of crew chiefs almost got shot during the base attack when they forced their way into a building on lockdown. Where all the guys with guns were at. On that note, who'd the idiot who decided to give maintainers guns anyway? Paul probably knows what I'm talking about - we're just about the most angry, sad, depressed, disgruntled shadows of human life you could find. I would trust Kurt Cobain with a gun more than half of my coworkers. Plus it was a cludgy ironsight M16 that probably hadn't even been zeroed. If I were to give people on the flightline armaments it would be an M9, or nothing at all... given how much I'd trust the majority of people in a firefight, if it came down to it it would be Stalingrad all over again - doubly so since we didn't even know if these guns would work, much less had more than one magazine for them. God the Air Force is criminally retarded, I swear. There should be a job position on every base where I would work, and before people make decisions involving work, they have to ask me if it's a good idea or not. Because I shouldn't have to point out that when you schedule two-shift operations all week, you have to arrange it so that the night shift doesn't end up working six days (since they have to open on Monday morning, and close on Friday night)... but the clueless monkeys in charge of the schedule don't get it, and so that's what we have to do, while the day shift only works five days. Oh and my office would have one of those James Bond shark tank things I could drop people in to. By the way, this random rant is exactly why maintainers shouldn't be allowed firearms :D

Well I don't think they have anti-air missiles - the Stingers that they had from the Soviet occupation are pretty much useless since time rendered the missiles inoperative. The RPGs are probably lying around by the truckload. Have you ever seen the AKs that they all use? Some of them look like they were used to fight dinosaurs. Of course, the unofficial answer is Pakistan.

It still is. When I was deployed there for a vacation in '07, the BX on Anderson was basically non-functional, but they were building a brand new one that opened while we were there with perhaps the most dysfunctional food court in existence. Regardless, the PX on the Navy base was still like, the most glorious thing I've ever seen.... second perhaps to Rammstein's BX. I don't know about that, but I can tell you that I've never been somewhere where $40 could last you all night... $5 for a beer from the Mamasan... $1 tips all night :D Of course, it's all fun and games until someone's underwear ends up nailed to the ceiling in The Viking. Don't even joke. I don't consider myself someone who's afraid of spiders, but those beastly ****ing banana spiders are on a whole new level of unspeakable horror. We were doing a highway cleanup effort and I went to go snag some McDonalds bags (mother****ing Guamanians love them some Micky-Ds) and immediately before I crashed into it, I saw the biggest, ugliest, meanest looking effing spider I've ever seen in my life. If I was a hobbit this would be Shelob. I proceeded to have the most epic freakout of my life right there along the highway. Anyway... All that and you didn't even mention the disgusting plague of toads everywhere? Working on top of a jet and having a tree snake *fall out of the rafters of the hangar* and plop on the jet next to you?

I c wot u did thar...