Frostiken

Our F-15s are yellow under the green (under the gray). Any idea what that's about?

What a bizarre poll. With the inability to pick more than one, I therefore demand a comedy option. I guess DCS: A-10 is the comedy option? Comedy option it is then.

Refueling would be easier if the bugs could be ironed out too so you'd know if you're doing something wrong, or if the tanker is just yelling 'disconnect!' because the AI boom operator is a dick.

If you didn't know this thread was taken from another thread, it reads with Tharos telling everyone that their internet connection is shit :D

That and there's no armor whatsoever to punch through. Mud huts and Hiluxes explode pretty good.

I like how they show a Seymour jet taking off at the end, even though those are MO jets :D I'm really confused by the ACUs? I was in Bagram just a couple years ago and we wore ABUs just the same as any other - the crew chief, B-man, and whoever the hell the third person on the ground there was all had ACUs... huh. Given the lack of canards and the much, much wider body, I doubt you'd see an F-22 doing a cobra anytime soon. Additionally, I've never seen a cobra, 360 or just 90, done with any form of load on the wings (pylons, weapons), and from what I understand it's for a reason: it disrupts airflow too much as well as causes extreme G-forces on the wing, not to mention just making the aircraft significantly heavier and harder to control in such a maneuver.

It really comes down to simplicity. You can control most of the systems entirely from the front seat but it's a HOTAS button-mashing nightmare. Something that can be done by pushing Reject Fwd on the appropriate hand controller may require holding Coolie Down on the throttle while pushing Castle Left on the stick for less than 1s but more than 0.3s. Additionally the extra screen is convenient if you have a pilot in the front as you can have A/G radar, the pod, weapon video for AGM-65 / AGM-130 / GBU-15, and your SIT display up. In the front, you're probably always going to want your TEWS screen up so you're not getting shot at, your SIT display and / or the TSD moving map, and maybe your HSI? Basically, in order to FULLY do things from the front you have to give up some flexible functionality, but that's why there's supposed to be a backseater. I'm not saying it's totally practical, but the capability to single-seat it is there. http://instantrimshot.com/

You understand that's going to affect accuracy, right?

I have no idea why you people are so attached to that aircraft. Flying Legend: F-4 Phantom. This thing was the turning-point in US military aircraft design, and was one of the most advanced fighters in the air at the time.

A nifty feature I advise everyone to use is to add 'modifier' keys to their profiles in DCS: A-10. I have the Warthog's paddle switch as a modifier, and I've bound the entire keyboard to the CDU so I can type whatever I want :)

Because the F-15E can still function by allowing the players to hot-swap - this is how Janes did it in 1998 and it worked like a peach. It's unfeasible to swap seats back and forth in an F-14, especially given its primary air/air role. Stick your SIT display on the MPCD, A/A radar on left, TPod on the right, and you really won't have too many issues performing a basic sortie from the front cockpit of an F-15E, with the possible exception that you have to memorize some extremely confusing HOTAS. Seriously, if you're having problem with the A-10, your mind will break when you see the control list for the F-15E!

Isn't the biggest obstacle to an F-14 the segregation between cockpits? I was under the impression that you just couldn't do many things without being in the right seat.

To be fair the F-14 did pretty well in Iran's hands. Surprisingly. But the F-15 is a legend for more reasons than just its kill ratio. Whether or not the F-14 was a fleet defender is irrelevant, you don't get a free pass because the airframe turned out to be useless. The F-15's practically become the lynchpin of any modern combat operation anywhere. Given the limited size of the F-15E fleet, the shit it's managed to accomplish in the relatively short time it's been around is far beyond simply being 'impressive'.

Well the difference between those is that the F-15 / F-18 haven't been touched in over a decade, F-16 was updated like a week ago and is still under very active development. At this point in the game, the only thing DCS could do differently as far as the F-16 goes is make it look better, and wanting a sim just because of a graphical update is kind of petty. It's not like they're going to fill their F-16 with a bunch of laser cannons and other whacky shit that BMS isn't able to.

What? That's pretty much common-sense. Lack of detailed avionics, lack of 90% of features due to not-clickable cockpit, I assume even the flight model is simplified. Well they seem to be taking up a lot of one of those :]

It's also the most realistic: Notice that none of the F/A-18s in that video dropped any ordnance or, well, accomplished anything :D Honestly though, I'd rather have an F/A-18 than "Yet Another F-16 Sim" because DCS: F-16 would be a massive waste given BMS / F4AF, but it's still a dull airframe. It's like getting excited about a slightly used sensibly-priced midsized Kia. Part of what makes a simulated aircraft interesting in my eyes is the history behind it. Aircraft that achieved impressive things or are historically famous or have done great things in time of war. I'm not saying that's all there is to it, but it really does bring to life the charm of flying them. The KA-50 is unique in that it's a single seater (that and I had absolutely no idea what it was when I bought it). The F4 Phantom has oodles of history behind it and really represented the turning-point in US aircraft development. The MiG-25 represented the USSR through most of the Cold War and was (and really, still is) quite impressive (even if we were fooled into thinking it was better than it really was). The F/A-18 doesn't have any of that... it's not done anything impressive since it was made, and when it's retired it will quietly fade into obscurity, little more than a footnote in history. I just cannot get excited about this aircraft in any way. It doesn't look impressive, it doesn't have impressive stats, it doesn't do anything impressive... the only real thing it has going for it is carrier takeoffs and landing, but that's not nearly enough to make a sim about, given that both events take place in just a few seconds. It will be fun because it will be faster than anything we have now, and I'll go ahead and buy it, but not because it has the coolest-sounding tank-shredding cannon with wings attached, but because it's probably going to be the only modern aircraft sim we see for another several years.

I have no idea what the hell that is up there. The only thing I thought when I heard 'Colonial' was the dropship from Aliens. Anyway, what I really, really want is a DCS-level Mechwarrior game. If you've played Mechwarrior, while there's a lot of neat concepts, it's really got a lot of simplification and silliness about it. To hell with that, I want to flip switches and push buttons and have things happen!

- Dust trails last for all of one second. Vehicle stops, dust disappears immediately after. It also looks like it's from 1999. - Your 'weapon smoke' is from the active motor plume. The Smerch is most obvious when, after it finishes firing, it might as well have fired nothing at all. The massive cloud of debris it kicks up, to say nothing of the blasted crater of earth it leaves behind it, and even the rocket plumes themselves, are pretty obvious for quite a long time after firing. This is an acknowledged problem of rocket artillery and makes them prone to counter-battery fire. I notice you elected to not show in your screenshots what the Smerchs look like mere seconds after they fire their last rocket. - Try reading the whole thread.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ICcHxoNjVY Here's: 1) What happens when tracked vehicles move over open land, and 2) A Tunguska firing all manner of things leaving a hell of a lot of smoke floating around it for quite a while. Here's: 3) What the ground looks like in FLIR: Note that it doesn't appear like splotchy lava. http://www.x20.org/images/DGI_FLIR_scene.jpg Awful picture that's pretty irrelevant because of it aside, you're also looking for ground units engaging ground units in what appears to be a heavy forest. What about SAM units? SAMs need pretty unobstructed lines of fire - even an IR missile requires a not-insignificant amount of time to find, acquire, ID, lock, and engage an air target. Some can get away with less cover than others, but you aren't going to see much success firing SA-9s from a thick forest. Tanks also are best used in pretty open areas, and will entrench hull-down to take full advantage of clear lines of fire - great for ground combat, not so great for being subtle. Here's the thing: If a ground unit wants to hide, it can hide pretty well. If a ground unit doesn't want to hide, it can be seen really easily (or even if he does want to hide, sometimes it doesn't matter). The problem is in DCS, unstealthy units aren't easy to see. No dust trails, no weapon smoke, no track marks / telltale signs of passage, no intelligent AI that can give me guidance to an enemy (in the CSAR mission the pilot says 'infantry 2000 meters to my east' before you even know where he is - meanwhile SAMs and AAA is lighting you up... like... really? Really?

Have you read any post in this thread? Let me sum it up for you: Here's what a Smerch launcher looks like when it's firing. Now think about what it looks like in-game.

All the more reason for ED to implement a label-less way of enhancing visibility of ground units :)

Yeah but was the Bombcat actually any good?

I'm playing through a few of the stock missions that I haven't done, like 'CSAR'. This missions has convinced me more than ever of the necessity of labels... I honestly cannot see how this mission is possible to complete whatsoever without the use of labels, or rather without using metaknowledge of the mission...

Yeah, I was disappointed nobody was in the hangar working today :( Was a beautiful day, but nobody was even flying!