Frostiken

It'll still chunkify some Talibs :D

If it's a competent multi-role fighter aircraft, I'll be happy. Unless it's an F-16 because all the Viper nerds can go back to AF and pretend their crappy little Mazda Miata lawndart deathtrap is actually cool. And unless it's an F/A-18C because we've all agreed that it's totally inept at everything. :D

Of course :) The F-15E is the absolute undisputed king of PGMs. There's really nothing else in the world that can match its capabilities. It lacks in a few areas, for example if you compare the quantity of GBU-12s to the A-10, the A-10 comes out ahead (due to the fact that the GBU-12 is so long they can only rack up at most four on each side, leaving the center racks on STA3/4/6/7 unused)... but then again the F-15E has AGM-130s and, well, nukes ;D And hell, if the cannon is your thing, the F-15E does plenty of ground strafing as well.

Bring the pain!

Nice :D Word of advice though, turn off the radar altimeter next time... "PULL UP, PULL UP!"

Why, because their feelings are hurt? I think a 'work in progress' thread is the best time to speculate on features and how it should work, when it's all, you know, in progress and can probably be changed before it's rolled out. The cruelest thing you can do to an artist is tell them something is perfect when it isn't. I don't see anything wrong with anything I posted - I simply noticed something, and mentioned it. If I'm wrong about it, I'm wrong, the bomb goes in as shown. If I'm not wrong, maybe they notice it's blowing up a lot higher than it should, it gets changed, and we get a more accurate product overall. Would you have preferred I sandwich my concern between mountains of groveling and praise, like some vizier trying to explain to a brutal king that tax income is going to be lower this year? That just makes me disingenuous and doesn't actually change the nature of my concern. I'm really not concerned about a developer's feelings when it comes to product improvement. Do you think that every bug report submitted begins with "This game is great, seriously, the best, you guys are awesome. I have deposited the necessary tribute to the PayPal account, and you will also find this gold statue I have erected to your divinity, my grace. Really, please, I am but a humble supplicant before your majesty. But I... uh... I'm so very very sorry but I'm terribly afraid that I think I may have possibly noticed a tiny problem...", just in case someone's feelings are hurt that they programmed something incorrectly? Are we really concerned with being politically correct *on the internet*? No, you say "This is broke. Here's how to replicate it. Here's how it should work. It rates 2/5 on severity." I could understand if I had said something to the effect of: "Nice job you idiots, this is total crap. Did you even bother looking at any videos of the bomb going off, or did you just guess and make some shit up? Why are you wasting your time on this garbage? Who cares, where the **** is Nevada?"... but I didn't. I was pretty much matter-of-fact to the point.

I gotta say, in all the videos, the little expended carriers the continue to float around like angry hornets amuses the hell out of me.

Arming = removing all the safety devices before takeoff, like the pylon breach pins, the CMD interrupt pins, and other armament ground safety pins. Not to be confused with pins for the landing gears and such which are removed in chocks before they first taxi out. EOR = 'End of Runway' which is typically a parking spot where the aircraft are armed, and then wait for clearance to take off. Hot Pits = As mentioned, putting fuel in without the crew leaving the seat, typically with one or both engines running. Loading = Putting the munitions on, loading up new chaff/flare buckets, fresh rounds. It makes sense to do these in different places due to the potential for catastrophe you have when you mix loading fuel, loading bombs, and dearming them all in the same area. Related story: On the F-15, the Emer Jett button is curiously designed and, if it's pushed slightly, the only real indication is that there's a white band showing. Well at some point this button got slightly pushed and the white band was almost impossible to see - so much so that nobody noticed it. When the aircraft got to EOR and the pin was pulled from the pylon ejection breach, the carts fired and the guy nearly got crushed by a falling 660 gal fuel tank. Not a fun thing to have happen.

If it does have a radar altimeter then I imagine what I said is correct - that regardless of how high it breaks open (which would still allow you to cover greater area), the actual weapons themselves - the BLU-108 and the skeets - are programmed to work around a certain height-over-target to maximize the effectiveness of the penetrator shot. So a higher HOF would break open the package and release the 108s, which would float around and spread out, but would still only activate at their pre-set altitude of, say, 200 feet at which point they begin spinning, rise up to around 400 feet and hurl the skeets out. Otherwise, a higher HOF would just have the skeets shooting things too far away to be effective, I would imagine. Globalsecurity had this to say: Which seems to suggest that yes, there is an 'ideal' release altitude that the BLU-108 strives to achieve which would answer the question of the radar altimeter.

Hot pits = refueling without shutting down. The F-15 shuts down one engine in order to access the fuel receptacle, but basically the idea is the crew doesn't get out.

Would be interesting then to put in reduced damage / penetration over distance, so you have to evaluate your target and decide if a closer burst at a risk of covering a small area is preferable, or if you can cover a wider area and still have enough energy to punch through the hull...

It's okay Paul, I'll always love you :D Only the first part of my post was actually directed at Viper... shame on me for not quoting. Don't expect a hug until you roll around in some soak-up pads though. Thanks, that's good enough. I only brought it up because I remember reading something about the skeet having a laser on it and calculating something about range, though maybe it was to simply discern a 'taller' object from the ground around it.

Is this really that hard? I'm not asking you to invent cold fusion here. Question: Do the skeets in real life really fire from that high altitude? Concern: The picture shows a penetrator captured mid-flight most likely firing from half a mile in the air, where all the canisters and skeets are (one of which can be seen releasing four more skeets). Possible answers: A) The skeets don't discriminate based on range, but at greater altitudes the penetrator will have reduced effect as one would expect. B) It's our understanding that the effectiveness of the EFP is maintained over long distances and that the skeets can and do function within that altitude envelope. C) No, this is just a work-in-progress though and expect it to change. D) RARJARAHLGBLA ARGUING SEMANTICS HULK SMASH Nobody's complaining about anything, all I did was voice my puzzlement at the height the skeets are firing at.

Yes well those conflicts were also a pretty long time ago. For ODS, most F-15Es didn't even have LANTIRN pods because not enough were ever made and they had to team up to share one between lead and wingman. Every branch of service got the short end of the stick there, with a notable lack of resources all around. Additionally the war moved so much more quickly than expected which overextended air assets considerably. I don't think it's fair to compare the rather unique circumstances of ODS, as I'm fairly sure many lessons were learned from that one. Additionally, only 6 combat losses is a trifle compared to the number of sorties that they flew. Keep in mind that in Kosovo, the air war was such a cluster**** that we let an F-117A get shot down, and then were so bone-headed we didn't bomb the wreckage. Good video, you but you definitely got lucky on the SA-19 / Igla. Those are probably the biggest nightmare for me. You have about one second to do something before it hits you...

Alright well, submit it as a bug report :D It doesn't help the matter than the skeets don't explode with black smoke. Regardless my intent was more on finding more about the system, if they really can fire from that high. Picture was to illustrate my question, not to call out Viper...

Viper, are those not the penetrators mid-flight? Or are you suggesting that the screenshot just happens to have caught them as they left the skeet? What are the tiny black dots around the 'fired' dispersers at the top of the screen then? Look like skeets to me.

And what? The picture shows them firing the penetrators from like half a mile up. Granted I don't know much about this system, but I imagine for penetrating armor, the closer the better since the EFP will lose a lot of velocity and accuracy at that distance. All videos I've seen show the penetrators firing at less than half that distance.

I never did bother to learn how to fly the KA-50... maybe when I get my new graphics cards I'll give it a shot. One GTX 460 and its partially melted retarded brother can't handle the game at 2560x1600 with full settings, and I'm a man who doesn't compromise..

Exactly.

I find the picture of the tanks being mauled to be a little puzzling - all the footage I've seen of the CBU-97 suggests that most skeets fire their EFPs about 50 meters or so above the targets. Even if you did set it to a higher altitude initial function, I was led to believe that the skeets have their own laser ranging as well to ensure the targets are within optimal range for the EFP...

Even still, no need to get tied up in semantics - designation lasers pulse like a strobe. It's how the bomb can identify which laser point to drop towards.

Prior to DCS: A-10C I didn't even know this weapon existed. It might be the coolest damn thing in the world. No wonder it costs like half a million dollars to drop one.

Ooooh sexy :) I assume it'll have rudimentary tracking abilities?

You do realize I actively work on the entire family of targeting pods and probably know more about them than anyone on this forum, right? What you said: "The TGP laser emits energy outside of the IR spectrum." What the Tpod laser wavelength is: 1,000nm - 1,500nm. What the IR spectrum is: 700nm - 1,000,000nm. What you said: "The TGP laser emits energy outside of the IR spectrum"

Speedbrake is the right spelling.