Frostiken

:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: Right after you learn to not be a jackass.

Mostly what annoys me is the intro speech - Darkstar this is Hog 2-1 4x A-10s with <insert list of every munition I have>. Then after all that I realize I keyed the wrong radio and have to listen to it again :D

Well it's going to be a little slower in the air since there's 250 kts of air blowing against it too.

I love how 'one second' turned into 'three seconds' for the sake of arguing against it... First of all, if your engine is on fire and you're spinning towards the ground, the fire handle is not the handle to be concerned about pulling. Secondly, even in the ultimate oh-shit emergency, pulling the fire handle is not very important. The aircraft will not explode if you leave the fire burning for another ten, twenty, even thirty seconds or more, and will have little to no effect on pulling out of a catastrophic dive. Thirdly, losing an entire forty-minute sortie because my TrackIR shifted while I was trying to click the UFC is far, far more an inconvenience than dying after I was shot down anyway. Anyway, next time you have one of these 'critical emergencies', try not blowing the fire bottles - the engine will remain burning without much of a problem, and in fact you can still use power from the engine to recover, so all things considered pulling the handle is probably NOT the thing you should do.

Christ I can't even land with a crosswind without veering all over like a drunk, this guy glided the plane two inches about the centerline without even a tiny wiggle.

Also, should really be a feature on all the emergency handles, but since the canopy jettison doesn't work (why not?) and you don't pull the seat handle to eject...maybe food for thought for future upgrades / modules that anything that will catastrophically affect flight should probably have a 'safety' on it.

Also, don't be afraid to overshoot your approach if you have to - the A-10 can stop in a fairly short distance (though mostly due to the fact that you can fly the approach at 110 kts and still be outside the stall envelope). Stand on the brakes if you have to. I have noticed that ILS tends to bring you in a little hard, at least at Batumi - I rely on ILS for the localizer to ensure I'm lined up with the runway (pretty important I'd say) and the glideslope mostly just for the first half of the leg, as being too high at that point can result in some nasty corrective maneuvering towards the end. Flaring at the end shouldn't gain you altitude, but it should slow your rate of decent - this smooths out your curve to a solid landing as well as bleeds speed. If you're gaining altitude when flaring, it usually means your speed is simply too high for your given AOA. Mostly it's because you can go slower still, but it can also mean that your AOA isn't steep enough. Typically I approach with flaps down, speedbrakes at about 25% (retracting them can gain you some quick speed). I shoot with my TVV roughly at the edge of the runway, and then lead it out just before landing (so if my flare is a little long I don't land halfway down the runway). Once down, throttle completely back, extend speedbrakes all the way, and coast until about 90kts, then slowly apply wheelbrakes. I'm unsure if hot brakes are modeled, but if they are, gradual application and only at low speeds should avoid the condition. If not, just stomp on them. Engage NWS at 60kts. I personally have a real problem with control - I tend to get minor oscillations on approach, and once on the runway I have a seriously hard ****ing time staying in a straight line. I have rudder curves set up but with differential brakes even just putting a bit too much pressure on one brake will cause me to veer around (kind of why I like the 'all or nothing' approach to the wheelbrakes). Anyway, try less technical landings first - hell, start with the least technical landing of all - simply try to fly on to the runway with your gear down. And practice, practice, practice. If you land, and you're on the runway, pull in the speedbrakes, throttle up, and go-around for another touch-and-go. This is also a nice way to learn if your landings are too hard, because I've noticed that wheels tend to accrue damage - if you're "doing it wrong" eventually you'll blow a tire, and then it gets interesting... though all things considered it's not *that* hard to land with a blown tire. Also turn off birds until you're comfortable.

A few times this has come up, including just now when I couldn't figure out why my damn APU would only spool up to 60% before dying. Due to nuances of TrackIR and the UFC buttons being very close to them, I find myself occasionally inadvertently pulling the fire handles, which terminates fuel flow to the selected engine. Needless to say this is slightly more than an inconvenience if it happens during flight. In an effort to alleviate accidental engine shutdown in-flight, can we get a one-second 'hold to pull' feature put on the fire handles, as a sort of 'Are you SURE you want to do this?' feature?

Honestly don't worry too much about the AOA donut - you'll be able to land and stop just fine without perfect form - focus on just getting the aircraft down without damage first. Watch your VVI to ensure you're not landing like this idiot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB5CXlEALJ0

Well this is also for recon aircraft - they're going to be flying straight in to snap a picture and leave - the A-10's got a lot more flexibility in terms of where it can go, how it's going to approach, and how it'll accomplish its mission. I would imagine tracking it on radar throughout an engagement and providing location updates is going to be a lot harder and more chaotic than something flying straight and level on a fixed trajectory. Point being, scanning a small sector of the sky will increase odds of detection, but the sectors of the sky from which the A-10 could approach from are unpredictable and many.

It's hard to tell from those graphs since of the only two 'slow' aircraft, one is fairly small (SD-2) and one's an absolute giant (Mohawk), but it seems that something like the A-10 would be pretty well-off as far as being able to find it visually goes. Also found this interesting: "For example, the RF-4C at 500 ft and 400 kts has a detection chance of less than 0.1 at slant range of 1 mi even under very good conditions".

"Search the area near the sun by extending arm and hand as to block out the sun’s glare. (Looking into the sun without shielding the eyes will cause them to become blinded for a few seconds." LOL

"Up there in Aberdeenshire" do you actually have any idea how far away the aircraft you're looking at are? Is this based on professional observations? Are you actually seeing every aircraft? I'm guessing no, no, and no.

Entirely depends on the size and scope of the jammer. GPS signals are extremely weak, so weak most GPS receivers in a car get baffled by the presence of a metal roof over them. A network of cheap, portable jammers could black out an entire theater. During Red Flag GPS jammers are used to blot out the entire area specifically for training without the ability to use GPS whatsoever. They aren't giant pieces of immobile equipment, IIRC most of them are man-portable little boxes.

I put together a sorta-half-assed example of what the A-10 looks like at different distances. Note that this is only a tiny, tiny segment of the sky. There's 9 A-10s hiding in the sky, and they're all properly scaled based on, well, read the image. Where's Warthog? Can't find them? Answers: Yeah 'easy' my ass. EDIT: Ugh, imgur compressed the hell out of it...

It's not a matter of seeing it, it's a matter of finding it. The sky is a very big place and given varying visual contrasts as well as glare and simple limitations in visual acuity, ***FINDING*** the target is the hard part. For what it's worth, a very wide-bodied aircraft like the F-15 at 15,000 feet is roughly the same size as looking at a dime 20 feet away. Not invisible, certainly not a wide-bodied aircraft like the F-15. If a threw a dime on concrete within 20 feet of you, it would take you a little bit of seraching to point it out. Now put this dime on a three-dimensional plane and it'll take you a lot longer, because there's a hell of a lot more concrete to look at. 6000 feet is awfully close and you would be able to find the aircraft pretty quickly, but it would still take you time - multiply by factors like time of day, cloud density, how low / high they are, and this is also assuming you're not standing in the middle of a god damn battlefield, in a valley, surrounded by trees... Additionally, this doesn't even take into account differing aircraft dimensions - Calculating how visible something in the sky is involves pretending that the wingspan of an aircraft corresponds to it being a giant circular blob - certainly looking straight at the belly of an aircraft is going to present a high-contrast coloration and the widest possible point of visibility, but that's not the issue - we're talking about aircraft, specifically a ground-attack aircraft, flying a combat mission - it will not be flying with its belly towards you unless it's pretty much right over you. The visible cross-section of an aircraft on approach is far, far more limited.

Wish DCS looked like that... the lightning lighting up the cockpit is amazing :D

One threat that's quickly becoming a problem for modern Air Forces are GPS jammers. Despite encryption, frequencies for GPS signals are known and due to their low signal strength means that they can be susceptible to barrage jamming. The results should be obvious - EGI will lose alignment (this is actually represented on many aircraft as error rate in feet), JDAMs would be effectively useless, and reliance on L/L / UTM coordinates will make things infinitely harder, requiring targeting using more conventional methods or bullseyes. So. How about it? Maybe too much for DCS: A-10 right now, but undoubtedly an interesting feature for a future module, as GPS is relied upon so heavily that its loss can outright cripple modern combat operations.

Following it and FINDING it are two different things.

Well what gets me is the lethality. Every time I'm hit by one, everything on that side of the aircraft is just *gone*. Wing is chopped completely off at the base, tail is gone, engine is dead... seems a little over-the-top compared to the lethality of other missiles. If you watch with F6, some aircraft can take a Patriot to the face and still fly with all their bits intact. I dare you to find a small-bodied aircraft in the sky reliably, even if you *can* hear it, it is extremely hard to do so. Source: Working a flightline where I watch aircraft takeoff - unless you follow them, you will be extremely lucky to spot one in the distance.

So what happens if they can't secure a contract? There's only so many aircraft in use today that need trainer sims (which is why I wonder about the F/A-18C given that it's going to be phased out completely in a few years).

We had a -15 launch a chock through a fuel truck... Anyway, bumping this again: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=74249&highlight=handbrake Good interim solution. The W-pause-W is pretty simple but doesn't work in MP... this does.

Yeah, and Jackson Pollock and Rebecca Black are the greatest artists in history. In my opinion, everyone who thinks that, or actually wants this to be more than a DLC/expansion are a bunch of idiots. So why is ED alive? Discounting the Flanker game (part of the mid-90s flight sim explosion, everyone had their hands in these), LOMAC was not a serious flight sim, it was really more along the lines of IL2, presenting simplified models of aircraft - it was quite a degree of fidelity higher than Over-G fighters for the Xbox, but not by much. Additionally, the response to DCS: Black Shark was somewhat subdued, whereas a 'romantic' plane like the A-10, a plane which lends itself popularly to imagination and hollywood-esque notions, has exploded in popularity and sales. I know firsthand half a dozen people who own or know of the game, whereas I don't know anyone who even knows what the KA-50 even is. Hell I don't even remember how I found out about the game, but it certainly wasn't because I read hype about it or heard it through the grapevine. I think I just stumbled across the box quietly sitting at the bottom of the games rack. The market you seem to be arguing for are the people who are legitimately excited to fly a cargo plane from Hong Kong to LA in real time. So why did Microsoft fire the shit out of the only studio who was making those kinds of games? Was it because that market was making them money hand-over-fist? Or maybe because the return on their investment into FSX was slim to none, and they saw that the market for those kinds of sims has been slowly collapsing and was no longer worth their time? First, this isn't the 'world of adults', this is the world of business. Second, stop being a patronizing asshat. A good business strategy is not making a game that people aren't going to want to buy, using the money you won't make to then develop your NEXT game that people will want to buy... instead of just doing that in the first place. There's a good chance the next DCS module could be another F-16, and not because ED is going to do something new and unheard of that Falcon hasn't already done - it's because it's an insanely popular airframe and will move a lot of copies - not because it's an obscure gimmick they just felt like pouring tons of money in to.

Eh, I still find SA-18s the deadliest. You have at best about four seconds to do something before it hits you, it's practically immune to flares, the launchers are impossible to find especially with the TPod, and they seem to do more damage to aircraft than even an AIM-120... I've never been hit by one and had less than half my airframe blown apart.

So therefore the concept of 'bad taste' doesn't exist? Are you saying that it's inconceivable that it could possibly be true? That brand loyalty has never sold software before? That that's pretty much the main reason COD is still spawning clone sequels? That nobody on this forum has said 'I'll buy whatever ED makes' before? That the niche market that games like the DCS series and ArmA appeal to aren't full of fiercely rabid fans who defend products from every scrap of criticism and seem to have a belief that the respective companies can do no harm? The colloquial term for someone like that is a 'fanboy', though if I'd used that earlier this place woudl implode. This place has plenty of fanboys, and to disagree with this notion is absurd. I've been lurking around long enough to identify many of them. I've seen posts by people suggesting that others buy multiple copies of a game 'to support ED', as well as people saying that they'd buy any product ED would put out just to give them money to make the next game. Both of those are irrational behaviors and are, well, kind of disturbing. Let me put it this way: This is a joke. You're supposed to be offended at the notion of it being real. Rather than do what you're expected to do, "everyone" celebrates, starts researching data, announces that they'll buy enough copies to craft into a human-shaped mannequin with which to have sex with... something is wrong. That 'something' isn't people simply having "different tastes", it's the scary reality that ED really could probably put out anything, put any pricetag on it, and the customers of this forum would buy it no matter what. What makes that 'wrong' is that customers who aren't as lovingly attached to the DCS brand as you guys are would *not*. So to respond to your statement, Speed - yes, your opinion is wrong. ED has managed to somewhat revive the ailing flight sim genre and attract people who aren't as obsessed as one used to be expected to be, and assuming a lack of military contract, to try to push such a product out would alienate a huge amount of customers and undoubtedly cost them a serious amount of sales. It's not a matter of it existing. It's a matter of ED only being able to put out one product at a time, and if my choice was to get this joke in two years and in FOUR years finally get an F-15 or, hell, even an F/A-18C, it's a non-issue. If this were able to be put out as some sort of pack or DLC (basically released in any format that didn't consume huge amounts of time better spent on other airframes), sure, whatever - worked for LOMAC... sort of. Could this little toy be interesting? Certainly. Would it be worth the time and money? God no.