Frostiken

http://www.freefalcon.com/forum/content.php :)

Anyone installing anything into the C: drive's 'program files' needs to be sent to computer user's re-education camp. Partitions are your FRIEND!

:confused: F-15 does indeed have an AFCS (automatic flight controls) system which includes a sort of limited/hybrid fly-by-wire functionality. Has eight probes - two AOA transmitters, two forward pitot/static probes, two total temperature probes, two duct pitot/static probes (though the static is really just a hole in the side of the inlet duct). On top of AFCS the F-15 has five moving parts (three ramps, the bypass ramp, and the diffuser ramp) in each intake in order to shape the incoming air to be slow and healthy for the engines to operate at maximum performance at any speed and high AOAs. Proper ramp scheduling requires a composite input of the entire pitot/static system (well, half of it for redundancy's sake). So an iced-up duct probe can cause it to think the incoming air is traveling much slower than it really is, the ramp won't schedule properly, the engine will injest a shockwave, flameout, and the jet will flip over catch fire crash and explode. Or something.

I've been wondering this too.

Prepare to be sad then :) Yeah it could be possible, but the fact is the maps are missing in reality. It's not actually that uncommon.

Nope, not a bug. Real life maps, even in aircraft, are missing big hunks. You just have to make do with a lower quality smaller-scaled one.

The real joke there is that the current F-22 *is* the downgraded foreign one :D

There's a difference between collateral damage and wholesale indiscriminate carefree slaughter.

What's with everyone wanting a Phantom? My real wish for DCS is to have the terrain and ground bits updated to be prettier. Textured kilometer-square blocks feels dated :P Imagine ArmA2's terrain, but developed by Crytek :)

Ugh, imagine that trade-off too. Risk your tank's armor and trust it to defeat the RPG, or have a system that saves your ass but turns all your buddies to a soft pulp outside... All things considered, I thought DARPAs Iron Curtain system was, albeit silly, very cute :)

I've never seen the taxi light used during the day. Landing light, yeah, it's pretty much always used (on the runway, of course) because you can see it miles away. I don't know what to say about the anti-k's except that civil aviation is undoubtedly different in this case. F-16s have the most irritating goddamn anti-k in the world that absolutely hates your retinas, whereas the Aussie's F-111s have a funny little rotating red light on the belly. During Red Flag exercises the entire area looks like a rave. Even in Bagram, anti-k's were always a-go, at least at night. Spent plenty of time complaining about the Aviano light show taxiing down our ramp... For daytime I never paid that much attention. I can tell you with 100% certainty that at Mountain Home, anti-ks were always on when you were out of chocks no matter what. Again, it's most likely MAJCOM guidelines with theater specific supplements. Going to go on a limb here and say that as far as the USAF goes, you should have your anti-ks on during taxi and takeoff.

Anti-Ks should be on from the moment you leave chocks to when you fence in (or whatever local policy dictates... in Bagram, all lights go off immediately after rotation). The taxi light should only be on when taxiing, and should be turned off just prior to parking into your space (to avoid blinding the ground crew). The A-10 might be able to get away with not having its anti-k's on because of the strobing position lights, but every other airframe to include Tornados, F-111s and F-16s, all have their anti-ks' on when they leave chocks so I see no reason why the A-10 would be different. In Lakenheath they don't put on really any lights when sitting in chocks though (at MO they were always lit up after the JFS shut down), so lighting is probably MAJCOM directed. That someone thought that this was so utterly necessary that it HAD to be on the HOTAS confounds me. This goes along with like, having a switch on the stick to adjust the cockpit's bleed air temperature... surely there was something better they could've stuck on that switch like, I don't know, autopilot modes? When Fairchild made the A-10, maybe they envisioned it turning all its lights on and off to strobe the enemy to death or something, I don't know.

Law of warfare dictates that weapons will always be better than protection... :) Me, I would just hit the tank from the side to leave it dead in the water, then drop a GBU-12 on it when the repair crews show up.

Almost forgot. AV-8B Harrier: + VTOL! + Naval ops. - Small payload, IIRC cannot even carry JDAMs. - Tends to forget to stay in the air, flips over, blows up, catches everything on fire, and makes even the Osprey look safe. - Sub-mach top speed.

Because it's the right side :)

I have no idea what the point of this is.

Uh, at the same time, this is like the 'airplane on a conveyor belt' myth - a car gets stuck because the force of movement is sent to the wheels - if the wheels spin, you go nowhere. An airplane forces against the air itself. An airplane in the grass should only get stuck if the landing gears are completely buried.

At the same time, lack of labels (even cut-down ones like I use) severely disadvantage people without oodles of cash to spend on ultra-high-res monitors, top-end computers to use them with, TrackIR, etc. Not to mention the lack of labels is extremely unrealistic since a pilot's eyes are far sharper then the pixel pitch of your monitor...

I started off by jumping right into a ramp start to familiarize myself with the cockpit. I also like to test myself to see if I can figure out how to start up without reading any help (I failed, mostly because I didn't know the key-combo to push the throttle over the hump :D). I then played a couple training missions, read/skimmed most of the manual (it tends to have a few skippable sections, like much of the CDU). Every time I'd complete a 'chunk' I'd go in-game and play. All in all after about 10 hours in-flight I felt comfortable enough to fly missions.

You click the option box that simply shoves all the numbers through a simple equation so the ME can let you pick your preference. PS: My point is that neither system is better :D

Apparently you metric guys just don't get it :) Let's try this: Think about how far a meter is. Let's say you had to explain to an alien (who has his own system of measurement that you don't understand) how far a meter is without actually showing him. What would you say? You would have to use a universal constant, ie: the speed of light in a vacuum, at which point you would have to use, as JS put it, an 'overly complicated' conversion that is 'not consistent'. What does 1/299,792,458th of a second have to do with anything? If a meter were truly a 'universal' system of measurement, wouldn't it make more sense to define a meter as "the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/100,000,000th or 1/10,000,000,000th of a second"? To compare, light travels one foot in 1/983,571,056th of a second. That is just as much a bullshit number as 1/299,792,568th! My point is this: A meter is nothing special. The only reason you 'get' meters is because you've been ingrained with the understanding of just how far a meter is in regards to spatial distance. Likewise, when a scientists talks about lightyears, he doesn't expect you to calculate the relationship between a lightyear and a meter in your head - you simply have to understand the spatial distance of a lightyear: the distance in a vacuum that light travels in a year. The same goes for other spatial distances that far exceed that of a single meter - for example, one AU. Because for most people, numbers become meaningless when they're very large. What's easier to understand - "The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million LY away", or "The Andromeda Galaxy is 23,651,321,000,000,000,000,000 meters away!" When it comes to the Imperial system, you should never have to actually convert anything. Nobody will say 'take your aircraft to 152,900 inches AGL!'. A foot is a foot. It corresponds to a set spatial distance. An inch is an inch. Again, it corresponds to a spatial distance. That spatial distance just happens to be 1/12th of a foot, however, just because you *can* convert doesn't mean you have to. As I said, a kilometer isn't a unit of distance, it's just 1000 meters. To that end, (physical distance aside) the difference between saying 10,000 feet and 10 kilometers is effectively nil. Why? Because a foot is a foot is a foot. The number of yards in a mile doesn't matter, just your spatial understanding of how far a yard is versus a mile. No user of the Imperial system has to actually perform conversions, because when we say 'four feet', we understand how far four feet is - we don't think 'four feet... that's 1.3333 yards!'. PS: If you want to know more about how the metric system is just as stupid as the Imperial system, consider the gold plate that's attached to the Voyager probes, upon which scientists have inscribed instructions for translating time and distance to an alien race. Absolutely nowhere on that record is anything relating to 'meters'. The use the transition period of hydrogen, and the speed of light. Not your ambiguous, meaningless 'meters' :)

No, not a pilot, but I'm an avionics maintenance specialist. Everything from AAI to the VVI we have to know how to sit in the seat and operate. The only electronic gizmo we don't really do anything with is the PACS (basically the F-15E's DSMS). From a maintenance standpoint I absolutely hate the aircraft. It's extremely unreliable and completely unfriendly to work on, and the MSIP upgrades are accomplished by civilians that suck at their jobs and make ours worse by, say, mispinning a SATCOM radio that brings the entire MUX offline... But as much as I'll badmouth the airframe, it's still one of the most impressive aircraft ever made. Truthfully I really don't want the F/A-18 because I think it's ugly as sin.

England uses the Imperial system for almost everything as well, whereas for temperature they alternate freely between F and C... all things considered at least the US has made up its mind ;) Really, Metric isn't "all that". A meter is an ambiguous unit of measurement for distance, and a kilometer just means '1000 meters'. Since the aircraft measures altitude in feet and not miles (which would be agreeably absurd), 10,000 feet = 10 kilofeet = :D What gets me is how metric is talked up for its 'conversions', but if you ask an Aussie how far you have to drive to get somewhere, they'll tell you "1,xxx kilometers" and not "1.xxx megameters". Thing is that Metric users seem to believe that in the Imperial system you have to do conversions - you don't. If a target is 2nm away, it's 2nm away. Knowing how far that is in miles or feet is useless. It's 2nm away. A foot is a foot, a mile is a mile, and a nautical mile is a nautical mile. You should never have to convert anything. In my world, distance would be measured in the only scientifically accurate 'true' distance - the planck length :)

Switching Master Arm to off also helps ;)

Really wish the effects of wind were explained at some point. You see the same topics popping up again and again, and hell even I made a topic about the ladder lines drifting away... I don't even think anything was mentioned in the manual about it.