Frostiken

Does the A-10C even support HQ2? If you'd asked me before I'd ever played this, I'd have said 'Duh, yes', but given that I don't think I've ever seen a TOD switch, I have my doubts. Still, hearing the adorable pitter-patter of tiny frequencies being jumped around would be nice :D And yes, since most likely the next DCS product will feature a radar dish of some kind, it's probable that some sort of IFF modeling will come with it, so I guess getting into the habit now is the thing to do - though ED needs to fix the bug of the damn Mode 4 code dial being set to 'Zero' in chocks, which is *not* where it should ever be...

:love:

Here's a dumb question - that stupid dial on the panel... how do you know what it's set to, what with the whole lack of anything painted on the panel? :p

... turns on the poor neglected KY-58 and IFF system? :D

So it's not just me who felt that you seemed to roll too easily on landing... I'm working on landing without relying on my wheelbrakes as much as I used to, and the rate at which the end of the runway suddenly shows up is surprising, and I'll be lucky to have dropped below 60 knots by the time I find myself standing on the brakes to try to stop.

Ammo would be a safer bet. Avionics learns the weapon integration, but the weapons themselves aren't us at all. Anything I know about them I've gleaned from other sources, and to be fair it really doesn't impact our job enough to be worth knowing.

Always good times when the fuels nerd forgets the physics of that and gasses up a jet all the way on a frosty Friday night, and by nice warm Monday the hangar has become a flammable birdbath.

Just the unique way the alignment system programmed into the WCMD works. I imagine it's like a joystick calibration - you flex it around to all the limits and once you're done it uses that to find the 'center'.

That combined with the huge range of joysticks and lack of capabilities of many makes me think it's not a terrible idea to have variable levels of assist. What I think many would prefer is a minor assist with about 5% authority over your thrust and controls. Sort of like PAC, where it'll nudge you into place but exceeding the authority limits would still cause you to move around and break away. Getting your airspeed and alignment would be entirely up to you, but once you're in the right position it would help keep you there. If your airspeed is 0.5 kts too high, it might dampen it a bit, so people without ultra-sensitive throttles (or even the luxury of a split throttle) aren't constantly swinging back and forth trying to get their potentiometers to find the sweet spot. If you're rolling just a hair to the left (since, honestly, roll trim is so sensitive it's almost impossible to get right), it'll relax it a bit. Basically, all the ultra-minute maneuvers would no longer become as necessary, but the rest of it would still be entirely up to you. *Shrug* Either way I suspect air refueling for us in the sim is a lot harder in some ways than in real life. You can see videos of A-10s flying in behind the tanker at +20 knots, slam on the airbrakes, snag the boom, and fly perfectly straight and level with nary a shake, all in about five seconds. Even the best air refueling I've seen in-game involves a lot of shaking around and slowly creeping in to place. Some of you may think that air refueling in the sim is easy, and that's fine, but I'd like to see you keep your tune if our next aircraft is an F-16 or F-15 where you cannot even see the refueling receptacle from the seat... methinks things will become even harder.

I've been having this bizarre problem... it's quite minor but quite annoying. Occasionally while flying (maybe once an hour) I'll have a massive uncommanded pitch up. I'll be puttering along in alt/path hold and suddenly the nose will swing up about 15 degrees. Nothing terrible really comes of this, but it does kick off LAAP. I disconnected every other axis device I could, reduced to my HOTAS / KB / M / TIR / Pedals, still happens on occasion. Thoughts? I'll try to grab a track next time it happens...

I wonder what else it's sending - tuned INS comparison data, to ensure the bomb didn't 'drift'? Because three lousy numbers just for lat/long/elev wouldn't take more than a fraction of a second to send :p

Would be alright. The Harrier brings more interesting unique features *and* a rare find in simulations. I just really, really want something with explosive amounts of power under the throttle. The KA-50, A-10, and even the F/A-18 can't cut it. I want to be able to point at the blue and watch it fade into black. Did you know an F-15E with F100-PW-229s in slick configuration can supercruise? :D

I'm talking any lights at all. Finding the KC-135 at night was like trying to spot a black hole. I had to fly about 5,000 feet above him and look down to get visual.

I agree. If any of you do what salmons do, which is be delicious, I would be forced to consume you as well.

Basic physics dictates that the boom will have some resistance and thus should even out overspeed *slightly* (5 knots sounds dubious), but right now it does, literally, nothing. Seriously though, AAR is still the most buggy, unreliable pile of garbage in this game and it has been for several patches. It's actually getting kind of tiring that after many, many patches, both ILS and AAR are still basically broken. Tanker won't drop the boom unless I'm literally twenty feet away from him asking over and over for precontact... boom "jumps" up when you approach, boom doesn't properly steer up and down, requiring me to fly into the receptacle to some degree, tanker inexplicably stops giving you fuel, tanker forces you to disconnect for no reason, tanker doesn't even turn any effing lights on when it's night...

I'm curious about the lack of master warnings. Wouldn't complete, violent removal of the gear (which would cause immense damage to the airframe, mind you) cause whichever hydro system is feeding it to empty itself in pretty short order? Funny you should mention it - I finally got my computer working and am learning how to fly all over again. Took two hits from an SA-9 I didn't see (one was a glancing blow, hit my flares at the last second), knocked out almost *everything*. I dropped all my munitions and gassed it, and a second later my left engine exploded. CDU, CADC, Pitot pressure, static pressure, RALT, all out of commission. Massive rudder damage and asymmetrical thrust had me with the yaw trim dialed almost all the way. Started losing fuel in my tanks quickly (right moreso than the left) so I switched to drain from the right to get as much fuel out of it as I could. Switched to HARS for some basic flight data, found the nearest airfield thanks to my handy print-out charts... I flew in a basic approach and dropped landing gears, not even sure if they would work... well, they did, but the tires were missing on all three - not blown, just *missing*. Ended in funny little stumps. Took the gears back up, dropped flaps all the way and bled as much speed as possible, landed a picture-perfect belly landing (with a surprising amount of control with my one functional rudder). Immediately cut the engine, fuelflow, and power, and popped the lid to egress. As I watched outside... once hydro pressure took a dump, the nose gear flopped open in a comical fashion :) I guess hydro pressure was the only thing keeping it up... Honestly, my favorite part of this game is when everything goes completely tits-up.

...which is why there's EZ-mode 'Game' settings, and 'immortal', 'no failures', 'infinite ammo', 'infinite fuel' options. Those of us who want a more realistic and intense experience shouldn't be left out in, of all things, a SIMULATOR that's praised for its attention to detail, because a few people who already have the option of giving themselves a dumbed-down experience are on here oddly protesting against features they probably already have turned off and thus wouldn't affect them at all...

I've been having problems too. I connected up okay, took a bit of fuel, and then disconnected. When I reconnect (after resetting, of course), he'll say "You're taking fuel... disconnect." and it'll kick me off. Sometimes he yells 'Break away!' for no reason as well. I'll abort the refuel entirely and try again and no change.

I was having serious problems with TIR - it felt like the camera would get stuck in 'notches', moving my head around would cause massive misalignment on return to center... someone suggested to me to try using One:One, and it really does work pretty well. You'll have to increase the sensitivity of it a few times (go to each axis and click the up arrow five times or so), but it made it all feel a lot better, I can actually get away without recentering every 10 seconds (more like every 20 now...).

Seeing as how there's already an unlimited ammo hook in the game, seems pretty cut-and-dry to just stick a check-box on it for it. +1

Yeah the terrain in ArmA2 is really quite beautiful... nothing in DCS has yet compared to the first time I was flying through the hills with how realistic the forests looked...

Radios are finicky on ramp startups. Sometimes I can't contact ATC at all until I do some voodoo dance and it magically starts working.

Well I misread one of those posts up there, thought someone was saying the skeet fired an APFSDS :p

Oh god, so much misinformation here. The skeets fire an explosively formed penetrator against whatever big, blocky vehicle-sized hot thing it happens to see. That's it. Essentially, an EFP roughly mimics what it would be like to hit a tank with a plasticine cannonball traveling at Mach 7.

Right now, if you know what you're doing, you can blow through the startup extremely fast. We're at the point where every checklist has 'filler' features like checking the fuel gauge and oxygen gauge even though we all know there's no way either of those would be bad (I don't even think it's possible for the fuel quantity indicator to fail in the sim). So, I suggest we enable the preflight BIT... you know, the thing where all the crap flashes on the HUD... well, it's supposed to be interactive. You're supposed to center flight controls, arm EAC, enable SAS, arm it again, it tests GCAS, etc. It's a vital step no pilot would ever skip because it tests the vital systems that you trust to stop you from smashing in to the ground. With that in mind, I suggest that, maybe for DCS: A-10C 2, we enable these BITs, and even allow them to fail if performed wrong or if the system actually is bad - right now the GCAS BIT passes just fine even if your RALT is turned off, and presumably if it was completely broken too. Then again, I'm in to the whole random failures and maintenance aspect of these aircraft which seems to be an unusually unpopular stance...