Frostiken

Looks kind of unrealistic... he stands like it's windless, and it looks like the rear stabs would decapitate him, jumping off like that. Honestly, the way the dude bailed in Duxford was probably the most practical, he basically ran along the length of the tail and jumped off the side. I imagine there really was no 'right' way to bail out anyway.

POLL: TOMATO - FRUIT OR VEGETABLE? [ ] - Fruit. I put them in fruit salads even though everyone complains and hates me for it, and when people say they don't want fruit on a pizza, I make it without sauce out of pure spite. [ ] - Vegetable, because I hate dictionaries and science. [ ] - Comedy option.

It's not like the -18 can go underwater or something. Carrier ops = takeoff and landing, which constitutes like 2% of a sortie. The only real advantage here is opening up the sea as a staging area... in terms of actual flight simulation it doesn't add much.

This is true, the missiles may have locked up each other just because the game decided they did.

I skipped around in the video but every single damn time I just see two choppers flying in straight lines doing nothing. In fact, the bloopers at the end was the only interesting thing I saw. No offense dude, but you need to edit your shit. There may be something nice in there, but I don't care about watching 7 minutes of straight and level flying waiting for you to do one maneuver.

TPod air-to-air mode isn't described very well, nor is the training for it very representative of its potential. The important thing to know is that you're supposed to keep the pod's A/A mode really quite 'hands-off'. You put it in A/A, and the pod will now be looking for something that's very hot contrasting with a cold background. I'm fairly sure there's also algorithms that track movement on the background so it's not picking up someone's backyard bonfire. Regardless, the idea behind it is that the pod is looking directly forward, and as soon as another aircraft traverses your line, the pod will see it and automatically lock to it. The advantage here is that as long as the pod doesn't lose sight with the target aircraft, it should always be pointing at it. This means that on your HUD, wherever your TPod indicator is at is where the enemy aircraft is, so you can tell if he's maneuvering to get behind you, breaking away, etc. It also lets you watch them on the video. Fact is that this isn't very important for something like the A-10 but is immensely valuable for a multi-role aircraft.

People already got butthurt enough about Nevada "not being realistic", despite the fact no A-10 has ever dropped ordnance on Georgia... Doing the entire United States would be awesome though :) So much variation in terrain... Barring that... Colorado would be excellent. Rocky deserts to the west, massive mountains in the middle, plains and grasslands to the east. And lots of Air Force bases! Personally I'd *really* like fictional terrain, something designed with maximizing mission potential creativity. Canyons and mountains, oceans, forests, islands... something like ArmA 1's terrain, just blown up 10x in size.

I suppose that's *possible*, but the radar return signature on an AIM-120 heading straight at you would be countless orders of magnitude smaller than the giant, angly aircraft that fired it. I imagine the doppler return on it would be high, but, well, the front of an AIM-120 has all the radar cross section of a coffee can...

What's the point, this is just another masturbatory thread, same as any other. It's not like I'm destroying anything constructive. I don't even understand the point of this thread, he just asked for a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with the Hornet except carrier ops. And stressing the importance of carrier work just makes this identical to every other F/A-18 thread, and like every other F/A-18 thread, I have to trash-talk what an ugly, completely useless airframe it is, that will go down in history as being dramatically underwhelming in every single way and has never once done anything important or impressive. :D I just like picking on you -18 fanboys, it's even easier than the Viper nerds :)

There's a turbulence setting in the weather tab, but I heard it doesn't do anything...

What?

Stations 2A / 2B / 8A / 8B are the rails under the wings. They fire forward. Stations 3, 4, 6, and 7 are along the belly, and have pistons and swaybars that knock the missile away as part of the firing sequence. I have no idea how far the missile actually makes it before the rocket fires and if it's accurate in DCS, but yeah, the missiles fired off the belly get thrown outwards prior to the rocket igniting. If it just shot forward off of the belly stations, it would hit all kinds of crap and you'd end up with a missile missing half its fins :)

Moar liek F/A-18 Borenet <---- Also | | V

Why would saving and loading in a flight sim be any different from any other game?

Basically. Think of it like the spectator mode of any decent FPS where you can get the first-person view, except in this case you can seamlessly take over and it switches them to the spectator.

I thought female voices were generally advantageous only really because they're rarer and stand out more, as well as - as at least mentioned in the Wiki article - the pitch and tonal range standing out through radio comms. Regarding the Betty voice, I imagine it would work better than a male voice if only because 95% of the voices you hear in a cockpit are going to be male, having a female voice yelling 'Altitude! Altitude!' would get your attention.

Can you explain that one more? Maybe I'm reading more in to it than I should... Regarding the rest of your post... makes me wish we had mod tools :p

Well, it's been a year, so... :D

Yeah well, this is what happens when you're poor :D

I'll say, 304 wasn't even that bad of a jet :( Should've been 135, TBH.

No. Our F-15Es (and if an F-15E can't do it with a bomb, nobody can) carry GBU-12s in Afghanistan specifically because JDAMs cannot hit moving targets with any serious reliability. If someone's driving a truck around on a road, you just point your laser at them and the bomb will follow it and hit them every time. JDAMs, being inertial, have to know where they're going to hit before they even release and that's pretty much all there is to it. One thing specifically what BlueRidge is referring to is the ability to air-burst JDAMs. This isn't modeled in the sim because the damage system isn't robust enough to simulate the effects of an air-burst bomb. As near I can tell the damage is the same as in any old FPS game, so an air-burst bomb would actually be much less effective. Hopefully some day this will change and we can at least get some rudimentary simulation of earth penetration and shockwave bounce. The current problem we have in Afghanistan is that PAVEWAY IIs cannot air-burst. JDAMs cannot hit moving targets. Then someone thought 'What if we stuck a PAVEWAY IIs nose on the front of a JDAM...?' and the GBU-54 was born :D

Is that why adjusting my altimeter in-flight causes my aircraft to pitch wildly for a moment?

Well that's disappointing.

Yeah, that's another justification for more obvious units, we completely lack the ability to go "Hey chief, where's the last tank?" "Oh, he's over there."

If you're in any position to get shot or hit by that kind of crap, generally your canopy strength is the least of your worries.