Biggus

I suspect most recommendations are going to be for a K40. A diode laser will in all likelihood not cut acrylic in any colour other than black.

Can confirm, still seeing the 900-1,000ft AGL frame drop. It doesn't seem to be location dependent. This clip is on a south west track away from Rio Grande. The frame rates were not terribly different. In the 40s above 1,000ft, around 20 under. It's damn pretty though. Second video, note that the first pass is over the more populated part of town at over 1000 and it's very smooth, but the second pass is under 900ft and demonstrates some serious frame pacing issues despite being over a more desolate part of Rio Grande.

It's only automatic after the WSO initiates lock-on. The final paragraph on that page is very specific as to what the WSO must do to achieve lock-on. @Smyth is right on this one.

Page 1-122 is quite explicit in the requirement for a lock-on though, isn't it? It doesn't need to be maintained through the delivery, but it appears to me to be very much a part of the process to insert range information into the WRCS.

I don't think I did a very good job of wording what I said. The ~40 degree limit was really the limit of the Sidewinder seeker. I believe that the actual helmet gimbal limits are closer to 75 degrees in azimuth and elevation.

Thanks for these, @lesthegrngo!

In your opinion. And that's fine, we're all free to have different opinions. For what little it's worth, I think the E was probably the right choice to lead with, and I'm very much looking forward to playing with it on day 1. I'd just personally prefer a J or an S as they're far more interesting to me.

I wouldn't overplay the 'my country flew Es so it's an E I want' card. Plenty of us here who would prefer a Navy variant happen to live in countries that flew the E. Sure, it's a factor. It's not the only one in favour of the E.

It'd be nice to have the correct Sidewinder for Iranian Tomcat skins too.

I'd fly (and spend as much money on as I have on the F-4E) a recce variant quite happily. But I'm also someone who really longs for a study level P-2 Neptune or P-3 Orion, so I might be an outlier.

I don't think it sounds the same, but could be related. To save people the trouble of going to that thread, the behavior is as follows: 1. Server browser ping is 200, for example. Join server. 2. Observe ping is 200 while in the lobby. 3. Join slot and ping is now double, ie 400ms. I would not describe it as a spike, which is where I think this issue is different from the linked issue. The ping doubles upon slot-in and remains double the normal ping for the remainder of the session.

I believe so.

That's great news, BN!

Also doesn't fit the elevators.

I don't even bother looking for the slats, I look for the slime lights for an S. Took a bit of time for the early S birds to receive their slats, but every S will have formation lights as part of the rebuild. You won't see them on Js. The S birds that hadn't yet received the slats were referred to as J/S and aren't to be confused with the Super J, which was an update to around 28 Js where they received the AWG-10A and a few other goodies in 1975. These ones are harder to differentiate. The giveaway is that the port side ECS scoop has a splitter. And before these birds, you have the Js that received the DECM gear between 1972 and around 1975. I don't recall the name of this mod though! Hope this helps.

It's interesting. You see 200 in the server list. You join and in the lobby you are still on 200. The moment you select a slot, it's 400.

I'm hoping this is fixed soon.

Apologies, I misunderstood that you were talking about devices and not inputs.

Plug device in, go to options and start binding your controls. There's columns for each device. If I want to assign a function to my button box, I find that function with the search element of the category drop-down menu and enter the function name. Then when I've found it, I double click in the box that is at the intersection of the functions row and devices column and a new menu will pop up. I then press the button on my device that I want to use. So long as I don't exit the settings menu by hitting 'cancel', it will bind the button on my chosen controller to the function I selected.

I can see this adding enormously to the flavour of dynamic campaigns. Kudos, guys.

I believe the limit is 128 digital inputs and eight analog inputs per device for DCS.

They've also said that they want a short pre-order period. I'm hopeful that it'll be before xmas.

I'll be honest and at my first read-through of OP's post, this was exactly my reaction, for exactly the same reason. But then I actually went looking at the price of button boxes and noticed that the stuff that is aimed at racing sim guys (and if you're just googling generic button boxes, that's what most of it is marketed for) and was somewhat staggered. I'm seeing button boxes with maybe ten buttons or switches, a potentiometer or two and four rotary encoders selling for $300AUD before postage on Aliexpress. We're talking nearly the kind of money that you can buy a Winwing Orion throttle with. For vastly fewer inputs and lower build quality. We're not discussing bespoke cockpit panels here. We're talking about glorified gamepads that happen to be in mountable box enclosures. That part of the market (which is where most button box consumers look first) is full of profiteers and I think that's where OP's frustrations lie.

Regarding the 900ft frame drop: It varies by module. The Warthog, Hornet, Viper and Tomcat do not suffer this phenomenon for me. The Strike Eagle, Mirage F1, Mirage 2000C and Harrier all suffer from the 900ft frame drop. Here's how it looks in the Strike Eagle. Even if Youtube compresses it so that the numbers are unreadable, you can see the change in the graph and can see that it is repeatable as I travel through 900ft. In the modules where this frame drop happens, it does not seem to matter where on the map I am. Out at sea, close to cities, out over the wilderness, it's the same drop. Hope this helps a bit, @Raz_Specter! Edit: After @Mr_sukebe's post, I went back and retested and unfortunately my results are not repeated at the second attempt. The Viper seemed to suffer the problem this time, and the modules that suffered yesterday were smooth today. I can say that I don't ever remember not getting very low frames with the F1EE take off mission in the instant action section. It's now around 20-30fps (and once I'm over 900ft, I'm seeing around 60-70 depending on where I look). This is quite large progress over a few months ago, so we're moving in the right direction.