maturin

The firing solution for the S-13 rocket is off. At a variety of ranges, with laser on and careful aiming, the rockets will hit several dozen meters beyond the reticule. See the attached track. S13.trk

That still leaves aside the fact that I don't need to enter the kill zone if I don't want to. Even the Su-25's weaker 30mm cannon can sneak in a Shilka kill from maximum range every now and then.

I never said it wasn't possible, just that there are long odds, from the point of view of someone deciding whether to risk his life shooting at a plane or finding some better cover. And if you get a good shot on the electronics and achieve a mission kill, it's going to happen after a world of hurt has come down on you. I congratulate that gunner who can land a hit with his ears ringing from the rockets and HE rounds landing all around. I guess what I'm saying is that a convoy without dedicated AA (for example, Russian forces after first emerging from the Roki tunnel in 2008) is pretty ****ed, and the possibility of a mission kill is slim. 12.7mm is practically no threat in DCS unless I'm being careless.

Well, unless they are. A single round downing an A10 or Su25 is pretty long odds, and anything faster and more fragile will be using standoff weapons anyways.

Might work against a P-51. But unless you actually do have Vulcans, the attacking plane can kill you at his leisure by not overflying the convoy. FFARs can be used from far beyond the engagement envelope of small arms, and no air-ground cannon is smaller than 20mm, so the range advantage is the aircraft's. No human eye can judge the range to an onrushing jet accurately, and few firearms can be effectively employed at such ranges, especially when the ranges changes by hundreds of meters in a split second. Sure, there will be lots of lead, but spray and pray doesn't work when most people will aim there weapons in ways that don't land the rounds anywhere near the aircraft. I would be surprised to hear than infantry are trained in futile exercises such as leading jets anyway. I sure wouldn't want to be in a jet hit by a wall of small arms fire at short range or after overflying the target, but any effective shooting the convoy does is only going to happen after a barrage of rockets and autocannon rips into it.

I don't think the infantry are close to the OFP standard (except visually) and ED shouldn't be trying to upgrade them, as such. But they can be made useful. Currently half of them lack animations, and a town full of RPG gunners is no threat to an armored column at all. They really just need some AI and cover functionality. They should function like short-range ambush forces, going prone while attached to the trenches, sandbag bunkers and crew-served weapons that the game badly needs. ATGM infantry and RPG gunners garrisoning high rises will revolutionize the ground game. Suddenly JTACs will actually be needed to pick out on tiny or nondescript target among all the battlefield clutter, and the infantry threats will be deadly. Of course, this assumes that a single BMP-2 doesn't use its omniscience and unlimited supply of Konkurs missiles to kill everything from 4 klicks away.

The AI gladly fires R-27s and AIM-120s from 50km, so their behavior with longer-range missiles is inappropriate and suicidal.

I can't get Su-30s to engage with the R-77 (which is supposed to outrange the AIM-120 and equal the AIM-54) beyond around 15km, even in a closing engagement with a tanker, with AWACS support nearby. The stated range of this weapon in the encyclopedia is 50km. The same could be said for the Mig-31's R-33s and R-40s, which as I understand it are supposed to be heavy, long-range anti-bomber weapons, but they shoot like jumped-up Sidewinders in terms of AI employment.

I read about the 'quantity over quality' thing elsewhere, and I can't think how that would present itself except in terms of accuracy. You don't hear about Ataka or Hellfire being intended to be fired in pairs, and I would assume the purpose is to up the hit probability of a very fast, long-range, not very maneuverable or accurate missile.

The Vikhr was designed to be fire in pairs, right? But the Su-25T simply lacks the FCS to handle it correctly? Given the quantity over quality design, I wonder if they are too accurate in-game.

It's one thing that the explosions are poorly optimized, and kill FPS when you look at them. But if they're bringing down performance for the whole server, even for people who aren't looking in the same direction or are miles away, that means something is deeply wrong with how the engine handles events.

The proliferation of manuals gets more and more confusing as this game series goes on. Is there one single ED-run repository on the internet somewhere? If so, sticky than sonofabitch.

Realistically, does the presence of an OSA even warrant sending out a HARM-bearing fast mover? If you know where AAA is, you can kill it with Mavs. If you don't, then an F-16 will be moving so fast that it will run right into the kill zone as soon as the mud spike shows up, leaving precious little time to launch that missile and escape. Seems like short range AAA can't pose to much threat to a non-CAS mission anyways.

The willingness of AI to dash into target zones full of AAA and SAMs in fanatical fulfillment of their waypoints and attack orders is a general problem. In the campaign, every time I tell my wingman to attack air defenses with, he rushes across the entire AO to his death, never even attempting to use his standoff Vikhrs until it's too late. Does the AI have any conception of the range of his weapons versus the kill zones of known threats. This kind of decision can take place in two-dimensional space and should therefore NOT be difficult to accomplish.

Might the tiny range of an Osa be within the minimum for comfortable employment of AGM-88s? Might as well just smack it with a Maverick.

Real-life SEAD hit probabilities are downright miserable, so don't fret. Also, some missiles will have radars switch themselves off in self-defense.

I kill Abrams in one-shot, usually. Kh-25MPUs have a chance to miss, especially against radiators that have gaps between wires.

I very much believe that the solution is too complex to be attempted by a modder. It seems likely that ED has lacked the time, resources, but also the will and proper design priorities to exhaust every possible approach to the problem. Oh boo-hoo, it caused some AI problems and other issues. So fix them! ED's decisions get a lot of flak in many respects, so it is not unfounded to suspect them of poor performance here. I accept their difficulties with finances and technology access, and not part of the annoying crowd that expects clickable 6 DOF cockpits for every flying machine in existence, but this is one failure that deserves criticism. But yeah, can't wait for the new engine. I hope the wait is worth it, if it's prevented them from releasing a more short-term solution.

A box would probably be too hard to retrofit (although simplicity itself to implement if designed from the outset). A simple ground hugging layer would be easier. You would probably be able to fly underneath when entering a forest from the side, but you would just die on the ascent.

The Vikhr is one of the longest-ranged ATGMs in the world, and can safely used against convoys with just about every type of extant AAA. It can be carried in much greater volumes than the Maverick for a fraction of the cost. You should be able to destroy every kind of Strela, mobile gun and even Tunguskas with it. If there're Tors and Osas, then you have issues. If we're assuming that a ground attack aircraft has to stay out of AAA envelopes, then an Su-25T in skillfull hands can do vastly more damage than an A-10. It'll just take a long time and patient, careful handling. If there are no bandits around.

I would be overjoyed to simple have a 2D line segment giving collision to each trunk. Or a volumetric collsion box that is essentially cylindrical for large groups trees or even entire forests. And let tanks drive through trees with a speed penalty in forested areas; CA is already 75% abstraction.

The engine can't run scripts? It can't check, for example, proximity to an object given conditions such as altitude? Distance-checking a certain object class within 2km whenever a plane drops below 500m of altitude is the sort of thing a two-bit Arma modder could do in their sleep. This would function regardless of whether the game was drawing the trees or not. If your computer can draw thousands of trees out to many kilometers, it should also be able to track the distance to some of those forests, no? I was addressing the issue of users who don't draw the trees at all, and don't see what they are about to collide into. I can draw forest with a below-min reqs laptop, without immersion-killing pop-up, therefore a minimum draw distance for trees would be forced as part of any collision fix. No mention of collision boxes or workaround solutions there. The AI issues could be fixed by making forest invisible to AI, leaving it for players to worry about. ED seems to like fixing things later, so we should let them do that, so long as there's some progress. "Causing a few issues" is vague and sounds so trivial. Presumably they tried the most logical solution of making tree models collide, found a bunch of issues and then dropped the matter. The post proves that it's not impossible, just too much work to accomplish based on design priorities that are, in my opinion, FUBAR. As for the engine design and A2A combat at altitudes... Black Shark was FOUR YEARS AGO. A temperamental engine with hush-hush 64 bit requirements and tons of CTDs can be tolerated in the name of a good game, but is just hasn't been adapted to the needs of two ground attack modules, a low-level dogfighter, and now CA.

Did you somehow fail to notice that it is a shark?!?

We were talking about aircraft collision. Aircraft constantly track distance to the ground layers, while ground vehicles stick to it. Theoretically you could add another ground collision layer 5m (or however tall your average tree is) to the collision height of forested ground. Vehicles would slide underneath it on the main ground layer, though you would have to set their projectiles to fire through it (or not, depending on AI vision decisions). A minimum of 500m, for the tiny percentage of users who play without trees at all. Given the astounding hardware elitism on these forums, there would be no outcry about some people have to suffer from pop-up. Because tree collision is a gameplay issue, not an immersion issue, especially if it can be made to prevent tanks shooting through forests and ruining CA. As simple as that, eh? You'll excuse me for suspecting that engine limitations are a scapegoat for lack of trying, here. But I do learn more every day about how crappy this engine is and how little will there is to address its issues.

Selective collision! This is such a non-issue, I can't even express it. I have seen invulnerable aircraft flying in and out of the ocean with my own eyes, so the functionality already exists in the engine. Planes should blow up when they hit trees, but bullets and tanks do not. The AI looks through mountains (for shame), so it's not going to make the problem any worse. I play below minimum requirements on a 32 bit system, and draw my trees out to 3000m. The game should absolutely force player's systems to draw trees within about 500m for the purposes of collision. And at ranges where the trees are not drawn, make ground units in forests harder to see. Players with computers this bad are already disadvantaged heavily by low FPS and resolution, so don't lose sleep over giving them some small perks. Why do I get the feeling that not much thought has gone into this? I accept that tree collision is unlikely to happen in the near term unless there are significant half-solutions and workarounds. I believe that trees need to collide aircraft immediately. Now, if only player aircraft collide with trees, why can't the engine ONLY track the collision model of forests when inside the render bubble? That is, track the mutual position of a handful of tree clusters and only one plane (client-side) when inside the render distance of the trees themselves? Once again, since most trees in the game are the same height, why not simply take an average height value and apply it to land occupied by dense forests? If we fly through the very tip of a tree, who cares, so long as a solid collision with the average-height tree will be fatal?