maturin

The lack of MWR notifications has to do with the guidance system of the missile, I think. The Tunguska just doesn't cause them, in the Su-25T either. More importantly, the Tunguska can eat incoming ARMs for breakfast, yet is useless against circling, lightly maneuvering aircraft. I can emphatically corroborate the OP's findings that the Tunguska is practically useless at many ranges and altitudes. Over a dozen missiles harmlessly missed a slow, slow frogfoot. Edit: And so far as I know, the guidance IRL is not pure SACLOS. The pilot just defines the target with a SACLOS-like system but there is a radar involved.

After the new patch, the S-300 only needs its Tracking Radar to fire, and only turns on the tracking unit once a target is within range and painted by one of the redundant Search Radars. This makes the S-300 hard to kill. I was just fired on by an S-300 site that had lost both Search Radars, and had only a tracking unit. However, when I place an S-300 that has only a Tracking Radar to begin with, it is unable to fire on targets at any range. This seems like a discrepancy. Furthermore, realistic S-300 sites are impossible until TOR units fire on incoming missiles. This is their intended purpose, as proven in an earlier thread. Currently, Tunguskas have to fill their role.

At least let us look at the damn list of controls!

Is the firing circle moving away from the aimpoint after the first shot?

In Georgia? Hah, drop them anywhere.

Nothing is more embarrassing than diving in on a target with with two 500kg bombs and hitting release than to have only one bomb leave its rail. Then you've got the other one hanging on there, almost rolling you over as you sashay stupidly away from the target. This bird only wants to drop one bomb at a time, even in Salvo Mode and no matter what the Ripple Quantity settings is at. I can't even find an explanation of the settings, ranging from default to 1 to 4 to something else. If I choose a loadout in which every weapon pylon holds the same kind of bomb, then the system drops them two at a time, symmetrically. This happens with default ripple quantity, without salvo mode, and works perfectly. If I try to set the salvo mode to two (the correct value, right?!?) or anything else, then it goes all wonky again, dropping one by one. When I have multiple types of bombs, even in salvo mode, they drop one at a time regardless of ripple quantity. Or maybe both drop, but at an irritating delay that spaces out the impacts too much. Especially with cluster dispensers.

The possibility has been raised that they weren't trying to hit at all.

Crashes like ****-all in 32bit, so yeah, it's 64.

Depends on the forest, although you have a point for much of the Caucasus, which is rugged. On the other hand, real world Georgia has thousands of miles of paved and unpaved roads that aren't marked on the map, which would allow for transit. As for driving through trees, that just opens up the issue of tanks being able to steam up mountainsides with no problem. Without unit labels, those same trees should block player LoS though, right? Which is is why it's more unfair with AI involved. All in all though, forests and terrain should be a fair and decisive tactical factor, especially since we cannot camouflage, fortify or bury SAM positions in this game. If it was real life, I'd dig a ditch so just the radar and launch tubes were sticking out, then drape camo netting over the rest of it. AND find a clearing in the woods.

Oh yeah, I know it happens. But the missiles don't hit you, do they? I had S-300s launching on me through mountains the other day. Because of the lofted trajectory of the missile, they could hit me if the radar kept its contact, without line of sight. However, when the missiles lost contact with the radar, they exploded harmlessly. In a similar situation, a radar on a mountain peak kept launching on me, only for dozens of missiles to explode after a split second of flight when whatever half-assed script the game uses realized that there was no line of sight to target. So SAMs see through mountains but don't kill you because of it. Players parking SAMs they control in forests is a perfectly fine tactic. However, AI ground units killing each other through trees is a CONSTANT occurrence.

The coder is probably sort of busy. And doesn't monitor the forums for you convenience, so don't be so entitled. Just place an invincible T-72 behind an Abrams and count the shells it takes to kill it. Then repeat with frontal shots.

Oh, come off it. YES. Go try it yourself. Most ED employees are no more qualified to know than we are, unless they personally coded it.

Trees in an MMO are numbered in thousands, not tens of millions. They are also irrelevant to your character and computer unless you are standing right next to them. MMOs are not comparable to combat sims for a host of reasons, so think of ArmA 2, whose complex tree models block bullets and AI vision. It may be that the sim's currently configured engine, which renders a lot, calculates a lot, and already runs pretty mediocre, can't sustain an added burden (witness the explosion particle fiasco). Either way, CA is probably doomed to remain a half-done appendage of DCS until this is sorted out. We can spend most of our time close-in dogfighting live humans, but where are you going to find fifty humans willing to sit around in stationary tanks?

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that making terrain occlude AI line of sight would require prohibitively complex engine re-write. Luckily, the AI is too stupid to take advantage of its omniscient knowledge of unit position. SAMs can't shoot you through the mountains, after all, and even in the case of a lofting S-300 missile, it detonates when the radar loses contact. Ground unit vision through trees and buildings, however, breaks the game. It emphatically does not matter how many buttons your 3D cockpit has. If the tactics that work in real life do not work in the game, then your simulation is a failure. And I know that forests could be made to block AI vision in a way that does not require a rewrite of the engine or a faster processor. If necessary, they can use the darn 2D map to check for forests between units. Raycasting and LoS checks are expensive in terms of system resources, and could be used only when needed. If collision models are a problem for trees, just assign viewblock and (plane only) collision geometry to entire forests.

If everyone zeroes their weapons for five thousand meters farther than the targets, like your main gun when using cannon pods, I'll stand up on top of the berm.

Pretty sure the gun pods weren't meant to ever be used in dogfighting. More lead down range is manifestly not a good thing if a good portion of it will just miss.

On the contrary, I'm criticizing ED's lack of constraint over AI decisionmaking. When an AI chopper sees incoming fast movers, their first reaction should be to *hit the deck.* There should be factors discouraging the decision to engage in head-on confrontations with enemy jets, preferring to run towards terrain or friendly AA. I mean, jet AI knows to hit the deck when flying SEAD missions towards enemy SAMs. And why is the default altitude for placing choppers in the mission editor and generator 500m? That's half the problem. They're suicidal from the start. Hold on a minute. A firing solution existed for the completely imaginary avionic and fire control systems that the AI uses to launch its weapons. We can't know for sure without talking to an Apache gunner IRL, but the AI has perfect awareness and perfect aim when using his weapons. All sorts of factors that would make the employment of Hellfires against a fast, maneuvering target unfeasible in real life are not present in the sim. It's a somewhat poor point of reference, but hitting a jet with a SACLOS guided ATGM in any other sim (ArmA, Steel Beasts) would be almost unimaginable. Right, but the Hellfire has twice the range of the R-60. In the hands of the AI, a dedicated ATGM is a better anti-air weapon than an IR-seeking anti-air missile. Think on that.

Christ, why does everyone on these forums always deny the existence of glitches that they don't experience personally. Yes, a helo pilot may in *certain, extreme* situations target a jet in self defense, and yes, in rare situations ATGMs may be versatile enough to threaten slow jets. But the AI of helicopters routinely and reliably creates absurd situations where pilots make unrealistic decisions.

Of course it's slow compared to Hellfires. It's an ancient SACLOS ATGM designed for ground vehicle use. Is the overall time to target (at max range) 20 seconds? What are the game's speed values?

In the history books of DCS... It's a very popular fable around these forums, one that isn't reflected in the system reqs of the game. 64bit is the future, but take a glance around at other game, even demanding ones.

It would be a pretty big project, actually. You'd have to get all the rushing air sounds changing with speed and flight path, deal with the changed reflections on the cockpit, etc. And unless the holes could appear in different places, it would look somewhat fake after a while.

Since the game simply crashes 32bit machines with no official admission that 64bit is required, I think ED don't really give a shit about that.

It was a one-off mission that I don't have anymore. Try creating a SAM site with 4 radars and see what he does.

Yep, DCS' ground-based explosions look half as good (in terms of both realism and detail/aesthetics) as most games', and murder my framerate.

Today I sent an Su-30, loaded for SEAD, after a patriot radar. After launching its second ARM, the Sukhoi announced that it was RTB, even though the radar was still living and shooting and he had two more ARMs attached to the fuselage pylons. I don't have time to test this exhaustively and won't have enough internet access over the weekend to upload tracks. So I invite others to make sure that Russia's most powerful SEAD platform is working to its full capabilities.