maturin

Dream on. The first game to look that photorealistic will be a corridor shooter, not a flight sim that renders whole countries.

In 1.2.1, the yellow cockpit cursor (or small white cross), which has no purpose other than flicking switches the Frogfoot does not have, is now permanently displayed on my screen. It distracts me when changing view and breaks immersion. How do I get rid of this brightly colored little annoyance? It never showed up in the first version.

On the other hand, the fact that the default unit country is USA, and that the selection sticks to the (invalid) A10 after switching the country to Russia IS a problem. The menu filter is incomplete.

The editor isn't terribly user-friendly. Look forward to a variety of quirks.

But there ISN'T one in flight. Is the FCS not capable of realizing when it no longer has laser contact to a missile? If the Shkval can track a helicopter, why can't it track its own Vikhr?

One step forward, two steps back. Because by restarting the laser I can double up my Vikhrs just like old time, and there is zero reason for a cooldown between launches when the system is clearly capable of near-simultaneous ripples.

I just don't take the Phantasmagoria pod. It seems sort of gamey to dual-role SEAD and ground attack. Or rather, I need the space for KH-29s and KH-25ML because the #(&$@*^$(&% Vikhrs drop straight into the ground every third shot and can't be relied upon to take out large numbers of vehicles. Where's that patch?

Speaking of Georgian Oil War, is there any way to skip missions through cheating or modifying files? I spent over an hour flying an exhausting, victorious defense of Ochamchira, only to have the next mission (to chase routing units) crash to desktop and magically reset time to the prior mission. And this time I can't find my crash dumps either. Anyone know where they are?

But the RWR is just going to tell me what I already know... the vague location of AAA. It's not going to help me overfly the air defenses or know when to pop chaff when I'm trying to use those cluster bombs the mission gives me by default... right?

The thing about the campaign is that you never have SEAD (although there is nothing bigger than an Osa on the map and no hostile air), and there is often too much AAA to take out. I play the game pretty cheap, using F7 and F6 to track units and missiles, but I would still die if I started doing bomb or gun runs.

I've died three times, but have pushed the Georgians out of Abkhazia while learning to fly in this definitely-not-tutorial campaign. And I was wondering how experienced flyers handle the series of attack/defense missions. With my standoff weapons, I tend to simply circle around over my own lines at 2000m, launching Vikhrs and rarely getting into range of their AAA. It gets boring, sometimes. And yet the mission gives me cluster bombs, which I cannot imagine ever successfully using and getting out alive. Not only do I suck with bombs (were they made more inaccurate since LOMAC?) even with the superior FCS of the Su-25T, but I don't know how you are supposed to stand up against SAMs without using the cheap F6 views and psychically evading the missiles. You can't very well hug the deck because so many of the Frogfoot's weapons don't work well at low altitudes. Do players with the experience and good joysticks pull this sort of stuff off? Edit: And come to think of it, was this campaign designed for the Hokum and just dropped into DCS: World?

Seems like A10C made a significantly bigger splash than FC2 or World.

Oh.

And the RHA equivalency of the T-72 is actually LESS than the physical thickness of the turret. In that case I've never seen a sane estimate. Or at least, parts of the side turret are up around 300-500mm on all the estimates I've seen.

I think it's a common issue.

The dust from moving tanks makes them dramatically easier to see, and has no effect on your ability to lock them with the Shkval or other missile requiring laser contact and computer recognition. It's an anti-smokescreen.

No argument there, but ANY anti-armor weapon will do against something as old as a T-55. If you bill yourself as an MBT-killing monster, you don't go up against obsolete MBTs, any more than you test your SAMs on Cessnas.

So the IED is a better weapon than the AK47, and the Blackhawk is a better weapon than the Raptor? There's higher kill ratios! Of course it has nothing to do with the usage of each weapon, according to situation. Sending helicopters after tanks in enemy territory is risky business. Also, how many of those tanks were T-55s with only 150mm of frontal armor anyways?

Or a Dead Sea full of it.

Armor estimates are easy to find, but rear and top armor is a pretty big mystery. The most detailed estimates are for the professional tank sim Steel Beasts. Ain't no auto cannon getting through that side armor, except to pick at that tiny spot in the hull. http://www.steelbeasts.com/sbwiki/index.php/Image:M1A1_HA_frontLOS.jpg On the other hand the commander's hatch looks quite vulnerable, once you close within 1000m. http://www.steelbeasts.com/sbwiki/images/3/30/M1A1_HA_sideLOS.jpg The T-72's top armor actually looks like a pretty tough nut. http://www.steelbeasts.com/sbwiki/images/3/34/T72Barmour.jpg Now let's refer to the coloring book, which claims that the top armor of the hull is too thick to penetrate. And it also mentions that trying to track a tank with what is technically just a big firearm is a dumb idea. http://s207.photobucket.com/albums/bb48/hamm172/WORLD%20OF%20TANKS%20STUFF/?action=view&current=T-62_CB_page7.gif

I'm not terribly skeptical about Russian claims of new ERA effectiveness against KE rounds. That stuff is getting advanced, with radar-controlled pre-detonation and such. The Israelis say that their ADS systems can knock down sabot rounds, after all. But this is rather moot, since ERA will be next to useless against the GAU-8, which is going to hit dozens of times, finding the gaps in coverage and hitting blocks twice.

I have heard (not from an authoritative source) 20mm for thickness of Abrams roof armor, but this is surely absolute thickness, rather than RHA equivalency. Parts of the roof have a chance of withstanding RPG warheads that penetrate 300mm RHA. Also, the effective thickness would be greatly increased because of the angle of incidence of rounds, plus danger of ricochets. Edit: The ACE2 mod for ArmA 2 estimates 40mm RHA equivalency for roof armor, so conceivably vulnerable to the A10 at short ranges.

For perspective, the RHA penetration of most 80ish mm HEAT rockets is 300-500mm. That's many times more than the GAU-8 at point blank. But back on topic, I don't think an 80mm HE rocket would even scratch a tank. It's really just a little charge designed to throw fragments around, knocking over cinderblocks and infantry.

Lol, I'm sure they will tell me about the hundreds of destroyed MBTs they have seen... rusting in the desert from thirty years ago. I doubt that an A10 has destroyed a single MBT in Afghanistan with any weapon. I would be interested in reading a study on tracking tanks. Putting a few 1.5 inch holes in a tread or roadwheel isn't exactly debilitating, and the tracks are a difficult target from a variety of angles. And you are overly optimistic to assume that a mobility kill suffices in all situations. A tracked tank is easily repaired. Israel has won wars based on their ability to quickly redeploy their knocked out tanks, and in many missions a complete kill may be needed in order to secure the security of friendly troops. I'm not disputing that the A10 can mission kill tanks, or that that is valuable. But being restricted to mobility kills makes the GAU-8 a, as I have said, poor anti-tank weapon in some respects. You know what else is restricted to mobility kills against modern MBTs? The RPG-7. So the GAU-8 is in that category, despite the entirety of the internet masturbating to the fearsome roar of the GAU-8 'tank-killer.' So in the end we agree that it is not terribly realistic to burn up hundreds of tanks in DCS, because in real life most of them would not be burning, and that the GAU-8 doesn't chew threw tanks nearly so well its counterpart AT weapons.

Precisely why they were slated to be replaced by F-16s. The GAU-8 is a poor MBT-killer in conventional warfare. The A-10 was kept on because it's so good at CAS in assymetrical warfare, and has many other tools. Obviously. My original post explicitly specified MBTs, in response to a post that did the same. Yeah, except for the latter takes place from miles and miles away. It's the kind of ranges people talk about on this forum, plus the published RHA penetration estimates for the gun are from those ranges. There's also that study out there that found tiny percentages of actual impacts and penetrations against T-62s, so things get chancy at long ranges. 69 mm at 500 meters 38 mm at 1,000 meters I don't know what happens to these numbers at 2000m, but by that point I imagine it barely qualifies as an anti-tank weapon. You might as well be dousing the enemy armor in Shilka fire and destroying optics that way. It'd be faster. Depending on the target. Exactly my point. If the target it an MBT, it ain't optimal. And just about every AT weapon on any other vehicle (including the Maverick) can reliably burn the crap out of them from even greater ranges. Which is my point. And in DCS, you can't track or suppress tanks, which was also my point in the original post. That would be far preferable when trying to blunt a Soviet advance across Europe, hanging out under the edge of anti-air umbrella.