maturin

There's no point in modeling shrapnel at all unless you have a vehicle damage model with components that can be disabled like crew, engine, tires. Otherwise it's just for killing infantry which are irrelevant to this game anyways.

You can make an LoS check as well. Does DCS have any airburst weapons?

Case in point, calculating cluster impacts brings out FPS down to 2. ED just isn't terribly good at coding things that aren't somehow attached to an aircraft.

Of course you should stay in your AFV... with your foot on the gas pedal. NATO has just told you in no uncertain terms that 155mm fragments can penetrate armor (that means your precious RHA) as easily as 25mm APDS can. That means you are no safer than an infantryman (especially when spall enters the picture). 25mm APDS will penetrate every vehicle short of an MBT. That means M113, Bradley, BMP, CV-90 (not sure about the Namer). That means M-60s and T-72s and other older tanks need to worry about their rear and roof armor. Composite armor is irrelevant here, since it just adds extra value to the RHA rating which is already not good enough to keep out 25mm APDS. ERA is even more useless because it protects at best 60% of your frontal arc. But artillery falls in a circle around you and (at worst) above your vehicle. You will be hit countless times in places where armor is thin and ERA and composites do not exist. May have been hospitalizations. I don't remember because I didn't save the source, which was an academic paper on injuries caused by terrorist bomb attacks. It ran through the precise list of wound types (primary, secondary tertiary, blast wind, etc) that you brought up. Which makes it a better source than your post, which is what has the odor of the 'internet' in this case. In which case it wasn't a severe-enough injury to cause a real casualty, was it? Shrapnel wounds are the injuries that are noticed first of all. It's the (actually potentially fatal) blast trauma that takes hours to manifest, and the TBI that plays out on a timescale of years. You played a bait and switch here. A minute ago you were talking about which effect is more lethal, assuming all factors are equal. I was responding to your claim that people were overestimating fragmentation. So anyways, it's the shrapnel that drives people into cover, where they can be killed in blast pressure if they're unlucky and suffer a direct hit. That is, fragmentation is the primary lethal mechanism. Artillery below a certain caliber is simply no guarantee of a kill against entrenched troops, but the presence of shrapnel-throwing shells is guaranteed to suppress them, which is the point. And this is the havoc that results from having a simplistic hitpoint vs damage system in the first place. It is incredibly negligent to code a warhead that treats multiple layers of steel the same way it treats flesh and rubber.

Remember that fragmentation causes 80% of causalities in most bomb attacks. As a general rule, if you are close enough to an explosion to be harmed be blast, you are probably already dead from shrapnel. That's a very interesting article, thanks. But is it also rather old? Modern tanks shouldn't have much to fear from 25mm APDS even in the rear armor. HE Arty remains something that will force tanks to move, not score kills outright. Against lighter vehicles, fragments are going to disable components and kill crew, not destroy. In DCS, we can't even kill the gunner of a humvee. No, we should not bring up ArmA here. HE near a soft skin vehicle should have a good chance to kill the passengers. In ArmA, even a guy on a bicycle is considered to be in a vehicle, and so you can lob grenades at him all day. You can't harm him until the bicycle dies. As for spawning fragments by script, this can cause a lot of problems in MP unless it's done right. I think we're all familiar with that issue in DCS. The ACE 2 mod (which is what actually makes ArmA a simulator) has an elegant solution for this, whereby explosives basically just fling inaccurate sprays of fragments at units and vehicles. So if there's nothing there to get hurt, the engine doesn't have to waste resources simulating anything. It works in games with 200 players on a server.

There's no such thing as 100% in warfare.

But wait... why??? Seriously, there's nothing in DCS that needs physics. All the flight model and ballistic stuff run on in-house 'physics.' All PhysX did for ArmA was force the team to spend a whole year re-implementing it instead of making actual features. No flight simulator is going to have a terrain engine complex enough to require PhysX for ground vehicles. I'm trying hard to think here, what possible reason ED could ever have for shelling out on expensive Middleware that takes ages to configure.

14nm is within visual range, no? All AI in DCS world knows where every unit on the map is, pretty much all the time.

Or maybe they're having a problem with maintenance and want to baby the transmissions.

Did this thread title sound dirty to anyone else?

Could you explain in more detail what you're talking about here?

The TELARs will kill you before you get close enough to use your Vikhrs, though. Or at least they have that capability. Buk sites have become more diffident in later patches. Note that you can lock a BUK launcher with the ELINT, but only after there is a telephone pole-sized missile streaking towards you at Mach whatever.

Theoretically you should be able to shoot the passenger compartment pretty much indefinitely. (If you're really stupidly lucky.) It's just a big aluminum box. So it is probably more able than most choppers to survive an autocannon burst in the airframe. Just so long as the damage model includes the statistical chance of frag severing something important.

You're talking about the Buk, probably. It's just a damned hard nut to crack.

There's no way in hell it's true, but whatever.

Tell me about it. The Israelis aren't interested in any 'order' outside their geographically-limited project of colonialism. Everything is disposable in pursuit of that goal. TimeKilla: I just don't understand that story. WTF is is supposed to mean that he "intended to fire a live missile?" He knew he was shooting at a friendly pilot on the other side of an exercise? Was he a total psychopath?

Holy shit! Are those cliffs modeled with a heightmap? Are those trees rendering all the way out there? Will be able to crash into them now?

Ripple quantity is still broke, broke, broke.

Just patched. Su-25T Ripple Quantity STILL broken. Can anyone else repro or can a tester acknowledge. It's very frustrating to have perhaps the most simple piece of code in the entire simulation broken for months on end, despite constant mentions in changelog.

Where exactly do we have entire sections of infrastructure not connected to the internet? And remember that most damaging cyber attacks are actually conducted by agents on the ground, who pick the lock to the server room or coax a disgruntled employee into giving up a password.

The Igla-S is crazy resistant to countermeasures. When a few leaked into Libya, everyone freaked out.

Since this thread was over before it began, it can't hurt to nudge it off-topic a little. How many radars does your average destroyer carry, anyways? Will one good hit with an ARM silence it entirely, or is navigation split up from fire control, etc? Would you be likely to put the long-range SAMs out of commission, while still needing to worry about CIWS and the like? Ships really need a simple component damage model, because if we could hunt ships with multi-step strikes, silencing the radar and then pouncing on the crippled vessel with ground attack aircraft... that would be incredible gameplay.

No one ever said the Vikhr was better than the Hellfire L, which is unique in it's guidance capability. The Longbow radar is hardly standard on the modern battlefield. A comparison to just about any helicopter weapon is unfair. It's not fire and forget, anyhow. The Longbow radar dome has to remain LOS to target.

The Vikhr is 'modern' too, just with different priorities. It's cheap, really cheap for a precision weapon, and doesn't need a whole lot of ducks in a row to use correctly. What's noteworthy is that it has concrete advantages over its more expensive counterparts. It has slightly longer range than the Hellfire and is much faster, which counts for a lot when your targets are shooting back or running for cover. You can also carry more of them. I think it's rather impressive that the Russians managed to eek out a few things that the missile does better than the competition while still requiring much less resources.

Well, it takes a lot to outright sink a ship, and even then, the process might take hours. The main problem is that DCS ships have no components that can be disabled, just a massive number of hitpoint. The Kh-58 just has a simple HE warhead for taking out radars, AFAIK. You can't guarantee that it hits the waterline, so while one missile would likely cripple a destroyer, you couldn't expect a catastrophic kill right away.