maturin

Israel is not threatening Russia. Don't be an idiot.

And hopefully not charge for it. It's not the vehicle gameplay that DCS needs from ArmA: It's the modding community.

Whereas in the game, it takes half a dozen Harpoons to even set a little corvette on fire temporarily. I wish they would teach the ships (like the Rezky) to actually fire at each other, and implement some basic randomized damage tables for radar and FCS damage.

A shaped charge missile in the right place might make a neat hole in a chopper that is quite survivable. The Vikhr has a fragmentation component, however, so the entire airframe should be getting spattered with shrapnel. Anything hit by one should be emergency landing or limping back to base at the very least.

But on a basic level, is it correct to say that the U.S. lacks supersonic anti-ship missiles with heavy warheads, and relies almost entirely on less-powerful Harpoons (and Tomahawks?), while the Russians have a wide variety of very lethal ASMs? Even if the U.S. has superior defensive capabilities.

As usual, a videogame has introduced me to some aspect of modern warfare in the form of abstract, oversimplified gameplay, leaving me to try and find out how it really is in the real world. Despite the infuriating lack of AI knowing how to use its own weapons, I have been throwing American and Russian naval vessels at each other in the sim, and looking up the various ship classes online. And I have observed that the Russians have various launch platforms for multiple series of extremely powerful anti-ship missiles with supersonic speeds, sea-skimming capabilities and immense warheads. A single hit from some of these monsters can destroy the game's cruisers. The Americans, on the other hand, have to make due with Harpoons, which do piddling amounts of damage to larger warships and are easily picked off by CIWS (the efficiency of anti-missile warfare in the sim is incredible, even against massed attacks). The Russians also have these sorts of missiles in air-launched variants, some of them ballistic and nuclear capable. So my question is this: Does this disparity in the variety and firepower of anti-ship missiles exist in the real world as well? If so, how does the U.S.' differing doctrine and balance of forces respond to such devastating anti-ship capabilities? Is it all about the air war, with Russia's big missiles an attempt to claw back some advantage and deny areas of ocean to the superior enemy navy?

It's like 70% latin letters, you know...

For a second I thought that this was the actual dam they bombed, and winced.

Both kinds of SEAD missiles are grossly inaccurate. They shoot high. The radar stays on, and no defensive measure are taken. Simple as that. Tested it in and out in multiple SP missions.

A bomb is just an oval with fins. Shouldn't a high school physics student be able to derive all the relevant data?

ERA is highly unlikely to save you against a wave of FFARs, though. The most likely angle of attack means the spotty coverage won't be in the right place to stop the hits, and multiple hits are likely. That M261 rocket is beautiful insanity, though. Wonder why I haven't heard of it.

Bradley has crumply old aluminum armor. Enough HE impacts should start beating it up pretty bad, while even the weak HEAT version would go right through. THe ERA coverage on the upgraded versions is pretty bad and not designed against air attack.

I think in real life you will just have no idea where the Tunguskas are. At all. So GBUs are a nice option, if the fish jump into the boat.

Could you be more detailed? The in-game text and internet says that it can be fired from 100km at high altitudes, and that's what I do.

Thing is, the Kh-58's launch override range is greater than the willingness of the Patriot, S-300 and Standard to attack. Even if it takes a salvo of 8 or so to score any hits on even a lone Tico. It would be nice if ARM hits to ships would disable their radar, though.

So how does this work in the context of the Su-25T Georgian Oil War campaign? Each mission is filled with enough AAA to murder you up close, mixed in with the armored targets. And it seems like your mixed loadout of Vikhrs and bombs encourages the player to snipe all the Strelas before roaring in to mop up the clear field. Although I guess these are all short range IR threats, not Tunguskas.

Like what? Isn't the game world too simplistic to offer any serious cover? At least to vehicles. Some infantry might be able to hide in FOBs, but those poor suckers get targeted by Mavericks and can't even lie down to hide, so I'm not going to lose sleep over their hit detection.

So you're saying that the current mission format of clearing SAMs and then mopping up vehicles is unrealistic, and we should just be at the armor's throats? It seems to me like you can't really do SEAD against a Tunguska, because their radar range is so short. You have to be a couple kilometers away to even target them with any ARM, the flight time of which is too short to allow much of a window for coordinated attacks on covered vehicles. Will the AI Tunguska not abandon a lock on your aircraft in order to launch defensive missiles? The Tor seems like a pretty similar platform from our perspective, except that it can reach out beyond the Su-25T's non-ARM weapons, while still having a really short envelop for true SEAD.

Maybe the game is laying down a grid of objects (in greater quantities than the drawn explosions) to see what they collide with and what vehicles are hit. When there should really just a be a homogenous damage field with a chance to escape hits...

I don't fly the A-10, just the frogfoot. What are the correct tactics for employing PMGs against Tunguskas (or Tor) and scoring a one-round kill? And on that note, has anyone else noticed Kh-25MPU becoming highly inaccurate?

And those calculations should be absolutely, 100% client side, with hit resolution performed on the bomber's machine. To it otherwise is sheer insanity. It shouldn't matter to anyone else's computer where every last little bomblet is. They'll never see them anyways, except in the replays, and there's no reason why the actual positions can't approximated with a rain of sprite. The dud rate is high enough to cover any discrepancies. And really, if this was the real virtuality engine, there would be no problem having 20 A10s appear simultaneously. And you know how much crap THAT engine gets from fans.

I don't know for the life of me why they don't just make the FX for cluster weapons client side in a hot fix. Sure, it would stink not to be able to see other people's bomblets going off, but at least it would keep people from crashing for stupid reasons why they go and tinker with their derp of a 90s engine.

Man, where the hell do they keep that barrel? It looks longer than the truck.

So I missed the Victory Day parade in Saint Petersburg, but I saw the whole rehearsal for it. And noticed that the Motor Rifle companies had some towed howitzers. Can anyone identify the weapons at 10:13? I'm sort of shocked they would still use the things. Any howitzer is pretty useless against modern armor, while lacking the punch, versatility and above all mobility of recoilless rifles and mortars.

Err... how the hell do you expect anyone to do that? Mavericks have never been fired against anything remotely modern, much less state-of-the-art Russian AAA. 95% of the combat in this sim is purely speculative.