ScottishMartialArts

You're certainly correct that, just because a given munition doesn't cause a tank to burst into a fiery explosion, it doesn't mean said munition can't damage a tank, injure or kill its crew, or drastically reduce its combat effectiveness. So, for example, the Hydra probably won't kill a T-72 outright, it might destroy its optics, or damage the turret traverse or stabilization mechanisms, or something of that nature. In such a case, the tank isn't going to be very effective any more. My understanding, however, is that ground unit damage modeling in DCS isn't that sophisticated: it's a hit points + directional armor rating system, afaik. Such a system is much more binary in nature: either a munition pierces the armor or it does not. Again, in real life, that 70mm HE rocket may not penetrate the armor, but it could blow a tread off, or start an engine fire, effectively disabling the tank, but that's not what DCS can currently model. Would it be nice if the damage modeling was more sophisticated for ground units? Sure. But in most cases I'd rather have larger battalion size battles, than have company sized battles where sometime, on occasion, a FFAR, which is not anti-tank ordinance, manages to get a mobility kill on a T-72, as is possible, but rare, in real life.

This mission needs some tweaking. Although I'm sure it is in fact completable in its current state, the wonky flight leader AI and the stringent separation requirements means that it takes more attempts than it ought to, frustrating the hell out of the player in the process. It's a mission requirement that you stay within a certain radius of the flight leader, i.e. fly in formation. The trouble is that the leader's pathing AI, in its current state, is extremely erratic once you enter the canyon. He at times makes random changes in altitude, attitude, airspeed and flight path without reason. This is particularly noticeable at the third LZ, where you and the leader provide cover for Springfield 3 and 4: the leader often enters an ascending spinning hover, in which it appears his rear rotor has failed and he's just spinning like a top. Such AI behavior is undesirable sure, but aside from looking silly, why does it matter? Because if you don't know to anticipate that the leader is going to make some random and bizarre flight path change, it's very easy to lose sight of him. If you lose sight of him you can't maintain formation, and if you can't maintain formation then you won't stay in the trigger radius, and once you're out of that radius, it's mission over, even if you were 50 minutes into your 4th attempt on the mission. I don't mind losing missions because of ground fire, or because of entering Vortex Ring in landing, or something of that nature. I do mind losing missions because it's an expectation that you know exactly where the AI is going to randomly spaz out. Repeating a 90 minute mission a half dozen times just to figure out when the AI will do something weird that you can't anticipate isn't fun. Recommendation: increase the formation trigger radius, to give the player more margin for error, and thus more time to rejoin formation, when the AI spazzes. OR sort out and fix what's going on with the flight leader's pathing AI.

As currently written, the UN campaign mission briefings leave a bit to be desired. Although you often enter the mission with an idea of what's going to happen, your exact route (the mission planner flight plan is often incomplete), the location of the objective, and most importantly your actions on the objective, are left to be discovered as you play the mission. While I understand the conscious design decision of keeping surprises hidden from the player, it makes no sense whatsoever to keep the mission plan hidden. I'm currently on mission 6 "Patrols" in which you transport some air assault infantry into various patrol bases so that they can search out and capture or kill the rebels. The mission briefing makes that much clear, but what it neglects to do is tell you which waypoints are LZs, which helicopters in your flight will drop troops at which LZs, and which helicopters will be providing cover in those areas. As a result, you're just flying blind, waiting for an audio file to trigger to tell you that you've reached an objective, and what your actions on the objective will be. In this case, it should not be a mystery to the player that he is going to orbit the LZ at waypoint 5, standing ready to provide cover with guns while flight lead drops troop, and that at waypoint 8 the player is going to land to drop troops while Springfield 3 and 4 provide cover. The fact that I'm having to dig through the triggers in the mission editor just to figure out what my PLANNED objective is is not good -- if nothing else, I run the risk of spoiling the legitimate mission surprises while trying to figure out what the mission objective is. My recommendation would be to amend the mission briefings so that the narrative style story information is in the Situation section, and then use the Objective section to detail the navigational plan, which waypoints correspond to the objective, and what the actions of the different flight elements will be on the objective. It wouldn't hurt to include a few more image files, as appropriate, so the player has a clearer sense of what's going on. Now some missions do in fact provide this level of information, but many do not, and that's a problem Again, I'm not asking that every detail, twist, and turn of a mission be spoiled in advance. What I'm suggesting is that operations orders, even for hasty missions, always make three things absolutely clear: the commander's intent, the location of the objective, and the actions on the objective. Keeping the player in the dark on these things isn't keeping him in suspense, it's simply obfuscation. Now maybe the objective gets changed when some unplanned circumstance arrises in mid-mission, but that's very different from putting a pilot in the air without giving more than the vaguest idea of what he's going to do.

I've found that keeping your rate of horizontal deceleration to as slow as feasible really helps. The faster you come up on the translational lift threshold, the faster you have to make adjustments, and thus the more likely you miscalculate and throw off your glide path. Particularly once you get below 60KIAS, you want to ease off on the cyclic back pressure so you have more time to anticipate and compensate for the transition out of translational lift. This of course won't always be feasible in combat, but right now my main concern is landing the bloody thing reliably without killing everyone on board.

Just nailed my first autorotation landing. Honestly, landing without power almost feels easier than landing with it. :P

You have to do a little conversion to tune into a TACAN. Look up the TACAN channel, either in the mission planner (although notably NOT in the F10 map), or in the list provided at the back of the A-10 and KA-50 manual. Then google the TACAN channel to VOR frequency conversion, and input the frequency into the NAV radio. Edit: Or if your referring to ILS stations, rather than VORTACs, then just check the Aerodrome list at the back of the A-10 and KA-50 Manual.

I'm not sure you need to be approaching from so high. The manual recommends that you be at roughly 500 feet at roughly 1 statute mile out. That said, my landings are really shaky too, but here's what advice I can offer: Once you're on final approach, pitch up 3-4 degrees while decreasing collective to maintain altitude. The collective adjustment will necessitate pedal and cyclic adjustment as well, so respond accordingly to keep the helicopter stable. Once you're stable and the helicopter is beginning to slow down, lower collective (making necessary pedal and cyclic adjustments along the way) until you're descending at 500ft/min. At this point, you should be on a glide path for the landing point, with the landing point staying fixed in your windscreen, making collective adjustments as necessary if this is not the case. As your airspeed begins approaching 40KIAS, the aircraft is going to transition out of translational lift, meaning your rotors will become far less efficient, so you need to start adding collective back in to slow down your rate of descent and avoid a Vortex Ring State. Continue adding collective until you've arrested your descent and you are in a hover. Try to time your hover so that you are just above the Rotor in Ground Effect, otherwise entry into IGE as you are raising collective will probably result in you beginning to climb again. Once in a stable hover, lower collective and settle the aircraft into a gentle descent to the landing point. Alternatively, I have found that the skids are pretty durable when it comes to landing while you still have forward velocity (not so much with excessive negative vertical velocity :P) and so it's feasible to make a (slow) airplane style landing. Simply continue your descent while operating just above the translational lift threshold, once IGE and just prior to the landing point flare so as to brake your forward velocity and vertical descent, coming to a short sliding stop on your skids.

Same here. Fortunately it's not terribly complex, and if you have any prior sim or RL aviation experience then none of it is new. Still if RMI, CDI, VOR, NDB, NAV Radio vs. COM Radio, etc. are all new concepts, then the manual isn't going to help you.

I'm not (yet) a mission designer so I don't know the implementation details, but if the Elbrus Rescue mission is anything to go by, you use the FM COMM radio. AFAIK, ADF is going to require an actual ADF beacon, where as with the FM COMM you just tune into the ELT frequency, and set the radio mode to HOME. The VOR indicator will then come to life, giving you azimuth indications to the beacon.

:D It's funny because I think this is the result for 9 out of 10 of pretty much everyone's landings right now.

Thanks for posts, Bivol! I must admit however that much of your terminology has me a bit baffled: I know what a deadzone is, have an idea what a curve represents, have no idea what throw is, etc. Do you know of any material that I could study so that I have a better understanding of computer joystick input settings? I've looked in the DCS User Manual before, and while it does a superb job of explaining HOW to adjust settings, it does very little to explain WHAT the settings are and what they do.

Same here. I described it to someone as being like a top that has begun to lose its spin and is beginning to oscillate out of control. I attempted the first campaign mission last night, and had one of my best flight sim experiences of all time on that 90 minute cross-country flight as the sun sets in the west, but everything went bad once it was time to land. I quit out when I had completely lost control of the helicopter, which had entered a 75 degree right bank and was plummeting to the earth with only a few feet left too go before impact. :P

Plus six quick missions. Also, the campaign has 15 missions.

Ugh, I set the autoupdater to download when I left for work in the morning, and then I return 9 hours later to discover that there's still over 200 megs to go at a rate of 2KB/s. My connection is not terribly fast, so at this point it would take even longer to torrent the full 1.2.4 install. Guess I won't be flying as soon as I had hoped. D:

My apologies if this has come up before, but a thread search did not return any hits, and I don't want to manually sort through a 113 page thread. Bug Report: Type: Mission Scripting Affected Mission: A-10A The Valley 6A Problem: Victory fails to trigger despite destroying the objective (T-80 Platoon with T-80s #21-23) described in the briefing. Cause: There is an additional, undocumented, victory trigger in this mission: Destroy T-80 HQ Group. Recommendation: Amend mission briefing so that the player understands that he must destroy both the T-80 Platoon group and the T-80 HQ group, OR remove Destroy T-80 HQ Group victory trigger.

As I recall, they have some add-on sale where for the low, low price of $4.99 you can purchase "Download Insurance" allowing you to download the game as many times as you want for the next six months. After that you're SOL and need to repurchase however, and if you call bullshit on the whole paying extra just to be able to download the game more than once, then you had better make sure that your one and only download is successful within the 24 hour grace period, otherwise you just flushed your money down the toilet. Terrible, terrible e-store from a terrible, terrible publisher. When I needed to track down a copy of LOMAC to get FC3, I took a look at buying it from the Ubi store, but once I realized what a scam it was, I decided I'd be better off grabbing a used copy off ebay.

It's an entirely separate installation, so no overwrite. Furthermore, Black Shark 2 includes all of the Black Shark 1 mission and campaign content along with the new stuff.

I kinda get the impression that most ED releases going forward will be available first and foremost through digital distribution, and then sometime down the line, maybe, in some territories, there might be a physical boxed release. I could be completely off in this impression, but if you're planning on waiting for the DVD then you might end up waiting a while. If you do get Flaming Cliff 3 through digital distribution, then keep in mind the following: You MUST have a valid and authenticated original Lock-On/Flaming Cliffs 1 or Flaming Cliffs 2 installation. I was rather pissed about this when I first tried to buy FC3 last fall, but evidently it's a requirement mandated by the Lock-On IP holders, i.e. Ubisoft, one of the most asinine publishers around. The cheapest and probably easiest option is to check Amazon for a used copy of Lock-On original release, or to grab a copy of Lock-On Platinum, which has the virtue of still being in print. Depending on your territory, Ubisoft might sell Lock-On (original) through their online store, but the Ubisoft store is a piece of shit that only lets you download the game once and then makes you buy the game again if you ever have need to download it a second time. So to sum up, your easiest course of action is to order a copy of Lock-On Platinum and get it installed and activated. From there, just download DCS World from the DCS website, which is free, purchase a FC3 license through the DCS website e-shop ($40 right now, but will go up to $50 once it's out of beta, which will coincide with the 1.2.4 patch which is due any day now), download the FC3 module, install World then FC3, then activate FC3 the first time you try to run an FC3 mission. Hope that made sense. It's not terribly complicated in practice, but written out it looks like a lot of steps.

While I have no way of knowing this for sure, that particular incident was about 1.5 weeks into the invasion. In all likelihood the pilots in question were probably lucky if they had gotten 36 hours of sleep total in that period. This isn't to excuse the negligent mistakes they made but just to point out that when operating under the degree of fatigue and stress they were almost certainly under, you probably aren't going to be seeing things properly or with as much acuity as usual.

Cool, thank you!

What is this? I was expecting the Black Shark 1 menu music, but this isn't it.

A specious argument. One could just as easily ask the following: what will you do tomorrow if your house burns down and all your belongings go with it? Clearly, by such implied logic, owning belongings is foolish because you might one day lose them. Nothing is permanent, and all financial transactions involve risk, so it is invalid to treat Steam purchases as a special case when you point out that one day Steam might shut down. The first computer game I ever bought was Command and Conquer: Red Alert, and of the two CDs that the game shipped on, I lent one to a friend and never got it back, and the other is too scratched as to be playable. Did I make a foolish purchase because 17 years later the game media would be lost or damaged beyond repair? Hardly. Likewise, just because it is hypothetically possible that Steam could shut down does not mean that it is a likely in the near to medium term future. In the long run, Steam will surely one day shut down, but then to paraphrase Keynes, in the long run we're all dead, so why worry about it? But to answer your question, if Steam shuts down, I'd just torrent the thing, figuring that it's fair use to make back ups of software you have legitimately purchased, that I legitimately purchased the software in question, and that the torrent represents my backup. Sorry to derail, but this is a pet-peeve of mine.

With UTM, the numeric coordinates specify a metric square of increasing precision. If you were to have just two numeric digits, such as LN 1 2 -- note that such a coordinate is so imprecise as to be useless, and thus never appears either in game or irl -- then the coordinate would be for a square that is 10,000m x 10,000m. Four numeric digits, LN 12 34, corresponds to a 1,000m x 1,000m square. Six numeric digits, LN 123 456, which happens to be the precision you work with when they teach you land navigation in the US Army, corresponds to a 100m x 100m square, which is enough to get you in sight of your objective when on foot, or enough to call for fires provided you aren't danger close. Finally, eight digits, LN 1234 5678, and ten digits, LN 12345 67891 correspond to 10m x 10m and 1m x 1m squares, respectively. The CDU always expects a 10 digit UTM coordinate, but it is programmed to parse less precise coordinates. Specifically, it will treat a less precise coordinate as being the truncated version of a ten digit 1mx1m precision coordinate. In other words, the CDU will take the entered coordinate, and append the appropriate number of zeroes to make it ten digits. For example, if you enter LN 123 456, the CDU will translate that into LN 12300 45600. The CDU waypoint will therefore have a 1mx1m precision, but the actual target or location being referenced by the coordinate in this example may be anywhere in the box formed by drawing an imaginary line east 100m and north 100m from the actual waypoint. This has to do with how coordinates are read on a map with MGRS gridlines -- you go right (east) then up (north) -- and since the CDU has appended zeroes to a six digit coordinate, the waypoint is specifically for the 1mx1m location at the bottom left of the box specified by the coordinate given to you by the JTAC or whomever. One last note: the digits of the coordinate must have even parity, i.e. you can have 6 or 8 digits, but not 5 or 9, etc. For example, LN 123 45, would refer to a box that has 100m precision in Eastings, and 1000m precision in Northings. Since grids, and by extension grid coordinates, are squares, you need identical precision in both dimensions. Therefore, feeding the CDU with odd parity coordinates will cause it to generate an error.

IIRC, it indicates distance, in meters, from the center of the crosshair to the tip of one of the crosshair lines. It's very useful for estimating ranges in JTAC talk-on (not that JTAC actually works these days :P) and for adjusting cluster bomb settings to ensure that all targets get hit.

Nevermind: I was able to get it figured out. Anyone know of a good Warthog HOTAS profile for LOMAC?