Mouse

I watched your track 3 times in DCS A-10C version 1.1.1.1. I checked the input monitor (rctrl+enter) and external view to see if I could discern what you're doing. I can only come to one conclusion: you flew straight into the ground during controlled flight. You never lost control of the aircraft. It did exactly as you commanded based in your stick inputs. (Alternatively, the track is screwed up.)

I'm not sure that's what ghost or I ever said, BlueRidge. I don't know if it's your intent, but you come off as a bit hostile to the discussion here. The OP was comparing the Gulf War to actual DCS scenarios. There's certainly a valid interest in that with regards to DCS. What missions has the aircraft been performing historically? What was it designed to perform? What can it do if backed into a corner? Those are all useful questions, especially for people who want to create believable, challenging missions. We got involved in Libya and there is still a huge problem in Syria that could lead to military intervention in some way, so I'm not so sure you need quotes around the word realistic with regards to Arab Spring-inspired missions. It seems a great source of hypothetical missions for all of the modern aircraft in DCS.

China is a major trade partner with the US, so it seems odd to think we would ever come into direct conflict with them. Their current economy is much stronger than Cold War USSR or Nazi Germany, let alone Iran, Iraq, North Korea or Vietnam. It's only getting stronger too. North Korea's military is probably a joke compared to Iraq's. The real danger North Korea poses is their proximity to urban areas in South Korea. They would probably be able to do a lot of civilian damage before they were stopped. For that reason no one will ever provoke North Korea. Everyone hopes they will slowly deflate and collapse. If North Korea were to start a serious conflict without provocation, I would be very surprised if China supported them. China won't let North Korea collapse right now, however, because they enjoy importing its natural resources at low cost, and neither China nor South Korea wants to deal directly with hundreds of thousands of starving refugees. On the other hand, Iran would have defeated Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War if the international community hadn't stepped in. They seem the most likely country to be in direct conflict with NATO countries in the near future, but would that be significantly different from the conflicts in Iraq? If you're looking to create realistic scenarios, I think history is right now offering some pretty compelling situations with the Arab Spring. Missions inspired by these civil conflicts can offer challenges other than just dodging SAMs. The trick, I think, is figuring out just what can be done about that in the DCS mission editor on a map of Georgia. I've never made a mission before and I'm still a DCS newbie, but I've lately been tempted to try.

I've had some issues with contacting the towers myself. I figured the problem was on my end when ATC was silent for a while, however just moments after I finally started both engines, ATC came on out of nowhere and gave me permission to start them. As many say though, it's still in beta, so I don't worry too much about things like this right now anyway. I don't always know enough to recognize if the fault is mine or the software's.

No love for the Kiowa Warrior? :<

Let's settle this once and for all: TurboHog's Godly Ka-50 Special Invincinble[sic] Edition > A-10C > Everyone Else's Ka-50 Personally I would recommend the A-10C to new DCS players.

Fun is subjective, but you can't deny that plenty of people who HAVE thought this through--or experienced this in the past via other games and simulators--think it would be fun. There are already games which offer two-seat aircraft. It can be a lot of fun to operate a helicopter with another player in games like Battlefield 3 and ArmA II. Unfortunately those are terrible as flight "simulators," but the potential is undeniably there for both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. My main worry is mostly that we'll never see another helicopter again...

I lurk a lot on these forums and rarely post, but I need to put in my support here. I'd commit to buying it, but I'll buy anything DCS at this point. Still... my dream would be to get some sort of two-seat aircraft in DCS. All of the aircraft I want to see the most are two-seaters. I'm fortunate enough to have a buddy to fly with who feels the same way. I understand the technical challenges for single-player, but we would love to share a single aircraft.

The simplest solution I can think of is to make the options surrounding labels more configurable in the following ways: Icon shape, size, transparency, which can vary by the kind of contact Kinds of contacts that will have or not have an icon (e.g. air only or no infantry) Information displayed with icon (including color, shape, size of icon as information!) Ranges and even elevation at which icon is displayed and target information (if any) Weather degradation of contacts This would allow someone to create icons which are essentially just semi-transparent dots or marks in the sky to represent very distant aircraft. As you get closer the icon might change to represent the kind of aircraft it is, and then as you get very close actually disappear entirely. It could be limited to fixed-wing air contacts above 1500 feet AGL, while other people might prefer to have range information at closer distances (to replace the loss of depth perception) as well as dark dots over ground vehicles that are within 2 nm. The other option would be some kind of LOD object which does not lose visibility at long distance. This would be less configurable, but I do not know if this would be easier to implement. It would seem LOD objects takes work on rendering code and asset creation while the icon bits would add more and require only some thoughtful changes to less complicated code.