PFunk1606688187

For me anytime I launch DCS if I want to be able to alt-tab I have to click away from DCS to bring something else to the front while its loading from the initial splash (the image of the HUD on a sky). If I don't task switching doesn't bring any other window to the front and DCS remains on top. If I do the above when DCS loads, either single missions or when launching the Multiplayer client, I can task switch.

The -1-1 is just the performance and planning supplement. It contains all the necessary information to plan every aspect of a flight involving aircraft performance under all conceivable conditions based on testing done to the airframe. It contains dozens of charts you read to determine all sorts of things like rotation speed and rejection speed at a given sea level pressure and drag index, the stall and approach speeds for a given configuration, etc etc. The -1-1 for the A is close enough to the C as to be nearly the same, owing no doubt to few actual changes made between the two models in terms of performance. The real difference I think would be the drag indices. I've personally never come across the The TO 1A-10A-34-1-1 and I'm not so sure its that readily available. I have easily found the -1 for the C though. Thats pretty easy to find. I'm pretty sure I found it here even. The TO-1A-10A-1 I have contains the -1-1 as well. I believe this link provides the same one. http://www.476vfightergroup.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=42

You're basically explaining why people pay to go to university. @Scrim You do realize that publicly available doesn't exclusively mean free and without copyright, right?

Some people prefer to actually pretend like some unmodeled systems are modeled for the sake of immersion and enjoying the procedure. The IFFCC bit test is a fun one because it lasts only about 30 seconds but adds lots of fun immersion to the start up process. In real life I would imagine they'd turn the pitot heat switch on when they configure for take off, not after take off, simply because once you take off the last thing you want to do is worry about one more switch, especially if you get into an emergency situation and you forget about it. If you get engine problems you could easily misdiagnose the speed loss incorrectly. I usually turn it on right before I enter the runway then when I run up the engines with brakes set do one last scanflow to ensure everything is ready. Everyone plays differently. Everyone also usually min maxes their start up even if they're realism nerds because the sim doesn't make start up as simple as it is in real life. Real pilots don't worry about armaments and profiles or flightplans, at least not how we have to. I usually try to get my load out done while Left Engine is starting up so that I'm ready to press Load All as quickly as possible. Also means I can close the canopy to reduce noise pretty much as quickly as possible.

The problem is that while real pilots might do one thing its also dependent on the systems they use. DCS CMS bears little resemblance to the real thing insofar as its actual behavior. The threat logic of the A-10C CMS is too stupid to allow it to select the proper program. Its better to come up with custom programs of your own that you know work well against certain threats and just manually cycle the profiles in advance of the most likely threat. Its also worth noting that the CMS is not infallible. The RWR and MWS do not have 100% reliability for detecting missile launches. I have seen phantom launches that I can't identify and I've seen missile launches happen in plain view of the aircraft with no missile launch warning. This is in many ways a very realistic behavior. Real pilots practice mutual support for a very good reason: systems are not 100% reliable. Wingmen always cover the attacker, watch for missile launches, direct the defender through his jink. Put it this way. Semi mode got a ping from a radar thats well outside of threat range and won't be on your flight path. Its simplistic threat logic though picks out a chaff program on standby. A few minutes later while ingressing to attack you hear your wingman yell "missile launch! your 3 o'clock!". Well what just happened? Your RWR didn't say anything, but you don't have any time to think, you have to start your jink because IR SAMs give no response time. Well since the CMS didn't pick up this launch for whatever reason when you kick into your current CMS profile you dump a bunch of chaff but no flares. Oops. Now you're dead, or relying purely on maneuvering to defeat. This is why I always use manual. Even if you select the right profile ahead of time an errant radar contact could reset it without you noticing. Real life I'm sure the CMS logic is WAY better but nevertheless this aint real life. I've had an APU fail to start on the ground. Battery on, inverter on, fuel available, no reason for it to not work other than a random failure. As for start up I usually go for a right to left scanflow. Batt, inverter, APU, then I start flipping on switches starting on the right aft panel, through the centre console, then to the left side. By the time the APU is on the bus I have everything flipped on that doesn't need an alignment or an engine running.

Track would be the easiest way to troubleshoot this, or a video. Even a screenshot would be beneficial.

Look of the X52 belies its above average utility with DCS A-10C. Its a small sticking point but I would miss the dual-stage trigger more than I'd enjoy the split throttles if I found myself using the X55 I think.

Except there's nothing stopping you from diving a little while CCRPing too. ;)

Auto CMS is garbage. At the bare minimum use Semi. Auto will waste all your chaff long before you need to be dropping it. Countermeasures systems in DCS are not sophisticated enough to be left alone to make decisions for you. Ideally manual is the way to go because the threat logic of the CMS is borked. I'd say that flaps are essential controls for every airplane, ever (as long as they had them anyway). Speed Brakes are considered important enough to be on the throttle HOTAS. The Flaps lever is on the base of the throttle to the left of the track for the throttle handles.

Lots of those forgotten CDU pages contain bugs. There is a page that allows you to actually change the time in the CDU, but for whatever reason every interger is multiplied by 2, so changing it forward one hour makes for 2 and 4 hours to 8. I'm fairly certain it will never be fixed. :P

Another other option is just to go nap of the earth and use that to calibrate your altimeter, with something like a 100ft error. It worth noting that the radar altimeter is built into the aircraft while the GPS sources are external, so not using the former but using the latter would seem... backwards with respect to trying for a stripped down landing experiment, but to each his own.

HD 4850 512 :megalol:

Well considering its extremely unlikely for an aircraft to be landing somewhere where they don't at least have an ATIS to give them local pressure, onboard instruments to determine local Baro pressure directly aren't usually available (in fact I don't know if any plane would have such capability). That said, as long as you know the elevation of at least one spot on the ground you can use the Radar altimeter to determine the offset from mean sea level pressure and get local Baro from that, ie. set 2992, overfly the airfield you intend on landing at, observe your Baro altimeter relative to your radar altimeter, and change pressure until your Baro alt matches known ground elevation + radar altitude.

The 476 has an advantage with respect to how much real world knowledge many of the core members have, and that shows in the way the play style is organized via the 'as close as reasonable to real life' SOPs. That said so much of the knowledge is readily available on google and really its about studying it and internalizing the meaning and adapting it to the sim more than anything. There are things though, like the contracts, which I'd never once encountered before joining and they transform how you approach flying with another person. One of the beautiful things is when you're the wingman to a very experienced lead you can spend a 2 hour mission killing lots of stuff and never have to flip on your TGP because the whole time your lead just sends you SPIs and fighter to fighter briefs that explain to you in very clear terms what you should do. Its a very liberating feeling actually, not being obsessed with needing to see in stark detail the fake-FLIR outline of your target and instead bowing to the other guy's instructions by using the Maverick seeker head to hit that white hot dot on the left of the pair, or being guided in to drop a pair of Mk 82s onto a speck to one side of an intersection and on the pull out having smoke dropped on the next target and finding yourself having in 2 minutes put 4 iron bombs on 2 targets more effectively than if you'd been staring down your soda straw on your own trying to figure out what to do next. Its not everyone's bag, and surely everyone has the opportunity to play the game as they desire, but when the systems are designed to work like real ones do, once you start to use them as they were meant to be (however clumsily an amateur might do it compared to a real pilot) its a transformative experience with respect to how you approach the aircraft. Yea but the thing about the A-10C in DCS is that whenever you create a waypoint using any point like a SPI or your own sensors by default your waypoint has a 10 digit grid in it, which brings an accuracy of 1m. Being that MGRS is decimal based 8 digits is 10m accuracy and 6 digits in 100m accuracy. The only way to get a coordinate thats less accurate than 1m is by manually inputting the coordinates, so by default any waypoint created from a SADL generated point or an onboard sensor will be as accurate as is necessary for even the most modern of IAMs.

6 gigs is about the minimum required RAM in order to run any large mission without your computer having to resort to using the page file. I think people overstate how strong a video card you need though. My video card is an ancient piece of crap and I get by. The single core CPU is however a big issue. The only alternative to getting a whole new mainboard is to see if there is a decent enough dual core for the socket in it.

Well my problem is that you're not really articulating clearly what a "target point" is. Noodle, who knows a great deal about how the actual aircraft's systems work, says there are no more points available to pilots than we already have in our waypoint database. So what is a target point? Is this just the conceptual notion of having confirmed enemy shared on the TAD using datalink somehow? If thats the case then that still doesn't have anything to do with waypoints. Your thesis that wayponts are not meant to be "indiscriminately" targeted is completely wrong as far as I know. The conceptual issue of sorting between navigational and target related waypoints appears to be a non issue for real pilots.

I don't know why its so hard to have a written briefing that defines these things though. Its already obvious to anyone flying that waypoints which are in mid air are navigational while waypoints which are at terrain elevation are targets or some point on the ground of relevance. Naming conventions? Well every pilot can have his own in game when flying with his friends. Thats all a matter of creating a system that works. Single nato phonetic character plus numeral works pretty well. A good briefing should have an explanation of the enemies you'll face, the specific objectives you're going to destroy, and how all that fits in the flight plan. ENO insists its not the mission creator's responsibility to "spoon feed" information, but frankly thats a pretty silly notion. If you know something and you want them to know it make it clear as day or its a waste of people's time trying to figure it out. A 30 second reading of the briefing included in any mission should leave me wanting for nothing if this is supposed to be a "pick up and go" mission with no meaningful preparation. Really this is again where I say "DCS players get themselves into unrealistic trouble" because we're getting to the point where we're contemplating systems that handicap players who hop into missions without doing any meaningful preparation or reading of the briefing and who get confused by the waypoints. Do real pilots ever have any doubt as to what every waypoint in their flight plan means or what each of them is named? No, and because of that the systems are designed for that kind of use. The "Target Point" is a gamer's idea. Its the flashing waypoint on the minimap that tells you to go here to receive bacon. I still think you're taking ridiculous liberties with my perspective though. I don't think one extra layer of discrete separation about waypoints is worth much so I must clearly desire no meaningful symbology? Taking things to an "extreme" is not a fair way to characterize someone's argument when their argument is in no way about making broad sweeping generalizations, and instead about a single system specific topic. I just think that the notion of a "target point" is a subdivision that makes sense to people playing DCS more than it would to real pilots. Would I welcome a switch you can throw to turn a square waypoint into a diamond to indicate its "special"? Sure, I guess, but honestly its a crutch for people who have no idea whats happening around them. It still needs to be named something or else every other waypoint like it will still be as confusing as without this new system. If you get confused when you read waypoint names like "Tanks" and the briefing says "Enemy tank platoon at waypoint Tank" then what are any of these things going to do to help you?

Indeed. Good stuff in there. All in all though, going back to what was the original catalyst for this entire conversation, I've yet to see a good reason why we need one more waypoint type. ;) I'm not speaking against this sensor fused modern datalink capable warfare, I'm merely discussing the systems as they are in the A-10C we have. One more subdivision of the waypoint database isn't going to meaningfully improve the lot of the A-10C pilot in our game. What will improve it is the implementation of the TAD's full suite of capabilities.

2 people who know nothing about the actual military are arguing about how to properly design 21st century avionics. Clearly this is groundbreaking stuff.

At first I thought it might be some old ass ghetto A-10 but I don't see a canopy bow so I can't say I'm certain. Its got the F-4 stick so I'd put money on it being American at least. Its got 2 engine by the looks of the fire handles and throttles. Speaking of cockpits, I think this one is awfully clean looking for a pre-vietnam era jet. Particularly interesting whats on the right side. B-58

Yep. :thumbup: To me this situation seems very unlikely. At any given moment the pilot should know where everything is. He will absolutely know where friendlies are and if he is fighting a CAS mission he will have some ground controller or a FAC giving him up to date threat info. Basically if its in the database and could be displayed by an icon he should already have an innate awareness of where it is around his aircraft and I think the existing tools do a good enough job. Its really not that they shouldn't use the new technology, its that having clear cut definitions of whats enemy, whats friendly, where everything is at all times, its a perfect idea that doesn't fully apply to the inevitably imperfect battlefield awareness you have. If there is a threat that will be able to shoot at an American aircraft in a combat zone its almost definitely going to be coming from someplace they aren't expecting or haven't logged. If you get launched on by known enemies while attacking then your tactics suck. If you get launched on during an attack and you consider it an acceptable risk or part of the plan, you'll absolutely know where it is at least generally enough that you can react without flying the wrong general direction. Even so real pilots don't react to waypoints, they react to threats and so a missile is a threat above anything else. They start thinking in terms of azimuth and evasion pattern. If they don't already know which direction safe(ish) airspace is going in then what are they doing there? So for its use in a reflex situation I'm not so sure its really that needed, though an elegant solution to this proposed system could be useful. I just don't think its absence is in any way hindering people's ability to be effective and aware in DCS. I think if we had even more of these toys DCS players would get incrementally worse just because most of them don't learn to play by any meaningful standard of realism and so they get into all kinds of trouble real pilots never deal with. DCS players are so very much walking around on crutches. About the "solution", if there are pre-existing enemy formations on the map having some unique marker on say the TAD to identify them to augment SA would be beneficial but to be honest I wouldn't be surprised if the TAD already has this in real life, DCS just doesn't let us implement full TAD utility because of the lack of MDCs. Now, how does any of this apply to waypoints? I guess you could have a subcategory of waypoint called target waypoint. Give it a unique shaped icon, make it easier to sort when attacking, but to be honest I think its always more important to visually corellate your flight path with the ground than it is with the moving map. Preparations for engaging targets on waypoints in your database and flight plan will not be done haphazardly. If you're using waypoints in an attack you're going to be well briefed and clear on what you're doing. In the pit every attack is briefed and both pilots ensure the other is clear. They go in from an IP and its not exactly hard for them to look at the letters and numbers of the waypoint name to ensure they're flying towards and engaging the right set of coordinates. Whether we have unique symbology for "attack points" or not they will always need to use basic naming conventions to sort them out. Without that a bunch triangles or circles or rhombuses will be just as confusing as a bunch of squares. Another thing for us to take into consideration is that DCS is a ridiculously unrealistic battlefield. Waypoints and markers and data is so much more useful than in real life because in DCS stuff doesn't move practically at all. What good is a waypoint if the enemy can be 2 or 3 miles away from it after a few minutes? Now you've got all these lovely red Xs or Triangles or whatever but the enemy is nowhere near them. Do they mean anything? Do they help? This is where UAVs and other aircraft sending SPIs is much more useful. Then you also get POD in POINT mode. Or smoke. Or "next to the hardball on the N side of the intersection, before the treeline, moving south". Thats my point of view, and I'm sticking with it til someone who knows more about it tells me I'm wrong. :music_whistling:

Your corrected version of my sentence says exactly what I intended. I was never talking about hiding information against a pilot's will, merely that subdividing information into more categories doesn't necessarily improve situational awareness. The F-16 HUD being a prime example. The HUD mode is a pilot choice. Its existence however suggests that a logical pilot choice is to hide information that is not relevant and only hinders a WVR fight. Choice is always relevant, and I have seen people comment on Rafale HUD videos saying they have no idea how the French fight with so much symbology cluttering their views. HUDs and as far as I know HMDs present symbology monochromatically. This has not changed for a reason I imagine, not the least of which would be for compatibility with night vision equipment. Part of our disagreement would appear to be misunderstanding. Your point about how apparently my logic taken to its conclusion would see the elimination of the HUD entirely suggests you're approaching my argument very differently than I mean to present it, and while I might be willing to admit a possibility of being poor at writing it, I'm going to suggest the bulk is you interpreting it incorrectly. I don't know how you take my argument against overclutter and information overload to the point that I don't believe in HUDs. Here's the thing about Red Xs and recognizing threats. How is a Red X going to help you when someone shoots and you have a split second to react? Its not, you're going to check the RWR for a red flashing light and if you're lucky you can catch the azimuth of a missile launch, then immediately Jink. If your wingman is correctly providing mutual support he should then be able to spot the launch point of the missile and direct you through the correct evasion, if thats at all relevant. If not he could be able to spot the launch point of the missile. With an HMD you can make it into a Mark point or SPI right away, share information, and attack or pass it on to other aircraft who are able to attack it if you're not. A perfect example of the simplicity I'm talking about is in fact the RWR. It is as basic a tool as it is effective. Azimuth, threat level, priority. Add more complexity to the displayed information and its overload. It already overloads us with useless info about search radars (I bet those are prioritized out automatically by some setting in real life). I have to waste time pressing PRI or SEP to see whats hiding under them. 2 more button presses I don't want to make. Like I said above, red symbols in the HUD/HMD aren't likely to be something we'd ever have for real. But even if we could, or we can scheme together some new symbol that works in green, what is its actual value? What situation does it improve? It can't help us with unknown threats. Before we even had green stuff to stare at pilots were sorting out the battlefield by looking at terrain and being aware of where they were in relation to it. I think a lot of people's issues with SA in DCS come from the fact that with the limitations of PC hardware and DCS' quality(lack thereof?) of terrain/etc rendering we're basically looking through a glass darkly.

Most of the people voting their "worst" have no sense of charm. :P Nevertheless, who'd have thought that I'd be posting this for my ugliest.

The difference between filtering and hiding is entirely semantic. The goal is always to show as little relevant information as possible. Notice how in dogfight mode for an F-16 how much suddenly disappears from the HUD? Red X, makes me think of a video game. Thats still one more tier of information organization that the pilot is asked to manage. One more thing to consider. One more cluster of buttons he has to remember to use when that information becomes outdated and needs to be changed. If a pilot isn't using clear naming conventions for his waypoints that keeps him from getting confused in battle then how is a new system going to help him? In that situation it becomes a crutch. Its benefits can't come from an assumption of pilot incompetence. This is when things start to turn into a matter of dealing with amateurs using the systems versus professionals.

There is something to be said for simplicity though. Too many symbols, too many discrete subdivisions and you can actually make something more unwieldy in a dynamic situation where you're overloaded already. Thats at least the counter argument. Again I still don't know how you practically segregate target waypoints from regular ones in a meaningful way. I do know that there is in reality a wealth of symbolic information represented in the TAD which carries over to other sensors which we do not have in DCS thanks to our lack of an MDC. That would allow you to see friendly forces, FLETs and FLOTs and the margins of kill boxes all displayed on the map, on the TGP, and possibly I imagine also selectively in the FOV of the HMD. Nevertheless I struggle to conceive of a new class of waypoint that would augment things. Seriously, if someone knows of something altogether different in another modern aircraft I'm interested. I don't count the Ka-50 because that thing is a mess. Its features are really limitations when it comes to most of its avionics. The limitation on waypoints and the absurd way you have to navigate through uplink targets makes my head hurt. Well Mark Points would never be predefined. They're explicitly in situ. As for other points well the mission designer actually can populate the map with points, lots of them and I'm not just talking about the flight plan. You can actually place nav points on the map in the mission editor, give them names and when you type that name into the CDU scratchpad it will show up and you can then enter them into your flight plan or set them as your steer point in mission mode. You ever seen a video of someone playing FSX with something like a 737s CDU (they call it an FMS)? They enter the flight plan by typing the names of waypoints that are in a database. Mission creators can create their own waypoint database in every mission if they wanted. With the right briefing you could say know enough on the tarmac to create a second flight plan made up of only target waypoints if you were so inclined so long as they were already under database waypoints in your CDU. This is of course where I can turn back to the point about mission creators. They can easily populate a mission with flexibility providing good briefings and lots of nav aides that aren't even necessarily included in the default flight plan, depending on the scenario. Thinking about the multi-flight plan idea, using the CDU repeater and a quick UFC Func command you can swap flight plans pretty fast. Off the top of my head I count 3 button presses to change flight plans, 4 if the CDU repeater isn't open on the MFCD, 5 if you want to return to a different CDU page or a different MFCD page. The only way to augment this as it is in the Franken suite of our A-10C I think would be to have an option to dump new waypoints directly into new or existing flight plans. Maybe add a button to cycle bewteen flight plans as easily as we cycle between steer points. The absence of such a thing in the real aircraft however suggests to me that the real pilots don't even bother with these things. Ultimately these systems are designed to be used in very carefully orchestrated ways by trained people. The real pilots' methodologies are almost definitely not the least bit like most DCS A-10C players. The way they operate makes most of our perceived issues immaterial I imagine.