PFunk1606688187

Not exactly true. I've heard an A-10 pilot recount trying to orchestrate a CSAR mission in 2003 for some downed airmen and trying to make his way through dense air defenses before having to call the mission off after nearly losing his wingman. Its not really that cut and dried when you add the chaos, fog of war, and necessities of time to the mix, even in a war where the US is kicking serious ass.

I have yet to see a UAV that can mount a 30mm cannon with 1150 rounds. Might seem a silly thing to say, but what other weapon can be used so close to friendlies once they're almost getting overrun, or need constant reattack? JDAMs are pretty precise, but you'd still never use them precisely 100m from friendlies. I get it, UAVs and advanced sensor packages are the future, but that future is hardly realized. Til it is, the hole is pretty obviously there once the A-10 goes permanently off station.

Perhaps we should also bear in mind the difference between not being able to spot camouflaged targets that you don't know are there versus being talked onto their positions and then being able to see them once you're aware of them. We've all had that moment where we had someone trying to get us to see something and then it suddenly becoming apparent to us and then afterwards its easier to find it again whenever you cast your eye over it. Also, since when do we ever see vehicles in DCS camouflaged? Maybe I missed the "Perform" Camouflage" waypoint action in the ME.

Open ended statement about the dot not removing all complaints about not seeing stuff invites people inferring something from your statement. Or to put it another way, what exactly was the point of that? It didn't really apply to the conversation where we discuss how the sim fails to cope with the empirical limitations of the screen and pixels and how options exist to ameliorate this. Instead your comment was aimlessly contrary. A sort of "whats the point" kind of comment, or thats how it came off. Basically it sounded like you said "why bother, people are never happy" or something.

He said "fast moving jet" which is a pretty good clue. Should also check out that 15 minute TED talk video where an A-10 pilot describes his job through the events he participated in in 2002 and 2003. It was really good. It really epitomizes the attitude of the A-10 pilot as I understand it. He describes going below a cloud deck only 1000 feet above the ground in a valley where he has to make high G turns to break off gun runs. He describes doing this over and over and over, then as the forces break contact he says "then we gave support for another 45 minutes". I think loiter time alone allows the A-10 pilot to develop a clear picture of the situation then exploit and constantly refresh his situational awareness while delivering more ordnance than any other aircraft. A fast mover would be going so fast he'd have a hard time seeing stuff sometimes, then he'd be off station tout suite. Going slow isn't all bad.

Hard to believe that its only a few miles across a border to a whole different world of gun ownership. (I live on the side thats the hat)

Then kindly articulate a whole thought and don't leave it open to interpretation. Cheers :smilewink:

Right, so that solution isn't 100% effective ergo its not better than having nothing at all? Even if you stuck gamers into a holodeck they'd probably complain about not seeing things, but that doesn't mean that it has anything to do with the merits of the solution either.

Well it would be very possible to do it within the framework of the sim relatively easily. We've already seen this kind of thing demonstrated in the Ka-50, meanwhile the functioning of the HUD on the A-10C can basically do most of what an HMD would do anyway, but just restricted to the LOS of the HUD glass so that says that the aircraft itself already possesses a head start. The hard part would be restructuring the HOTAS to have a new sensor. There's also the fact that getting a sensor to talk to another sensor would probably be tricky. Overall "easy" would probably be relative to say making an AFM for an FC3 aircraft... for a developer. For someone without source code access? Probably a nightmare if not downright impossible.

^ I needn't bother replying when someone has already put it in better words.

I'm really just commenting on the general utility that a head unit can offer a ground pounder in terms of SA and ease of target and weapons management. I really don't get what WildBill is trying to say really. I don't think you got a leg to stand on buddy. ;)

I was just playing this excellent mod for Arma 2 and 3 (ish) tonight of the Apache Longbow. Seriously realistic systems integration for an Arma mod. It of course had an HMD and it was ridiculously badass. With it you can direct the intelligent radar sensors focus, you can slew rocket pods, aim the gun, aim Hellfires, look off bore and fire Stingers, look off bore and see an artificial horizon with TVV, speed, VVI, and alt/rdralt, you can also use it as a laser pointer to direct munitions, get range to target, or mark waypoints. So... uhhh yea, HMD/HMCS or whatever its called... pretty freaking useful for ground attack. 15 minutes in and I never switched the sucker off. It felt naked not having it by a half hour in.

I honestly have no idea why that would matter. They'll spend the whole time under your desk with your feet on them. :lol: At the end of the day all that should matter is if the functionality and durability is quality. EDIT. Also, with respect to looks, the crosswinds do look an awful lot like something you might actually see in a real airplane, unlike the Saiteks.

I wouldn't know for sure since I've never used them, though I'm not going to make any wild and crazy wagers that the internals are any better. I would assume they'd still be plastic, even if the foot rests themselves are some kind of metal. I can't tell you if the price bump is justified based on build quality. I also read that the toe breaks on those can be difficult to use, particularly while trying to also deflect the rudder, but don't hold me to that. Ultimately Saitek is Saitek is Saitek. Its going to be roughly the same. Considering the fact that the throttle on the X55 is the same as the one on the X65 I wouldn't expect them to not reuse stock bits. I've been looking into possibly going this direction, but thats a whole different price bracket.

Whats most ironic is that even with that strategy in mind, the USAF roster of active fighter aircraft ought to make any Russian strategist laugh at the absurdity of it. I'm pretty sure the USAF has more active F-16s than the Russian Air Force has total fighters of any brand.

Its more complicated than that. The ability of a person to spot an object on the ground at X altitude unassisted by binoculars far exceeds what a default FOV pilot in DCS can spot. What we get when we use a narrower FOV is probably more like giving us natural human sight more than even binocular level zoom. There is a reason that many other sims have used the "dot" concept to assist virtual pilots with spotting. This is because without that, using standard resolution monitors, you're seeing LESS than a real pilot does. So if that real pilot has a job thats considered really difficult for the human eye, the virtual pilot is suffering far worse than he is. This is before we even get into things like the contrast and colour representation in the sim versus real life, or the lack of peripheral vision, or the fact that terrain is so much less distinct in sims than in real life. Simply saying that the sim has integrity in its realistic fidelity because it doesn't give us an assist is false logic. It has no more integrity for not assisting us than it would if it did. The integrity of its simulation is based on whether it adequately represents real world functionality in a believable way. Not being able to see aircraft or ground targets at ranges similar to real life at default FOV is not what you'd call the pinnacle of realism. I love me some DCS but lets not pretend its immaculate. The A-10C's lights for instance are not bright enough to be considered realistic. At night they are pretty inadequate compared to what a real airplane looks like. You can be in <1nm formation and hardly feel saddled. Nav lights are too dim and the strobe is just a joke. Funny thing is the lighting on other aircraft in DCS is better. Apparently the Hawk's is pretty darned good.

The other thing might be that the tanker has a different airspeed at the waypoint from the racetrack. When you program a tanker to fly a pattern you give it the pattern speed in the waypoint actions or whatever its called. You tell it to do a racetrack at a given altitude and a given speed, and this may vary from the speed thats given for the waypoints it flew up til that point. I have myself observed a tanker flying at a faster speed than it flies the orbit at until in the critical range where the boom lowers and the nav lights come on. This isn't necessarily at the pre-contact range as if you will see him change his behavior when you get closer regardless of the radio call. Once you're in this range it will be, as far as I can tell, flying the parameters in the tanker pattern instruction and this can be faster or slower than the waypoint's speed. Combine this with the groundspeed/wind variables and you get lots of reasons for the tanker to give you a hard time with respect to overall airspeed. In general tanking is screwy. Its rather unrefined as a whole and doesn't resemble real world behavior in many categories. I hope that as the F/A-18 gets closer to being a thing they'll look at tanking again. I'd say try calling for a rejoin but not calling "ready precontact". Instead fly to the left wing position and fly formation with him. See if he changes his speed as you get closer. Try it on various heading and speeds if you feel like it and then throw wind in for kicks. I going on a lot of supposition based on observed behavior.

160-180 is slower than any aircraft tanks at. I believe the C-130 is the slowest and it does it at 200. The A-10 at 220, and everyone else a whole lot faster. Problem with tankers as I understand it is that they're tied to groundspeed, not airspeed, so the wind will make him fly different airspeeds to match the given groundspeed. Its something we'd all love to see changed.

Just be warned. Those Saitek Pro Flight Pedals aren't built to last. I've "broken" mine twice. Each time an aggressive yaw kick lead to them being knocked off their track and I had to open it up to fix it. Its all plastic inside so you better never ever wear your work boots with them. They do have a nice wide stance though and the toe breaks are easy to use, though they too also aren't the best. I've found that my toe breaks have a massive deadzone at the bottom of the range. There's no missing range on them, you get 100% input, you just have to push them a decent amount before they start to respond so thats either by (poor) design or its a result of quality control problems. In any case, if they broke for good I would really really have a hard time going back to a stupid twist stick. A-10C does need SOME coordination in turns since the yaw damper isn't perfect (perhaps a bug) and of course crosswind landings are just horrible with a twist stick.

I thought that the crosshair or something obvious like that started flashing 5 seconds before masking and that that was your warning.

TIR or one of the free alternatives.

HMD/HMCS is genius because it doesn't preclude the eye, it mates with it perfectly. You use your eye to find something on the ground and use a "Make SPI" command to point all your sensors towards it. Your argument is like saying F-16s don't need the HMCS because they have a radar, or they have their eyes, but completely misses the point that now they can use their radar with their eyes. Helmet Mounted systems are brilliant for all aircraft simply because they're an enormous upgrade to the Mk1 Eyeball. I'd be giddy if I could get that capability in DCS. There's also the fact that apparently the one in the A-10 is so low profile that it works with NVGs seamlessly, and by extension I imagine Binos as well.

Yea without the mods I would have stopped way earlier. I personally prefer the way they scaled the environment in the Scandinavian mod to the default game. Its much more varied whereas the default game feels very same-same, especially on the highway interchanges. If you judged your location on interchanges alone you'd never know where you were. My favourite truck to drive was that Kenworth W900A with the 18 speed gearbox. I still wish that the loading docks had more character. Its a ghost town, and I seriously would get proper frustrated when I'd do a 40 minute delivery drive and realize that the place I was delivering to was literally an empty lot with not even a single other container in it. XD I may go back though, maybe there's a new hardmode map or something.

Wonderful thing about bureaucracies, you can't even kill something without waiting a few years to see it finally happen. Wouldn't it be great if a war broke out the week after the last A-10 landed? :thumbup: As for the suites... eh I try not to know what I'm missing. Makes me too sad.

When you stall your car and wonder why you didn't get a chop tone.