PFunk1606688187

In the end I found it impossible to not have something tangible on hand as a reference while learning, or when re-learning. I wrote out in ink a composite of the HOTAS button/SOI index that is present on pages 88-92 of the A-10C manual pdf. These are an essential reference to the use of the HOTAS while learning. I wouldn't have been able to learn nearly as quickly without it by my side. Even if you have a second monitor that can display the PDF, the one in the manual is not very useful for quick reference as all the information is broken up over 4 pages. Instead what you need is a single sheet which compiles all of the possible HOTAS functions based on the SOI you're interacting with, in spreadsheet format. Learning to use the HOTAS fluidly is core to being effective and a better reference than whats in the manual is essential to effective learning. In the end when I was learning the A-10 I wrote out lots of things, but the only things I ever used regularly in my self-directed indoc were a written out start-up procedure/flow and a copy of what I've described above.

One thing I can tell you is that when I finally jumped in fully to try and learn the A-10, starting in a pit with a friend talking me through start up, continuing with avid focus, playing hours for pretty much every day straight through over a month, by the end of that month I had run out of things to read, basic technical things to comprehend for the MOST PART. I knew the overview and I knew a number of tricks. I felt comfortable in the pit and I didn't feel like there were a lot of things that I couldn't at least passively comprehend. However, thats just understanding systems use, button pressing, GUI interaction and management, and airframe familiarity and competence in control of it under various conditions. Beyond this there is a new depth of detail that requires tremendous patience. That would be the tactical execution of all of those systems' functions. This is a topic which is in itself where the art is, and it is one which is unfortunately the least well documented one. You can learn the ins and outs of a correct 30mm gun attack against a tank, how to properly utilized your various payloads and how to use the systems effectively to manage target info, but the subtitles of the tactics are the most elusive topic. Most military documentation relating to ground attack tactics appears to be closed to us, while much of the systems documentation is more readily available. This means to become a true pro at using the airframe realistically to kill stuff likely means either a LOT of trial and error and more reading of the elusive documents, or just of finding good friends and playing with them and learning the tactics bit by bit, from people who know stuff that isn't much published, and also people who've done this enough that in a few years have used trial and error to piece together intelligent Ground Attack Tactics. Yea, big mouthful, but its the truth. The technical side also involves a very severe bit of skill and knowledge decay. You can't walk away from this sim for a few months without coming back to huge gaps in your knowledge, though the more often you relearn the less difficulty there is in relearning and the smaller the gaps themselves become. I can remember coming back from my first break, when I felt very competent last I played, and sitting in the pit staring at the buttons and completely forgetting how to even turn on the engines. I did remember quickly as part of the process of becoming competent is internalizing lots of repetitive flows and muscle memory that allows you to forgo consciously needing to recollect much. Ultimately its a VERY VERY rich game to invest in, and for the price you paid, on sale, its a helluva bargain, one of the best you may ever have. It could take you months to just run out of things to learn from the manual, and you could play for years with other wingmen without ever mastering every skill. Its as bottomless as you make it. It is daunting, but frankly its not all that hard if you look at the skills and systems individually, its just big and deep as a whole. It requires long term investment. You are not going to be a pro in a week, but every hour spent learning is in this game I a far greater investment as you will receive in return something which you can't have in most games. Most games you get diminishing returns very quickly. This game is not so shallow as to allow you to hit the ceiling even in your first year. Good luck. I wish I could start all over again, just for the thrill of learning so many new things. Much advice can be mined from these forums as to how to crash course yourself in enough key things so that you can get off the ground and not languish in trying to learn the wrong complications before they're of use to you.

Has there been any change in the issue I read about with DCS' netcode where a smoke rocket placed by one player would appear in a different relative location for someone else, effectively making smoke use for FACing more troublesome than it ought to be? I remember reading that some players had done some pretty conclusive tests to show that the same smoke deployed in a different spot for different clients,

I say become very very familiar with the flight instruments. Don't be a HUD whore. The HUD is not technically rated as a primary flight instrument. You are supposed to be able to fly blind by the "steam gauges". Become extremely comfortable with the whole cockpit. Never stop reading and rereading sections of the manual until you've run out of things you don't understand or don't remember. What you can't find in the manual read the forums for. Lots of great old threads if you use search. Focus primarily on flying the aircraft to start. The avionics take time but you absolutely cannot utilize them well without being able to fly the aircraft so well that it can exist as second nature underneath your active use of those systems. Fly the pattern until you never pop a nose wheel or screw up a landing. By now I can land the A-10 from almost any situation using some basic rules of flight and the AOA indicator. If you understand how to fly the airframe then you will be infinitely better at executing attacks and using the systems on the fly. Oh, and don't be a HUD whore. I think I said that already.

I think perhaps you need a tutor if you haven't got the spare time to explore the sim avionics and discover things in a more plodding but progressive manner. In the mean time, these videos really helped me. https://www.youtube.com/user/gerryabbott/videos They cover mostly advanced stuff. The biggest problem with the A-10C is that its a complicated weapons delivery platform. The avionics involve understanding an entire computer system interface. If you don't properly set up a HOTAS to interface with it then all of the elegance of its design which is made for ease of use under stressful situations ie. war, will be lost to you. Beyond this is the fact that employment of weapons is largely based on understanding the weapons, their limitations, and planning along intended parameters how to use them in a given scenario. Basically, the systems serve a purpose, but if you don't know the purpose or how the system function you're not gonna find anything easy. There is a lot of theory that needs to be understood. The manual is good at showing you a lot of the systems, but is HORRIBLE for teaching tactics. It'll tell you how to do something you don't even understand but it won't tell you why you're doing it for when etc. Again, this is when a tutor helps, or friends who know. But I'll be honest, if you think FSX is easier, you must not have flown a PMDG before. Using the Boeing FSC to create a realistic flight plan and then flying it following VATSIM instructions... about as hard as anything I've ever done in DCS, thats for sure.

Well it would be better for me because then I wouldn't groan audibly everytime I thought about having to carry rockets for anti-infantry duty.

That's a really good point. Those who operate off of the North American standard are accustomed to a system that isn't based on the ubiquity of the 10 being behind everything. I take it you mean the Air Force only? I find it hard to believe that the French land forces wouldn't use Metric when even American forces do. That whole NATO standardized thing. As for the whole Metric vs. Imperial thing, well I'm a Canadian. We're far more Metricated than the US is but our proximity requiers us to remain literate in Imperial things as well. This leads to interesting things for me. Namely I imagine the world in Km of distance, Kph of speed on land, and Celsius degrees for temperature. But if you tried to tell me you were 177 centimeters tall I'd have no idea what that is. I'm pretty crap at measuring small things in cm and the fact that a meter is too long to be of much use for anything modest in size and a cm is too short, the foot somehow finds its way into any metric mind. Its certainly interesting, especially when I try and tell my mom something and describe it in metric. Her brain is still wired for Imperial. I'm with many people who have no issues with imperial for aviation. Most of the flight sims I've played have done Feet for altitude, but having played a variety of different types of planes in IL2 1946 I learned that there were many ways to see things. Meters for Germans, Feet for the USAF, and of course my introduction to Knots came with carrier borne USN aircraft. Why do people bitch so hard? :huh:

I feel like the rift is only gobsmacking if you dont' already use the Trackir a lot.

Apparently a well trained eye will be able to identify certain canopy references that when the target is along the same line as them (like a rivet or something) then you know that a well timed roll in will lead to the correct dive angle. Any form of roll in should always pretty much involve you rolling the top of the canopy in such a way that you can pull your velocity vector onto the target. You find a canopy reference that is the top of the plane and try to line it up and pull the invisible line from that through your HUD and hopefully put the TVV where it ought to be so you can track the pipper up onto target. EDIT. I completely forgot to mention that the bombing triangle is the foundational concept that informs all these "tricks". They're just short cuts to get you onto the correct hypotenuse of a bombing triangle.

I'd recommend setting up a mission using this script with a single target in the middle, then reading this thread and practice the various pieces of the process. Everything you need to know about executing a lot of CCIP is in that thread, some linked in it, as well as some other documents linked in that thread as well. In particular this is a good read (T-45 Weapons Strike). Its a modern Navy training manual for CCIP as well as manual bomb delivery. Its particular to an aircraft other than the A-10 but its easy enough to translate alot of the techniques. Its really part of the advanced stuff though. There is a bit of a deficiency out there of specific tactical primers on how to execute CCIP in a non Low Flying scenario. There's a great article over at SimHQ that outlines basic 80s A-10 tactics, but nothing really in depth for post Gulf War, so you're going to have to figure out yourself how to execute a correct roll in in an environment that doesn't permit a standard 90 degree base leg but which asks you to stay above Igla range.

The Huey is 10 freaking dollars!

Its also apparently unreliably sensitive and does not trigger at the right time according to Eddie.

In my experience this would lead to worse braking. :music_whistling:

You should trim your aircraft for the release speed so that at the moment of release your aircraft is neither nose heavy or nose light. You want your TVV to be static at a point ahead of the target and you want that target to be centred along the PBIL and for the Pipper and Reticle to be tracking up towards the target with little to no input required from you once you've established your dive angle. CCIP, for all the "magic" of the LASTE Pipper, is still extremely difficult to master. There are several threads about this, the best being the "Battle Book" thread. Therein is a PDF of bombing tables used for particular configurations. The professional way to do a bomb run is to roll in at a predicted height and speed, establish a particular dive angle and angular offset of your flight path from the target (see putting your TVV a set distance ahead of the target and keeping it there) then if things are done correctly releasing the bombs at a particular speed and altitude before executing a particular Safe Escape Maneuver based on the predicted frag pattern from that particular release configuration. This is hard, obviously. In any case getting good at CCIP means understanding the method. Doing it willy nilly is less likely to lead to good habits as you're already displaying a bad one, of having your aircraft in a bad configuration that leads to an apparent dangerous release, though I never knew that could happen because if anything my plane always has a nose up tendency at release if I don't trim it to be neutral.

I love that poster. Its like DCS: 1980s.

I haven't played the new patch yet, but by this do you mean that Anti-Skid is working better? Press Ctrl-Enter -> Accelerate to some speed like 50 knots -> depress maximum braking and observe if the antiskid is flipping out turning the brakes on and off. If this has changed... well damn.

AKA Bullet Time. Why can't they just call it that? Why do they justify it? "It represents his analysis capabilities and his quick reflexes" yea or you just say "we wanted to make it frickin awsome for people to shoot stuff but still be easy enough that casual gamers could feel powerful". Even so, it looks tasty. That it has strong sandbox design elements is the most interesting part. There is of course a strong over the top element to the hacking, but since that's central to the theme its no weirder than the string of easily grappled structures in an Assassin's Creed game. I'll be watching this one.

Its just really annoying that this gets passed off as a premiere "sim". It basically means that the mainstream gaming industry will never ever devote serious bucks to anything remotely within the category of an actual sim.

Lets not forget the Emil! That badass of the Battle of Britain is worthy of a DCS sim, too bad its probably not going to be done for the same reason as the Gustav. Oh well. A 109 is a 109. If I recall correctly the Kurfürst was the one with the retractable tail gear. In any case, the thought of a 109 makes me about as happy as this guy.

In this regard I see no advantage in playing War Thunder over IL-2 1946 modded on a popular server. You never need to matchmake in IL-2 if you play at the right hour, you have persistent servers rather than one off matched ones and you have a variety of full real to slightly less real servers but certainly more opportunity to get into a legit dogfight but know that your opponent is locked into his cockpit. And even then external IL-2 is nowhere near as gamey as external War Thunder. Naw, I see War Thunder as a fancy pretend simulator. Even if the full real stuff is decent the population just doesn't seem to be there. I haven't succeeded once in actually entering a full real match. I suspect strongly that you need to hook up with a cadre of friends just to "seed" the matchmaking.

I'm sorry did somebody say Bf-109K?

The thing is with all the times that this question has been posed, that post you quoted is the only time I've ever seen the Wind page described in its real function in straight forward terms. Everything has been something like "It doesn't work, ignore it" or mostly conjecture mixed in with a lot "you're confused about what it should be doing". In all fairness there being a single post that concisely answers the simple question "wtf does this thing do exactly?" is something a lot of people, including me, will miss. It was at the end of a page followed by 2 pages of "zomg they broke something!". I wouldn't call that ad nauseum. I'd call that the first time anybody ever described what it does in actual fact.

So what exactly is the designed function of the LASTE wind page? Is there some place I can read about it in detail?

Another argument in favour of a low HOF is the fact that it seems the LASTE system doesn't account for the drift of the bomblets. :P

Lemme put it this way, I never ever worry about the A-10 overheating like a prop plane. The word "radiator" is meaningless to me. If things are getting hot I must not be flying fast enough. :P Flying the A-10 is really simple. Its bloody delightful actually. Engaging in combat operations is not as simple, but the flying bit is a breeze. There's nothing harder about the A-10 over a prop plane I think. Even the tricycle landing gear is a huge improvement. The speed brakes make it almost impossible for you to screw up a landing approach speed while the auto retracting flaps mean you're never going to break those by accident either. The AOA indexer is my favourite. You don't even need to worry about calculating your landing speed, because it'll always tell you whether you're too fast or slow because you're gonna be on the right AOA. Understanding systems is a whole separate thing to flying the airplane. If you learn to fly before learning to kill stuff you should have an easier time. You don't want to be fighting your speed alt or attitude when trying to remember HOTAS commands. In general if you can fly a prop plane proficiently there should be nothing to make piloting the A-10 harder other than learning some new concepts, most of which involve having to not bother with X Y or Z that would need to be monitored on the P-51. EDIT. I thought of another way to characterize the A-10. Its a 21st century avionics suite slapped into a low speed Jet from the 1970s designed to emulate the best qualities of a rugged German prop plane from WW2. If you look at airshow photos of the cockpits its insane. There are patching jobs done to things in there that look like one of the disasters my grandfather used to do to his piece of crap motorhome. Its delightfully kitch. :D