PFunk1606688187

Well the CBU-97 isn't WCMD, nor is the 87. So what I'm wondering is what is the computed pipper supposedly representing with CBUs? Is it an impact point for a CBU which doesn't deploy but instead flies like a dud straight into the ground, or is it the centre of a projected area of effect for the dispersed bomblets? Its a valid question, and the presence of WCMD doesn't invalidate it either. The kit on the ordnance might be guiding it, but the aircraft itself is still going to do calculations on its end of what would happen if things went according to plan based on available data like winds and inertial tracking. Also, with a WCMD kit where is it going? Its going where you're telling it to go, so the pipper's position is as important to the WCMD calculations as it is to you. So again, what is the pipper meant to represent in terms of the weapon's effect? I can't remember if WCMD is CCRP only since I never use them. Nevertheless, CCIP plus 87/97 -> What is the pipper projecting? PS. I'm bearing in mind throughout this that what occurs in game may not be accurately modeled to what is meant to happen as well.

Num* and Num/ = best compromise.

Well the problem with learning what they are is that it means you have to know what they do, which means you gotta learn the systems. So to learn what most of those do means you gotta learn how to use the systems themselves and how they function, and TMS and DMS are used in every single system pretty much. The only outlier is the CMS which is used exclusively to operate the Counter Measures Systems. Setting up a good hotas control scheme for your stick, whichever one you use, is going to be a bit of a chore because you want it to be as functional as possible because thats what the real HOTAS does, it minimizes the need to take your hands off of it. Definitely look into using an in-DCS modifier which lets you turn any key or joystick button into a modifier that can allow you to effectively double or triple the number of uses for a button or key. The A-10 doesn't need that many controls really, most of it can be handled by HOTAS or in game clicks, but my X-52 with a modifier uses nearly all the stick buttons twice, while the throttle only uses one hat twice. To be honest I really wish that the manual had an overview of what TMS and DMS means. I know that the same concept is used on the F-16, so its not an A-10 exclusive concept. You understand it as you use the various systems, but its not directly explained. They stand for Target Management Switch and Data Management Switch. They're used to navigate various MFCD pages as well as the HUD, along with the Coolie Hat and the Slew Hat. Just a little page on the philosophy of the HOTAS for newbies would be helpful I think. What I did when I was starting is I took the info on pages 88-89 and 91-92 in the manual and wrote it out on a single piece of paper and referenced it constantly as I learned the systems. Having a handy reference for what TMS Aft Long means or DMS Left Short is going to save you a lot of time, and in fact I don't know how you'd ever learn anything without it. To learn the systems its best to basically read the section on it top to bottom, understand almost nothing in it, then go into the game, play with the related system, go back and read, go back to the airplane, and so on until you comprehend what it means. Also for most of the systems there's a decently verbose overview from some people on youtube. The TAD gets a pretty good one from Gerry Abbot. The full list of HOTAS controls necessary to use the full functionality of every system is: TMS DMS CMS Coolie Switch Slew Switch China Hat Boat Switch Nosewheel Steering button Master Mode Control Button and any OSBs on the MFCDs that have a function that aren't directly accessible from the HOTAS controls. This doesn't include managing system settings via the UFC and CDU which have no direct HOTAS controls. Oh and work on them landings. Once you crack those the hardest part is done... except for AAR.

It would be interesting to have somebody who knows something official comment on this. There were patch notes a while back on fixing the LASTE wind page. Is it actually fixed? Did the new fix make for a worse problem?

Which doesn't have much to do with evaluating the tactical realities of the battlefield. Emotion has little to do with why a bomb or a gun run kills X or Y Taliban. It just has something to do with how you talk about it once its over.

Totally agree. What do you set your FOV limit to if you don't mind me asking?

Radical changes in the throttle could over time cause your current trim to disengage the A/P, but not minor ones. The trim tabs that it uses are rather substantial and they provide a lot of deflection, but if you're changing your throttle setting a lot you should be manually flying anyway. The reason it works this way is because of the whole way you're supposed to trim the aircraft. Its said you trim for airspeed, but this isn't completely true. You're really trimming for Angle of Attack which for straight and level flight occurs at a particular trim setting for a particular power setting. Adding or reducing power will cause the necessary trim for level flight to change, which is what the A/P is able to do within a limited range. As you add or reduce power the angle of attack necessary to maintain level flight is different. If you were to set perfect trim for a single power setting at a particular altitude you'd get a particular speed, hence the phrase "you trim for speed". By trimming for a particular angle of attack/speed you're going to get that one speed at level flight then as you raise and lower power you'll see yourself gain or lose altitude, but your angle of attack and therefore your speed will remain the same. Your trim setting has remained the same so your angle of attack is the same and so your speed is roughly the same. If you were to radically reduce or increase power you'd see gains or losses in speed as well, but in general they'd even out to the same speed, provided you have enough altitude to even out or you retain enough power to actually generate enough lift to avoid entering a sharp dive. Gentle additions or subtractions of power would lead to a loss or gain of alt with no discernible change in Speed outside of A/P. This is how correct landing occurs, at a particular fixed angle of attack which is set by trim and then sink rate is adjusted by moderated changed in power setting. The other thing about angle of attack is that your plane will always stall at the same angle of attack, so you can trim to a particular AOA then its only your power that'll cause you to stall in that configuration. Lowering the nose lowers the AOA so you don't stall, however with no power applied this lower non stalling AOA is incapable of achieving level flight so you lose altitude. This is the conundrum of the unpowered glide mode. So in short, minor changes in power will not cause your A/P to disengage if you were trimmed for level flight, but when you do disengage it you will immediately depart from level flight as the trim setting is incorrect for that configuration. Radical changes in power will cause A/P to disconnect but doing this is just weird, so why are you doing it. :P Yes the A/P will disengage if you move the stick. I don't know about rudder, but I've never tried to apply rudder while in A/P without touching the stick. I believe Alt mode may not disengage the A/P because I can remember a few times thinking my plane was damaged or bugged out because I couldn't control it when it was that I hadn't disengaged the A/P, but for the level modes it should disengage under strong inputs from the stick at least, rudder pedals likely, but again why would you only input rudder?

I did see a video on youtube of a news story about some A-10 pilot who got some award or at least recognition I think for staying on station and providing close support to troops while squeezing every drop out of his dwindling fuel while sending his wingman to go tank up and he said he took some small arms fire and pointed out the clearly repaired battle damage on what looked like one of his elevators. They were dinky and wouldn't have made a difference to handling most likely, but I dunno if A-10 pilots would be lying to news agencies. EDIT. Here it is. Nice little propaganda piece, but unsure if they'd fake battle damage to make it look even cooler.

No TGP? Stuka, I like your style.

Yea that looks correct. If you read closely you'll see that those diamonds are referred to by LSS, meaning Laser Spot Search, I presume. Most of that HUD symbology should have a clear explanation available somewhere in one of the declassified manuals floating around. Its mostly alien to me because I never flew the LOMAC or FC A-10A, but the history is fascinating. I would search it out but the manual I have that likely includes this is 400+ pages and is not of the kind where the words are part of the PDF, so its just a bunch of pictures I can't search.

You do know that if we had videos of it, you could watch a bunch of your own countrymen get chewed up too. But no, you're right, the only explanation is that killing those lame Taliban was so much fun that we've artificially lengthened Enduring Freedom so that our service members have more opportunities to blow them away, as compensation for their shrinking benefit packages.

Is there any available knowledge on what the future would be then for BVR tactics? Are there going to be exploits in the 5th gen that lead to new tactics or is it going to be come a bit more bland and a game of rock, paper, radar?

The Engage disengage button is in the HOTAS sub-category of controls as well as the LASTE category of the controls. There are two buttons to engage it in the A-10, one is on the throttle (which should be under the HOTAS sub-category) and the other is on the LASTE panel which is just aft of the throttle. There are lots of reasons it won't engage. If EAC isn't turned on I'm not sure you'd hear the ding though. Likeliest culprit is that you're not trimmed properly and the airplane wants to deviate from straight and level more than the autopilots control tabs can correct it. If its not that maybe you're double pressing the autopilot engage button.

Yea thats interesting indeed. The A-10's finest hour and it didn't even have a computed reticle. Those pilots must have been damn competent. Manual delivery, even with PAC for the gun. Most people in these parts seem to have issues with 21st Century CCIP.

I'm no expert on the history of the A-10's upgrades but what I've read of the -34-1-1 (Non-Nuclear Weapons Delivery) the references to CCRP seem to indicate that its for LASTE v6.0 only which I believe is a later 90s period upgrade. Also CCRP isn't required for cluster munition delivery, at least the ones in the A-10C module. Granted those are semi smart weapons, but without a WCMD they're no smarter than a Mk82 prior to their HOF and even then the parachutes don't have brains either. Even so, I don't think WCMD requires CCRP either, though I never use them so I can't remember clearly. I think its pretty clear CCRP was absent from Desert Storm, though someone is free to contradict me. I'm however unsure if CCIP was wind corrected at the time of Desert Storm. In any event, the bulk of the weapons available to the C today would be usable by an A from 1991 with the exception of the WCMD CBUs and the JDAM I'm pretty sure. Its just the variety and accuracy of the delivery methods that would suffer. ...I think. :music_whistling:

Well, doing the whole CAS thing is pretty complicated. It of course depends on how serious you want to be. You can be super serious and read stuff like this (T-45 Weapons/Strike) and hone hyper realistic skills, or you can fudge it and consider whatever works good enough. The only thing that differentiates CAS from normal ground attack is the presence of friendly forces in close proximity as far as I understand. The available methods of delivery as far as actually flying the plane would be roughly the same, its just the way you choose one or another and avoid some in particular that's affected by the scenario. Think of the delivery as a skill and the CAS being simply the conditions that dictate the appropriate skill for the task. A good primer on tactical weapons delivery would be this: Hog Basics: RAF Bentwaters Tactics Guide, 1982. Its a good overview of how a 2 man flight of HOGs would approach a tactical delivery. That said, its not exhaustive and relies on 80s doctrine which is effectively the opposite of whats been done since the 90s. You gotta realize that tactics are not a static concept. They are or should be based on the situation and the threat. The threat in the 80s was a massive Soviet army with powerful Air support and SAMs that could strike a high flying A-10. That threat is not present in what the US does most of the time since 1991 so the A-10 now mostly flies above the highest ground threat, and so far in the last 10 years that's been basically AKs. Also, what the A-10 was going to do in the 80s wasn't expected to be CAS per se, because a ground attack aircraft can do any number of ground attack missions. Most A-10 missions people play are a wide variety of just about anything. Whats shared amongst them is a lot of how you just put the weapons where you want them. The advanced systems the C has doesn't negate much of the thinking in that 80s treatise either, it just opens horizons for new ones, but doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't consider going old school sometimes. So you gotta realize that tactics and how to go about killing stuff is an exercise in assessing the situation, determining the correct tactics, and adhering to them until the situation and your own judgment determine its time to change them. That means there's no easy answer for "how do I do CAS?". The good news is that you can start in easy mode, fly with no enemy threat, and just practice the delivery itself, which is what real pilots do too. They bomb targets, get good at hitting them, then work on stuff like flying tactically to avoid getting killed before during and after putting iron on enemy. A better way to start would probably be instead to ask "How many ways can I deliver Weapon X?" then later it becomes "How would I deliver Weapon X in Situation Y?". Then you have an argument with somebody because everyone has a different opinion. :P For basic flight maneuvers, there are no doubt dozens of resources for this. The basic principles of flight haven't changed much in 100 years so using something like this WW2 video is no less helpful than using anything else: The list of basic maneuvers that any pilot should be able to do is lengthy but each is relatively simple, though some are harder than others. I'm pretty crap at doing a slow roll, but barrel rolls, aileron rolls, loops, and chandelles and many others are easier to master. Basic maneuvers aren't all technically useful in real scenarios, but they form a basis for more practical maneuvers which are usually composites of these skills demonstrated in the base maneuvers. So you wouldn't do a barrel roll in a tactical situation exactly as the video demonstrates, you'd do it often with less preparation and probably a bit less accurately, but doing a barrel roll along the axis of an IR SAM's track to you is an effective tactic but would not resemble the textbook barrel roll seen in a training vid, at least not exactly. Part of mastering basic maneuvers is it just makes you better at knowing how your airplane handles. Being able to do a single aileron roll without losing altitude means you know how much pitch to add before going into it. Knowing how much alt you lose doing a split-s at 5000 feet and 300 knots means you know if you'll crash or not when doing evasive moves. I had a bunch of resources on more A-10 specific stuff I found. Things that describe stuff like the safe escape maneuvers used in attack runs so I'll see if I can dig that stuff up. But the list of stuff you could find on how to fly this plane all by itself is lengthy, so its easy to drown in detail. Basic Flight maneuvers combined with take offs and landings is probably enough to start. Then it should be avionics and weapons systems while also working on navigation and continuing to work on aircraft control. There's a reason real pilots always rely on mentorship. Its just so damned hard to explain it in writing. I could write a 10 paragraph essay outlining good ways to put a rocket on a target, and this wouldn't mean that I couldn't write 10 more paragraphs on using the gun correctly either. Oh and about angle of attack: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/98683522/AngleOfAttack.pdf, thats a good read for a quick intro to it. The A-10's Angle of Attack indicator is a beautiful thing. :thumbup:

LOL, I guarantee you nobody here is going to think of the right Spock when they read this. :lol:

I believe the satisfaction ought to be derived from the knowledge that you've decimated their ego and reduced their emotional state to something approaching juvenile because you made them rage quit. Thats not just a tactical victory, its a strategic and moral victory. You drove a bandit from the skies and the server, you exacted a total victory over his will to play the game. I can't think of any more total victory other than perhaps making him so mad he breaks his joystick. :P

I used to play IL-2 1946 online for years before I got a Trackir, and while I was shot down about 70% of the time, and the other 30% saw me doing some terrible shooting, when I did go down in flames I was usually pretty aware of who was doing it to me, thanks to the POV hat. Frankly it takes more effort to set up a decent Trackir profile that doesn't make you want to kill yourself than it takes to get used to using POV hat snap views to clear your tail.

Like what? ;)

Have they solved the bit where that melts the carrier deck yet?

Lets be honest. The USAF has always had a troubled relationship with CAS. Going all the way back to SAC the bomber mentality had a somewhat similar ring to it to the Luftwaffe's assumed superiority over all other forces in their drive to be the sole creditor for the victory in Britain while they deliberately sabotaged any attempts to secure a dedicated support system for the Kriegsmarine's Ubootswaffe (I mean planes to spot ships seemed pretty obvious, so much so that in later years the use of Carriers to hunt U-boats was the only sensible tactic). Ironically the Luftwaffe pioneered the concept of CAS during Poland and most impressively the 1940 invasion of France where ground controllers were embedded with ground forces able to call in dedicated air units who were on stand by to respond within an hour. Obviously today its more about the fighter, or the multi-role fighter to be specific as budgets shrink. Unfortunately if you combine a chilly attitude towards CAS with the generals with the utter lack of understanding for how the military functions with most elected officials, you get an environment where its easy to let something go that you'll regret. Just look at SR-71 and the first Gulf War. So the cold war ends in 91, the same year the A-10 proves itself possibly the most flexible and relevant combat aircraft in the US arsenal for the current expected threats. Ironically then it will die for another cold war aircraft that will serve a mediocre role in any asymmetrical conflict, the one most likely to see American forces tied up in in this current world environment. Hopefully the F-35's advanced avionics will allow to see in 5th gen detail the enemies that will soon overrun the friendly forces it didn't have the gas or stores to protect as it moves to rejoin the tanker, yuk yuk. The Taliban have been given far too little credit by those who've never been in the shit with them. You think after this many years of NATO fighting them that they're still alive because the pilots suck? Tech doesn't win you wars against smart enemies. I would have thought this concept would be burned deeply into the American psyche by Vietnam.

What can I say, I really like helping newbies. :D

How did a thread about american dumb rockets getting laser kits become about Russian versus American guided AT missiles?

Learn to fly. Learn to take off and land. Practice touch and go's in a standard Crosswind Downwind Base Final pattern, otherwise known as the basic visual or circuit pattern. Learn stable level flight. Learn about trimming your aircraft. Definitely bind the trimming controls to your stick (you are using a stick right?). Learn and understand Angle of Attack and how it relates to speed and stalls. In general learn to be confident about controlling the aircraft because learning to use the systems and shoot at stuff thats gonna be shooting back at you takes a lot of concentration on its own. You don't want to be fighting your own ability to control the aircraft when someone is trying to shoot you down. You have basically two jobs in the airplane. You're a pilot, and you're a systems operator. Many people are crap at being a pilot, but they can use the maverick quite well. The other thing is that the basic skills of being a pilot are basically universal, with slight differences between aircraft (or major ones with helicopters), but the systems are generally very different, as much as many nations try to create some commonalities between multiple aircraft systems. I could go on for hours about this or that thing, but the two things I'm going to say should get serious emphasis are: 1. Angle of Attack - Because so many people have cloudy understandings of flight because this critical factor is mostly poorly understood by them 2. The HUD is not a primary flight instrument - It isn't. You can usually tell how important an instrument is to the operation of an aircraft by where its placed in the cockpit. Occupying the top and centre of the front dash is the Attitude Direction Indication, the Vertical Velocity Indicator, the Speedometer, and the Altimeter. Below the ADI is the Horizontal Situation Indicator that is a composite navigational instrument. Those 5 instruments can be used to fly the aircraft without even looking out of the cockpit, and you should learn to use them, even when the HUD is functional. The compass tape in the HUD is nowhere near as precise as the compass on the HSI, so its clear which of the two you would be using for precision navigation. Good habits are a good foundation, and if you're brand new at this learning it right is the whole point of having a community of people to give you advice. Read the manual, study the systems, focus on one or two at a time until you feel you're competent with them, but keep focusing on basic airmanship. Thats harder to master than a basic weapons employment, and in the A-10 flying the aircraft precisely is important to hitting the target, unless you wanna wimp out and be a useless CCRP lamer. There are lots of great resources for learning anything. There's a mountain of great youtube vids covering lots of things, from the TAD to the HSI through the multiple weapons systems and various ways of delivering. On the forums there are great threads with lots more info thats not gonna be found in a youtube vid. I would personally put the CDU as being a key system to learn once you get to that stage. Its very powerful even if its so retro looking. EDIT. Oh and about the runway markings. The taxiways are marked by yellow signs and the runway entry is marked by a red sign that has the runway numbers on it. The markings on the runway itself can get complicated, so just for now aim to land on the part where the tire marks are. Landing in general has been covered to death everywhere so check out youtube and search this forum.