PFunk1606688187

Yes. There is an in game way to observe it. The BATA predictive round impacts (little donuts) are always in an apparently tighter grouping than the actual round impacts. Someone has released a mod though that modifies the gun impacts to be tighter. Well there is plenty of debate to be had over the degree of the inaccuracies but its undeniable that for instance the JDAM is probably the least well modeled weapon since it has none of its real life counterparts main features beyond the basic ability to hit the SPI within a certain radius of certainty. The actual flight model for it is probably one of the least fleshed out (I don't want to sound like I'm denigrating the developers) and reaches its terminal velocity at release or something like that taking forever to hit compared to more well modeled weapons. The Paveways for instance apparently have an advanced flight model while the JDAM doesn't. If you poke around enough you'll find the issues discussed. The CBUs in particular seem to have the most frequent discussions since they're the ones that have actually had some developer attention but still aren't quite there yet. Its natural though that you'd not notice since you have no frame of reference. Most people even fans of military aircraft don't know much about the weapons in question and since even tactics about how to use them can be scarce even in these forums and are nonexistent in the manuals there's really no way for anyone to compare the modeling except when someone with a bit more knowledge comes along and informs us. Though when you read A-10s over Kosovo, hear about the effects of the CBU-87s, then compare that to the sim you can't help but furrow your brow. At this point in time I'd rather see the A-10's weapons get totally upgraded to be as well modeled at hte A-10 itself rather than buy one of a dozen new modules that'll carry some of the same weapons. Its all a question of user desire though. Most users don't use the DCS modules to the level that they'd even notice the difference or care.

Classification isn't really the crux of the issue. The physics of free fall munitions is no more difficult to comprehend for us than that of the lifting body principles on a modern fighter jet. That therefore gives us an unfortunate nagging sensation on the backs of our necks when we realize that the Mk82 AIR ballute is clearly failing to do its job and instead making the use of those weapons pointless. Much the same with the dispersion of the GAU8 which is greater than it should be or the serial under-achievement of the CBUs the 87 in particular. None of these things are particularly opaque since what people who are struck by the knowlege we have of what they believe ought to be secret military stuff fail to comprehend is that its all public domain for the most part. Its called the laws of physics. Even something as complicated as a Maverick missile, once you know how it does it in principle, can be modeled even without full access because the laws of physics give us enough information that we can fudge it into existence. Since a simulator is not reality but instead a closed environment that we can manipulate its therefore possible to tweak this thing we've created into performing how it would in real life. Its therefore just a question of effort in most cases and unfortunately it seems that you don't get the dollars by developing weapons nearly as well as when you develop aircraft. So it will be that DCS will swell with excellent aircraft and even A2G radars but will still have some nagging issue with the weapons that are carried by these platforms. It seems then that mostly people are tolerant of these issues for the same reason people were tolerant of the issues with flight models 10 years ago. Its no better anywhere else so "it'll do" is your only choice.

Well honestly I feel that it would be worth it since this is more than just a flight simulator but also a combat flight simulator and combat is one part aircraft one part weapons. Frankly the weapons in DCS are very unpolished. There are very few weapons that you could say aren't without gaping holes in their representation for one reason or another so tidying all that up, even with some concerted effort to focus on that and only that for a spell, would be one of those things that makes for a quantum leap forward because as a simmer its those extra little details that make this into more than just playing at realism but actually playing a game thats about realism. Not much point in having a brilliant digital replica of an aircraft only to often find yourself not quite flying it like real pilots do because if you did some of your weapons wouldn't work quite how they're meant to. I some how doubt it'll happen but... one can only hope.

Its a rather crude simulation of the weapon compared to the very exciting methods used in simulating the flight models. Sadly when you have a system this simplified it is inherently quirky. So rather than simulating the environment and conditions and the capability it simulates the aggregate probability of capability and in a manner which is sadly very transparent for the end user after long enough. Its the reason why for instance the Force Correlate mode is useful as a sniper rifle when in real life its far less accurate than standard centroid tracking and so also capable of hitting at a far greater range than centroid mode in either the sim or in real life, by a margin so considerable as to be grotesquely unrealistic. It is therefore one of those weapons where you need to make a conscious effort to use it realistically and self limitation is the only method for ensuring you aren't exploiting the weaknesses of the simulation.

When you start to take A-10s are better than F-16 jokes seriously.

Just for reference this is about real life, not DCS and its miserable version of a strobe that involves basically turning the nav lights white temporarily. I pray 2.0 improves this then realistic lights procedures would be more than just milsim fluff.

Well we can play theoretical games all day long, it still doesn't change the primary general wisdom of how these weapons are employed or the logic that surrounds how one looks at using them. If a pilot knew there was a MANPAD localized to a particular area its more likely it'll be a very general space and something that you'll want to hit with either an area effect weapon that will suppress it, drop some bombs on it that are big enough to get the job done too but thats more for the fast movers that can fly over these things and not take forever to do it, or hit something near it that'll do the job of killing or suppressing the threat. One story from my favourite reference A-10s over Kosovo had one A-10 pilot acting as AFAC directing some Harriers onto Arty positions and was facing AAA fire from a wooded area that was threatening the aircraft he was vectoring in on target. This excerpt I believe is relevant to our discussion: So he used a Maverick to kill some AAA, or at least make it shut up. He did it however in a manner more in keeping with how the weapon was designed to be used. He also considered using his Gun to if not destroy at least suppress the area from afar. Not a MANPAD but its more like the kind of threat you face in DCS anyway with our static enemy units. A plausible way to deal with that MANPAD then would be if he's being transported by a vehicle you can simply lock up the APC with the Mav and take it out and him along with it. I know that in a few 476th missions you will often make a pass on a group of vehicles and on the second or third pass a MANPAD will shoot at you because the script spits one out after the group takes damage or loses a member. With the suppression script we can also area suppress any MANPAD that fires from a general location even if we can't pinpoint it. One thing that always comes back to me though is that fiddling around trying to wipe the map clean is time consuming and the split second reaction of these pilots in real combat is all about minimizing their time over target because in reality the best way to defeat a threat is to never be subject to it, or minimize the time you are subject to it. That unfortunately is also a deficiency in DCS since AI has much better awareness so much of the surprise stealth that is part of real life tactics are irrelevant to DCS without the right scripting and even then I'm not sure its effective. As ever the strength of your mission designer is often the deciding factor in how realistic you can play your tactics while trying to still be successful and effective. (looks like I'm back to making my trademark long winded posts) hello guys

Has anyone done an analysis that goes beyond the effects and into the realm of "why"? Is it just the old bugbear of no fragmentation effect that's making the 87s/103s underpowered? Reading about the BLU-97/B bomblets it deploys it seems they use shaped charge, incendiary, and fragmentation effects.

Whether the effects are realistic or not doesn't change the assessment though. When you assess the effects of the sim weapons you do the same thing, you just have to take into account its sim effect instead of its real life one. Like with the CBU-87, your assessment is, why the hell would I bother carrying this thing? :music_whistling:

The thing with weapon choices that was taught to me by smarter individuals was that every release is designed to achieve an effect. The pilot has to decide what that desired effect is and decide how to use his weapons to achieve it. Every weapon excels in different areas so consider the effects those weapons can achieve before picking them up. Dispersed small groups of units don't favour CBUs while more concentrated armour formations do. Point targets are better serviced by Mavericks, the Gun, and dumb bombs in ripple twos. Mavericks on LAU-88s however have quickdraw available to them and so you can use that to engage a large concentration of hardened targets so carrying lots of Mavericks is clearly conceived to be an Anti-Armour loadout.

Thats true but in real life it can be an issue with so called PIOs - Pilot Induced Oscillations. I believe there was at least one instance of a pilot causing an airline crash entirely because he was over controlling an otherwise perfectly flyable aircraft. Sim pilots encounter this issue resulting from both the oversensitive short throw sim sticks we use as well as poorly calibrated or understood curves which create the afore mentioned increasing input rate. Low or erratic frame rates can also contribute greatly to this. Most people I know who use curves do so because of massive PIOs they suffer when trying to AAR without one.

Curves make up for the lack of stick throw that we have which effectively lowers the resolution of your input compared to a real stick. For the same angular depression from centre which is read by the pots in your stick a shorter stick moves less distance while a longer stick moves more distance. This means that longer sticks effectively allow for finer control. Curvature allows you to use a compromise solution to offer increased input resolution in part of the stick throw while sacrificing that resolution elsewhere. Ideally you don't want any stick curve, but if its necessary then its necessary. Excessive stick curve can create what I generally just call input acceleration, where the curve goes from higher to lower resolution sharply (the curve is steep) and so you get an unwanted and difficult to control increase in input authority. If this happens in a bad part of the flight regime it can lead to stalls or simply jerky flight. If you calibrate your curves properly you can get either little to no noticeable acceleration of input or you can see it happen in parts of the stick throw you seldom encounter, such as deflection beyond the point of stalling in most phases of flight. Last thing to consider is how some modules are designed. I think there are simulations of stick forces in some of those prop planes that occur independent of the curve. I'm no expert, I don't fly them, but I recall something about that. It may influence the relevance of using curve.

Even if thats the case I think it makes good sense in flight to counter the natural adverse yaw from banking by pushing rudder in the same direction as the bank (step on the ball) than to have to do it with opposite foot. You're already pushing the stick right to roll right. If humans have issues making parts of their body do opposite things it seems to be natural to have blended inputs to the same side. Obviously to a novice it makes little sense on the ground, but in the air it should seem a lot more natural. Thats my logic anyway.

Selecting a previously created profile via DMS Left/Right with HUD SOI is just as valid and shouldn't be the cause of this.

The problem with that approach is that, unlike in a race car, you have serious issues managing your awareness of the game world. Take the existing zoom, put it to a level you think is close to "true" FOV and then try to use a clickable cockpit, fly formation with another aircraft, and prosecute a ground target or try to dogfight an enemy. Its madness, even with TrackIR.

Have you done the math or is this just a wild assumption, like the exaggerated ones you previously accused others of having? From my time analyzing the FOV concept in sim racing the math for a true to life FOV is dependent based on eye position from the monitor and the size of the monitor itself.

The engines max out at a lower ITT than the real ones so its clear that there's something missing in the engine model.

Yep well thats the fun of sharing ideas. Every now and then you get to swallow your pride and learn something new.

Naw its just me forgetting that you can rename them. When creating any new waypoint, be it mark or mission waypoint, it should automatically bring the waypoint up on the CDU repeater so you can immediately rename them. Annoyingly the manual doesn't state explicitly that you can rename mark points but talks instead only about creating new mission waypoints from them so even scanning the manual when replying to things leaves me making mistakes, ergo my signature. *points at the bottom of the post* EDIT. I also just realized why I never thought to rename a mark point. It takes exactly the same amount of work to created a new mission waypoint from a mark point as it does to rename it, you just press a different OSB. So once the new name is in the scratch pad, where you press the OSB to rename the existing point I just press the create new mission waypoint OSB. At the end of the day its exactly the same number of button presses and just being in the habit of doing that meant that I'd never bothered with mark point renaming.

Thats a pretty good pace for learning. Landings don't worry about ILS. Real pilots mostly land visually and save the ILS for bad weather. Learn to use the AOA indexers and roll out speed shouldn't be an issue.

This is a nomenclature issue. Waypoints are any points stored in the database, be they named points in the mission database or mark points. Either case its the same thing just cataloged separately. They function nearly the same. The difference is in firstly you can't name markpoints so in the heat of battle you may forget which is which and so when masked you can't correlate with the TGP to be certain if you're not attacking immediately and secondly when sending a point to a wingman he would create a mission waypoint rather than a markpoint from your SPI. In either case, a waypoint is a waypoint. Specific scenarios dictate which type are more useful. The distinction in this discussion however is between using stored data that you can slave to versus a temporary and potentially spoiled line of sight SPI. I don't know where I suggested the shooter should be heads down the whole time.

I'm not talking about mandatory for one. I'm talking about good habits that promote higher likelihood of success and efficiency. In terms of theatre I think it makes little difference. Even in absolutely zero threat environments like Afghanistan my understanding was that pilots would drop on coordinates as a matter of course since it was a tool for guaranteeing you were hitting the right thing in CAS. Ultimately air superiority has no bearing on it. If you're facing a zero threat environment, sure. Do whatever. Circle for 2 hours over the target, drop on your TGP LOS, whatever. However, threats are threats. Missiles can kill you. If you're on a mission where there are threats then the attack run itself is the most dangerous part of the mission and the one where your SA is most important and where being distracted by target coordinates, TGP, etc is a waste of your most valuable resource as a pilot. In terms of weaponry, again I don't think thats a fair argument since the Paveway was used first in the Vietnam war, a war where enemy fighters were a factor and a war where surface to air threats were at their greatest in history til that point. Paveways were used first by my understanding as a way to improve hit probabilities for Thuds going deep into North Vietnam trying to hit stationary strategic targets. Deep strike missions though are generally outside the purview of the A-10. Mostly its a BAI aircraft and so more likely to be facing front line forces or forces near to the front line. For moving targets the Maverick is clearly the superior weapon. In this scenario melding TGP with Maverick via SPI is a much healthier choice. But by all means, if you want to suggest that certain good habits are irrelevant because most DCS players operate with impunity over near zero threat airspace, well I can't argue with you. Most DCS pilots neither face realistic threats nor suffer the difficulties of managing a 2 ship formation. All in all Paveways against moving targets is just a sub-optimal arrangement to begin with. The A-10 is poorly equipped as an aircraft to make it work in its favour barring being the FAC that's lasing the target for a faster aircraft dropping the bomb from much higher up.

That's a question of the application of the weapon itself. My understanding is that Paveway IIs are not really designed for hitting moving targets. Our JDAMs are so laughably not a JDAM that we needn't even consider them for that job either. Whats more when dropping on a moving target you would simply not use a SPI to do so because you're going to be dropping ballistically behind where the target will be at impact so at that point the question of even using a TGP SPI seems irrelevant. For lasing at that point you're looking at using the TGP point mode to follow the target as it moves and the guy dropping should probably be doing so in CCIP on a point ahead of the target. I don't think our DCS systems though are really designed to make this an easy task, not in CCRP and with any of our GBUs. Modern JDAMs apparently have the ability to take target telemetry persistently from the attacking aircraft thus allowing the TGP's SPI to constantly guide the bomb when dealing with a moving target. For our weapons we're obviously dealing with a much cruder system. My understanding is that in real life in CAS scenarios at least they always drop on a coordinate in the waypoint database. There is obviously a great question of style at work here but I honestly wonder what the cost of using a waypoint primarily is. if the target turns out to be not there, slew the TGP, drop a new SPI, bombs away. You can adapt to it on the fly. Using a BOC attack with a waypoint SPI is 100% reliable and lets you call an audible mid attack if you so choose. The opposite cannot be said. If your TGP loses LOS and you never took those coordinates into your database then you now have to look for the target again. You waste more time when the difference in making a waypoint is mere seconds with the handy HOTAS controls. Yes, its absolutely more button pushing at the set up planning phase and almost nothing during the attack. Thats exactly the point. You shouldn't be using a TGP to plan an attack when you're at risk of being shot out of the sky. You shouldn't have to be putting your head into the cockpit to validate a TGP SPI during an attack run because thats when you're likely to get shot out of the sky. Mileage should vary based on permissibility of the threat environment but honestly with the missions I fly level bombing at Angel 16 is not the norm nor is it the most difficult way to fight so I wouldn't want to assume all my attacks follow that. But you just said it "unless something unexpected happens" which is to me what you always plan for. You always have the "go to shit" plan. In my group's missions we have aggressor pilots who fly Mig-21s against us. For us every time we enter the AO we're looking at potentially having to bug out before all stores are expended, before the target is totally destroyed. For that scenario taking an extra 5 seconds to generate a steerpoint and slave to it means nothing compared to having to reset for another attack that takes several minutes depending on what the environment is like. If you're flying into and out of a sliver of safe airspace in an IADS to deliver stores then you're very much using the systems as best you can. Just imagine you're ingressing to attack, you get a launch warning, you make evasive maneuvers to defeat the missile, now you've had your TGP LOS ruined, and thats as much a possibility at Angel 16 as it is in the weeds. Also my group runs persistent missions so we often attack targets, fail to destroy them, then catalog the coordinates in debriefing so that someone else can attack the same thing. Absolutely. This is just my thought process after having a long education in how to not suck from playing missions that actually challenge your ability to survive and be effective simultaneously. There's also the factor of flying with other players. I never ever ever fly without a wingman when I play DCS now. That alters how you perceive the scenario. You have to constantly deal with the heads up heads down dynamic and you have to understand now just how you're seeing the target but how the other guy is too. Take the basic Lead/Wingman interplay. When I'm running a flight I'm badgering my wingman in the pre-brief about not using the TGP. He may have one but I tell him he's not allowed to really use it unless I tell him to. I'm heads down more, he's heads up more. I have to catalog targets, assign them for him and for me, share that info with him using the systems and manage the 2 ship flight all throughout. So, take a target we intend to engage via coordinate. I send him my SPI, tell him to catalog that was a waypoint of a given name and that that will be his target for the attack run. I may be planning a simultaneous attack or just a shooter/cover attack. In either case I'm concerned with doing 5 things at once. You have no idea how much more complicated things are with 2 airplanes that always have to be in mutual support. So, lets say its a shooter/cover attack using Mavericks. We have an IP, a target waypoint, an egress direction, a formation to fly in and all the other goodies that are part of implicit contracts. If he's the shooter and I'm covering then I will be heads out, he will have the lead on being heads down if he has to. Even so, I may want to BDA the attack on the way out and as soon as the attack is complete the role reverses back to him being cover and me being lead. In the process of flying cover I may have to maneuver radically and obscure my TGP LOS. Staying in tactical formation is usually more work for the wingman and for the attack where I'm cover that means I'm following the other guy so its my job to stay where I need to be. Do I need to worry about where my TGP is looking? No, I want to know it'll be looking there so that when I egress after the attack I can get where I need to be, find my wingman after the escape maneuver, have him rejoin on me, then just shuffle my flight path to get LOS to the target and BDA instantly rather than having to bugger with slewing. You make that into a shooter cover CCRP bomb attack I see no difference. With bombs its actually worse because I need to fly a supporting flight path and that might involved radical maneuvers ahead of his attack to ensure I'm level, eyes out as he's going down the chute or over the target. Remember CCRP is not mandatory level bombing, its usable in almost every way CCIP is from a geometry perspective. Also when sharing data I want to ensure he has the point, I don't want to waste time resharing coordinates if he loses it. Also flying formation involves keeping eyes on the other airplane, watching for threats, watching 6 for Migs, etc. Having to validate a TGP LOS is just one more thing that detracts from my SA and when you're actually honestly worried about losing sight of your wingman or worried about flying the right path to the target eyes in the pit for even 1 second starts to feel unacceptably long. Thats just a slice of why I think how I do. I also stress that someone from my group could come on here, say he thinks I'm full of it, and give it another way. I think thats fair, and I don't assume I'm always right but thats how I parse based on my experience. The nice thing about the systems is that they're very flexible and you can go your own way. Even with the contracts my group flies with there's lots of variety in tactical style. What I did learn quickly is that when you fly realistically all those things like the UFC and the HOTAS controls become obviously beneficial in a way I never truly appreciated. Moving my UFC buttons to the Numpad and the Insert->Page Down buttons made it very easy to make adjustments mid flight.

Thats not the point. The point is that CRTs are still arguably better or at the very least competitive in some respects despite being deprecated technology ergo the monitors have radically improved argument falls flat for me. Whats definitely improved on the medium to low end level is the cost and ergonomics. CRTs are inconvenient, but arguably not nearly as bad in terms of actual visual quality. Who said that? My personal example of a tactical formation was saying that it was possible but far more work than it would be for a real pilot. An A-10 is about 4x3 pixels on a 1680x1050 monitor at 1.5nm at default FOV. Thats a very large single seat fighter.