PFunk1606688187

Yea, people's zeal to be correct apparently blunts their irony-radar.

I'd say thats roughly what you're looking for. There are a lot of variables at work here though and those of us who're competent (massive Dr. Evil air quotes on that) came to it after a lot of practice. A lot of practice. I can't emphasize that enough. There are numbers in the Battle Book that tell you where to put your depressible pipper for use in confirming your position at track altitude but those should come later. Read those two threads and start with working on your tip in. Battle Book numbers are for a target at 0 MSL so crank them higher based on what you're dropping on. Expect to suck. Expect to not know what you're doing. The skill also rusts quickly. I just went to the range a day ago with someone and I'd say that only one of four passes I did would've passed muster, and by that I mean passed criteria for not aborting it, nevermind being a pretty example of dive bombing. Worry about validating correct canopy references and being able to tip in to the right dive angle and with the target where you mentioned above, then move on to worrying about post tip in criteria. This is though the reason we sim. Its a bottomless pit of potential, a skill you'll never master and can bang away at for years. Good luck. :thumbup:

Its perfectly possible to kill armour with dumb bombs, the issue comes from accuracy, ie. one bomb is likely to miss. However if you pickle with your pipper on top of a tank in a ripple single 2 release you're quite likely to kill him. The rule with bombing is the lower a release and higher dive angle the more accurate, the flatter a dive angle and higher release the less accurate. PGMs definitely make up for these deficiencies but like I said they're just no fun. For softer targets obviously the kill radius becomes higher and then it becomes a matter of optimizing the delivery profile to meet maximum effect on target. In general bombing is bombing and whether its a Mk82 or a CBU-87 its all going by the same general logic. Further reading: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=99688 http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=117350

Not to the degree that its slower. How can a JDAM that uses a more efficient guidance system than the inefficient bang bang concept of the GBU-12 take longer to get to the same target than a GBU-12 pickled after it? Simple - by having a highly unrealistic flight model. The JDAM we have doesn't even have good range to justify that reasoning.

In any ripple release the target is the centre of the ripple. In this case you'd set no vehicle as SPI but instead the gap between vehicle 3 and 4. Or if you're me you'd put the CCIP pipper in between those two vehicles because CCRP with dumb bombs is no fun at all (and generally less accurate).

Well tell me what the load out is by station# and I can tell you how asymmetrical the drag is.

Disagree. Zooming is a poor fix that would only become better with scaling. :thumbup:

Uhhh... wow. Welcome to Earth? Don't be fatuous Jeffrey.

Asymmetrical drag from stores can make for a very active rudder during takeoff. I don't think its new. Perhaps some are only flying with sharper asymmetries of drag than usual.

OR should be worse since the pixel resolution of existing models is inferior to typical monitors that are themselves insufficient. The thing about scaling and making sure things don't disappear should count for not just the entire aircraft but as you said Sharpe parts of it. Those parts are what make it possible to determine aspect and closure rate and such. If the tips of the wings, the vertical stabilizer, things of that sort become impossible to see or get truncated then it changes what you think you're seeing. Its unlikely that a decent scaling solution should make using zoom unnecessary but it should make it possible for us to use less zoom to achieve a similar or better result. So instead of going to max FOV I should be able to go to maybe 15-20% narrower than default. This makes it possible to still maintain peripheral SA while gaining that ability to read the opponent aircraft and hopefully as range closes needing progressively less FOV as those bits become larger in terms of pixels. Going back to the ground target thing, I wish ED would give me some damned gyro stabilized binoculars. That would more than make up for much of the pixel issues in ground target search.

I also think that solving the problem of spotting targets in an air to air engagement should be seen as a separate issue to ground units. There is no rule that ground units must use scaling if we want some kind of scaling to work with air to air engagements. Its two separate scenarios. In terms of DCS the newer terrain engine absolutely will improve our ability to visually identify enemy targets because it'll be much easier to use basic terrain association to keep tack of where something is whereas right now since all the ground textures are muddy and indistinct we basically have to be lucky to have the ground appear unique in the vicinity of the target whereas in real life the ground is almost always unique to some degree. For air to air engagements the sky is the sky. It creates a type of contrast puzzle that is largely the same regardless of the age of your game engine. Dots look blackish, the sky is blue, sun makes things white if it shines on them, etc etc. I see no reason to conflate the scaling discussion of air to air with that of air to ground.

Believe it or not, real modern pilots fly their aircraft basically by those same parameters, with CCIP only allowing them to more easily salvage a poor pass. Even so, those parameters don't exist purely for delivery of a bomb on target, but also for factors such as frag avoidance. CCIP profiles are programmed to allow a pilot to meet things like the frag avoidance parameters based on TOF of the bomb and the only reliable way to do that safely is to fly a predictable path. The big difference in the modern world is that rather than using fudged compensations for being off the wire you instead use CCIP cues to adjust your dive bomb attack. The same calculator that produced the 476th charts produces an additional figure thats used for using the depressible pipper for manual bombing. Therefore the parameters for flying a CCIP delivery and a manual one are basically the same.

Dogfights happen at greater distances than 1nm or less. The whole problem is that we can barely make out aircraft until they're basically right on top of us, and even then within 1 nm its much much harder to see than it ought to be. Its only at about 0.5nm that it becomes easy to keep track of something but basic real life tactical formations in modern combat exist at great than 1nm with merges in the visual being begun well beyond the formation spacing. Even at less than 1nm you get aspect changes that cause great difficulty in guessing what the enemy is doing. Yes some aircraft are small but that makes the problem all the worse. Scale at less than 1nm is just as much an issue it just doesn't suffer form the "impossible" problem. The amount of information you can glean with a glance is still severely handicapped. Its not just about being able to see the enemy, its also about being able to see what he's doing. If real life pilots considered the Mig-21 very hard to see, how hard is it for DCS pilots now? Flying in tactical formations as I do regularly when within 1nm at default FOV I have a hard time knowing exactly where the rather large A-10 airframe I'm flying opposite to is pointing when he's not broadside to me which makes timing formation maneuvers all the harder, and these are maneuvers I know well and which I know the outcome to. Compare that to a dogfight where you don't know what the enemy will do and now you can barely make out where he is nevermind where he's pointing. Yes it will help when spotting against the ground. The object will still not be the same colour, it'll be close and difficult to spot but a moving blob thats not the same colour as the ground is easier to see the larger it is. Its a moving object so the movement is part of what catches our eye. The size helps. Just because spotting gets harder against the ground doesn't make the basic angular increase in size ineffective. As for LODs and all the rest, well part of implementing scaling should include looking at the entire way the sims renders things. The scaling can incorporate colour shifting such as making the blob lighting in the sun and darker in the shadows, vary things based on whether you're flying into the sun or away, etc, the same way it would influence the appearance of something in real life. I live close enough to where I can watch airplanes taking off and landing and depending on the time of day its actually easier to spot an aircraft against the ground than against the air based on where the sun is. The effectiveness of scaling, while not a 100% remedy for everything which is not what anyone is suggesting it is either, will depend on how much work is put into it and how clever the devs are at implementing it. Its not as if scaling as done in other sims is a finished product. There's plenty of room to expand the capability the same way DCS has expanded what sims can do. If DCS can break new ground on simulation it should be able to break new ground on scaling just as easily. Nobody said its impossible. Thats not the argument. The argument is relative difficulty. At longer ranges impossible enters into it as pixels become larger than the apparent object however at nearer distances relative size of the object naturally affects the ease of spotting it. You can't argue that a smaller dot isn't harder to see than a larger one, regardless of special contrast against ground or sky or sunlight or darkness. And as mentioned above the smaller the object the harder it is to discern its aspect off and as such harder to use a wider FOV to make tactical decisions in a dogfight.

Thats not logical. The basic issue is that at any range the other aircraft at a wider FOV appears smaller to us than it would to a real pilot ergo we lose sight of him more easily than a real pilot regardless of ground clutter or contrast et al. Certainly scaling shouldn't overcome natural obstacles to sighting but as it is the basic angular relationship between human eye and object is not adequately represented at any range in DCS with a usable fov. Now, the question of scaling is about at what point do we bother to cut off the effect? Thats up for argument, but what isn't is the simple fact that apparent size is always wrong at a usable FOV and thats basic math, you know triangles and stuff. That we can still make do doesn't change that basic reality. Enemy aircraft at 1nm at near default FOV appear too small. Zooming in on them causes us to lose a lot more situational awareness and its harder to track that moving target at higher FOV due to the narrow field of view. The whole ground contrast is entirely irrelevant. It has no mitigating influence on the correctness of the math.

That doesn't even make sense. If the target within a reasonable visual range for a human eye is rendered at below a single pixel how is that not a problem? If the target at a usable ie. wide field of view is harder to spot than it would be for a human being at the same range how is that not a problem related to the scale of the rendered pixels? How do you propose to fix a basic issue that the pixel resolution of the target is below what it would be to a human eye without forcing the human to use a narrow field of view that creates equal deficiencies in his ability to function? How can there be any solution beyond scaling when the basic problem is the existing pixel resolution being smaller than it would be to a human being?

Not necessarily. Many of these suicidal pilots appear to have tried to compartmentalize their behavior. Its obviously an internalized thing. The idea of crashing a plane into the ground is, in a twisted way, far less overt than say beating a flight attendant unconscious so that you can carry out your plan. They're basically cowards, they do it alone in the cockpit, silently. Now with a flight attendant there the obvious opportunity when someone goes to the john is removed. Psychology for this type of abnormal individual is not easily predictable. No doubt there could be those who would never do it if they can't just be alone. You can actually see this kind of mentality in trends in suicide. Many people are simply unwilling to do it a certain way. Guns are too messy and hanging is too painful. Fear of heights, so its all about pills. Nice, easy, drift away. Its not as easy as just saying "well someone wants to die so they'll find a way". The statistics say otherwise. People who do this kind of thing are messed up so normal logic doesn't apply, if such normal logic ever applied to begin with.

The fact that we need to use max zoom to be able to spot targets AT ALL at a reasonably realistic max range is unacceptable. You simply cannot effectively scan the air that way. Its not possible. The way a real pilot is supposed to work is he has about half the sky with his wingman the other half and he scans it for enemies. If you can't see anything without max zoom then you are simply not flying realistically because that dot thats barely visible in the middle of the screen would be equally visible to someone who can see an area nearly the size of default FOV. Its a basic empirical fact that our monitors at a usable FOV are incapable of rendering objects at a realistic resolution. Even at max zoon its not going to be realistic either. The pixels are just too fat to represent a dot you should be able to see. I know from talking to real pilots that more than 5 nm is perfectly reasonable expectation of visibility. This shouldn't be hard to do. You can do the math to figure out the size something would appear to a human eye at a given distance. That won't change. What does change is monitor resolution and field of view. Within that you should be able to easily find a reasonable factor for scaling and then balance it with thorough study of credible pilot reports.

Basically wind drift does not create sideslip, which is why your ball is centred. Using Rudder to correct this only slips the aircraft then which isn't correct. If this truly is wind doing it to you then you need to take it into account when attacking. Dropping free fall munitions into a cross wind strong enough to put your TVV off your HUD is going to be problematic anyway. If the impact point in a dive is off your HUD view then there's simply no way to compensate for that. Centring the HUD as in the F-16 would make CCIP useless then.

What would have really helped that picture is if you had the CDU repeater showing the Steer Info page so we can see how much wind you're experiencing. You can confirm its wind by flying into or away from the wind and that should centre the pitch ladder and TVV.

I don't see why not. F-16s have a few mm of stick throw and thats it. Pressure is specifically what they use. Its the only control solution that I know of that stands a chance of being replicated on a simmer's desktop.

^ Thank you for validating that I am the rightest right person in the thread. All you other right people can suck it. :P In all seriousness though its just a headache trying to figure out why we can't get something right that seems so easy. At a certain point we must surrender to "I am not very good because I need more practice" and do the boring bit of flying boringly, that is if you want to master it, no reason you must. AAR isn't required for the A-10 given how most missions are made. Do you have any buddies you can fly with regularly? If you do you should try and do lots and lots and lots of formation flying. That'll make sitting behind the tanker seem like taking a break (until the hook up of course). Using that doc you can basically engineer flying for 2 hours while spending almost all of it working on your formation flying skills. Maybe that'll be the one that pushes things forward for you. http://www.476vfightergroup.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=76

I went to write a long ass reply but I figure this is a better way to justify the "suck" argument. PROBLEM: (summary of comments) How do RL pilots perform AAR with ease while I'm working for so long to master the operation.. I'm good with all other operations in the sim, so why is this one so difficult? PROBABLE ROOT CAUSES: You suck because you have flown about 5% of the hours a real pilot would have by the time they see a real tanker You have not practiced in a regimented environment and have spent almost none of your insufficiently few hours practicing the esoteric skill set known as formation flying PROBABLE SOLUTIONS: Ensure you fly more hours Ensure those hours flown are done in a way thats useful to practice and not just dicking around Actually try to practice real administrative formation flying instead of that weak stuff you see people do in videos that amounts to nothing more than a very close chase formation which handles instead like a tactical formation I think curves are no short cut for time spent learning to fly properly, which is what really makes AAR easier for real pilots. Hours spent doing it. Thats a miraculous human metric for skill and only those talented mofos get to cut those hours down to the bone and get away with it. Unfortunately most of us are untalented hacks, but its okay, we can still learn. Formation flying is part of every phase of a pilot's sortie in military flights barring breaking up for some reason or another. Most DCS players only do formation flying or something barely resembling it near the tanker. If we didn't have CCIP in these planes dropping Mk82s or Rockets or using the Gun would involve just as much practice as this, if not more. Modern tech makes it easy to be really generally poor at flying and get the job done. Tanking hasn't been handicapped this way. Fly more hours, pick one control scheme and stick with it after trying out a couple variations to see if that'll get things to work, but stick with one if it doesn't and just carry on. Practice practice practice. That's my final word.* *If you know me you'll know thats a lie

I love the people who use a voice of reason to distill the arguments into neat yet misleading generalizations. My stick is a piece of crap - I think curves suck. Just one man's opinion not based on any common factor such as high quality hardware, stick extension, whatever. I perceive a measurable degradation in responsiveness that is unnecessary in my opinion because curves are not necessary, a conclusion I drew based on having a POS stick and doing more than good enough. I don't give a crap if its not realistic. What is realistic? Its an arbitrary concept. You fly a real airplane? Good for you. Curve, no curve, neither case provides me with a realistic sensation. What leads to what someone perceives as either most realistic or most useful based on an arbitrary perception of realism is their perspective and therefore outside of any other person's frame of reference thus making most advice not irrefutable. We also don't have stick forces, G perception, realistic FOV, and a whole pant load of other stuff. Everything is therefore a compromise. I feel curves compromise my ability to throw the airplane around, meanwhile I have no issues holding close echelon formation or staying on the boom ergo I get a more realistic experience by my arbitrary measure out of no curves because I get maximum control rate with no downsides. If someone can't stay on the boom with 30 curve and maybe some saturation then its not lack of stick curve thats holding them back. One thing I do know is that when you suck you often Pogo ie. oscillate your controls back and forth and when your controls are sluggish ie. there's a curve on them then that only exacerbates the issue. So whats the final tally? None, its opinion. I do know that after simming in many genres that any attempt at realism is always a compromise. Curves compromise something I think is important. No extension here - don't care if someone flew a real airplane, these aren't real airplanes and they don't have real controls. One thing you shouldn't do though is assume why someone thinks something, especially if they say different. Its a form of dismissing the merit of someone's point of view, a very common internet past time. I at least tell you its in your head, suggesting its your subconcious that's full of crap rather than the conscious part of you that can wallop on me if it so chose to. So, where'd it all start? I said OP should try no curve and trim nose heavy since he's probably on a heavy curve and trimming perfectly level. When you can't make head way the only smart thing to do is either walk away for a long long time to avoid frustration and practicing bad habits or go for a radical change of approach. Your brain is great, but its sometimes weird and dumb and you can trick it into doing a better job.

I think its just typical internet gamer elitism that supposes that nobody wants to be the guy in the backseat. Thats a tense exciting job, particularly in the Tomcat where the front seat guy is basically boned outside of WVR without him. It also allows people who are weak in BFM to still contribute to combat multiplayer with friends who are. All in all the "nobody wants to pay to be the WSO/RIO" is the kind of babble I expect from people with teamwork handicaps.

Give 'em the backseat of the TF-51 and/or give 'em the back seat of any multi seat aircraft but with no functionality beyond being able to look around. DCS incentive flights are like free marketing at that point and you're still not giving the real goods away. It dovetails perfectly with the effort they went to to make the TF-51. It would be pretty awesome to be able to try and get my skeptical friends to try DCS by giving them a flight in at least the free aircraft. Guys like Leatherneck could even go so far as to disable the scripted RIO to make sure you can't tag along for combat missions. Its just good and original PR in my opinion.