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PFunk1606688187

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Everything posted by PFunk1606688187

  1. Baseball wisdom is universal.
  2. This video is probably good right about now for stirring up trouble in this thread. I wouldn't be surprised if the vid was fake, just because its too damned amusing. https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=558830810882063&set=vb.452716798160132&type=3&theater
  3. Mechanical is better than rubber dome. Cherry is just a popular brand.
  4. Well thats your perception, which is not mine. All the rest of your post... well I'm not beating a dead horse right? :music_whistling:
  5. People pay $90 for the PMDG 777, and thats before you consider the -300 expansion. Its not unreasonable I don't think and its gonna sell no matter what. I mean lets look at this. We're a niche community. We pony up insane cash for peripherals. People buy $500 joysticks just to fly the A-10C that hasn't cost $60 in a long time. I've personally put hundreds of hours into that plane alone. How many people are going to fly the Tomcat basically every week for the foreseeable future? Lets say every week for a year. 90/52= $1.73 a week for your jollies. Oh man what a rip off. :music_whistling: Besides, I want them to charge me $90 for it. That means it'll be special, they'll be saying "This one is different, its the best anyone has ever seen in DCS" and they'll have to make sure its true. If its just another $50 module why should I expect something epic? All the other stuff coming out at that price has basically no avionics in it.
  6. Form over function? Your kind will rule the world forever it seems. --------------- Edit. Cherry Buckling Spring The first image shows trivial hipster garbage, while the second image shows a refined product for the discerning keyboard warrior.
  7. I find flying close formation echelon is far more challenging than tanking since you're flying outside of your buddy's plane of motion while with AAR you're basically flying a near identical track to the Tanker's. I'm not gonna beat the curve thing to death, but the extra responsiveness of the 0/0 is just as much a benefit to tanking as the higher resolution of a curve, but also the sluggish input of a curve is its own detractor since its delaying your inputs. The only thing a curve is doing is taking your excessive controls and handicapping them, while without a curve its all about precise control. Which one is better for someone to learn anyway? Should someone who has poor precision be worried about his tanking? The notion of using a curve to make AAR more comfy is kind of like trying to achieve a result before you've achieved the proficiency in control to deserve that result. If the stick is such a POS that it needs something like you said, then all bets are off for most advice I think. I do agree with the advice about formation flying. Its a lot of fun and not nearly as stressful as chasing a tanker. Flying with friends is a hoot and having fun is extremely beneficial to learning while stress and failure can be off putting if experienced too often.
  8. I just think that curves aren't necessary or the lack of one any sort of obstacle to success in AAR while the downsides to having any curve on your stick affect all other phases of flight to such a degree that its not even worth considering in my opinion. So I suggest to anyone who wants to shake up their approach if they're hitting a brick wall on AAR to nix the curve and try trimming nose heavy. The other thing is that I find, and others I know have said the same, that tanking in a bank is easier than level so perhaps another way to approach the problem differently is set up a tanker in a permanent orbit rather than a racetrack. Another thing I did when I was learning was to flip the HUD to Stanby mode and get rid of all that green shit. Its a visual formation exercise at its heart so the TVV and the speed and the alt and all the rest are just distractions. Learn to tank without them and you can correctly ignore them when you're better. Its worth noting also that real pilots will be very proficient at general formation flying long before they get near a real tanker so thats going to play a major factor in how easy it is for them. If you only fly solo you're really missing a key chunk of the experience overhead you would be relying on.
  9. So you're telling me keyboards that expensive are still using those POS cherries? Bleh. Gimme a buckling spring key for that price and we can start talking.
  10. The problem with stick curves is that it lowers the resolution of input at the further ends of your stick throw. You're sacrificing precision at one end for resolution at another. I used to be a curve freak. I couldn't do jack without my 20/20 curve. Then I switched it off, had a few shaky landings, and surprisingly it was easy peasy after that. Before anyone tells me well yea bub, you got a $500 stick, I don't. I have a second hand X52 that I've done the spring mod on (using a piece of plastic from the lid of a 50 pack DVD case). The first thing I noticed when I turned off the curve was the responsiveness of the controls. That curve slows you down. Rolling is faster without the curve, as is pitching. I'm sure a stick extension would make it even better, but honestly its mostly in your head. To me the responsiveness of the controls with a curve is muddy. I don't want to make my inputs perfect at the cost of alacrity. Whats more I think that extra responsiveness is beneficial. I think the net result of a curve is basically like capping the horsepower of your car to keep up with your own inexperience, because muscle memory is an experience thing. When I started my curve dependency I tried to fly without it, hated it, and went right to the training wheels. I wish that I had just taken the scraped knees because it was just another thing for me to unlearn along the way. I might feel differently if I flew prop planes regularly, but with something that has SAS I don't think its called for. Pure mind job in my opinion. :joystick:
  11. There's also the factor that dedicated CAS platforms get to train exclusively for the CAS role while multi-role fighters are basically splitting their time between multiple jobs and they'll never have the time to focus on the task as well as the A-10 culture does. Its very much the same with dedicated air to air aircraft. If you roll the A-10 culture into the F-35 culture or whatever other multi-role fighter you'll lose something thats not on any tech sheet. You'll lose a community of pilots who are close to single minded in their focus on precision ground attack with troops nearby. You can make the argument that losing thats worth it when you consider the budget, but I doubt you'd see the generals take the compromise if you told them they'd lose their dedicated A2A culture instead.
  12. Several of the people I fly with regularly say that they actually trim their aircraft noticeably nose heavy before hooking up. I would also recommend a 0/0 stick curve if you aren't using that already.
  13. @^ Map size shouldn't have any effect on finding opponents or on the frame rates. FSX only has issues when you use up memory because the inefficient engine doesn't know how to dump resources once it loads them thus leading inevitably to the OOM. Moment to moment an engine built for massive maps won't have issues since it'll never load more than whats nearby, as I assume it already does in DCS. Finding opponents is about mission design. There's nothing stopping people from flying off the edge of the map in Georgia is there?
  14. I have no idea why the CCIP pipper and gun cross wouldn't be wind corrected while a degraded mode one would be.
  15. Its about watching the joy of a community united by a single announcement. The wandering subject matter of this thread is like the murmured conversations you can pick up at a great party.
  16. Wikipedia is nice and all but its no academic resource. Half the stuff thats used as citations are dead links and you could never reference it for anything because as things get edited parts disappear. Its a nice reference for the conventional wisdom though.
  17. Eh, I'm not a Starship Troopers fan personally. Its because I stupidly read the book before seeing the movie. Big mistake. I love Robocop, but I just don't like Verhoeven's take on the story. Stilll... yea maybe I'll bend the rule for that one too. He's definitely not as bad as Casper Van Dien.
  18. A lot of what individual pilots experience in combat itself depend on the conflict in question. What A-10 pilots trained to do in the 80s is radically different from what they did in the 90s and further still different from what happened in the 00s. Kosovo tactics were heavily restricted by both the ROE and the primary threats, ie. shorad systems. Most of the medium to long range SAMs were suppressed by the SEAD cover and enemy air threats were minimal to non existent most of the way through. Desert Storm, which I know less about, would likely have involved lower altitude stuff but still not nearly as low as 80s A-10s would have trained to do since their threat environment was about persistent enemy air threats in a type of conflict no post WW2 western aviator has actually ever seen unless you count Thuds getting jumped by Migs in Vietnam. The only rule with tactics really is whether they address the situation at hand appropriately or not. Every war's tactics tend to vary, particularly with air wars it seems. If you're doing something and you don't really know why then you're probably doing it wrong. Its however pretty obvious that precision munitions have shifted a lot of the focus of modern tactics for good reason, but also its worth noting that pretty much all of the wars fought in the PGM era are against enemies who're far from parity so the kinds of things that might force pilots to use older tactics might not be present. Considering the way DCS lacks any intelligent SEAD and no EW to speak of most of what allows strikers to stay high in the contemporary conflict seems to be absent in our simulation so when evaluating if any given tactic is obsolete has to be taken in the context of the environment we're employing in. DCS is not the 21st century battlefield so I think its not so easy as to say "A-10s haven't flown in the weeds since the 80s" if someone were to make that assessment. This is all of course musing based on your commentary mvsgas. Its not a direct response since I don't think you've made any conclusions. For a nice overview of how the Kosovo war was fought you can read this, written by A-10 pilots. https://duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Faupress.au.af.mil%2Fdigital%2Fpdf%2Fbook%2Fb_0090_haave_haun_a10s_over_kosovo.pdf I seem to share that link about once a week. :D
  19. Lots to talk about here but to keep focused I'll only hit on reattacks for now. The short and the sweet of it is it depends. If you're attacking a target with a pop up its probably for a reason. If there's a threat that makes you need to mask then you may very well egress via masking and reattack in similar ways modifying the ingress based on evolving knowledge of the target. However if the target is basically toothless after your first attack or always was then you can simply set up a wheel over the target, flying over it like hawks and swooping in as your orbit in the wheel comes to a point where you can line up a roll in. The USAF teaches the standard 90 degree offset roll in (more than one way to skin a cat though) and you can basically use that as your go to for attacking in just about any situation. Line up the target based on a known canopy reference and roll and pull into it (an art all to itself). Pop up attacks are different than standard box pattern attacks but basically from the wheel whatever you can use to enter the appropriate attack type works. The unsatisfying answer is that there's no rule or method to working a target that lets you circle it. You do what works. You look for it, you swoop down, you kill it, you climb back up to altitude and keep looking or reattack. If nothing is shooting back its just a gallery and you're free to do what you want. The only proviso is that airspace is like a minefield when in bad guy country. Where you've been is generally safer than where you haven't, so try not to circle into unfamiliar areas. Work up visual references and work the target. Air space may close down though as the mission maker might be clever and have manpads spawn when you start killing stuff, so always keep an eye out. Two aircraft working a wheel will still provide mutual support and cover each other's attacks. The benefit is that watching the attack builds SA on where stuff is and makes it easy for the guy watching to roll in immediately to hit the same spot or stuff right near it. Whether to hang around and work a wheel or egress by masking and do another pop up is entirely situational though. You could write a whole book on this stuff and I'm no expert. The short of it though is that this is the kind of stuff that makes being a real pilot a tough job. Experience, judgment, tactics, intel, situation at hand, limitations of the load out, the front, etc etc etc. Its no easy thing to answer. One easy answer though is you never have to return to the IP every single time. Some people think attacks have to be regimented strict affairs. There are lists of things to always concern yourself with and real pilots have contracts they have to follow to ensure everything is covered, but following those contracts is not nearly as strict as one might think. Do what works, and some of what works is circling the target. In general though you never have to go further away when reattacking than you have to. How far you have to go is a lot of judgment and experience though. This is a good place to start with some fundamentals, but it goes way deeper than this: http://www.476vfightergroup.com/showthread.php?3131-Air-to-Surface-Weapon-Delivery-Methods There are also people who are much much more knowledgeable and experienced than myself. Maybe they'll drop by and help out. Who knows. I speak anything about this stuff with great reservation and assume that at any point someone might contradict me.
  20. Its not even just the implausibility of the quality of the response, its the proficiency and accuracy with which they direct their fire to you. Most of these units have no dedicated Anti Air sights yet aim with a precision that often puts the optical Zeus units to shame. So yes, they know you're there far too easily, but they also can fire so well on top of it. I don't care if the BMP-3 or whatever has a sight that can be used for AA, its not the primary mission of the unit and they're not gonna just zap you with perfect aim because you unmasked. A whole platoon firing in unison at you is of course obviously not how real life works. Its obviously AI shenanigans because they haven't written into the AI a human level of awareness and fallibility. Funny thing is that it appears as though the dedicated AAA units are well coded since I fear them far less than BMPs. There are as I said before scripts to help this. Suppression script forces units in a group to basically button up and another script I know of actually degrades AI awareness to boot. I consider both of those rather important but still they shouldn't be necessary. These are things that should be build into DCS because mission scripting can be volatile. In short, DCS AI ground units by default behave like sentry robots with perfect SA, SA that actual real life robots would never have unless they had something like radar.
  21. I'm not a Nascar fan either. Fans are idiots, they like stuff because of a brand, not because its good. Days of Thunder is better than Top Gun because its just a better movie. The character motivations are cleaner, the full circle of Tom Cruise driving his former rival's car is more poignant, the scene where they rent two cars and do a demolition derby is far more fun than any of the fake dogfights. Also, Michael Ironside 100% diminishes the final vote for any film he is in, barring Total Recall. That is what I call the Michael Ironside rule. Command & Conquer is the only other exception. Its not a war movie silly, its an exploration of the darkness in man, which is tangentially related to war. Who cares if Marlon Brando was fat, he gave a chilling performance. Anyway, I usually tune out people who say Apocalypse Now is a horrible movie because thats just... inconceivable. The smell of Napalm in the Morning beats out Talk to me Goose as epic film lines anyway. And for such a dumb war flick the helicopter attack scene is way more interesting than watching people struggle for a missile lock at WW1 engagement ranges. :megalol:
  22. Why would you pick a hard deck below the mountains? :huh:
  23. Oh nonsense. Top Gun wasn't awful because of historical inaccuracy. It was awful because it was awful. Purely as a story telling exercise it was trite and cliche and over the top and thats without considering the glaring inaccurate portrayal of air combat, which really isn't what makes a movie bad necessarily. Apocalypse Now is far from a historical re-enactment of the Vietnam War in any accurate sense but its still a far better movie than Top freakin' Gun. :lol: Now, know what was a fun movie thats not nearly as cringe worthy (by comparison)? Days of Thunder. Just gimme 5th gear! :megalol:
  24. Its just a matter of personal discipline. Just don't use the C's systems that are outside the scope of what you want to do. There are many things though that you would want to use that are better eyes out helpers. The UFC for instance combined with the CDU repeater is an excellent tool to make you a better eyes out pilot than an A pilot could ever be if you need to use that system for some reason, and they did use it. There's no reason you can't just put two distant points in your CDU then fly DR between them. Drop a point on Senaki then another on Gori east of the Kashuri gap and all you gotta do there is go south from Senaki, find the Rioni river, follow that east til the gap, fly the valley then follow a certain road east to the Gori and bam thats Dead Reckoning. If you got your maps you can try and use those rather than the TAD or CDU to check that out. For doing CCIP attacks just don't use mark points, which is actually pretty darned hard to do anyway without a TGP, and just prosecute targets based on visual references. Pick an IP for yourself, pick a visual reference for flying to the target on your run in, bring along WP and self mark or memorize where other targets are in relation to the existing wrecks that give off big smoke plumes. Fly a wheel over or offset from the target and use that zoom to get a good look. It takes lots of practice and training to quickly and efficiently use sensors in the attack. It really takes little effort to fly the airplane visually because people naturally want to fly where their eyes are looking. So look where you want to go, look where you want to start your run in, and do everything by looking. Once you get a few visual references and get a feel for the surrounding terrain you can basically spend the entire attack sequence with your eyes out of the pit only glancing at the HUD and maybe the DSMS to confirm weapons. Of course you then in that situation realize how good the DSMS is as well since you can cycle profiles heads up via the HUD instead of having to go heads down to manually set up everything. The C is far better than the A in so many respects. Its entirely the self discipline (or lack thereof) of sim pilots that makes the C into this heads down monster that overloads you. Just keep your big eyes out and leave the pod at home and its amazing how old school the C lets you fly.
  25. Real life Safe Escape Maneuvers dictate reaching 4Gs within 2 seconds. The assumption is you're not yanking to achieve that G instantaneously. Most times I've seen people lose wings when flying is a result of them over Ging during a SEM, and usually its to a ridiculously high degree. By the same token having pulled quite a few high Gs in my own time I have never lost one when reaching those Gs relatively smoothly. Still, all bets are off when going above ~7ish.
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