Cake

I agree that visible moisture should be present to cause inlet ice. The bigger point missed so far, at least in this thread, is that icing conditions for jets is based on RAT, not OAT. RAT increases with speed, so at temperatures slightly below zero outside air temperature, the RAT can be well above zero and icing should not occur in these conditions even with visible moisture. Clearly this is modeled incorrectly. Maybe the modeling just uses outside air temperature and doesn’t correct for this?

Garmin has a HUD for their G5000 bizjet avionics. I'm sure they could do one for the F5, but doesn't mean they are...

This would make for a pretty cool upgrade for the F5:

Just snagged it. Looking forward to a new and interesting area to fly in.

Please remove this verified by visa step rom the payment system. I just wasted 15 minutes on a phone call to approve a $40 credit card purchase. I’m sure others are dealing with this as well. Having made so many DCS purchases in the past, it would be nice to not be inconvenienced like this. Even for a customer’s first ever purchase, this would still be a silly waste of time. If someone frauds out on a purchase, then by all means revoke their license, but please don’t make us take our time to do your job.

I’d say not. Back in the day ED mailed those of us who were testers on the Su27 team some really cool flight jackets. I’m pretty sure they value the whole community a great deal. People who are willing to do this kind of thing are really volunteers to help make ED products better.

It would be nearly impossible for a carrier to have ILS, right? Where would you put the approach lights and marker beacons?

Good points. In fact, cities can clearly be seen as lighting up thin cloud layers above them. I think the screenshots show nice work, but I get a feeling things still are far from realistic. The most important lighting is for aircraft and aerodromes. We should be able to see aircraft with normal nav and anti collision lights from 20+ miles out under clear conditions. Also, look at the provided Persian Gulf pics. I’m thinking the runway lights are only visible up close.... Look at the blue taxiway lighting, it has almost vanished at a a fairly short range, where the city lights can be seen at much greater distances. This doesn’t match reality. From these perspectives, the taxiway lights would be much more evident.

Yes. And keep in mind that while it's somewhat fair and reasonable to assume that two different F-15s configured identically will have very similar performance given the same initial airspeed, attitude, power, and configuration, but when you start damaging these airplanes this assumption is no longer fair. If you smash a good part of the wing off two different F-15s in two different collisions, your are unlikely to have similar control, maneuverability, and performance afterwards. Moreover, the condition of and aerodynamics of severely damaged aircraft like that these may continue to change as they are flown and subject to continued airflow and g-loadings. I think there was a lot of luck to go along with a lot of skill in this example. For sure this airplane was not easy to fly in its condition, and as such I don't think the pilot would have spent much time looking over his shoulder at the wing, even if he could assess the damage later in the flight by doing so.

Not sure if it was salesman BS, but I’ve heard the current LG OLED 4K screens have higher refresh and lower latency than most LED screens. Anyone know more or have any success?

Does Kutaisi even have an ILS? I can only find old info that says it has NDB approaches. Assuming it has an ILS, Some airports share some ILS components on reciprocal runways. If that were the case, they'd typically switch the ILS to the active runway (so the active runway is on the front course)... the frequency would be the same, but the identifier would be different. Unless this this scenario is happening, why would the ILS be be turned off for anything other than maintenance? I don't get it.

The important part to me is that its seems obvious that DCS World has a smaller carbon footprint than operating real Su-27, F-15. etc :thumbup: Not really answering your question, but still, I find this fascinating: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-energy-consumption-explained/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Alternatives that do not have the energy consumption issues like Stellar have emerged. Like the keybase.io blog https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-stellar points out, "It's very likely the world is at great risk right now, and as cryptocurrency scales, the share of blame it shoulders for climate change will scale, too. You should fear a backlash. There may be social and legal opposition to any cryptocurrencies which haven't switched away from proof-of-work."

Did I imply otherwise?

Hopefully, proof-of-work based crypto-currencies like Bitcoin will fade in to the ether in favor of superior option such as Stellar, which does not have negative impacts of the mining process. My understanding is that Bitcoin mining alone has already surpassed consumption of 1/500th of the world's electricity. Such a bad idea, this electricity should be used for important things like lights, heat, transportation, and DCS World.

Buildings?

I think this is worth a little push back.... IRL the weather is only as predictable or unpredictable as it will be... No one is sure when they start. So, when you start a mission, you only have a forecast of what might be expected during your flight and the current conditions. You get a briefing from your meteorologist and when you reach your destination or target area such predictions may or may not be right. Real-time weather is one thing that could certainly make campaigns or missions more interesting. Certainly if the weather meets certain conditions, you won't go. That is part of your planning and decision making process for real pilots. Maybe another target is more suitable, or you choose not to launch. If you know it all in advance, that is in fact not realistic. The advantage or using LIVE current weather is that given a mission, the Wx brief and your choices based on Wx influence the outcome. To remove Wx from the equation (or know Wx in advance) like muehlema argues, makes it more of a game and less of a simulation....... or at best more of a historical reenactment....

Great idea. I'm all for it. To expand upon it, I think we also should have the option to fly with Wx based on specific historical dates and times. Not sure how we could do this retroactively, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to start building a database of real world weather for the maps in DCS by timestamp. This database could be maintained by ED and mission servers would have the option to connect to it for a given mission. If we can't get old data, we could simply use the oldest data we have for that specific month/day/hour as a historical approximation. PIREPS could be part of this, but some combinations of METARS, SPECI, radar, lightning strike data etc would probably be more useful. The mission designer could then choose to fly the mission on historical days based on given conditions, or try the same mission based on the weather conditions for a different day as well as the current conditions in pseudo-real time. Certainly, this wouldn't prevent anyone from doing their missions under ideal conditions, but come on, real F-15 pilots don't just fly VFR. Everyone here wants to simulate every button and knob in the airplane, but flying in real world conditions is just as important in the name of realism.

I wonder what is really going on here? It's almost as if lights are treated as small objects that cannot be seen from a significant distance. At night, aircraft lights can be seen from great distances. Typically, you can spot an aircraft's strobes at night before you would spot the same (entire) aircraft during daylight. As far as aircraft go, you'd think this would be a somewhat easy fix, but as for objects on the maps? I dunno...? I will say that upon landing in many different real airplanes in my experience that the landing lights don't light up much of the runway until you are pretty close, but it should work well enough by crossing the fence and one can see well for a good distance in front when on runways and taxiways. Of course the light power depends upon equipment, but better equipment often has higher approach speeds. Compare the previous screenshot I posted to the one attached below. Just took this from the xplane demo. You can see the blue taxiway edge lights, green taxiway center line lights (I know these aren't at all airports. Notice the runway edge lights can be seen from side angles. I turned on all the landing lights and taxi lights on the 747. You can see the effect on other objects. It's pretty convincing. You can imagine they would light the runway pretty well. Tried to capture a screen from during a lightning strike. Couldn't seem to time it right, but I will say the strikes lit up the runways and grass areas. Very realistic. I'm tempted to buy this just because of the night flying and weather, but I think DCS could do it better. For me, xplane totally misses the feel of the airplanes compared to DCS, but I want to do realistic things for the aircraft simulated in DCS, which includes approaches in bad weather and night flying for some of them.

Gotta say, the night lighting needs much more than tweaks. I wanted to see if it was improved, so just for kicks I set a flight from LSV to LAS. Night time. Thunderstorms. Taxiing to the active, it was almost impossible to see the taxiway center lines more than a ten feet in front of the airplane. This may be somewhat realistic, but even the nearby lighting that you could see was unrealistically dim. Almost no lighting visible. The sky was abnormally bright, even between visible lightning strikes, the effects of which were dramatically understated. By this I mean the sky way too bright when no strikes and almost no change when strikes occurred. After departing LSV, I found myself climbing above the clouds and leveling at 5000ft. Lightning strikes were occurring all around, but strangely, no towering clouds, just a clear sky with terrain poking up through the clouds and lightning strikes coming to/from clear sky above. These strikes shouldn't have been coming out of clear air, but rather between clouds and the ground or with other clouds. The bigger problem was the strikes were very dim and had little effect on the brightness of the visible cloud layer below or terrain. Approaching McCarran, the airfield lighting was very understated compared to the neighborhood lighting all around. If I recall correctly, I landed on 26R. Attached below is a sample shot after the landing roll out. Here's some problems with it: What shouldn't be there? I *think* the hill in the middle of the shot is Potosi mountain, which is about 20 miles away. It is clearly visible at night in heavy rain against the overly bright sky, and you can see some area that on this that is illuminated well compared to the nearby runway edge lights. What's missing? Well, you can only barely see one taxiway light from the parallel taxiway that is only about 100m away. It's not all in the picture, but looking in all directions, you cannot see any of the other airport lighting or the parallel runway edge lighting that is only 200m away. The majority of the airport is invisible even though it is within a couple miles of this location. Neither can you see many of the numerous towers or buildings nearby that have obstruction lighting within 5 miles of the field. Of course it should be normal to not see the more distant things in these conditions, but lighting should be much more obvious than terrain at night that can be seen from much greater distances. There are also specific issues with the design of the lights themselves. Look at the nearby runway edge lights. These should be L862 (or L861/2), which are either bidirectional (180 degrees amber/180 degrees white) or omni directional (360 degrees white). In DCS, they only shine in narrow cones aligned with the runway. They are also way too dim. I wanted to see how DCS compares to other sims at night so I just downloaded the xplane 11 demo. I have to say that at first glance the night lighting is impressive. The effects on the terrain, airfields, other aircraft of light sources such as lightning, aircraft taxi and landing lights. etc. are much more realistic and aesthetically pleasing. Beating xplane for visual night realism would be a good goal for ED.

Yes. All fixed in 15.84.338. No need to do any sort of uninstall or mess with the keys at all for me. Just update :)

So, uninstall KA-50 or uninstall DCS open Beta? Either way, this seems to be a bug with the current update, as that is the only change to the system. Finally, is this going to use up an activation?

FAA, not ICAO, but applicable for Nevada:https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/150-5345-46E.pdf Also: https://www.faa.gov/airports/southern/airport_safety/part139_cert/media/aso-airfield-standards-quick-reference.pdf I’m thinking standard runway edge lights per FAA are either omnidirectional or bidirectional. I will say from experience it can be more difficult to identify the runway from the edge lights when not lined up with the runway, but they should still be visible.

Just installed today's update to OB2.5.0.15085 Installation was clean with NO mods from version that worked prior. No hardware changes. Upon startup I'm getting a message saying my KA-50 BS key is not authorized and inquiring for a key. I have been running the BS upgrade from BS version 1 (steam) with no issues.

I'm always price conscious, so I'd probably go for the 2k at this point unless you're not sensitive to the price difference and/or need the additional pixels for other things. Why? The future of DCS is with VR. I think for a DCS-only system, this makes monitors a short term solution. It used to be that I could justify a somewhat expensive monitor. For example, I had a 20" 1600x1200 that lasted almost a decade through several CPU and GPU upgrades. This was purchased in a time when most people we're at 1024x768 and it held up well even after most people switched to 1920x1080. I'm currently running a RIFT / 1080Ti. Recently, I decided I was missing the photorealistic details so I went back to my 144Hz 2K display with Track IR. That switch lasted all of about 20 minutes because, despite it's sharpness, the feeling of being in the aircraft was gone. To me, DCS World felt completely flat by contrast. Considering the flaws of current generation VR (e.g., RIFT's lack of viewing range / sharpness, etc), we could argue back and forth and give pros and cons for a 2D monitor vs. VR. I like VR much better despite its flaws, but I totally understand why some choose the monitor option. However, I think it is reasonable to expect huge improvements in the with VR that will reduce and eventually eliminate most of its disadvantages. I think in a few years, the majority of DCS will be done in VR. So, I probably couldn't justify the pricier monitor based on DCS alone.... You didn't say DCS only though, so maybe the decision really comes down to what other things you use your system for.... I think most gaming titles look good in 2K. A 2k display isn't nearly as good as say a 5K Mac, for things where additional desktop real estate for more open apps would be useful.

The video was about aircraft (including F-15) based in Alaska.