Fishbreath

I'm not an expert, but I have some guesses as to why it behaves like it does in this thread: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=114496 I don't claim that the real helicopter is like this, but I don't have a lot of trouble explaining the bouncing.

Ka-50s with the R-800 on the same channel are automatically datalinked. (The datalink knob also has to be turned on, and you have to select different self-IDs with that knob.)

I think (but I'm not sure) that you need the laser on for CCRP delivery. You should see the target diamond when you hold the trigger down if it's working.

Bombs won't drop if you're below a certain altitude AGL (though I don't know exactly what it is), and since Su-25T CCIP was unintentionally changed in version 1.2.5, it's harder to get the CCIP pipper to appear without a very steep dive. Being in a very steep dive gets you to the no-release altitude faster.

I dunno—I'm a notoriously hard lander, and the only time I've broken the landing gear on either the Su-25 or the -25T is on landings after big parts of the plane have been blown off. They're tough, but they aren't carrier-strength undercarriage, I've found. You can't just slam them into the ground sans flare.

This happened to me once. (Thankfully I only had the Ka-50 at the time.) I hadn't done anything on Bolt's list—one day it worked, the next day it didn't, with no input from me whatsoever. Only uninstalling and reinstalling fixed it.

I've gotten through the initial phase of planning; I think I probably have enough basic architecture down to start working on the script. I hope to have something to show soon, but there are a few other projects (a Battle of the Bulge AAR with Command Ops) I'm working on that have priority.

Chaff rejection capability varies from missile to missile. For instance, if someone shoots an R-27ER at you, you can pretty much just toss your chewing gum wrapper out the window and it'll track that instead.

If I recall correctly, the mechanical system doesn't fail, it just doesn't give you full control authority (to simulate the increased stick forces required). Watch the RCtrl+Enter controls indicator to verify that.

After another mission in which battle damage caused the failure of my hydraulics systems, I did some forum diving to see if it was realistic that I could fly for twenty minutes after both main and common hydraulic pressure went to zero. (It wasn't.) That said, though, I found this thread from 2010. In posts 10 through 15 or so, there's a discussion of a bug: both hydraulics systems fail at the same time from damage, but they fail separately if set that way in the mission editor. It occurs to me that, in my most recent period of playing DCS games (from about May until now) I haven't once seen the Ka-50's hydraulics systems fail separately after taking battle damage. It could just be that I'm horribly unlucky, and that every time I take damage, I take damage to both hydraulics systems, but I'd like to know if the bug from 2010 and BS1 was ever fixed?

After I failed in an exciting way at a mission in the Ka-50 Deployment campaign, a friend of mind said he'd be interested in flying it cooperatively. I was thinking about things I would have to do to make it a little more playable with two, and I got to thinking that it might be nice to have a better FAC. The one in the Deployment campaign can't repeat its calls or notify you about moving targets or anything. I got to thinking that it wouldn't be too hard to come up with a script that does all of those things and more, for cases when JTAC is too heavyweight, or unsupported without mods, or presents the wrong sort of information. It's mainly something I plan on doing as an adventure in DCS scripting engine stuff, but if there's sufficient interest, I'll release it, too. Things I want to do for sure: Register units as FACs for line of sight checks. Register groups for FAC observation. Register zones for FAC positional information, e.g. "targets next to the factory". F10 menu control for repeating target calls. Script support for enabling and disabling FACs, target groups, and zones. Things I'd probably only do if someone wants to use them: Adding FACs by client group for better multiplayer. Advanced comms support? Talk-ons: support for special FAC responses so mission builders could e.g. give the FAC a radio response providing guidance to the target from major landmarks. Smoke and maybe IR pointer support. Deeper F10 menu control, such as asking for target marking or priority tasking. (Very speculative) support for voice acting for the really fancy mission builders out there.

Given the way mission files are structured, I suspect the same thing.

FC3 doesn't integrate (easily) with the Steam version of DCS World.

The Su-25T is a lot of fun—it has some reasonably fancy targeting, but still relies on the TsM-model datalink, and it's not all dropping JDAMs from 15,000 feet. Unfortunately, my wingman is away from his computer for Thanksgiving, so we won't have a chance to take another crack at it for a few days, but I'm looking forward to it.

My friend and I took up some Su-25Ts last night, and we were doing great until the hostile fighter jumped us. I guess next time we ought to run more vigorously toward friendly AA.

I pledged for one too. I look forward to seeing it released.

I've only overheated the laser in two circumstances: 1) Accidentally binding the range/designate target button to my push-to-talk key. 2) Firing a full weapons load (cannon, rockets, and 12 Vikhrs), then rearming and returning to combat before the 30-minute full cooldown had elapsed. Normal use (ranging for unguided weapons and guidance for 12 Vikhrs) has never burned out the laser for me.

Has there been any news on this? As a temporary fix, I'm going to have stationary units move a little when they spawn, but being able to remove them would be great.

You don't have any right to say this: After you said this: Sorry.

On that note, I've found that my DCS helo experience helps me fly on instruments in Arma, and my Arma helo experience makes me better at seat-of-the-pants flying in DCS.

I think the problem is that the data you have is hard to work with. The probabilities you have would work just about right for a closing target checking once a second, but they don't translate very well to e.g. a crossing target. The graph is probability of detecting a closing target before a given range; you would want something more like probability per unit time vs. range graph. You could maybe cheat it a bit. 400 knots is about 250 yards per second, so the gap between each vertical line on the graph is about four seconds. So, for instance, from 5,000 to 6,000 yards, the midpoint of the curve in there looks to be about 0.08; we'll call that pDetect. There's a corresponding probability that the plane won't be detected: 1 - pDetect = pUndetect = 0.92*. If you have a bunch of independent events, the probability that they'll all come out in a given way is their product. Our pUndetect happens in a four-second window from 5,000 to 6,000 yards, so it's logically the product of the probabilities that the airplane won't be spotted in each of those four seconds: pUndetect = (1 - pDetectPerSecond)^4 or, filling in a little and working it out... 0.92 = (1 - pDetectPerSecond)^4 4throot(0.92) = 1 - pDetectPerSecond about 0.98 = 1 - pDetectPerSecond pDetectPerSecond ~= 0.02 So, at 5,000 to 6,000 yards, there's about a 50% chance that an aircraft will be detected after 25 seconds, and it's almost certain that it'll be detected after 50 seconds. That passes the smell test for me. For this specific case (using the probability to detect a 400kt closing target during a certain 1,000 yard window as the probability that such a target will be detected in four seconds if flying head-on in that range window), you can just use this formula to convert to probability per second: pDetectPerSecond = 1 - 4throot(pDetectOver1000Yards) * It's possible to run the math that comes after this the other way around, I think, but it makes more intuitive sense to think about it as the probability of the event failing to happen in this case, and since I'm not a mathematician I can't tell you why**. ** Okay, so I asked a mathematician, and we came up with an answer that has to do with distributions and independence of probability. This is a fun case where the way you ask the question has a significant outcome on how easy it is to find the answer, so that's cool. Pretend that you're rolling a six-sided die, and if you see a six, you detect a target and stop rolling. Now, on any given roll, you have a one-in-six chance to roll a six, but since we don't keep rolling after we detect a target, the probability that we'll roll a six on, say, the third roll depends on the results of the previous two rolls: if we roll a six the first time, there won't be a third roll at all. That's the phrasing that asks about pDetect, with the wrinkle that we have to sum the probabilities for the first, second, and third times. Asking if we haven't rolled a six after the third roll contains the implicit assumption that we get three rolls in, because that's the case we're asking about. The answer to that question just happens to contain the answer to the other phrasing, too. It's actually a little more complicated, because summing the probabilities per second doesn't quite work out (if you assume that for second n, pDetectInThatSecond = pUndetectPerSecond^n * pDetectPerSecond), but I'm given to understand that's because working it out second-by-second is a piecewise approximation of a curve (the one described by a probability density curve).

Not really. Speed, altitude, boresight vector, and velocity vector would be enough, wouldn't it? The flight model can start with that, just like it does in an air start.

The R-27ER is very vulnerable to chaff right now—there's a thread around somewhere that says it'll only track a non-maneuvering, chaffing target about a quarter of the time. I think that's obvious bunk, and I hope it'll be fixed soon. The AIM-120 and F-15 is working as intended. You don't get a launch warning when an AIM-120 is launched at you, because it's an active missile instead of semi-active, and the launch platform therefore doesn't need to use a missile guidance radar mode.

Well, I was going to do a bunch of work tonight on my training range mission's air to air setup, but I guess that would be wasted effort now. :P

2. Static target objects are treated as buildings by the game (and the AI), so you need to use actual objects if you want the AI to respond correctly to commands, I think.