Fishbreath

Autopilot is actually pretty good, usually, at putting a bomb nearly in a pickle barrel. For accurate bombing in the Su-25T, there are a few things you'll need to keep in mind: 1) Be wings-level when you're about to drop. Bank introduces side-to-side errors. 2) Bomb from relatively low altitude. The Su-25T has no means of correcting for wind (if present), and CCRP is less precise than CCIP anyway*. 3) If you're attacking an area target, don't be afraid to ripple a few bombs at it, cluster bombs especially. The Russian cluster bombs are underwhelming, in my experience. 4) Killing a tank or a decent IFV is going to take nearly a direct hit. Honestly, I find that S-13 rockets are my favorite unguided anti-AFV weapon—you can hit about two targets per pair of pods, and a direct hit on a tank will either kill it or really, really hurt it. * CCIP, however, is broken right now, and has been broken since 1.2.5—the pipper doesn't drop as far as it should, so you have to be in a very steep dive to get it at all.

I saw a thread about a similar problem not long ago—it was a very windy Ka-50 mission, and the pilot was having his missiles go dumb because the wind pushed them out of the guidance matrix before the missiles could pick it up. Could that be happening here?

The bullseye marks a location called bullseye—militaries frequently give radio calls with a bearing and range from bullseye rather than from a specific platform. The mission maker has to set an airfield to your coalition for you to be able to rearm there.

'Cy' is Cyrillic 'Su'.

Just wanted to let folks know that I haven't forgotten about this—right before Christmas, I was wrapping up a Command Ops AAR about the northern shoulder of the Battle of the Bulge (here), and after Christmas I went on two weeks of vacation. I want to get something hammered out on this front this weekend; proof of concept, if nothing else.

Hold the trimmer down while changing attitude if you aren't in FD mode. The pitch change doesn't happen in the real helo because the pilots 1) trim almost constantly (there's a video around of a flight over Moscow; you can hear him tapping the trimmer almost constantly) and 2) don't have to recenter their stick when they do. In the sim, the pitch change happens because the Ka-50 autopilot can't distinguish external deviations from the set attitude (wind, change in ground effect, etc.) from control inputs, and we without FFB sticks can't trim as the real guys do.

On that note, sign me up for the MiG-21 pool!

This mod claims to do it.

It's the A-10A modeled to the same level as the Su-25T, not the A-10C with a detailed avionics model.

The smoke sticks to the plane while you're shooting, then falls back when you stop.

And vice-versa: the autopilot has no information on pilot inputs, so it tries to correct when you move the stick sans trimmer because it looks like any other deviation from desired flight parameters.

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.