Fishbreath

Cluster bombs in general seem a little underwhelming right now, both the American ones and the ones off of the Su-25 series. Hitting a truck with multiple PTAB-1Ms, or the bomblets out of the CBU-87, and failing to kill it seems a little off to me.

I approve of the engine fire. That seems apropos.

I hopped on for a little while earlier, and flew on (well, near; my formation flying is not a fully developed skill) Vedexent's wing for a run at the Abramses. After taking a Chaparral to the tail and mistaking my 'unlock target' button for my push to talk button twice in a row (not my finest hour), I ended up making a belly landing at Mineralnye Vody with no hydraulics. Not a bad afternoon, all told.

I'd like to see this fixed, too. I'm planning on introducing two friends to DCS via the Su-25T, and it's much harder to work on bombs with CCIP being so hard to get to.

ARMs do benefit from launch authorization override if launched high and fast. They have a little more range than the -25T's computer thinks they do.

One thing about the Su-25 vs. the Su-25T is that the Su-25, while having 1000kg less fuel, is so much better on thrust to weight that the fuel it has lasts longer. Normal flight for me in the Su-25 is about 80-90% engine RPM, which yields a reasonable cruise and enough power for maneuvering in a target area. The -25T needs north of 90% engine RPM in most circumstances, I find.

Not as far as I know (limitation of FC3-level aircraft).

I might hop on a little after work today. I was going to join in last night, but a few of my college pals roped me into Planetside for a while.

I'm not sure if there's a real process. I occasionally see references to a bug tracking system, but I'm not sure if that's for testers only. If it is, keep bumping the thread, or maybe start a new one with a more descriptive title and link back here for the previous discussion/research; someone will see it eventually. There's not generally a ton of acknowledgement when they do. Alternatively, one of these upcoming patches is supposed to be the start of open betas before the final release, so that might open up a ticket tracking system to the general public.

That last part is definitely true, and I don't claim to have any particular insight into the codebase, either. In general, I tend to come down on the conceptually simpler, 95% solution for just about any problem, so that's some of it.

Calling a probabilistic system a 'hack' is mischaracterizing it. It's a perfectly suitable system for simulating fragmentation. What people call a 'proper system' is what I, as a software engineer, would call a hack—it's cool, but it's vastly overcomplicated and very likely underperformant compared to the alternatives. If it does turn out that they almost have a full mathematical simulation done, fine. It gets us to the same place, and that's all I really care about in the end. I still think it's sandblasting a soup cracker, and that the effort would have been better spent elsewhere. I'm not trying to demonize the devs. I'm definitely railing against a certain class of people on this forum who refuse to accept anything that isn't a completely perfect one-to-one simulation when that's never what we're actually going to end up with.

This thread delivers. There are three inescapable facts here: 1) The current bomb and rocket damage model is quite bad, because it's not even beginning to account for one of the two ways in which exploding things do damage. 2) A full-on fragmentation model is probably limited in feasibility, given the potential for really intense scenarios like rippled cluster bombs. A simplified one might work well enough in all cases, but either way, actually keeping track of fragments would be gobs of work, and I'd rather the various engineers work on other stuff. 3) A probabilistic model is, I hate to break it to the rivet-counters, just about as good. A LoS check and a chance for a target to experience fragmentation damage will look, to you, just like modeling fragments individually. You won't be able to tell the difference, it'll run better than the alternative, and it'll get done about ten times faster. When it comes to simulation, 'good enough' is not an insult. None of the aircraft we have yet are perfectly modeled, and none of them ever will be. We're not modeling the individual air molecules interacting with the quantum-level surfaces of the wings, and we wouldn't gain anything if we did. Additional realism in the process only goes so far toward producing additional realism in the outcome. Saying that an approximated fragmentation model is worse than no fragmentation model at all is just silly—it's like saying that a simple flight model with scripted spins is worse than a simple flight model with no spins at all, because neither of them is an advanced flight model. I would much rather have some sort of fragmentation damage modeled in six months than wait five years for a whole new damage system and individual fragment modeling that'll probably run like crap anyway.

I might be up for it.

You can actually use the Shkval at night without NVGs. Turn brightness all the way down and contrast all the way up, then turn brightness up until you can see something on the screen. It's basically just a contrast stretch. This wouldn't work for real, since there's noise in the actual system that isn't modeled. That said, I don't want this fixed, even though it isn't realistic. Honestly, we're never going to get a Ka-50N or a Ka-50Sh, so on those grounds I definitely don't want to lose what rudimentary night attack capability we have. I'd love a FAC that can use the datalink, though, as neat as the JTAC mod is.

That wasn't exactly the main point of my post—I'll be happy for a Su-27 AFM, but I'd much prefer the Su-33 AFM first, because the SFM is good enough for me in BVR and dogfights, and the improved landing dynamics are so much more important for carrier landings than runway landings.

Because of the canards. That said, I'd say high-quality landing physics are much, much more important for the Su-33 than the Su-27.

This makes me think that bomb explosion graphics are both undersized and too short in duration. Some of that will be hard to model—it seems unlikely that DCS will model the wind picking up dust and keeping it aloft in the near future—but it's definitely not the case that I'd consider a general purpose bomb a very good marking tool in our simulation.

I'd definitely be there too. Even flying a Su-27 or a MiG-29, if it's 1989 and there's OPFOR in the air. It's a fun scenario, and if you squint at it Georgia isn't entirely unlike Germany. :P

Afghanistan featured Su-25s and didn't need CAP and SEAD. You'd have trouble making a Su-25 squadron without support in a Cold War environment, yes, but that's not the only possible battlefield.

You might try going back to 1.2.4 or so (see this sticky)—the earliest version of 1.2.4 was released on April 30th, which is just inside your window for the videos. If the CCIP pipper falls further then, you might have a case for getting it changed back. I was flying the Su-25T earlier, having been in other stuff for a while, and it did seem like it was harder to drop dumb bombs CCIP than it used to be. Edit: here's a showing the pipper at the very bottom of the HUD, from 'six months ago'. This appears to be before the last HUD fix, where they put the pylon indicators for dumb bombs back in. Could it be that they changed (accidentally or intentionally) the bomb release pipper so that it didn't cover the pylon indicators?

I fly the Ka-50 and the Flankers, too, although the Su-25s are just as near to my heart as the Shark.

Confirmed—in the vanilla Su-25, when the laser is on and the gunpods are depressed below boresight, the weapons control system knob turns to 'PROG', and the gun pods track the point at which they were initially fired. When the laser is off, the weapons control system knob turns to 'FIKS' and the guns stay at a fixed down angle. In the Su-25T, when the laser is on, the Shkval is off, and the guns are depressed, the weapons control system knob turns to 'PROG', but the guns don't track. Turning the laser off moves the knob to 'FIKS', and the guns behave in the same way. With the Shkval on, the guns work more or less as expected, although I had trouble making them hit with autopilot on, and the guns weren't firing a full burst before cutting off. (The autopilot may have been introducing pitch changes faster than the guns could correct for them.)

I don't know if I fly enough, single- or multiplayer, to make me a good member, but I do enjoy the Russian stuff.

If you're talking about videos like , that's the AGM-130.

In the clickable cockpit, right-click turns off switches and turns dials in the direction opposite left-click, and I don't think that's a mappable function, so you're probably running into a hard-coded limitation.