NoCarrier

That's because the engine ignition system will only work when your throttle is set to idle (or when you put the Engine Operate switch of the engine in question to IGN). So the sim's portraying the situation right. In my experience, though, the simulated throttle will only start responding when you start giving throttle input through your controller. Otherwise the throttle levers will be in the cut-off/idle position as the start-up script obviously expect them to be. So I'm guessing you have either the "synchronize cockpit controls with HOTAS controls at mission start" option enabled, or you're moving the throttle before the start-up script gets to engine ignition. It would be nice if the script could override your controller throttle position momentarily when it's trying to start up your engine. On the other hand, a lot of people would then accidentally start rolling because they didn't leave their throttle in idle. So pick your poison, I guess.

The GBU-38 is part of the JDAM family—it's a GPS guided weapon. The bomb will try to guide in on your SPI the moment you release it, so you'll need to put your SPI on the target you intend to bomb before you pickle. You also do not need to lase to guide the bomb in, although you might want to quickly lase before you drop to get an accurate SPI slant range measurement.

I, for one, welcome our new spidery robot overlords. :music_whistling:

Would be even cooler if the new fire control did dynamic lead too instead of having to use Kentucky windage on moving targets like in that video. But anything's better than nothing, I suppose.

There's a floodlight dial on the lighting panel that will allow you to adjust the floodlights from full bright all the way to off, just the way you want it. As far as I know, the Emergency Floodlight switch on the electrical panel is just there to help pilots find their way around a cold and dark cockpit.

The Sikorsky S-67 Blackhawk, the sleekest attack helicopter that never was.

Pro tip: if the tank's plastered with ERA, it's Russian... :smartass:

Long story short, you are not the first one to point this out. Most of us are well aware that the UH-1H's armament in the Huey module is not historically accurate, but Belsimtek apparently went ahead anyway on the basis that the H-model is more fun to fly, either as a slick or a gunship, than the B and C models, which are relatively underpowered. Also, I read somewhere that the Australians actually had an H-model gunship in service, so it's nowhere near outside the realm of possibility either.

Like Svend explained, there are no analog wheel brake axes among the Su-25T controls you can assign to your Saitek rudder pedals. The "wheel brake" command you found is a digital (i.e., on/off) one you can only assign to keys or buttons. Perhaps you can get around this with 3rd party software, but I don't know of any.

That being said, the AI's ground fire seems to be laser-accurate no matter the circumstances. I've seen a fellow player get nailed by a BMP-3 main gun round while he was trying to do a gun run on it—at 6,000 feet or thereabouts, at night. It's come to the point that I fear BMP-3s more than Shilkas or Tunguskas, because 23mm or 30mm strikes are survivable—100mm shells aren't. And let's not talk about the number of times some janky T-72 manages to get some 12.7mm hits on me. ("Go directly to homeplate; do not pass Go, do not collect $200.") I seem to remember someone stating this was because ground vehicles use the same logic to engage both air and ground targets, but I can't remember where I read that.

Eagle Dynamics fixed my order history and sent me my coupon code. For those Mi-8 early purchasers who haven't received a coupon code yet, it might pay to check whether the purchase was registered in your account at all.

Yes, please. Was this a trick question? I'm not sure. :music_whistling:

I've been checking my spam folder for the last month.

Still haven't received anything. I'm guessing it's because my purchase of DCS Mi-8 wasn't linked to my account, or so it seems. I started ticket #27552 two weeks ago but haven't heard back yet.

Put down a battery of, say, four SA-13s, make the first vehicle in that group a Dog Ear radar, and voila, the SA-13s will be alerted the moment a target enters the radar range of the Dog Ear (instead of having to acquire and track a target visually). Try it yourself. Put down a SA-13 battery and overfly it at night at, say, 10k feet. Don't forget to turn your nav lights off! You'll notice the SA-13s won't see you, and won't engage. Then make the first vehicle in that group a Dog Ear radar, and watch what happens when you try to overfly the battery again...

Then you forgot to put the CDU in Nav mode. This is done automatically when you start moving.

I confirm; I have the exact same issue. Note that the beam is only visible when the NVG is on and the beam is outside its field of view, though. The beam is not visible, like it should be, when NVGs are off. Come on, ED, how hard can it be to properly fix this?

EGI must have aligned for the full 4 minutes, your CDU must be in Navigation mode, you must have EGI mode selected on the NMSP (Navigation Mode Select Panel), and both pitch and yaw SAS must be engaged. Those are the four direct requirements for EAC. Let us know if you need help with any of the above.

I agree with you that something obviously has changed with the recent patches, but the P-51 will start up just fine if you open the throttle just a tiny amount. If I remember right, the start-up tutorial has you open up the throttle about one-quarter which is now way, waaaaay too much. Just a teeny-tiny amount will do it now; I've even managed to start the engine with the throttle fully closed. And be Johnny-on-the-spot with that mixture control lever; when you hear the engine catch, put that lever in the Run position immediately. And I do mean, immediately. Your window is about a second long.

I'm a self-professed jet jockey and I've read my Robert Shaw, thank you very much. You're just hating because you can't get to 30,000 feet in one minute like the jet jockeys can. :smilewink:

Haven't received a coupon yet. Can't find it in the spam folder either. Is ED still working on this?

Another thing that search radars do is share target data with air defense vehicles in the same group. A whole bunch of my multiplayer Warthog-flying friends got spanked by SA-9s and SA-13s one time after I added a Dog Ear radar to the vehicle group. They thought they were safe in the dead of night at 12,000 feet with only the DE search radar symbol on their RWR. The search radar and AD vehicles do need to be in the same group, though; data is not shared among different groups as far as I can tell.

Well, a BRAA call meant for you call will only make sense to pilots aware of your position, i.e. you and the others in your flight, while a Bullseye call will make sense to everyone aware of the current bullseye. For the price of a little mental gymnastics on your part, everyone gets to have good SA.

DCS World multiplayer is currently a disaster. It used to be slightly better with 1.2.4, but now we're warping all over the place again, even with just two or three players on the server. It's nigh unplayable, and its only saving grace is that I'm not CTD'ing anymore like I used to.

First of all—and this is the biggest reason why I think combat flight simulators will remain a niche genre—the potential audience is only a minority of a minority. How many gamers are potentially interested in playing a flight simulator of any kind? One in four? One in five? Whatever the exact number, it's bound to be a minority of the gaming community at large. Then, a large part of those interested people are just not into shooting things. They are perfectly content to load up their human mailing tube of choice in their modded-to-the-hilt X-Plane or FSX installations and fly from Heathrow to Frankfurt all day long. The flip side of that coin are the people who just want a no muss no fuss aerial deathmatch and "put the thing on the thing" and pull the trigger on another player, so they can claim their XP and be a little closer to the next tier of aircraft. Finally, we are left with a very small audience of medium to high fidelity combat flight simmers, who might or might not be interested in a high-fidelity WWII combat flight sim. Some of them might prefer a medium fidelity survey sim like Il-2 Sturmovik. Some of them are jet jockeys and not interested in flying WWII fighters at all. How large is the potential audience for a WWII combat flight sim of high fidelity? It can't be that large, not nearly as large as Ilya most likely thinks it is. Yes, I think it's true that in the 1990s, the audience for flight simulators was larger, relatively speaking. Gaming was much more of a geek hobby back then, and the PC market share was much larger. Hardware limitations prevented flight simulators from growing too complex, especially in the early 90s. This is the golden age of PC flight simming that many of us remember so fondly. In the early 90s, we had both Lucasfilm's Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe and Dynamix' Aces Over... series, which were fun and accessible. The diehard simmers played Falcon 3.0 or Tornado, but whatever sim was played, it was probably played with mouse and keyboard. I don't remember many gamers having joysticks for their PCs even then, when they were more widespread than they are now. Then came the sims that were more complex than before, and could only sorta-kinda be played with the keyboard, like 1942: The Pacific Air War and EF2000. Finally, we get to the classic sims of the late 90s that are being modded and played even today—Falcon 4.0 for the jet jockeys and Il-2 Sturmovik for the propheads. It's at this point that a joystick became damn near required. This requirement for a proper control set-up, and the growing complexity of the combat flight sim, finally made it a niche genre. I feel it's this additional hardware requirement that's the absolute biggest stumbling block for the flight sim genre today. Cheap HOTAS set-up—100 dollars. TrackIR 5—150 dollars. Set of rudder pedals—another 100 dollars. That's 350 dollars right there, a very steep investment for an interested gamer who's not even sure he's even going to like flight simming. I'm part of a large gaming community, and I've seen too many potential simmers try out DCS A-10C and be turned off by poor controls. They try the sim with an Xbox 360 controller or an old joystick if they have one, and they can't do it. With poorly suited controllers like those, the realistic flight modeling proves just too big a hurdle. As Ilya already admitted in a post around here, he doesn't know the answer to this problem. I think, as long as you'll need a 350 dollar setup before you can even hope to master the advanced flight modeling in modules like DCS P-51D, there'll never be a cheap solution to this problem. Maybe the flight sim will rise again when we can directly plug computers in our brain, but in the mean time, the smart solution would be to include some kind of autopilot functionality so that gamepad and simple joystick flyers can compete on a more or less equal footing. It's not an ideal solution—and yes, it's gamey—but it's better than the alternative, i.e. no customers at all. But Ilya, if you're reading this, I'll tell you this much: the problem isn't the lack of a manual. Screw the manual. Nowadays, everyone's hitting Google the moment they hit a snag. Just put everything on an informative and properly structured wiki, with hyperlinking and plenty of illustrations, animations and videos, and you'll be set as far as the manual goes. Well designed training scenarios are nice, I suppose, but what we're really lacking in all commercial combat flight sims are multiplayer training tools! I'm talking about ACMI-like functionality, and multi-crew functionality that allows you to see a trainee's input. Design a training syllabus, get a a cadre of RRG-sanctioned volunteer instructors together, and start instructing. Or leave instructing to the many on-line virtual squadrons out there on the internet, but robust multiplayer is the way forward and all flight sim developers had better embrace it! There's this whole on-line community of enthusiasts out there, ready and willing to start instructing the newcomers. Give them the tools to do this, and press ED to fix the multiplayer side of DCS World posthaste. The current state of DCS multiplayer is nothing less than a disgrace.