AndyJWest

There are forested areas on the SA mainland part of the map.

Take a look at the satellite images on Google Maps. There are a few clearly intentionally-grown trees next to human settlements etc, but nothing else.

Yup. I had the same issue at Port Stanley, in a Harrier.

Cichlidfan was definitely one of the good guys. I got a free Huey from him, which I'll be taking out for a memorial flight...

There's a table of TACAN frequencies here, if this helps: https://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Instrument_Landing_System_(ILS)_Frequencies

For any given set of conditions (weight, IAS, MACH etc) there will be an optimum sweep angle. It is the job of the auto control to match this as best it can. I'd be surprised if a human pilot could do significantly better.

I'd guess that they put brightness and contrast knobs there in the real aircraft because they needed adjustment depending on conditions...

It seems readable enough to me if you adjust the contrast and brightness.

The castoring behaviour seems a little odd to me too. It isn't usually a problem on an airfield, but can get awkward quickly on a carrier with any obstructions at all. Particularly with the sort of relative wind over the deck needed for launches at high weights, since it tends to turn into the wind even when you don't want it to. Modelling the guy with the tiller clearly isn't practical, but it did occur to me that a (hopefully) relatively simple fix might be to add some sort of 'straighten nose wheel' command that could only be activated when the aircraft was stopped. This might at least simulate the deck crew helping out with steering to some extent, without making everything too easy.

Or at least, they thought it was.

The left rudder pedal is invisible under night lighting: see screenshot: Latest open beta version.

The quest for further realism in DCS never ends...

Ice? Not sure if it's modelled, but IRL this can happen in the right conditions, e.g. descending through cloud. There is a pitot heater switch on the left forward console.

If that is her first heli sim flight, I'd say she's a natural.

Or you can plot it with a compass and ruler, and measure the resultant angle with a protractor, like any competent old-fashioned ships navigator should be able to do. Don't need maths to do trigonometry.

As I understand it, a real-world Hornet can only be catapulted with external tanks if they are either entirely full, or completely empty. I'd guess that is the reason they are done that way.

A few Erks may have been Oiks, but it wasn't a requirement...

The T-45 mod needs the Visual C runtime installed, apparently, that might be the one needed. I think 'vc_redist.x64.exe' from here is the relevant one. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads-2647da03-1eea-4433-9aff-95f26a218cc0

Forum polls are generally a poor way to determine the view of forum contributors, and an even poorer way to determine the views of the wider customer base. From the numbers participating, it seems self-evident that most people who will have seen the poll weren't sufficiently interested in the idea to consider it worth voting, one way or the other. All the poll really tells us is that currently there are maybe 15 people who might participate in a hypothetical subscription service.

It doesn't really say anything about helping with shooting blind. Instead, this seems to relate to setting the guns up so they converge directly ahead of the aircraft 'velocity vector' under specific conditions. If you adjust the guns to their highest available angle, it will give a marginal improvement to visibility, but at the expense of making aiming harder under other conditions. Which aircraft is this manual for?

If the total adjustment available is only 21 mils (less than 1.2 degrees), then at the convergence distance of 300 yards, this equates to an available vertical movement of about 3 ft either way from the default setting. Not insignificant, but not enough to cure 'shooting blind' problems in most cases, I suspect.

It may be working better than it was, but it still has issues. As for rewind, I don't think that is possible without a fundamental rewrite. As I understand it, track files essentially 'play through' a mission, and consist of data on the initial situation, followed by user inputs. If that is all the data available, it simply isn't possible to 'rewind' to arbitrary points in the recording.

If anyone wants to 'support DCS', they can buy more stuff. If they already own all the stuff, they can still buy more, and gift it to someone else. As for 'bonus content', creating new material and then only making it available to a subset of your customer base is almost always a poor business decision. If it is worth having, sell it like anything else.

In answer to the obvious question, 'doesn't that hurt?' I can definitively state that nobody knows, but most likely, yes, it does... From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodpecker

This seems to be a result of the way the scratchpad on the UFC probably works. It appears to be a segmented display, rather than a bitmapped device. Only the first two possible characters are alphanumeric, and the remaining seven are numeric only, according to NATOPS. The 'A's or 'R's are '8's with the bottom segment unlit. The option display windows to the right have a different segment layout, so can show more characters.