roadrabbit

This is a fundamental thing: think of IAS is the effect of the air on the aircraft. TAS is the speed at which air particles are passing the aircraft in flight. As you go higher air density drops and in space is zero. However you can imagine being at 40,000 feet, where air density is very low. To maintain flight you have to travel very fast to achieve the required lift for level flight. Thus your TAS would be high. However your IAS would be very low in comparison, and could (in the earlier days of flight) reduce to your aircraft's stall speed. Think of lift being produced by the number of air particles passing over the wing - TAS is the speed of their passing. If you want to follow this further, google "coffin corner" which is relevant.

Should have said: the A-10C Hog is my fire loving friend. I agree there are lots of failures to choose from, but 4 engine fires in 8 flights??? I wonder if it's the way I fly :music_whistling:

I agree with the first part of the sentence above, but what if the mechanism to shut off the fuel via the Fire Handle has been damaged? Then pulling the Fire Handle might not shut the engine down. In any event, as I said, it is possible that the engine fire could extinguish just by putting the thrust lever to Cut-Off, which would be a good move. Long term damage to the engine could possibly be minimised and no-one would have to clean the engine of extinguishant (depending on what was used, of course). A possible example here would be a ruptured fuel line on the engine side of the cut-off valve. In my experience, if something can possibly happen, then one day it will. :thumbup:

Er ....... if you mean to Cut-Off, it just might, actually. After all, what is the most likely thing to be on fire? Yup, you guessed - fuel. So if you cut the supply of fuel to the fire it could possibly go out. Possibly, because the fuel cut-off itself could be damaged and so be part of the actual cause of the fire. So the designers give a second means of cutting off the fuel supply - the Fire Handle. I suspect that pulling the Fire Handle also arms the extinguisher system too - ready if needed. Incidentally if the engine fire is raging and the engine is still giving power, it is a good idea to shut the engine down anyway. If you don't, then the extinguisher could be blown straight through the engine with reduced effectiveness.

In order to introduce a bit more realism into the simulation I thought I would check the 'Random Faults' box. Having now had 4 Engine Fires and Failures in 8 flights I am thinking I've had enough. Is there a way to adjust the failure rate to something a bit more realistic? Please don't tell me that it IS realistic ;) but a 50% fail rate does seem a little bit excessive.

:huh: Yeah, but who are you fooling? Only yourself. You know you 'died' and always will have that at the back of your mind. Why not start again with a new avatar and see how far you can get? This way you will have a measure of whether you are actually improving or not. A good job the 'enemy' can't resurrect any of their pilots :music_whistling:

:noexpression: Hmmm ...... I'm not sure. If I was to upgrade to an SSD hard drive I suspect my load times would be greatly improved. I know it is not a great test of computer performance, but my Microsoft internal performance score is 5.9 and the limit is my data transfer rate of my hard disk. All other scores are 7.6 and above. One day I shall upgrade the hard drive but, to be honest, I am very happy with what I've got at present. The way I see it is that DCS World is a very complex and full simulation - waiting for a short time (less than 2 minutes) for it to load is not a problem for me.

:thumbup: Yes - that's what my researcher at nVidia told me - it depends on two factors: the amount of RAM your computer hardware can handle, and the amount of RAM your Microsoft Windows operating system (OS) can handle. The figures he gave were: Windows 7 (64 Bit): Home Basic - 8 GB; Home Premium - 16 GB; Professional -192 GB; Enterprise - 192 GB and Ultimate - 192 G. Incidentally, silly to ask, but I regularly clean my PC with CCleaner. I have used this program for some years now, ever since the huge improvement I got after first using it. With all the various upgrades to DCS World and any other updated programs there is a lot of crap left behind. CCleaner does it for me - could it help others? PS Love the vapour trails off the wing tips :D

My experience is that RAM has been the main problem. I have just upgraded to Windows 7 Professional, which means that I can now use ALL of my 24 GB installed DDR3 1600 RAM. Load times are 55 secs from initial load of DCS World; 1 min 55 secs to load first Mission; 52 secs to load second and subsequent Missions. The result is now I get NO stutters and my frame rate has doubled to 80 fps. I have now been able to upgrade to Version 1.2.6 of DCS World with no problems whatsoever. Like others I had gone back to Version 1.2.5 because of problems I was having. Note that I do NOT have an SSD drive and I am still getting flawless results. All my scenery sliders are out to max as well - I am still getting used to all the stuff I was missing. Lesson - get more RAM! It's a whole new world out there ...:D

:thumbup: Yes - I have already found out, but thanks! I have now also installed Windows 7 Professional - see the thread in this forum for details. Wish I had known sKateZilla's two cents worth before I started that little run-around. :doh: I now have ALL my RAM operational

:) Having found out that Windows 7 Home Premium will only use a maximum of 16 GB of RAM, I decided to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional. I went to the Microsoft site and bought an Upgrade Key from Ireland (usable in United Kingdom). Yes, it was cheaper elsewhere, but I didn't want any problems (:lol:). Then I went to 'Start' and began the Windows Anytime Upgrade process. Everything went fine, I even entered the e-mailed 'Key' and the upgrade started. Then - disaster! A message appeared saying that I had entered a key that was not correct for my system and that I should enter another key. Hmmmmm! I tried again with the same result. I then went to Amazon and looked up some product reviews which were alarming, to say the least. I, too, tried to use Microsoft websites, but as we all know, these are pretty useless. I even e-mailed my computer maker/assembler, but it was late. In the meantime I downloaded the latest Windows updates and installed them. When finished it asked me to restart my computer to activate them. I selected 'Restart'. :D :D :D Guess what? A message came up saying "Upgrade in process - do not switch off your computer"! Sure enough, the upgrade took place and the computer restarted, and I now have Windows 7 Professional installed :thumbup:

Taking this a bit further, I am using a GTX590 and running three 24 inch monitors. I have two questions: 1. I have 24 GB of RAM installed, but only 16 GB usable: why the limit? Would another GTX 590 in SLI allow the use of more RAM? (Do I really know what I am talking about? - Probably not! :D ) 2. I am thinking of changing my HD to a SSD - what are recommendations?

A new driver installation for my nVidia GTX590 fixed the problem!

Thank you Skall! A brilliant over-view for all of us new to missions and campaigns. This should be a 'sticky' for all noobies.

Hi, again! It's not a proper answer, but they might well do so and use true north in eastern bloc countries. The problem is that it could just be an error within the DCS World simulation. To fully answer the question you need someone who has used Russian produced aviation charts to enter the thread OR one of the DCS developers to give their views. As an interesting side-piece, even the runways at London Heathrow did historically have the incorrect designator for while - they were still being called 28L and 28R when the 'rounding' up or down process would have made them 27L and 27R.

When I flew in Eastern Europe, Russia and China we used 'western' produced maps and charts: Aerad or Jeppesen. These had all directions given in degrees magnetic. As described by others, this means that they had to be reprinted on a regular basis to keep up with changes in magnetic variation. We never saw eastern bloc produced maps - so I don't even know if they were ever produced in English. I suspect that the DCS maps are 'translations' from eastern bloc maps, but in any event, being in degrees true cancels the need for continuous updating within the DCS World arena. At the end of the day all maps are constructed by reference, at some point, to lines of latitude and longitude, i.e. the construction reference is true north. Magnetic variation is then added to 'directional' lines because, prior to inertial navigation systems, the only on-board directional reference was a magnetic compass based one. Does this help to answer your question?

:cry: It is very simple - check out: ...... Eagle Dynamics>DCS World>Doc>Charts Use the 'VAD charts' specified 'A-10C'. All these charts use Magnetic North as the reference, which is what you should be putting in your OBS track (or 'course' if you are a North American :lol:) box on your HSI. As mentioned earlier some other charts in DCS Worlduse True North. When I first started out in DCS World I was also unaware of all that I had downloaded - its all there, just waiting to be found!

Agreed - I find that setting up the orbit with the orbit centre-point fixed on a selected visual ground reference just ahead of the wing works very well. Then just adjust speed to maintain the reference point's relative position: if it moves back towards the wing slow down, if it moves forwards away from the wing, speed up. Practice and you will be amazed at how good you become! :thumbup:

Virtual Beers are on the House! :beer: Brilliant! Well, not brilliant actually, just sooooooo much better. Very many thanks to all who have taken part in this thread - it was worth pursuing to the very successful outcome. I can see clearly, now, etc etc ..... So now ...

Hmmmm ..... I have done exactly as instructed, but sadly it has not changed anything on my set-up. When I 'unrared' the file it gave me a .dds file of 171 KB size which I copied to desktop, then to C:\ ......... DCS World\Bazar\TempTextures as described. Is there anything I need to change or do to the .dds file, or just leave it as received? As I said earlier, could it be that having 3 monitors has an effect? The lovely pictures enclosed by HungaroJET are using a resolution of 1920 x 1080. My resolution is currently 5760 x 1080.

I love the "you can open these ....... " :( I only have Photoshop Elements and GIMP was way beyond me when I tried using it for something else. Sadly I need leading very gently through anything like that. Does 'Elements' take the nVidia DDS plug-in?

Here is what I want to change: http://imgur.com/QDjlJJS

Yes - I am using Notepad ++. I have tried, and succeeded, in modifying the graphics file referred to previously. My changes had no effect on the PAPI glide-path indicator lights. I shall therefore have to search elsewhere for the relevant <lights> to try and adjust. It occurs to me that the effect may be due to using three monitors - but even so, there should be a relatively simple mod which could do the trick.

So ....... I decided to give it a try. Unfortunately when I tried to <Save> my modded graphics lua I got the message <Access Denied>. I have put <Run as Administrator> in all places I could find - but no joy. What am I missing? I take the point about not necessarily the correct lights, too. Of course, all my runway and aircraft nav lights have this 'halo' effect around them. Not a problem for standard runway edge, nav lights etc, but a real pain as I said when trying to read the PAPI lights. I shall look elsewhere as suggested, but I still need to know how to <save> a modified .lua file

PAPI Lights Brightness Adjustment The folder where the reference to lights resides is: C:\Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World\Config\graphics and scrolling down (when opened in Wordpad) there are three seperate sections under 'Camera': Low, Medium and Far. Each section has the entry 'Lights' within it, and the figures, in brackets, following the word 'Lights' are: Low Lights (50, 10000) Medium Lights (100, 30000) Far Lights (200, 80000) However, in the 'read.me' file attached it warns that if I edit this file directly I will lose my changes after each and every update - a pain. It suggests creating an 'autoexec.cfg' file in either of two locations. I would like to experiment with the numerical values of the lights as described, but have never set up an 'autoexec.cfg' file before (do I just write it out in Wordpad and save it inside the 'config' or the 'graphics' folder?)and would like some advice as to how to do it, and whether it is advisable. Will I screw up everything if I do so, and how do I get out of it if I do? :helpsmilie: