howie87

Why does the steam sale undercut the DCS store? Also, does more of my money make it into the hands of the devs instead of steam's pocket if I purchase directly through ED? I'd be happier to pay a few quid extra if it does.

The ever popular Mi-8MTV2 Magnificent Eight for me please! And have a holly jolly Christmas!

So, are we going to get an even MORE deadly gun soon? :D Will this mean we can take out tanks from much further out if fixed?

I recommend learning in this order: 1) Principals of flight 2) Cockpit and essential systems familiarisation 3) Startup procedures 4) Ground handling 5) Takeoff 6) Trimming the airplane to maintain a heading, speed and altitude. 7) Landing (using your trimming skills!) 8) Circuits (takeoff, crosswind, downwind, base, final, go arounds and emergency procedures). 9) TAD navigation + EGI+ HARS backup mode 10) DSMS 11) Gun employment + PAC 12) Rockets + AIM-9 13) Dumb bombs (CCIP + CCRP) 14) ILS and TACAN navigation (IFR) 15) TGP employment 16) Guided weapons (laser + INS/GPS) 17) Mavericks 18) Countermeasures 19) Radios 20) AAR 21) Advanced CDU functions

+1 from me too!

Same here. Doing a clean install of Windows 7 onto my SSD also seems to have improved my framerate by about 10fps.

Good luck with your finals headspace. Stuka figured out the problem. Basically, if you have a geforce graphics card don't update to the latest drivers. "Nvidia network service" will stop TARS from connecting to DCS. Disable it and you're good to go. Only took 10 hours of blood, sweat and tears to find...

Any word on the Su-25T 6dof cockpit? Or the MiG-29's? Also, is the Su-33 going to get a 6dof pit eventually, to go with the new external model.

I am so bored of waiting for this... content development for DCS is so painfully slow. I wish people would stop developing for dying platforms like FSX and focus their efforts here instead.

I'm also not a fan of FC3. In my opinion, once you take the time to learn the systems in a study sim you can't go back to survey sims. The flexabilty just isn't there. I love being able to jump into the A-10C and enter my own flight plan and weapons profiles for example. I think there is a place for FC3 though, even though I just see it as a stepping stone for the F/A-18C and future DCS modules. I think when we have some high fidelity fighters I'll be more appreciative of FC3 though, just because we'll have more bandits to shoot at. Spending 20 minutes ramp starting an A-10C and flying 100 miles to the IP is less fun when you're getting shot at by SU-27's. We need something to even the playing field for the high fidelity guys. Give the guys in my squadron a solid multirole platform and I'm sure they'd be more than happy to trade blows with the FC3 crowd.

TARS is driving me crazy at the moment. It was working fine for ~4 months then one day last week it just decided not to. Whenever I launch DCS now, TS just says TARS is not running. Running TS 3.0.12 Windows user account control is off (no need to run as admin). I've deleted my DCS folder in saved games. TARS is installed and configured correctly in both the control panel and within TS (plugin active). Tried re installing TARS, then TARS + TS and finally TARS, TS and DCS - which didn't fix the problem. Another guy in my squadron had the same issue this week but a full DCS re install worked for him. Short of formatting my entire PC I don't know what else to do. I didn't even update anything. TARS literally just stopped working overnight. UPDATE: Even a complete format and clean install of Windows 7 hasn't fixed the problem. Absoutely out of ideas now and seriously annoyed.

Hope we get some videos of the AFM in action soon.

I'm interested to see how the ECM effectiveness has been improved. As far as I know ECM in DCS just causes radar to lose its lock?

I hope ED support the rift at launch... I'm looking forward to this device almost as much as EDGE and the Hornet. Hopefully in the next 1-2 years we'll have them all!

My point is that the AI knows who's friendly and who's not anyway. A simple IFF system for FC3 that let you know if a target on the radar is friendly or not seems like a fair compromise.

It is useful because you could identify friendly aircraft. How can you possibly say that's not useful?! Instead of a reasonable range how about a delay of a few seconds between a target appearing on radar and it being interrogated automatically? That would suffice for FC3. The AI already knows anyway so why shouldn't we?

I think we'll need it when we have a high fidelity fighter. The FC3 aircraft should have a simple system though. Even one that's always 100% accurate at identifying friendlies (from a reasonable range). It would make air combat less confusing.

But surely the AI 'knows' when aircraft are friendly? I guess the issue is getting the AI units to interrogate player controlled aircraft and fail to identify you as friendly if your IFF isn't set up correctly?

Maybe when we get the F/A-18C... ;)

Here's hoping they add more realistic ballistics to INS/GPS guided weapons soon. I'd like to see them actually accelerate towards a target!

Interesting. Didn't know that. Seems it made it onto the Tornado in DCS as well, as a stand in.

Yup... Should be GBU-24 I'm guessing.

Pretty much every bug I cared about looks like it's going to be fixed in this update. If it doesn't break anything else in the process, the A-10C will be just about perfect and the best it's ever been. This is a HUGE step in the right direction. All the extras, I can wait for. Ironing out the bugs has long been overdue and I'm happy to see ED respond to the concerns of the community on this one. Maybe 'everything' won't be fixed, but I'd rather see them trying to bring most modules up to a working standard instead of adding a load of content that just breaks the game even more. The little extras like engine smoke and better missile/SAM behaviour just make it even sweeter. Good job ED. Damn good job.

Wow, just reading up on the phoenix... 100 mile max range, 80,000ft cruise at Mach 5. That's one seriously bad ass missile. And the F-14 could track 24 targets at the same time, assign 6 priority targets and launch a full load of missiles almost simultaneously. Add a 135lb HE warhead to the mix (compared with 40lb for the AIM-120C) and it's hardly surprising that when other aircraft saw them on the RWR they used to just turn around and run away.

I noticed there's nothing mentioned about the A-10C's radios being fixed in the 1.2.7 patch notes. Hope this is just something they forgot to mention...