esb77

It's worth noting that unless values have been radically changed while I wasn't paying attention, the range and speed values in Zabuza's lengthy list do not reflect the values used in DCS World. Some are close to the same, others are off by margins that I'd estimate go up to 30 to 50%. The short and sweet version is: 58s or 25MPUs for long and medium range radar SAM units. 25MLs, Vikhrs, 29s (either variety), unguided munitions, and good tactical and flying skill for all the short range stuff. Haven't tested 25MLs recently, they used to be by far the best for destroying short range air defenses, but they may no longer be very good at it. In the test version of 1.2.7 Su-25T pilots were saying very uncomplimentary things about the 25ML's performance with the new flight model. Not sure how things wound up in the final version. Vikhrs are a more or less equivalent substitute, and superior in some ways (flight speed, payload capacity), they're just a bit harder to get launch authorization and standoff range is a bit less. I should hop out of my Mi-8 for long enough to check out how the AG missiles are behaving nowadays. Health advisory: stay at least 9 to 12 km away from any area you're not sure is clear of good air defenses. If you're not sure, then you'd better assume that they're there and ready to shoot. 23mm cannons do not count as good air defenses unless they swarm like locusts and have radar guidance, watch out for the 30+ mm stuff though.

Well, if launch range on expert ai Iglas is now 3-4 km that's a nice change from a pilots point of view. Last time I did a serious MANPAD range test 8-9 km was the minimum safe distance. That probably would have been sometime in versions 1.2.4 to 1.2.6, I don't remember exactly. Anyone tested other skill levels yet? Used to be that launch distances were up to .5 to .7 km different per skill level setting. Lower skill levels would launch closer to the edge of the missile's envelope and didn't reload as quickly as I recall. Someone complained about it earlier in the thread, but until they have a collision/line-of-sight model implemented for vegetation, aircraft v. MANPADS engagements will be lacking from a realism perspective. Of course, the real solution to SAM logic problems is to improve Combined Arms enough to give players decent launch control. Well, in multiplayer at any rate.

Dip bags for firefighting first I hope. Cool off some of the burning wreckage around airfields in multiplayer. :smilewink: Or just really spread out the puddles of burning jet fuel.

As others said, trim reset options are either manual, or using the level flight mode. Do you NEED to re-trim frequently? Not if you keep a hand on the stick most of the time. On the other hand if you want to keep the stick at a neutral position you'll need to trim, and I suspect that most 25T pilots trim with the autopilot rather than doing it manually. It usually takes 5 to 10 seconds to get really well balanced if you're not maneuvering too much to begin with. Learn all the auto-pilot modes well if you have the time. They can be very useful in setting up ground attack and bombing runs once you've mastered them.

Possibly I just don't pay attention but I don't recall this as an issue. That said, in a lot of the higher fidelity aircraft there is a brief test mode when you power avionics on, and alarms and warning lights will go off. Some do it automatically, for others you have to push a test button. The idea is that before you take off it's important to know if your warning systems are functioning properly. On the Su-25, you definitely want the AoA indicator to function properly. Could of course also be a minor bug in the program or in the mission file.

Also be aware that when landing airplanes wet, snowy, or icy weather settings make the runways and taxiways somewhat slippery. Landing in strong crosswinds can be . . . interesting.

If the pilot is one of the few hundred most skilled pilots in the world, is using a state of the art aircraft from a manufacturer that favors high thrust engines and extreme maneuverability, is carrying no weapons load, is carrying a light fuel load, and is willing to take on a much higher risk of a fatal crash than any responsible military or commercial pilot would under normal conditions, then yes. It's easier to get astonishing results if you know how to load the dice ahead of time.

As a beginner there are two strategies for safe VRS avoidance that work pretty reliably even before you get the feel for the helicopter. 1. Run on (aircraft style) landing with enough airspeed so you never loose ETL before touchdown. About 50 km/h in the Mi-8. If you're worried about a FARP not having enough room for your skill level, consider looking to see if there's a safe landing area nearby that you land at and then hover taxi to the FARP. 2. High altitude (say at least 100m above highest obstruction) transition to hovering flight. Gives you enough time and space to get back out of VRS if you get into it during the transition. You have to be gentle with the controls after you've made the transition, it may not work at high altitudes, high temperatures, high humidity, and high helicopter cargo loadings. It's also very hard on the engines in real life if you do it a lot.

There is a left hydraulic system and a right hydraulic system, and they are separated for redundancy. Some of the more demanding systems will not function with less than about 50% total hydraulic capacity, the landing gear for example. So having one system at 100% works or both at 50% works. I've flown with one system completely dead many times. If you notice damage to the hydraulics it's a good idea to get the plane configured however you want it for the rest of the flight, because once you loose too much fluid either controls will not operate, or even worse, can get stuck partially or unevenly deployed. Key systems are landing gear, flaps, and airbrakes. Landing gear is the most demanding on the hydraulics system, but if you're far from base you need to consider if deploying the gear before you loose pressure will cause too much drag to get back to base safely. Belly landings tend to cause fire and then explosion, unless you've dumped fuel so that you land with empty tanks. Air brakes are not advised if you have severe hydraulic damage. You can wind up with one brake closed and one stuck open, which causes terrible problems with yaw control. Flaps are less of a problem if they deploy unevenly, the yaw and roll are annoying but not a big problem. Maneuvering setting gives enough extra lift so that you can do a slightly faster than normal landing, but is easier on fuel reserves if you're trying to get a damaged plane back to base with full flaps. Most of the time if you get hit with an anti-air missile both hydraulics systems will be damaged. That's pretty much what the warhead on those missiles are designed to do. When I see only one system go down it's usually from AA artillery. The damage is less spread out and thus less likely to hit both lines.

The inelegant workaround is to make each vehicle it's own group. There's probably a better way to do it though. I know I've flown missions where with group dispersal on, after a few minutes of not being fired on the survivors of a convoy will regroup and continue to their next waypoint. I'd try moving this thread to the mission builders' forum. You'll likely get good answers there.

In theory, perhaps. In historical operational practice, no. In DCS no. The AI Su-25SMs I think have the widest options in terms of munitions in DCS as far as Su-25 variants go.

In DCS v 1.2.6 the default stick position is centered. If it's out of center either some sort of configuration file is out of whack, or your control device is sending it a signal that is causing the displacement. Some flight stick hardware can do this if everything isn't centered when you plug it in/start the computer/start the game. The way the trim system works is, whatever position the stick is in when you hit trim, the helicopter flies as if that position is the new 'zeroed' position. So unless you have a force feedback stick (that's working properly), after you trim you then need to center your stick. Otherwise you have the input from your trim setting AND the input from holding your stick in the position where you hit the trim button. It's not a perfect system, but they needed to do it in a way that works for both FFB and non-FFB hardware.

Haven't investigated closely on the 25, but with the 25T the dancing pipper effect is probably an effect of how the laser is modeled. If you want to make it really jump around, do a shallow dive over water. Fooling around with it, the conclusion that I came to is that the rangefinder does not like it when the laser is illuminating a highly reflective surface at a low angle of incidence. Low angle of incidence is probably the primary culprit. Makes sense to me, because those are the conditions where relatively little of the light is going to be reflected back at the plane, so the laser dot would be difficult for the sensor to see. I suspect the jumping is from the sensor getting brief periods of adequate reflection for a reading, and then loosing it again. So as far as the HUD output is concerned, it's the same effect as cycling the laser on and off several times per second. Conclusion: in a shallow dive with laser range finder on, pipper jumping around on the HUD is probably working as intended. It is what you would expect if you took out a physics book and calculated out the optics of the signal intensity available to the plane's sensor. Any laser rangefinder giving realtime output would display this behavior in similar situations. You could do a software layer on top to smooth the output by guessing what distance returned is the real distance, but getting it to reliably guess correctly would be tricky if you didn't have some other input to compare against. Oh, forgot to mention another bit. Targets on or near ridgelines. If your lasing dot is wandering back and forth over the ridge you will be getting wildly varying range readouts, but they will be accurate. Depending on the geometry this can happen with extremely small changes in angle, like for instance vibration of the airframe. This would all be much easier for people to see and understand if the laser was a bright visible light system instead of an IR one where we can't see what the dot is doing.

Yeah, the Russian cluster munitions seem to work better on soft targets. It helps to use the PTAB 2.5 submunitions instead of the 1.0 ones if you're targeting armor. The down side is that you get a lot fewer of them, so it becomes harder to land multiple ones on a target.

So what would you say does resemble a SEAD aircraft if not an attack aircraft capable of reliably landing guided standoff munitions on air defense units? A Cessna with a cheerful multilingual person broadcasting on a powerful radio asking the enemy to, "Please don't shoot us."? The ability to destroy air defenses is the foundation on which the ability to scare incompetent opponents into not shooting is based. DEAD is a subset of SEAD. You can suppress without destroying in some cases, but destroying is a very reliable suppressant, it makes the shooting stop. In DCS world, unless a mission designer goes to heroic efforts, destruction is the only way to suppress air defenses. Well, that or using the mission editor to set them as non-hostile. I'd also note that the MANPADS are visible chiefly due to merciful mission designers sticking them in the middle of fields at least .5km from anything remotely resembling cover. Stick 'em in a forest and they have it better than in real life. Not only are they almost impossible to find, but they can shoot missiles at you through the trees. In real life, they'd at least have to see and shoot around the trees

At 1:33 in the video it's a humpbacked single seater Su-25, that's characteristic of a T or TM variant. Also there's a Shkval screen shown in the gun camera footage when they're using a laser guided missile to take out a vehicle, and I'm not sure that any variants other than the T/TM have the Shkval. At 1:46 you can't really tell what the dorsal fuselage looks like, but it does have the external 30mm cannons and the IR jammer in the tail, both of which would also be consistent with a T variant. Later on you see a lot of Su-25s that are definitely not either of the T variants. Of course it's a whole bunch of short clips edited together, so who knows how much is actual conflict footage versus stock footage spliced in. It's likely that a lot of the Su-25 footage with HUDs shown is actually from S, SM or other modernizations that are more common than the T variants. You wouldn't want to risk losing your most advanced versions when there's no prospect of replacing combat losses.

In the Su-25T CCRP is not for guided munitions, the Shkval is. CCRP is for low level bombing with either: a ripple release of many bombs from multiple release racks a ripple release of cluster bombs use of the sub-munition dispenser pods or retarded anti-runway bombs. If you want to have any hope of killing things you need to be about as low as you can get without self fragging, flying level, and get lined up on the target fairly early so that you don't have to do flight path corrections as you near the release point. CCRP is very vulnerable to maneuvering induced error and wind drift, it also has mediocre inherent accuracy. If possible you want to drop a plane load of bombs rather than a pylon load of bombs when using CCRP.

Two other tips. Don't increase the collective too quickly. The heli takes a bit to react to the increased main rotor torque on the airframe, and you take a little while to react with the rudder after you see the heli reacting. Taxi and takeoff like an airplane. Take advantage of those wheels on your landing gear, it's great for a beginning heli pilot. Keep collective below 5 degrees taxiing, taxi to the runway. Steer using rudder, control speed with wheel brakes. Get lined up on the runway, release brakes, increase collective slowly to about 7 degrees, and have pitch neutral to slightly forward. When you get to an airspeed of about 60 km/h or so slowly increase collective until you take off. You'll also need a little bit of cyclic stick (to the right I think) to counteract the tendency to roll. May feel a bit like learning to juggle, keeping track of multiple things at the same time. Definitely an easier way to learn to take off for most people compared to a vertical takeoff. Landing airplane style is also a good idea, especially if you don't want a lot of first hand experience with VRS.

The Su-25 and A-10 are similar in combat role, but not in endurance. Why? Take a quick look at the airframes. The Su-25 is built to be fast, the A-10 is built to be maneuverable at very low speeds. That's even before you account for engine differences. Same sort of wing shape difference you'd see between a falcon and a soaring bird like an eagle. You should be able to get about 600km range at sea level with 2900 kg of fuel and a full weapons load, based on in game testing I did in version 1.2.4. Perhaps a bit more range depending on how you fly. That's with throttle set at 90% or so.

Did the rules for Vikhr employment change with 1.2.7? I've always turned on the laser manually for Vikhr, with no problems. Never needed launch override either, except for night missions where I forgot to equip the LLTV pod.

With the guided missiles the Su-25T is probably the best SEAD plane in DCS right now. There's one key thing though. For IR and EO SAM units, you have to spot them before they start shooting at you. Use the mission briefing in structured missions, use the F 10 map (you can set the settings to only show enemy units that showed up in the briefing and ones that friendly units have spotted if you want a more realistic, less god's eye experience), listen to friendly flights and your wingman reporting air defense units on the radio channel. Hopefully that gives you a general location for the SAMs, so that you can use the Shkval with zoom, or the LLTV pod (which is sort of cheating in daylight conditions) to spot the exact location. Once you have the exact location the IR SAMs are really easy to slaughter using any of the guided missiles other than the S-25L guided rocket(its range is too short).

I'd suggest going back to the manual and making youself a checklist of the procedures for firing the weapons that are giving you trouble. The thing is that one missed step will cause problems, and there are enough steps that without watching you fly it's hard for more experienced pilots to guess what you might be missing or doing in the wrong order. I have a whole pile of weapons employment checklists that I made when I was learning DCS aircraft, probably buried somewhere in my desk now because I no longer need them. I found that making them and having them around was a very good learning aid. One thing is that for some of the weapons, and this may be the case for the AA missiles, you need to press the firing key/trigger and hold it for 1-2 seconds, a quick press and release won't fire. Probably to prevent accidental firings. I don't think there's a selector for CCIP/CCRP in the Su-25T in DCS world, just a matter of if you're diving steep enough for the pipper to show on the HUD it's CCIP and CCRP otherwise. I could be quite wrong on that though cause it has been a very long time since I bombed anything in the Su-25T. If you were using the CCRP with Shkval and autopilot turning off the Shkval and the autopilot will get you back into normal CCIP/CCRP mode.

True, I suppose I could have been more clear on that. I was thinking in terms of operational procedure, "never fire just one." Or in the case of S-8s perhaps it should be, "never fire just 100." GGtharos is also correct about the ammo on the M1. What you'd want to hit with an S-8 would be either the turret hatch/top or the engine compartment from above and the rear. Your most likely damage with an S-8 though would be: paint, EHRA panels, antennas, and external sight mechanisms. Oh, and any cargo strapped onto the exterior.

I wonder how much of pepin1234's argument is based on that video he posted. If it's mostly from the video, well, some problems with the argument. 1. The majority of the vehicles in that video are not modern MBTs. Most are either 1960s era tanks or IFVs. I saw a lot of what were probably Bradleys before they got hit and at least one or two that I think were Strykers. For the Russian weapons test videos it looked like all pre-T72 model Russian tanks. 2. The few M1A2s that were in the video and damaged to the point of inoperability were not damaged primarily by AT weapons. I recognized the pictures. Those were tanks that hit IEDs containing 100 - 500 kg of high explosives, the giant craters under the tanks and damage primarily to the undercarriage is sort of a giveaway there. I believe that in most of the cases the crew survived the IEDs, though I'd bet some of them are now suffering from effects of traumatic brain injuries. The photos showing small holes in the side skirt? Well a small hole in the side skirt is a small hole in the side skirt, and not at all the same thing as a kill, or even a mobility kill. 3. Wartime criteria change depending on the intensity of the war. In Iraq damaged tanks were scrapped even for fairly minor damage if it would have been expensive to repair. Contrast with say WWII, where for some battles you would have used anything that was still capable of firing at least one weapon. So a lot of the tank 'kills' would have in fact been more like 'normal wear and tear' in a high intensity conflict. 4. The small AT weapons that do work well against modern western MBTs are typically 105 - 130 mm diameter, and use tandem shaped charge warheads. It also normally takes multiple shots to cripple a tank, and even more to penetrate the crew compartment. The last time the IDF visited southern Lebanon Hezbollah used something like 1000 AT munitions to get 15 Israeli fatalities. When converting to S-8s keep in mind that due to its generalist warhead and smaller diameter the S-8 has 0.25 to 0.5 of the penetrating power of a man portable ATGM. That isn't to say that weapons with damage potential on the order of an 80mm rocket can't render a tank inoperative. Hits from the side, rear, or on top of the turret could work. But uncritical acceptance of that video might give you a wildly exaggerated idea of how effective small rockets and missiles are against modern tanks. Haukka81's video is another good example. Sure the recent versions of Su-27s can beat the JSF and F-22 in VR maneuvering battles, but first you have to assume that they survived wading through a sea of AMRAAMs to get there, and that the gen 5 fighters didn't just supercruise out of range if all the AMRAAMs somehow missed. The thing about propaganda films and defense contractor advertising material is that it NEVER INCLUDES THE FINE PRINT. In this sort of thing details matter and you have to be smart enough to identify the deliberately deceptive stuff before you start thinking about how models of weapons systems should work.

There are several keybinds for throttle control, left, right, both, there may also be redundancy in terms of binds for keyboards with vs without numerical keypads (but I'd have to check to be sure). If you tap one of the default keyboard control for throttle of both engines, it will indeed jump in large increments. I recall this from once having tried flying without my HOTAS setup. I also recall fooling around with keybinds on the options page and finding a binding that gave me continuous/infinitesimal control of the throttle. I don't habitually fly with keyboard though so I forget what the workaround was. That was as of version 2.4.