Sheepherder

Confirmation: I emptied a full drum at slow motion (1/64 for the last few shots) and clocked it using the frame counter at almost exactly 9.4 seconds. So a constant rate of 100 rounds per second. But what you know about the M61A1 installed in the teen fighters is wrong. They are hydraulically driven at 35 horsepower, it's the primer ignition system that's electronic, the assembly has a spool-up of only 0.3 seconds, and it stores a live round in the breach. Compared to a revolver cannon there is no additional delay from the time the trigger is pressed to the time the first round is fired: it's almost instantaneous. Assuming a constant spool-up rate the actual difference is 15 shots, but that assumes there isn't something like an accumulator right next to the gun transmission to give it an extra kick to begin with. If anything, what's missing is the spooldown, which for every trigger pull causes a few live rounds to be ejected from the gun unfired. Lower rate of fire during the spoolup means lower rate of fire, it doesn't mean additional lock time. The only major advantage a revolver cannon has is the five less gun barrels to haul around and the fact that it doesn't waste a few shots every time the trigger is pulled.

Just checking: All the parts are in the same group? If so it's working, just at the pace of the S-125. Which means it takes forever to lock and frequently loses lock on anything fighter sized.

Did you ever stop to wonder why a US Navy physicist stationed in China Lake, California, named a missile after a Mojave Desert rattlesnake that slithers sideways and can sense prey in infrared?

I (and many others) have yet to see any proof that this feature exists, aside from an unsourced assertion on Wikipedia. I wouldn't be surprised if it was tried at some point and then abandoned, but that's a far cry from being operational.

No, he is correct. A process is an instance of a program, a thread is a slice of the program that can run independently of the whole, and a core is the metal. There actually is an advantage to threading on a single core - remember that the various caches and and system memory operate at progressively higher latency and lower bandwidth the further you get from the core. A single core operating a single thread will be sitting idle waiting on memory read/write for a good portion of the time unless it can queue threads and rapidly switch.

You can always cheat a bit and stick a lone infantryman, unarmed vehicle, fortification, or something else innocuous near or on the target. If you don't want it shooting turn off the AI and set it so that it's invisible to the AI. If its presence interferes with the destruction of the actual target then add an explosion trigger after the unit dies to give the fireworks a little extra kick.

Let's say AI and physics are on separate cores, since it illustrates the problem. There's a big do over Novorossysk, with a few flights of F-86s escorting a couple of B-52s while they pound multiple layered SA-3 and ZU-23-2 sites. The physics core is chirping along merrily, since it's mostly the simple flight model, cannon shells, and missiles. But the literal hundreds of units attempting to engage the aircraft are causing the AI core to choke. What happens? Do the US aircraft stop dodging easily avoided missiles and start slamming into mountains because they only get an AI update every few seconds?

So, I'm trying to build a set of tutorials for the F-15C and I'd like to highlight indications using the X: COCKPIT HIGHLIGHT INDICATION, but the manual states I need the debug console in order to get the element names, which apparently is disabled in public builds. Is there any way to work around this? Or am I just stuck with the X: COCKPIT HIGHLIGHT POINT trigger action?

Fair cop: before you posted I ran it up to about Mach 2.5 at 12 500 m, but apparently the HUD and steam gauges reads IAS and the HDD reads TAS and the F2 view reads GS. In any case, if you're doing something in the ballpark of mach 2.4 - 2.6 @ 12 - 14 k you're probably reaching the upper limit on speed no matter how you slice it.

The 2500 km/h number given in the editor and Wikipedia is in ground speed in the cockpit you will never see a number that high, because your instruments relay mach number and indicated airspeed.

Also, the radar warning receivers on all planes have dead zones where wingtips and such block sensors, and the Russian aircraft in particular are bad this way, so it's entirely possible that you get literally no warning that something is guiding a missile at you.

Carlo Kopp's education is in electrical engineering with a heavy emphasis on the radio and radar side of things. He's more reliable when talking about communications, electronic warfare, radars, missile guidance, and stealth (insofar as it's possible to reliably talk about such things when everything is classified). Even there though he often says incredibly stupid things: This is obviously a man who knows how a pulse-doppler radar works. And yet he's worried about the lack of RCS reduction against a tracking radar in the notch. It's just so patently absurd.

Given that high negative Gs causes people to spew their lunch into their oxygen mask and permanently go blind a proper negative G limiter is something of a formality. You could just as easily ask why the Su-27 doesn't have an auto-trimmer when it already has pitch, roll, and yaw damping. A jet engine is not a rocket, it breathes air to burn fuel rather than a separate chemical oxidizer, and so the amount of thrust generated is directly proportional to the amount of air going into the engine. When you inverted stall, not only is air not flowing directly into your engine, laminar airflow is in fact blocked from entering the intakes by the nose and leading edge root extensions of the plane. So no, the thrust of the engine is not constant, it has in fact suddenly and precipitously dropped to almost zero. An engine in this state actually continues to spin, so barring any other failures if you're not watching your gauges you will probably notice nothing amiss. In fact, in real jet engines the sudden loss of pressure on the intake side often causes the thrust being generated by the engine to take the path of least resistance and comes out the front of the engine, this is called a compressor surge. Sometimes it carries the compressor blades with it.

TL;DR: command link guidance needs to be highly directional to avoid jamming and omnidirectional to make sure it's always receiving the signal despite constant bearing changes. And a pony. Track-Via-Missile, which is a sort of datalink + SARH control mode, is probably only possible because the guidance radar itself isn't in motion and so a higher gain antenna is possible, and besides which you can fit a lot of wattage on a MAZ-7910. Even so, it supposedly retains SARH as a fallback mode.

Lots of sticks reset their centre point when the computer boots. A consequence is that if you boot your PC while something is resting against the stick the centre is completely off.

A few additions I'd personally like: FARPs for fixed-wing aircraft. Maybe three varieties: dirt strips, steel mats, and one designed to be placed on an existing highway. Chewed-up ground decals, because a surface to air missile or artillery battery parked in a pristine field is a little weird. Placable earth revetments, again a common decoration for SAM sites. ED could probably just re-use the aircraft shelters that already exist.

Negative Gs are different. In real life very little exists that will counteract them, and the normal human maximum is somewhere in the -3G range. While it's rare but not unheard of for people hung upside down (-1G) for long periods of time to lose consciousness and die. So in DCS when the Su-27 noses over into a -9G departure because you hit the ASC key you're already in for a long nap if not a fatal stroke, while the sustained -1G as your plane coasts to the ground upside-down delays your recovery indefinitely. This is probably close enough to reality.

...And then I went and GBU'd an airborne Mi-8MTV last night. Though it still took a lot of trial and error. It seems like the laser GBU's seem to have issues under or over shooting targets if you lase at the wrong time.

Anecdotal, but DCS seems to have a hard time hitting a lased target that's significantly above the ground/sea level. So, trying to bullseye an airborne helicopter with a laser GBU seems to be impossible, even though it's apparently been done before.

Actually, now you've got me thinking that this would be a good subject to do some empirical testing of, to see what makes an effective chaffing / flaring program in terms of volume and time. Then see if it applies equally to most regular flight conditions and evasive maneuvers, and to situations where a player is manning the launcher.

The vertical launch SAMs used to go stupid as soon as they launched against a low-flying plane. It was amusing while it lasted to score gun kills against SA-10 and SA-15 sites.

Most of the spotting was for tracks in snow and auger holes in the ice.

Got a source for this? Because the Ministry of Natural Resources seems to think you should be able to tell the sex of a moose from 250-500 meters. Anyways, now that you're done spitting up your coffee, I've done similar aerial survey work for them, spotting and tallying ice fisherman rather than moose. And I'm finding it hard to believe that tanks are nigh invisible a few kilometres out.

To be fair, they also shouldn't be sitting their waiting for your plane to arrive with an Igla perched on their shoulder.

The actual reasoning behind it is pretty mundane: hydraulic fluid is largely incompressible, so for all intents and purposes they don't store energy. You can have a powered off hydraulic system reading 5k, but crack a valve a hair and the gauge will immediately go from 5k to 0.