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Scrim

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Posts posted by Scrim

  1. No no, you heard them. I forgot that DCS is apparently special, and as such we should feel blessed that someone might be developing a module. Treating anything about DCS like a product is to be whining and ungrateful. :doh:

    • Like 1
  2. Nah. For starters, it's realistic. Second, I feel that since you only do it when taxiing, you can just move your hand down on the stick and depress the NWS button with your index finger if it feels uncomfortable to do it with your pinkie finger for longer durations.

  3. Distrust because of no communication =/= A valid reason to not communicate. Seriously.

     

    And again, as you obviously didn't read my post: Trust, that is something they ought to feel they owe the community they intend to sell their product to. Trust, as in a little communication with us, and not ignoring us until they want money from us.

  4. They owe us, the customers, trust if they ever want to sell us anything (if they against all odds will ever actually finish a DCS module). Saying "guys, were developing 5 modules" and for all intents and purposes not saying a thing until a release is on the table is not a good way of developing a sense of trust in the community. If anything, it comes across more like "don't bother us. We'll pay attention to you when we want your money". It's marketing 101, they do indeed owe us regular communication if they intend to sell us a product down the road. It's not much to ask for.

  5. Honestly, a MK84 is a very large bomb. With the amount of explosives and shrapnel caused by it, I wouldn't really doubt a 1200 feet kill radius. Though of course, those things tend to be calculated with ideal circumstances, i.e. nose fuze against infantry in the open in flat terrain that doesn't have any chances of the bomb burying itself before detonating.

  6. Well well well, them there uppity Austrians went and made a missile system that made sense and was handy to use? ;)

     

    I think it's correct (for the F version at least), would be a big mistake otherwise.

  7. Eh, lemme see: Fly into a tree, especially with a helicopter since they're most prone to. How do you reckon the blades will deal with it?

     

    Sorry, but making a jungle map with this joke of a tree simulation would be sheer idiocy. And there's really little justification for why trees still aren't collidable. It's just low quality, especially for helicopters. The thing that would be almost as bad on a jungle map would be the fact that the AI would shoot straight through it. A Vietnam map would mean pretty much only COIN missions for helos, and that'd just not work if you insert troops in a clearing and every single enemy withing range would open up on you through the trees.

  8. Update: The "lost fuel" theory part of C doesn't seem to be holding up. However, I noticed two other peculiarities about the fuel system when I checked it out.

     

    D, The amount of fuel transferred is not fixed to 36% of a full internal tank. Rather, it shifts depending on how much fuel is carried in the internal tank when the fuel transfer from the drop tanks to the internal tank is started. At internal fuel percentage levels 10, 20, 30 and 40, it would increase to 46%. At 50, 60 and 70, it increased to 74%. At 80 and 90, it increased to 100%. That's give and take 2-3%, especially the higher the fuel levels.

     

    E, The fuel transfer will not occur unless the fuel carried in the internal tank has decreased to it's current level. I.e., if you increase the internal fuel from say 40% to 50%, no fuel transfer occurs. After the 46% level results, I had to increase my internal fuel load to 100%, and then decrease it to 50%.

     

    For these experiments, the fuel levels prior to fuel transfer from the drop tanks were only altered using the armaments menu. I have not looked at how the fuel system behaves when the internal fuel tank has been completely/partially drained from regular fuel consumption prior to fuel transfers from the drop tanks.

     

     

    My recommendation regarding using the drop tanks currently is: Bring outboard ones, as the light makes it simpler to judge when these are completely drained. Frequently toggle the tank selector switch between All Tanks Off to Outboard Tanks to replenish the internal fuel supply.

  9. It's not set at 1150lbs by default, but rather it goes from how much internal fuel you had when you started. E.g. fill up 100%, 2 outboard drop tanks. Then tell the ground crew to decrease your internal tank to 80%. If you then switch over to drop tanks, it will fill up to max.

     

    I've done some calculations, and reached the conclusion that fuel system currently will fill up the internal tank when completely or partially drained with a maximum of a 36% full internal fuel load. If there's still more fuel in the drop tanks, it won't touch it.

     

    For the 200 gallon outboard tanks, I told the ground crew to decrease my internal fuel to 10%. I then switched over to the drop tanks, had the ground crew repeat the 10% routine. I ended up taking on fuel from the drop tanks a total of 3 times before they were emptied. It was 36%+36%+21%. The percentage refers to the percentage of a full internal tank.

     

    The inboard tanks yielded a 36%+20% result before these were drained.

     

     

    However, I'm struggling to make sense of the fuel quantity. As said, my experiment indicated that the outboard drop tanks contained 83% of a full internal tank. However, when I repeated this and looked at the fuel gauge instead of the % in the armament menu, I reached the conflicting result that the outboard tanks contained a total of 2900lbs. Now, the internal tank takes on approximately 2800lbs of fuel, so obviously something doesn't add up. If the result I got from looking at the percentage in the armament menu is correct, then the outboard drop tanks would contain approximately 2300lbs of fuel, not 2900lbs.

     

    What I've concluded to be the main issues so far is:

    A, The fuel system does not take on fuel from the drop tanks to the internal tank unless you toggle from All Tanks Off to the ones currently carried. I.e. you have to manually initiate fuel transfer from the drop tanks to the internal tank, just leaving the tank selector on the carried tanks won't work.

     

    B, When the player performs a fuel transfer from the drop tanks to the internal tank, no more than 36% of a internal tank's worth of fuel will be transferred.

     

    C, There may or may not be an issue with the amount of fuel contained in the drop tanks, and/or the amount of fuel displayed by the fuel gauge. There is also a possibility that when a fuel transfer is performed, some of the fuel drained from the drop tank is lost on its way to the internal tank. This would explain why the armament percentage slider indicated a lower quantity of fuel contained within the drop tanks than the fuel indicated by the fuel gauge. However, this seems unlikely, as I can't find an explanation as for why the fuel gauge would display fuel that doesn't exist in the internal tank. I will try to rule it out shortly, and update accordingly.

  10. I have played BMS and it seemed to have ridiculously good visibility at long ranges but that might have been due to more narrow FOV at max zoom compared to DCS. I was able to visually ID aircrafts dogfighting beyond AMRAAM max range to determine which one was the enemy. In BMS you rarely lose a dot against city backdrop as cities are just a fuzzy texture where sharp edged plane stands out well. Otherwise I didn't feel any practical difference between BMS and DCS in visibility of targets. I do take advantage of the zoom to the fullest in DCS though as I have it in a slider on HOTAS. As a disclaimer it's over a year when I last tried BMS.

     

    If that's how far you saw in BMS, either you played something else, didn't understand the range indicators for the AIM-120s, or something in your copy of BMS had been horribly altered.

     

    Last time I played BMS was less than a month ago. When I lock up a target for the AIM-120s, if I'm underneath it and thereby have the sky as a background, it's daylight, and I'm ~4/5 of max range (not loft range, regular range) I might be able to make out a spot where the HUD target marker is telling me it is. I can't make make out any other planes, not even in the same formation, because without the HUD marker it's just impossible to discern anything else.

    • Like 1
  11. You sure about that? I mean, at least Furia has said it's broken, and the ED testers ought to know, right?

     

     

    Edit: Confirmed, both sorts of fuel tanks do indeed work. I don't know if they work in the sense that the amount of fuel is displayed correctly, but they do add fuel to your plane. If you want to confirm it yourself, do the following: Start the ME, set up a plane for yourself. Start the mission, tell ground crew to empty say 95% of your tank, and add whichever size drop tank you want to check works. Switch to the ones selected, and see the amount of fuel in your internal tank rise rapidly. The main issue surrounding the outboard tanks seems to be that the Sabre will not continually draw fuel from them, instead it seems to fill up its internal tank when it's no longer full when you switch to the outboard tanks.

  12. I don't see the issue. There's two compasses, one to the right and above the sight, and one on the instruments panel, which is very well made with things lined up in a neat order, unlike the veritable chaos of the pictured instrument panel.

  13. The smart scaling in BMS is very intuitive. I've never had an issue judging the distance to a plane from virtually any angle.

     

    A plane twice the width of the runway just doesn't happen with the smart scaling in BMS. Seriously, I've never ever seen an F-16 look like that.

    • Like 1
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