Extranajero

It was a tragic day for your country's air force when you decided to take up DCS instead of being a fighter pilot.

Tested and working, thanks again

I've only given that a quick scan, but it looks comprehensible enough that I can go try it out. You get the coveted "Solution" tag, thanks awfully old chap

There are reasons for the lack of formation flying 1) If you are flying close formation it takes up attention that you should be using for situational awareness. Close formation, except for penetrating cloud and airshows, was buried as a concept ( together with many of the pilots who were doing it ) in the summer of 1940. 2) If you are flying close formation on more than one single AI then that's fine until they come to a turn. The last thing you want to do is be anywhere near them then. If you haven't seen it imagine a swarm of flies in a bottle that someone just shook up. Anyone who has any of the WW-2 campaigns knows this behaviour well.

Yes, please do that. The absence of a graticule isn't a problem, I can make one of those. Remember, like you are speaking to a bright 4 year old I already know about Notepad++ though

Can someone walk me through the process of lua editing needed to export the F-16 RWR to a seperate monitor ? I've read through one thread that describes it, but I still can't figure out what I should be editing and where the file is. Imagine you are explaining this to a bright 4 year old. I know it'll break IC, but I don't care about that.

That's what sold me on it, although leopard print would be even better

It's a sheepskin cover. I bet they cost the US taxpayer about as much as a whole herd of sheep and the farm they live on as well There's a green covered set of cushions under it. The covers look to be a Nomex type material, the same stuff they use for flight suits. I think they stopped using leather for seats in aeroplanes about the same time as they stopped putting ashtrays in cockpits

Easy mode won't happen, all the " please everybody look at me, I'm a real fighter pilot " nerds would have an aneurysm and I doubt it's even on ED's list. But you can try this :- Don't use the supplied training missions for practice would be my advice. They just drive you crazy when trying to learn. The second you get everything set up and match speed with the tanker it flies into a cloud and\or goes into a turn. Find a nice friendly mission to start with, one that has clear weather and a long straight tanker track. Tankers are never travelling at the speed they say they are, usually you need to be about 10 knots fast to stay with them pre contact. God knows what their ASI's are calibrated in. Bind the 'ready pre contact' radio call to something, you don't want to be faffing with the comms menus. Don't look directly at the basket, look at...I dunno, something else. Experiment. If you are refuelling off a boom then you'll have to work out some reference points on the tanker to gauge your relative speed. There are lights, but they are difficult to see. You can't just set a speed and sit there once you make contact, you'll have to constantly move the throttle by small amounts. If you want to refuel a Strike Eagle buy a neck brace, because you'll need it after contorting your head so you can look between the top of the hud combiner glass and the bottom of the canopy bow. If after all that you can't be bothered with the effort, or still can't do it, give up and shoot the tanker down. Tankers don't turn well and they don't have tail gunners. I still have a strong suspicion that air to air refuelling is a hoax, and all the footage you see was really filmed on a sound stage in Area 51.

Why anyone would want to learn to edit lua files to cheat when they can just use the method ( I didn't describe ) earlier, with no skill whatsoever needed is beyond me.

I can't think of a way either, but we won't get a better explanation. I can remember it being claimed that the spotting dots mod was being exploited, when the only provable thing that happened was some hall monitor\busybody type wrote a proof of concept that turned other aircraft into giant green triangles and posted a video of it to Reddit. Public PVP servers are hives of villainy anyway and best avoided, I leave that sort of thing to the wannabe Growling Sidewinders of the DCS ecosystem. Building a simpit is a poverty inducing mental illness, 1:1 scale modelling or both. Take your pick

I know - it's a combat flight sim ( or at least it's meant to be ), not Escape From Tarkov. Meanwhile the easiest and most common method of cheating is still out there and nothing has ever been done about it. Many of the people who use it aren't just cheating, but actively trying to wreck everyone elses experience. To be fair to ED, it's a method not limited to DCS. But cheer yourself up with the thought that most PVP servers are hell on Earth anyway, full of annoying kids with 10 Amraams loaded on their Hornets flinging missiles at anything that flies, red or blue. I've made the decision that I'll use whatever mods\tweaks\exports I like, and if that stops me joining a server then that's fine. I can fly with my friends on a private server where sanity prevails and we are all on the same wavelength.

If the hardpoint is powered on - but the pod is in STBY - it's generating Masked messages for me as well.

I've had over ten years of random things being broken every DCS update. It's a bit like getting up to go to work and finding your car doesn't have any doors or the wheels turned themselves square for no reason. People wouldn't put up with that from a car, or a toaster or anything other product except software. It's about time ED rolled their sleeves up, gritted their teeth and sorted out their 20 year old code. I pay good money for these modules, and I expect them to work.