Extranajero

Im sick of hearing about what is and isn't 'fair' in MP, mostly it's used in a " won't somebody please think of the children " way to justify a set of conditions that make no sense when you think about them properly.

The Wolf Pack US servers have the integrity check turned off, so the improved contact spotting mod still works. They also have dot neutral labels available, so you can use those if you like. The server is in the US, but the ping isn't bad from a European location, it's perfectly useable. The users seem to behave like grown ups as well.

Dear Fighter Pilot, Partner and Friend. No, you can't have a refund. But please purchase our upcoming F6F module and thank you for your passion

I'd like to praise ED for adding the Improved Contact Dot Spotting mod to the integrity check. Great job, you just put anyone who uses a 21st century screen resolution in multiplayer right back to where they were before the mod. Stellar work. You will have made the people who intentionally exploit the way DCS handles spotting very happy, because now they have their edge back.

Very probably. The AYD\AYF was an American system, so it probably originally had a built in toaster oven, trouser press and coffee maker, in a tasteful chrome housing. The Air Ministry probably muttered " Bloody Yanks " and ordered it with three lightbulbs instead and stuck them where the pilot couldn't see them, or made sure they were either too dim to see, or as bright as the sun and couldn't be dimmed.

The radio altimeter system was called the Type AYD\AYF and was fitted mostly ( but not excusively ) to aircraft operated by Coastal Command, including the Mossie.

+1000 That menu drives me barmy. The usual thing I do when taxi-ing in MP is to hit F2 for the external view so I can zoom out and get a look at the layout of the airbase ( assuming it's not one of those servers that disables external views to make everybodys lives as miserable as possible ) and check for other traffic. But every time I forget the F2 press gets intercepted and someone ( virtual me ? ) yells something about takeoff being aborted, while the real me yells at the screen to shut up. In fact the whole of the comms menu could lose about 90% of it's current functionality and the only difference would be that you can find the commands that do work and are useful a hell of a lot quicker.

I was browsing a USAAF safety booklet yesterday, written in the immediate post war era and intended for US military transport pilots. That had a section on how a faster than recommended approach can lead to a hard landing, because the pilots instinct when he sees that his landing roll might be marginal is to chop the throttle completely. Obviously that increases the drag and the sink rate, although we are talking two and four props here, instead of one. The advice was to take the zero thrust boost setting for the aircraft and use that for the touchdown, instead of going all the way to idle. Interesting what you find out when you aren't looking for it

Why don't you grow up ?

I couldn't say for sure, I'm quite experienced with classic racing engines, but none of those were attached to aeroplanes. It'll be accompanied by stuff like rough running, power loss and black smoke though. All things that you can hear, feel or see. Fuel mixture has an effect on the likelyhood of detonation, there is a bigger risk of it with the engine running lean.

I've never heard detonation in DCS either, I don't think there's a sound file for it. Just to satisfy your curiosity it sounds like someone dropping glass marbles on concrete and it's unmistakeable once you've heard it.

Really, is DCS a flight sim or are we playing Call Of Duty ? Do the people flying modern jets get this nonsense as well, or is it just for the WW-2 users ? It wouldn't be quite so bad if the sound effects weren't so badly done. A good healthy blood curdling scream might at least annoy my neighbours, but the current effect of the pilot whimpering sounds like a dog trying to cough up a squeaky toy.

It will definitely make the user experience more difficult and frustrating, which seems to be the entire raison d'etre of WW-2 and Cold War historical servers

A tiny handful, but they make an enormous amount of noise. They may have large monitors, but I guarantee they aren't running 4K or 2K resolution. I bought one of the largest monitors I could find when I upgraded a few years ago in the hope that the size of the display would offset spotting issues. It didn't. Large and expensive 4K monitors are probably better than smaller 4K ones, but the spotting is still dire. I had a crazy situation with the friend I flew with where we'd swap spotting tasks - his VR headset rendered distant aircraft like housebricks while I was blind - yet once we were approaching gun range I had to tell him which aircraft were friendly and which weren't because they all looked like Lego to him. Of course, the people who run the servers could just implement neutral dot labels, but that's not 'realistic' is it ? I had one of them tell me that labels were a cheat, which is fairly insane considering that it's built into the software and available for anyone to use by pressing a key combination. I refuse to run DCS at anything other than 4K though, I'd rather just not participate in MP if the spotting isn't going to improve. I mean I'm hardly here for the realism anyway, not when I can drop a 250kg bomb 5 yards away from a truck and not damage it

I agree with everything you wrote, apart from that one sentence. The higher you go in resolution ( which costs more, obviously ) the worse the spotting gets. If you have a potato monitor, or a crappy VR headset running at Minecraft levels of resolution it's absolutely fine. Even with a huge 4K monitor the spotting is currently lousy. The real reason certain people are so dead set against improving spotting is that they run DCS at low resolution to gain an advantage in MP. This is an open secret. They don't want to lose that advantage - but they can't say that outright here so the 'realism' argument gets deployed instead. If ED defeat this mod using IC, without first implementing their own version then they are crazy. There's a huge amount of goodwill to be lost if they do that.

I was maybe 75% joking about the Spit's landing behaviour. It just bites me when I'm away from it for a long time. Interestingly the RAF approved way to land an aeroplane until the very late 30's was to complete the final approach with the engine at idle. If someone had to blip the throttle to stretch the glide a bit then they'd often have to buy everyone watching a beer in the mess. Adding power to flare would have probably meant you had to buy everyone a double scotch. However, once monoplane fighters were introduced that technique was abandoned, because it started costing them too many planes and too many pilots and a lot of people were glad to see the back of it.

I've flown a real Spit. The DCS model is pretty true to life in the just bopping around enjoying yourself region of the envelope, no idea about the aerobatic part because I didn't do that. Those cliches about the pilot thinking where he wants to go, and the Spit just does it ? all true. It's incredibly responsive but not nervous or twitchy. You aren't watching it like a hawk in case it does something you don't expect. But you do need to give the DCS control settings some major tweaking to get it to behave properly with anything except an extended stick though. Everyone has a different setup though, the only suggestion I can make is that you try to reduce saturation and are careful about adding any curvature. The lack of a linear response that comes with curvatures over about 10 can make things much worse rather than better when it comes to the Spit. But YMMV and all that. Once you get it dialled in then it becomes very easy to fly. Why ED chose to have the unmodified controls only being OK with a stick length that just a tiny fraction of users own is a mystery to me, but then they move in mysterious ways and we as the end users just have to live with their decisions. EDIT :- I just watched Reflecteds video, that's an outstanding tutorial, you really must check that out Landing the DCS Spit though is impossible without bouncing into the air and coming back down on a wingtip. If the real Spit had flung itself back into the sky like that the Battle of Britain would have been over a day after it started, when we'd have run out of undamaged Spits Fortunately the real Spits undercarriage legs were made by Vickers and not by the ACME company that Wile E Coyote gets all his gadgets from

It's also a fiction that wartime RAF pilots mention in the books they wrote. Maybe it's all a conspiracy theory. But anyway... Luftwaffe fighter pilots weren't typically trained in instrument flight - that's why the initial cadre of Wilde Sau were mainly bomber pilots - so I suggest ED cages or removes the artificial horizons in the German aircraft. Also, ordnance loadouts. We need to get rid of those choices as well. You will fly with whatever the mission designer wants you to. This will be a great step forward in realism and show those players of lesser games that allow choices how superior and what serious flight simmers we all are. After all gentlemen, we aren't here to enjoy ourselves, are we ?

Wrong, as usual, and condescending, also as usual. I've read many accounts of pilots having their guns harmonised at ranges that weren't 'official' - the chances of them being able to do that would depend on how their squadron was run and what the culture inside it was. On the allied side for example, even before the Battle of Britain, significant numbers of RAF pilots changed to 250 yds when the top brass strongly suggested that they were to use the " Dowding Spread " which brought the guns into convergence at about 400 yards. Harmonisation wasn't just set at the factory and then left alone, that's why there are charts of ballistic drop and convergence versus range in the aircraft maintenance manuals of all WW-2 aircraft. Being able to change harmonisation is much less of a game-ism than individual pilots being able to change their bomb fusing or even their loadout. In the case of ordnance they just got what they were given. But does harmonisation matter ? not for the Luftwaffe aircraft in DCS, not very much anyway. It's more of an issue for the Allied aircraft. What would be nice would be for ED to say what the ranges are for the various aircraft in the sim....I'd be happy with that

Both cannon and MG's could be fired using the switch, if it looks a little awkward then that's probably mostly false perspective from the cockpit view. I could bore you to death about firing equipment fitted to WW2 British aircraft, but I won't The MkIX Spitfire had a 3 way rocker switch arrangement with the central push function being 'All' but on the generic HOTAS available to people like us, that kind of switch isn't usually situated where you'd want a trigger to be. What I do, using a grip with a two stage trigger, is to have the first stage firing MG's and then the final stage firing all. Works for me. There's a project called " Authentikit " who are going to be releasing - amongst other things like the throttle - the files needed to build your own Mossie yoke\stick from 3D printed parts. They'v already released a lot of other warbird controls, all free.

It was just there to give the pilot a choice of .303, cannon or both. The same firing switch was common to other British aircraft. The electro-pneumatic system was perfectly capable of releasing the sears on all 8 guns without any problems. The ergonomics are what you'd expect from a British aircraft, just be thankful someone had the good sense not to put the triggers under the seat

I found the AP201 for the Mossie. Looking at the diagram of the gun firing system there is nothing that could introduce a delay, unless there is something very weird going on inside the pneumatic gun firing unit. The associated electrical diagram shows four solenoids inside it, to open the valves, but that's only an electrical schematic. Presumably it's got more than 200psi on one side and nothing on the other - once the solenoids open the sears release, and they stay released until the pilot takes his thumb off the lever. Then the downstream air pressure bleeds off and firing halts. I wonder if the cannon had a tendency to run on a little after the solenoids closed ? that would be ironic.... I'd post images from the AP201, but then I'd have to host them somewhere and I honestly can't be bothered. In fact this is just an exercise in futility, because nothing will change, I wish I hadn't bothered now

I hope they told the BATF they were going to restore and fire the cannons

Maybe the laws of physics are different in Russia ? - that's the only reason I can think of why there'd be a delay - but in any event, it won't be changed so there's no point discussing it.

There should be no delay in the cannon firing system, but if ED decide that it's " correct as is " then I really don't have the time or energy to argue with them about it. I'd have to travel 300 miles to scan the diagram from the armourers notebook as my friend won't let it out of his sight - it's not very valuable in terms of money, but it was his dad's, so it has great sentimental value. I have a specialist book which discusses the gun firing systems fitted to WW-2 RAF aircraft, but that doesn't contain a schematic, only a description. Even if I presented them with the drawing I don't have any confidence in the problem with the Mosquito firing circuit ever being recognised or changed. Bugs are fixed at a glacial pace, even when ED admit they exist.