Zilch

Yeah, there's really nothing like nailing a challenging problem in DCS like that. The sophistication of DCS has really spoiled me for most of other games.

I've flown this a couple of times and gotten "Mission Complete" message, but after ending the mission, I don't get credit and end up having to re-fly it. Anyone else have this issue? Update: Instead of ending the mission manually, I waited until it auto-ended this time. No problems from that point...may be a work-around in case anyone else has the issue.

My time in the Albatros pays off again!

I tried to fly the 109-K the first day I got it. It didn't go well...realized I needed to dig into stick and rudder skills before trying again. I therefore spent a fair amount of time in, believe it or not, the L-39 polishing my basic to intermediate airmanship tools. It payed dividends, and for some reason the FW-190 and Bf-109 are not only managed, but enjoyable. I got airborne first try in Training missions, kinda proud of it. On to the Challenge Campaign, my second attempt at a takeoff:

'Member when DCS 1.5 came out, and for about a week the Spitfire was available in rudimentary form as an AI aircraft? I forgot I had managed to get footage of it before the update removed the Spitfire. You can get a sample of what the clipped wing will look like right here:

Just updated yesterday. It feels like an NTTR thing...my frames drop, then it crashes. I'll post on over there!

I keep getting client crashes or even "memory management" complete restarts a few minutes in...is this a problem with the NTTR itself, maybe?

I'm having an issue where only two of my planes, the MiG-21 and P-51, show up as an option in the menu. I have every module, so should the other aircraft appear here as well?

I'll have a look, thanks! Now, I do have some viewports extracted into another monitor (MFD's, radar, etc.) These have coexisted for a long time in my system with Tacview, no problems. I hope there's a way to run both of them happily.

Awesome! Just what I was looking for, going into the IFR side of things.

Bumparoo. Since November 15 when I upgraded Tacview to 1.5.2, it seems to be failing to export any ACMI files. I checked the troubleshooting section of the Tacview website, the .lua scripts are all accurate. Anything else I may be missing?

Thanks for the information, folks. Informative, as always.

The first run-through I used to test the super-secret AIM-190 human guided missile.

Heya, I am digging the work that Starway put into the Caucasus map, but, depending on the multiplayer server, you may or may not pass the integrity check. Has anyone found a workaround for this aside from uninstalling it?

Ah, hell. I've been hoping for a Viggen-tastic Thanksgiving this whole time, with a new plane to crash towards the end of the month. Turns out out they're teasing a teaser. Those cheeky maniacs...

I am hoping the Hawk ends up being the trainer it needs to be. It's already a fun module, and they've made huge progress on it. Best wishes to VEAO as they work forward. As for the F-5 as a trainer like the T-38, I had that thought as well. However, for some reason, flying the L-39 made me better at flying the F-5 (and apparently unrelated craft like the FW-190, even!) in a precise, controlled way. Every time I fly the L-39, I get better at flying everything else. Your mileage may vary, but I'm having such a good, valuable experience with the Albatros that I thought it was worth sharing. Of course, if I could only afford the F-5 or the L-39, I'd go with the F-5 for sure. You obviously don't have to worry about crashing a real aircraft here, but for the time spent in the virtual cockpit, I learn more, faster, in the Albatros.

Just a personal note...I've been trying to get a handle on taking off in this lovely plane since it came out, and finally got a feel for it today. WOOT! It's weird. I can't tell you what clicked, but I can take off every time now with no issues. Weird as it sounds, I've been flying the L-39 a lot lately and focusing on the fundamentals that I overlooked in the past in my eagerness to get fighting. As a result, I have a lot better feel for what an aircraft is doing, scan the instruments far better instead of relying on the HUD/TAD/TGP sweep from the Hog, and can react far more appropriately to correct mistakes. I never expected the L-39 to improve my prop flying skills, but I think it did. Almost certain of it. I know it's the FW-190 section, but it bears mentioning that even though its sexier to fly fighters the whole time, trainer aircraft like the L-39 are an express train to improving your stick and rudder skills. Maybe give it a try? Looking forward to the FW-190...it's different, for sure, and will open up new pathways into flight and multiplayer that I didn't have access to before. Good times!

I was able to get it started after applying ground power. I noticed that when I turned on the instrument lights, they flickered until the GPU was attached. Once electricity was flowing, it started up as normal. May be a decent work-around for some people until it's fixed.

Got a lucky T-90 kill with the HE rockets.

Even turning them off should not, in real life, confuse the enemy, if I understand correctly. IFF works by transmitting a code when queried by another aircraft. If it replies at all, it'll say, "Hey, I'm friendly," or nothing at all if the codes don't match. So, you can't use a lack of response to spoof the enemy into thinking you're friendly, they'll just see the same thing your now-confused allies will...nothing at all. Presumed bogey or hostile by both sides, just like if you had no IFF system in the first place.

The TDC cursor slew shows up in the Axis Assign menu, but I cannot actually bind it to an axis due to the control being grayed out and therefore, not able to bind. Is this intended, or should we be having the TDC cursor slew as a bind option to a joystick axis?

If you boil down Fun into a reduction and generously apply it to the surface of an Excitement pie, you get an F-5. True story. Great module, Belsimtek, and a great aircraft. The world is better off with this around! Whatever your next project is, I'm on board.

Flew a bit on the 104th today. Cool experience, very educational, so hopefully it's useful to you as well. One thing I noticed about the F-5 is that it'll make you think and learn. It's easy to pick up the jet and fly it, use the weapons, and so on...but to practically be in position to employ those weapons is another matter entirely! It can turn with the best of them, is small and hard to see, and armed for the knife fight. Two things I took away today (and a bonus!): 1. You cannot engage modern enemy aircraft unless you are 100% on your terms, which means they will almost certainly nail you BVR before you can get them into your phone booth, preferably unseen. I was hoping to charge at them by flying than 100 AGL with the hopes that ground clutter could mask me until I was WVR. Nope. Splashed. I was hauling a load of rockets to the A2G zone, hoping to evade radar and missiles by putting them on my beam. Nope. Splashed. So, change of concept. I headed toward the AO, which has a nice mountain range separating red and blue. As I approached it, I went high profile, medium altitude, radar on. This seemed to attract some attention. Snooze radar, put the baddies on the beam while the RWR shows them in the outer circle. Headed into the mountain range with my beam still on the RWR spike, so hopefully they're chasing my previous location while I displace a few miles off, wait for them to overfly, and ambush their asses with passive AIM-9's before they know what's up. That's the basic idea. With the help of teammates in F-15's providing SA, I shot down a Su-27. Sweet revenge. This leads to... 2. Situational awareness. This is either awesome or mediocre, depending on scenario. Against MiG-21's, you have the SA advantage, flat, and I'll take the F-5 over the Fishbed as my preference any day for this and other reasons. However, against current fighters, you're low man on the pole, not so much because of the simple radar (trade-off being that because it's simple and loses abilities, those are fewer things to think about and manage, allowing you to fight your jet the best way you can with head-up.) The biggest problem I had was IFF. There is no IFF interrogator in the F-5, which I felt like I badly needed in a mixed-coalition server such as the 104th. In a more segregated RedFor/BluFor server with NATO planes on one side and Russian style on the other, the IFF is less critical due to the clearly-legible RWR icons (21, 29, are bandit, 5, 15 and M are friendly etc.) However, in the 104th, the MiG-29 could be bandit or friendly, the only give-away being the paint job, and if you're in close enough to see that, you're either in some deep shit or you've got the situation in hand. Usually the first thing, since they could IFF query you from 40 miles out or more, allowing them the maneuver BVR to set up the merge in their favor, or just R-27 you while you're scratching your head about those RWR icons. Even though the F-5 is a strictly WVR fighter, I think the lack of IFF is a more serious detriment than its lack of BVR weapons themselves. If I knew the "15" spike on my RWR was bandit at 40 miles, I could avoid the engagement or set up an ambush to engage on my terms (hopefully without him knowing I was there!) Personal preference, perhaps, but going A2A, I'll take superior SA over a better weapon load or selection every time...on the 104th or the like, you'll need to get creative. This leads to... 3. Teamwork. The F-5 as a lone actor may be possible for master tacticians when flown against modern opponents, even more so when going against period-matched opponents like MiG-21's or other F-5's. However, for merely decent tacticians like me, it's like walking into a trap nearly every time when you go A2A alone against more modern jets. Lesson: Bring a friend, or make one! Specifically, my success against that Su-27 was made possible by good teamwork and communication with allied F-15 drivers (and if they're reading this, I'd like to say thanks yet again!) There I was, flying at full mil power, eastward skimming through northern foothills of the east-west mountain range through which Red Air was penetrating. A pair of Eagles were flying just north of my posit, scanning the area with radar and calling out contacts on the comms, engaging them when possible. Meanwhile, I had snoozed my radar and was head-up, when I got a visual on an unknown contact hauling ass northwards at roughly my altitude. I had no idea at the time, but it was a Sukhoi-27. I asked the F-15 guys to ID the target as hostile or not, which they did right as my AIM-9 got a good tone and the bandit pumped rearwards in response to their active locks. Bandit had not noticed me, probably because he had at least one F-15 painting him, allowing me to get into my happy spot: high energy, undetected, close-in and with a Sidewinder locked up before he has a clue. Fox-2. As the missile was about halfway to the target, I finally got positive ID on the type of aircraft right before, BAM, my first kill on the 104th thanks to those Eagle drivers. By providing IFF and locking up the target, the F-15's effectively extended my weapons range to that of the RMax of missile I was carrying, rather than the range at which I could get visual ID and be sure I was shooting the right thing (about 1/3 of RMax.) The F-15C: AWACS with teeth! Unfortunately, the enemy had F-15's too, and as I plunged into the mountain range to look for more prey, a friendly F-15 got mixed in with at least two enemy F-15's, dropping my SA and forcing me to hold fire several times for fear of blue-on-blue kills...As I was chasing them, an enemy F-15 slipped into my rear quarter. By the time I my RWR had a "15" spike in the inner circle, I was dead to rights and was blasted by an AMRAAM close-in. Nice shot, really... Anyway, as part of a team, the F-5 can apparently be pretty lethal. It's hard to see them, they can move like a Lotus on crack and have good all-aspect missiles and a solid gun to match. If you fly it like an F-15, Sukhoi or even a Mirage, the F-5 will humble you. However, once that happens, and you put the work and thought into using it either A2A or A2G, you can use it to humble your opponents, instead. Sure, getting loads of Su-27 kills in an F-15 is great, and it's what you'd expect flying one of the premier A2A platforms of all time. Getting fewer kills, but doing it in an "inferior" jet like the F-5, though, is a truly sweet experience and will net more bragging rights, if you're into that. Personally, I enjoy overcoming challenges that are stacked against me, and the F-5 is the perfect platform for that if you want to master stick and rudder flying and BFM. It has the added benefit of being a true joy to fly, and you can get straight to the tactics without having to learn or utilize complicated systems or avionics merely to get the jet going. The F-5 is amazing. Easy to fly, easy to learn...difficult to master. Perfect.

Although I understand the principles of flight well, when I first picked up DCS I wanted to get straight into the combat part as soon as possible. I learned the A-10, P-51, F-86 and more recently the F-5, and have studied tactics and weapons employment to enable this. It worked well enough, I can blow things up with good reliability and my BFM keeps me at about even odds in PVP...most of the time. However, I seem to have jumped a step or three, I guess you'd call it the "intermediate" level of flight training, where you learn how to control your aircraft with precision, hold a perfect descent rate, adjust for wind drift, and polish up your maneuvers in a clean, coordinated fashion. This got muddied over somehow when I was learning to pull high-G turns, aim my guns and work the various targeting systems. This was laid bare when I was flying my beloved F-5 and trying to fly a controlled dive to aim my bombs...I found that I cannot coordinate my speed, dive angle and descent rate simultaneously to enable accurate bombing. CCIP mode in the Hog is great, but it facilitates sloppy flying by calculating that impact point for you, and you don't need to do much but fly until the pipper is on the thing you want to kill and unleash your payload. It's an easy aircraft to fly and, for better or worse, covers up a lot of the steps you may have missed in training while you bomb with precision using its sophisticated systems. The F-5 won't allow for this, however, and neither will anything else that requires manual bombing or even rocket launches. Coordinated flight across every axis is required, and I found myself unable to do this, to my great shame and embarassment. I've been at this for years now...where did I go wrong? How could I have put so many hours into this and still lack fundamentals? What to do now? Enter the Albatros! The L-39 is the perfect module for going back and working out bad habits I've picked up. I originally bought it to support development, but the last few days it has become my go-to plane for unlearning bad habits. Great stuff...unfortunately the jet trainers have, in my opinion, gotten too harsh of a reception from us, but they're actually perfect for what I need right now, and I'd bet many other folks could benefit from them for the same reasons. Anyway, thanks to ED for a great module that is far more useful than I think most give it credit for! It's fun to fly, easy to learn but also will let you know where you're doing it wrong. Perfect. Hopefully, it'll help polish up those stick/rudder/throttle skills enough so I can finally dead-aim those manual weapons and fly formation...there's always more to learn, which was always the attraction of aviation, anyway. If you're doing it right, DCS will never become boring, no matter how long it takes for the next module to come out. Now, if I only had a spare few hundred thousand bucks...I hear L-39's are "affordable" jets to own...

Good feedback, thanks! I'll give it another go. By the way, this campaign is fantastic!