Cik

just a theory but for the A-10 it probably matters less than other platforms. the reasoning for this is that A-10 releases closer than all the other PWII carrying jets. the reason for that is because the A-10 is slower and tends to release at a lower altitude (IE, has less slant range to the target) since the seekerhead tends to correct more violently the further it is away, it might actually be possible to cause misses if you are in another jet and going fast. in A-10c though you're right and you will never miss even if you start lasing the moment the bomb departs the airframe.

the bomb overcorrects as it falls, and the amount of correction it does is a function of it's distance from the target. if you lase too early it can overcorrect and lose the laserspot, at which point it will fall ballistically and miss. this may not actually happen in the game, but many sim recommendations don't really pan out in sims.

it should just be removed and replaced with an ACMI system if you want to record DCS just use a video recording software such as OBS

ECM doesn't help because it doesn't suppress their range at all. even at high altitude, the realistic hit range of an AMRAAM is still far less than the burnthrough of the same aircraft. all jammers do is make you easier to see at long range, in combat they are basically worthless as all they do is help the enemy see you. it has marginal utility in a few other games, because the theoretical ROPT/RPI values sometimes lie outside burnthrough, if both combatants are high and fast. at that point, the enemy does actually lose the ability to shoot you directly because of the ECM. this never happens in DCS because missiles have tiny effective ranges. realistically ECM is a liability if you can't actually suppress the enemy's shot. in the modern age especially because HOJ exists. i'm not saying it's useless, just not against eagles. against mig21-era i'm sure it's probably sort of useful. not that you need it then either.

you snuck up on someone by running electronic noise that can be detected from 200nm? high altitude almost works against you in sukhoi, since the effective range of the AMRAAM increases and the effective range of your missiles does not, because as long as the enemy can make a halfhearted turn and chaff twice it will spoof every radar you have. sparrow armed eagles are of course another story, but if you snuck up on someone with sorbitsya you probably could have done it without it. i mean, no one expects the high flanker, partially because it's a terrible idea and because in airquake DCS everyone flies around on the deck because BVR is so twisted. i'm not saying victory is impossible by the way, but actually trading spears successfully with an eagle requires every advantage in the book and your chance of actually killing it are very low. to kill an eagle: really high, really fast RNGesus on chaff/flare chances he's not very good, and/or doesn't go full defensive early enough (as in like, what, 5 miles? lul) he has no friends, or you outnumber those friends 3 or 4 to 1 (and even then you're likely to catch an AMRAAM to the face from a bunch of cheapshot eagles anyway) BVR is a fool's game unless you are okay with getting a kill every 20 sorties, maybe the worst part about going high is that you can't effectively use your IRST because it doesn't gimbal low enough.

altitude doesn't mean that much because kinetic advantage in DCS is mostly meaningless if you are not an eagle. the weakest point by far of any of your weapons is the seeking. you could be going mach 10 and you would still miss at anything past very close range. archers simply aren't reliable enough to only take 2. they are the sukhoi's best advantage, and since you will often be ambushing groups it is imperative to bring enough to kill at least two semi-defensive targets.

highalt is pointless honestly. ER range is "technically" superior on paper but in actuality it's worthless. unless you can fire a radar missile and hit within about 3-5 seconds don't bother firing; all it will do is scare the prey and they will chaff it 100% of the time. load as many non-radars as possible; don't bother flying at high altitude, none of your missiles are reliable enough to hit anything past very close range. radar missiles are only really useful as a option for close range combat; they are less spoofable than your ET/R73 at close range because they close the distance very fast and because chopping throttle does not affect them. highalt is pointless; your only strength is stealth, VSCAN and EO. all highalt will do is waste your time until you're forced to disengage by the superior de facto F/E pole of f-15. jammers don't achieve anything due to very low effective ranges of all missiles. don't bother loading them; take more archers instead. don't expect to get kills off anything other than ambush. if it all possible, don't emit until the enemy has already blown up. shoot lots of missiles. seriously, underestimating what 2 chaff packets can do is a deadly mistake. KEEP SHOOTING! don't attack something unless it isn't aware of you or you have it outnumbered at least 2:1 don't be afraid to fire missiles and burn lots of fuel. you are significantly heavier than eagles because they will jettison their fuel tanks in close combat and you cannot. in actuality, being below 60% fuel before going into close combat is a good idea. this assumes of course eagles have SPAAMRAAM. if they are loaded with sparrows going high (~12,000m) or so is actually worth it. many eagles are extremely silly and fly around on the deck all the time because they are used to the inherent superiority of the AMRAAM and have no idea how to actually use a BVR platform like the eagle. you can get R-27R kills on these people by just shoot - crank - nose on - shoot - crank -repeat. mix in some T/ET and they will often lose.

if your misses are pretty close it's probably just the anemic default bomb modelling use warhead mod and at least you will probably damage things with near misses. in default DCS for whatever reason you can't kill a BMP-1 (renowned for being regularly penetrated by 7.62+ machine guns lel) with a 500 lb bomb going off within a few meters.

"hey guys, how do i land at 20 knots in the A-10" "don't, it's too slow" "WOW GUYS YOU DIDN'T EVEN ANSWER THE QUESTION!"

depress mic switch "falcon 2-1, hog 2-1 mud 6 bulls xxx xxx" "falcon 2-1 in" "magnum" wait a minute or two realistically you don't, it's not your job and all of this faffing about with taking out SA-10 etc with A-10 is pretty silly

in DCS planes actually literally vanish out of existence sometimes even before ~1/2 of actual visual range and also blend into the terrain/sky/whatever. who knows why. there's also no cockpit glint or anything like that modeled. exactly why this is still an issue after over a decade who knows. personally i think it's because this community always makes excuses for ED. every other sim of note has had visual spotting fixed up to realistic standards for like a decade now. the solution is freely available (literally) visual spotting is a core principle and requirement of flight sims, so all these "just use vertical scan lul" miss the point entirely. furthermore it's STILL A PROBLEM even after ED have added tons of platforms (and plan to add more) that 100% require it because they have very old or nonexistent radars. i barely fly A/A in DCS for this reason, because WVR is basically just an exercise in VSCAN mash lock until you find him and then shoot if you don't believe me that it's this bad, get in a mig21 and make a high speed merge vs. an f-5. you will start your turn out of the merge while looking at him and he will literally vanish.

visual spotting in DCS is unrealistically poor if you are having trouble with it, you are in the club of everyone who plays this game who isn't using telescopic eyezoom cheats tbh

approach low at 150 km/h, fire at 1.2-2.2~ km on medium burst setting, once done attacking (as fast as possible) lower collective, push nose down, jam right pedal and get into abeam as fast as possible; if no incoming rounds, do a gentle turn out, if there are rounds incoming then use your collective / nose authority to dodge until you are at the threat's max range, wait for it's last volley and then turn out and run. repeat until target destroyed. if you want your rockets to do anything you should install the warhead mod by the way, it makes rockets (for every platform) worth taking. anyway, the trick to rockets is to avoid coming in near VMAX as you are likely to kill yourself if you have to yaw. you can fire from a hover if you like but i think the recoil is far worse then. burst settings are the best feature of the aircraft, by the way.

it's best not to rely on the AI at all if you can manage it. if you have to travel a little heavier than you otherwise should, so be it. if you expect heavy enemy resistance, load heavy and then 'front-load' your engagement if necessary; if you have guys TIC you can drop more bombs than you might otherwise to ensure lots of initial kills and lighten your aircraft so you can be as agile as you need to be on the followup gun/rocket passes.

making a good campaign is a ton of effort and they probably just didn't have time. anyway, there's quite a few extraordinarily good missions to play for free that are more fun than the campaign, and more if you start playing multiplayer COOP. IMO though, that has always been the downside of DCS. the planes, wonderful, but everything around them is a little.. sparse. we still don't have most of the units we need to make a compelling mission in anything that isn't modern georgia, we're missing lots of SAMs, we're missing a ton of light armor and infantry-portable weapons for the insurgents etc. and most of the airplanes past the A-10 and black shark are pretty out of place in georgia.

the trick is to use the right weapon for the job. AFAIK all the campaign missions are going to be primarily busting armor. don't bother taking anti-infantry weapons, instead, truck PGMs and other efficient anti-armor weapons. i recommend something like (left to right) 2x AIM-9m LITENING pod AGM-65D GBU-38 GBU-38 GBU-12 GBU-38 GBU-38 AGM-65D rockets of some description GBU-12 100% combat mix 50/50 chaff/flare mix 60-80 percent fuel the trick when making these things is to stay in the 43-45k gross weight area, as the A-10 becomes an enormous slug when loaded close to gross weight limit, and especially if you have a lot of drag (mostly it's the triple racks) you can modify this loadout in a few ways, including adding more mavericks and less everything else, or adding more GBU-12s by using triple mounts on the central pylons. mounting anti-armor clusterbombs (CBU-97, 105) on the wing pylons is also a good idea, if you are fond of those though personally i don't take them in the campaign as usually the enemy is very spread out and it seems to blow up a lot of houses... generally though i'd pretty much never use the "official" loadouts, as you simply cannot do the mission with what they give you. they're fine for COIN or lighter tasking but the campaign is very inflexible; most of the time you're hitting hard armor and pretty much nothing else, and usually quite a bit of it so trucking PGMs is all you can really do. anyway, my advice is to just leave the campaign for now and play the included missions, missions you can find on these forums or the enemy within campaign. they're more fun IMO, for many reasons which i won't get into here.

cost i never really consider, instead i consider >effectiveness against target >what the target warrants (based on what it is, how it's defended, etc) >other concerns (how easy the weapon will be to deploy against the target, what my effective TTK is on whatever the target is, safety concerns) >how fun it will be: the game's a sim but tbh i never really enjoy trucking exclusively PGMs around, as it's pretty boring. generally when i outfit the plane i keep several pylons reserved for close support unguided weapons like rockets or mk82 TERs, as against many targets they are actually far faster to deploy, esp. when friendlies are in danger. multiple passes at 15,000 feet using LGBs takes FOREVER. i like to have at least a few weapons i can disintegrate a treeline with if there are some bad guys TIC with friendlies. then the rest of the pylons are GBU-38/12, mavericks. imo, a mix of PGMs and actually close support weapons is optimal. some targets require more standoff distance than others, generally speaking i like to preserve my higher-tech weapons exclusively for those threats.

ah, i see. it's a jokepost. took me awhile, very clever my friend.:thumbup:

edit: spoilers

the mission is one of the deadlier ones i think

against anything that doesn't have a forward aspect capability: line up on side/rear, come through formation at as close to mach 2 as possible, spray missiles everywhere, achieve kills, repeat against anything that has weak forward aspect capability: as above except beam out and run if they go hot on you. try to surround them with multiship tactics. if you get in, spray missiles and then run. against anything with far superior forward aspect / stealth launch capability: hug dirt, pray they don't see you, climb into belly, ripple heatseekers or more realistically, die.

yes, but that's not why it's a bad missile, and the su is relatively well-suited to carrying SARH with it's relatively ridiculous horizontal radar slew. the real thing that makes it worthless is it's CM rejection, which makes halfhearted defensive maneuvers defeat it with nearly 100% success rate, making nearly any advantage in speed/altitude pointless.

ah, if you're talking about scramble the mortars are actually pretty easy to find. got 'em

you're hunting artillery and you don't have a JTAC? what evil creature gave you that mission?

the answer at least in DCS is no, but then again the AMRAAM in DCS has a much shorter range than it actually should which means lofting doesn't give as much benefit as it should. i don't mean to insult your experience, but the physics seem to make lofting a thing, even if there wasn't a cue on the HUD. if you are at 15000 feet, the drag on the missile is a certain value, if you point your nose up in the air and fire the missile and the missile takes a loft trajectory, it will spend a high percentage of it's flightpath in the higher atmosphere, with correspondingly lower drag, so it goes farther on the same amount of propellant. does this give it a farther range than you would get from launching it at angels 30 to start with? of course not, because it has to get to higher altitude from lower altitude, then coast, then go back down, but it's superior to a nonloft trajectory which takes it through denser air all the way. it seems to me that the longer the missile flies, the more benefit you gain, which is probably why it doesn't work in DCS; the missile ranges are very compressed so any benefit you'd gain from the missile travelling high for awhile are cancelled out by the fact that it has to make abrupt steering commands to point the missile back down towards the target.