paulca

So I was doing "Minebusters" tonight. Seemed like a simple enough affair. Quite a long flight in to the target area, but I like that and can always use accelerated time if I need to. Climbed all the way to 20,000ft and figured I could just orbit over the target and take my time. MANPADs don't reach 20,000ft. Emm... wrong apparently. No warning, no missile launch alarm, no wingman call, just BANG, no engines. In anger I carefully steered the broken plane straight down on top of the MANPAD as I ejected. Got him and his buddies too! So... back to square one. Relaunched the mission and managed to kill all the required targets and polished off the remaining few trucks. Headed home. Told my wingman to RTB and then dropped in as his 2. Followed him for a nice formation landing. Only.... he slammed the brakes on as soon as his hit the tarmac, I went a little long and straight into the back of him with all 3 wheels screeching. So... guess what I will be doing tomorrow... again.

It played through fine the second time for me. I did also get the wingman who sat on the taxi way for ten minutes and then took off. He caught up eventually though.

If any of you play racing sims and drive a car in the real world will realise that even with the best most accurate car sim and the best more accurate steering wheel and pedals somethings are just very, very difficult in sims compared to reality. Following another car at close quarters accurately for example, analogous in a loose way to a2a refueling is very difficult in a sim, but yet we (drivers) do that every single day in traffic and can place the front of the car within an inch of where we want it to be. I think one key sense that people often exclude that can't really be simulated (at least well and not at all without millions of pounds worth of equipment) is motion. You body has the equivalent of accelerometers which are amazingly accurate. Without them you would not be able to stand up. Even though you are not aware of them or what they are telling you, they are telling you the tiniest little movements. So when you open the throttle to advance on the tanker while you may not be aware of it per-sae your brain is aware of feeling the acceleration. Add this feedback into the process of "motor memory" and your brain can adapt and learn some pretty amazing things. Without the proper sensory feedback the process of correct motor memory and 'hand eye coordination' does not work anywhere near as efficiently. If you want to see just how much of a difference it makes, next time you are in the car, try braking with your left foot. DO NOT do it in traffic!

Appologies if I'm confused between missions, but I believe I had an issue with this one. Assuming it's the one where you have to escort Shieffer (or what you call him) to be picked up by the Huey flight. I got all fixated and too close and kept overshooting my target before I got a firing solution and after doing pointless aerobatics over the battle missing everything I got a radio message: "We've lost sheiffer, shieffer is KIA" and to RTB. Then I started getting harrassed by the Huey flight about having them hold too long, but I no longer had the F10 menu option. Then the Huey flight moved in and landed at the LZ right in the middle of the enemy troops. Finally I got a call that Shieffer was onboard and to provide cover while the Huey egressed. The Huey did not egress the huey sat on the ground and was still there after I landed.

As someone who worked in electronic financial trading applications I have studied threading models quite a bit, trying to achieve single or double digit micro-second processing time. Layman: Wouldn't doing 8 things at once be faster? Reality: Not if they are competing for resources. Consider being in work, doesn't matter what it is you are doing really. Now lets say 8 different people bring you things to do. If they all just added a job slip into a pile and you went through them in order... how would that compare to you trying to do them all at once? In reality you would need to stop, switch jobs, work on it for a wee while, then stop, switch, work, stop, switch and so on. Which would be faster? In this example YOU are the resource the jobs are competing for. When there are competing resources the threads have to be managed and communicate via signals and locks. Threads have to suspend and wait while another uses the memory or resource they want to use. The more threads you have the more time this locking and signalling takes. Signals and locks often form competing queues. They cause the hardware to suspend and context switch executing processes to service another. All these suspending threads and context switches cost time, quite a lot of it in fact. The complexity of development also increases massively. The probability of a bug causing memory corruption or a CTD also increase massively. An example is making toast with a toaster. If the toaster does 2 slices and takes 2 minutes to toast them. If you have 10 slices to toast would it be faster to toast 2 at a time and wait, doing them in sequence or to keep stopping the toaster and swapping the slices every few seconds? If it takes you 10 seconds to swap slices you should be able to work it out that it will take far longer to keep switching the slices than to do them sequentially. Besides, DX provides only a single event thread. So anything and everything that requires a DX operation has to be pushed onto a event queue and wait until DX gets to it. Having more threads putting stuff onto that queue will just bottle neck the whole thing and actually decrease performance and increase lag. In short, multi-threading is only faster is a limited set of cases.

There are real world checklist items that will sort out your flaps of course :) I am always amused by the amount of sim and pc checklists that need doing before a flight. Is TrackIR running? Clip sound and correctly placed on headphones? Is TacView running? Is the Logitec wheel initialised for the pedals (mine fails to self test 1 in 3 times)? Are the warthog stick switches in the correct location? Chair at the right height? Headphone amp on? Headphone selected as default audio device? Do I have a pen and paper beside me? Then in the virtual cockpit testing the controls including the pedals does prevent you wasting 10 minutes sparking up the plane to find your joystick isn't working and you need to quit to fix it.

It occurred to me that I spend quite a lot of time at the altitude and range where visual target spotting would be done. I paraglide. Thus I spend a lot of time floating along a ridge line looking down in the valley. I am 2,000ft to 5,000ft above and 2-3km out from the valley. Not only can I see the landing field and spot individual cars parked there and moving along the road, I can also see groups of people standing under the trees. I even one day spotted, in my periphery vision a plane. Wasn't even looking at it and spotted it off to my left, about 1,000ft below me, coming down the valley low and hot. "Bandit, 9 o'clock low, hot. WTF!?" To a paraglider a GA plane IS a bandit and quite deadly, low level helo's are worse! So I radioed out "Heads up, plane coming up the valley west to east, low about 2,000ft AGL." and promptly did a big tight 360 to show my wing to the pilot give him the best chance of seeing me. The only advantage I have on a paraglider is I'm slow, practically hovering over the valley... that and polarized sun glasses. I believe the problem lies in the different texture resolutions between the ground, trees, buildings and targets and the way the isotrpohic filtering is applied. The eye locks into the detail it can see, so when looking at blurry textures under magnification it almost looks past the sharp targets as noise. One thing you see very clearly in DCS that you don't in reality is power lines. Power lines are a curse in reality. You can't see the lines even when 1000 foot above them. So you look for the poles or the shadow of the poles and you can pick them out from a good way off... if you are lucky. Spotting one across your landing field when you are committed is a butt tightening moment. Always have a plan B until the last second.

I was about halfway through it when I went to the Enemy Within campaign. It alternates around "drop bridge, destroy artillery, support advance" a lot. The bridges and arty you can hit easily with guided bombs and go home. The support advance missions are much more tricky as the units advancing are usually made out of wet paper, so if you leave a single enemy tank alive it can wipe out the whole advancing group failing the mission. Also beware that if there are two stage objectives when you order the units to advance from the first objective to the second more units will spawn, including SAMs, AAA and bandits.

Sound like the taxi way has visual textures but the physics engine is unaware there is tarmac there. The plane sounds like it is behaving as if it's on grass/mud and sinking in, bogging down.

What I find annoying about the TGP is 1. resolution. The ground textures blur out while the targets stay high res. This actually makes them harder to spot. If only the textures used by the TGP could be uber high res and stay useful when full zoomed, even from 4 or 5nm. 2. The ground textures themselves. It seems that for the 'scrub land' style textures ED went out and took a photo of a field full of cars, tanks and trucks. I swear for every real target there are 10 false ones. There are parts of the textures that look absolutely identical to a tank or artilery piece. The only way to work out it's not is to zoom all the way in and see if it goes blocky like the ground textures. 3. The IR simulation is pants. Those same patches of terrain texture in 2 above SHOULD NOT glow in infra-red, yet they do. 4. Towns and trees. Next to impossible to spot anything in them. 5. Small AAA emplacements are impossible to see.

Agreed, Though I would use the word "fixed" rather than improved. If they did what you told them to effectively they would be brilliant. The "Eject" thing has only happened to me once, usually they go... "2, affirm" "2, rejoin" "2, RTB" Which is better in that they stay alive and can be told to rejoin. The "Eject" response is kinda rubbish though. "Engage targets of opportunity", as you say, works most of the time. They seem to pick by priority within a 10nm radius or at least all the targets they have tallied. They will start with Anti-air. So if there are SAMs about they will usually, stupidly, run in on them, even if they only have dumb bombs available and especially if there are other anti-air threats for him to get shot by.

So I have spent quite a bit of time testing out my wingman and... he goes from being completely useless to astonishly good to completely useless seemingly at random. If you set him up well at good altitude and distance he will run in on Mavericks and fire 6 for 6 targets and 6 kills. However if you try and get him to drop a JDAM or a CBU105.... well, I gave up after 5 minutes of watching him orbit the target, brake, accelerate, continue orbiting the target. Again however, when I ordered the same wing man to just attack "ground targets", he flew 5nm away and dropped all 4 CBUs into a group of anti-air taking out about 20 of them LOL Wish I had got a fraps video of them. Of course them he went back to useless again. In the last mission "Storm before the calm - Enemy within" the first time I told him to attack, he responded with 2, affirm, 2 ejecting. Which completely screwed me up as I didn't have enough weapons to complete the mission and had to refuel and rearm! Does anyone have tips on what works and what doesn't work and how to use the buggy little fellas effectively? Cheers.

BULL-CURS was what I as looking for to pin point a bullseye reference. As to coordinate based positions, I suppose the CDU is the best option. Thanks, especially the video link :)

Mine was spotting infantry at 20nm when they were behind mountains. A good trick, but also impossible and as they were silent on RWR it can't be that. Also RWR gives bearing, but not range, so the AI must be cheating. It can be an advantage of course to get an idea of where stuff is when miles out. However when flying into a heavily populated area it jams up the radio frequency especially if you have several flights all reporting contacts. The flight radio frequency is completely jammed up with unit position reports for the first 5 to 10 minutes making it next to impossible to get a word in edgewise to JTAC or your wingman.

I have been trying to learn the TAD more effectively. When I receive a position such as "Bullseye 038 for 32". How can I slew the TAD to that point with the BULLS reference to my cursor and not my present location? It seems the only way to get a reference for a point is to put something there, like a mark point. A similar question would be... generally how do you reference the TAD cursor without making a mark point, so you can, say, pick a point and make it SPI? The other thing that I'd like to do, which I'm not sure if it's possible... is have the cursor position in EXP1/2 mode to show it's position at the bottom, rather than my current location. This will allow me to slew the TAD cursor to coordinates provided by ground troops/downed pilots or JTAC coords (in lieu of data).

It's easy to get confused, well I have found that I get confused. I spent about 3 failed runs last night because I was using the TDC on the hud to pick out the group of targets and I was getting lost in the TGP. However my TGP didn't seem to want to slew to SPI. I was using China AFT long instead of forward, reseting SPI to steerpoint. It's easily done. Took me a while to reset out of blondeness and realise my mistake. Another technique which can be very handy and will help address the above ... once you find the target, mark point it. Switch to "MARK" on the CDU selector knob and switch steerpoint to the new mark point either with the steerpoint rocker switch or the DMS up/down with HUD SOI. This way china hat aft slews the SPI into the target area anyway. Then again, that is probably worse as you will think you have a good SPI, but it will probably not be what you expect, even though it's in the right area. Assuming you look at the TGP you will realise and it's only a short slew and TMS up long to fix it.

I typically try and send him in on a "kill air defenses" pass before me. I like him that much! However he often does a pretty good job at spotting MANPADs and ZSUs on trucks that I miss on my recon. That and when I have made a run in and see I left stuff behind, I order him in for a go while I orbit. However I often have to wait a considerable time in the orbit for him to make a pass. Sometimes I give up on him and go back in myself. As he seems to do better with Mavs and Guns I might just give him as many mavs as I can (6?) and leave it at that.

Yea. :( Also noticed my wingman doing another strange thing. "2, attach ground targets at my SPI with <anything but maverick>" "2, roger" "2, engaging targets" ... 1 second later ... "2, rejoin" "2, RTB" Thankfully he doesn't actually RTB and will rejoin and reattck, but it seems he refuses most attacks but is fairly happy with mavericks and guns work more often than not. I am doing missions in the mountains, thought this might be why, maybe he can't do his prefered run in with some weapons in some terrains. <shrug> I bought the Enemy Within campaign, so that has filled my St. Paddy's well and truely. Feels much better than the default campaign so far.

For some reason that last video reminds me of the time I flew into my own Mk82Air.

I was dropping them from 12k-15k with the default 1800 HOF. Each one took out 2 or 3 tanks. The only issue is convincing the wing man to drop his. I ordered him to attack armor at my SPI with guided bombs, I checked on him 5 minutes later and he was flying around the armor group in circles. He had apparently dropped one CBU, but was stuck in a loop, braking down to low speed turning in, saying "running in", then just accelerating and carrying on round the loop again. I watched him do 2 or 3 complete orbits like this without dropping anything. There were still armor targets below.

The CBU-105 works well. Using the SEAD flights and CAP to make the area fairly safe, I've taken to orbiting until I pick out 2, 3 or 4 groups of armor, then drop 2, 3 or 4 CBU-105s. Try and get the wingman to do the same, but it's barely more useful than a wet rotting cabbage sometimes TBH. I may as well say, "2, Fly around the target area, pretend to attack but don't, then make sure and get shot at a lot." Then I pick the rest I missed with mavericks. Refuel/rearm, order the troops I'm escorting forward and do actual support while they advance through the stuff I missed.

Cool. In lay-mans terms, Don't hit the ground and jink... or jink first but don't hit the ground. :)

As to avoiding fire I have also been practising. Circling and playing with AAA Zsus and the like at 1,000ft. Just wait for the fire to come up and then not be where it's aimed, when it gets there be somewhere else. I suppose the easiest way would be to fly in a randomised zig zag jinking this way and that like a soldier having to run across the open under fire. It's much more fun watching the tracers and flying around them. I also play with SA-11s from long range. You can lead them around like little puppies until they are almost out of all energy then just "step out of the way" at the last minute. Though ... It wasn't the one I was watching and playing with last night that hit me and took both wings off :( It was the other one I hadn't seen, LOL What gets me every time though are the MGs on vehicles when I bear down on them with the gun. They don't fire at all until I get carried away and am right in their face and then they take out an engine and a bunch of systems with the first shot. So I now discipline myself and not get carried away. 6nm, good TGP, maverick won't lock. 4nm, maverick still won't lock... 3... 2... to hell with this I can practically read his newspaper, "Guns, Guns, Guns!" Of course by the time you get the pipper on the target again you are at 0.5nm. A 3 second burst later you are flying through your own ricochets and usually adding grass stains to the under side of the plane. The tank... hits your engine on the first shot and... drives off unharmed.

I did this mission recently. I didn't finish it though. Think I got fixated on an APC and he managed to kill me with his machine gun as I got way too close. I told my wingman to get Trail. So it stayed behind me and at least made an attempt to stay under cover. However as soon as you tell him to attack anything he pops up and invariably gets a SAM launch on him. He promptly dumps his stores "Engaged Defensive" and runs home crying like a girl. Next to useless.

Oh.. yes... houses. It did occur to me that dropping a cluster munition on a build up area might be a bit unsavoury, but it's a game and it gave me a chuckle. If you happen to be in an area with tanks and you hear an A10, if you aren't running as fast as possible to be as far away from any vehicle, you are asking for trouble.