unipus

Lot of assumptions packed into that. Lots of splash, no hits. So let's toss the assumptions in the trash where they belong and move forward with this: "what's reasonable to expect of a 1970s attack chopper" -- well, for one thing: good effect on target, using unguided and HE munitions. You don't have to be Steel Beasts to have a basic handling of fundamental things like mobility kills, weapons kills, crew bailing, morale, retreat, defensive maneuvers, popping smoke... all of that stuff is fundamental to the air-ground relationship and the lack of it very directly impacts the fidelity of the sim to real world tactics and behavior - and therefore the immersion and enjoyment a lot of people can get out of it. Maybe you're personally content to put rockets where you were told to and pretend it had a realistic effect, and that's great for you, but if you're trying to experience missions (or dynamic campaigns) that actually demonstrate plausible results, the systems currently fall well short. If you can imagine believable behaviors on the battlefield by ground units, you can start to see how much more immersive it would be, and the massive positive effects that would have through the whole experience. DCS is not just a flight sim, it's a combat flight sim.

I almost never use the button trimmer. The hat trim is much easier to make fine adjustments by (honestly you can fly almost entirely by trim) and not bugged. Interestingly, I've noticed I do still have to reset trim fairly often, as my pedals often end up with a high degree of trim that I didn't command - possibly AP doing this but it's not canceled by pedal even in AP mode. For the unguided weapons (and everything really) I find it helps a lot to reduce brightness of each gunsight. The static sight I reduce to about 50% usually, and the CCIP sight by a little bit less. Depends on the lighting conditions, of course, sometimes you need them much dimmer than that even. But when they're not the same max brightness it's much easier to parse out what they're telling you.

You can see this torque effect even in stable flight. For instance, line up for a rocket or gun run, then try to make corrections using collective. Anything more than the slightest input will make it very difficult as it will effect not only pitch but also yaw. The blade produces an enormous amount of torque. The other absolutely critical factor to understand is that the tail rotor and main rotor share the same power supply. In other words, if you have max collective, you cannot also have max tail rotor effectiveness. If you find yourself spinning left, then there are only two solutions: 1) lower collective to restore tail rotor power or 2) airspeed. Personally, now that I better understand how it works, I find the yaw channel invaluable for easy and steady flying in almost all regimes, including takeoff and usually landing.

Since learning to take it slow and be imperfect, my results got much better. My early attempts involved a lot of trying to do it the cool way and rapidly decelerate through lots of pitch or j-turns, etc. These mostly ended in fireballs because I didn't have the sense yet for managing descent rates. Once I went back to crawling and walking before running, the results predictably got a lot better. Slow and steady and then you can add technique to the level of your actual skill from there!

This is the boogeyman that's going to raise its head everywhere. Without meaningful fragmentation and splash effects and specific damage effects, weapons other than precision-guided are at a massive disadvantage. You see this even in AA missiles that lack proximity fusing. A 30mm cannon can't destroy an Abrams, no, except under extraordinary circumstances. But it can certainly do enough damage to immobilize it or render it combat ineffective in a whole bunch of ways that are not modeled at all in DCS. We also don't have a decent model for the suppressive power of any type of ordinance really. Until those things are represented, it's going to be disappointing.

You can absolutely kill Bradleys with the 30mm. Exact aspect and ranges, I couldn't say.

Really not sure what you're going on about at this point. But of course, go on filing your IFR flight plans with the DCS ATC then, I'm sure you'll have good and safe results and many successful flights... Anyway, the Hind ships with charts that give you all the information you need. If you're really not sure what you're heading into, there's big giant numbers that tell you how high you ought to be in the absolute worst case. Won't protect you from radar, won't protect you from AI that can magically see through weather, but it is realistic and doable.

Oh, I'm well aware. However, if you are trained to fly on instruments, and use your charts to stay away from terrain, it's entirely doable. More dangerous in a helicopter than a fixed wing, but either way the major cause of danger does not even apply in a sim.

This sounds truly interesting. I've joined the Discord, and read and responded to the rules... now I have access to many channels but as far as I've seen, all of them are read-only. What's the next step?

Questions remains: equipped to handle what, exactly? A ferry flight? A combat mission under marine layer conditions that are forecast to clear by the time you're on the target? Those all seem like situations that a capable pilot and commander would routinely face and succeed at. Penetrating a high threat area with zero vis at treetop level? Probably not.

You could fly it instrument with basic minimums just fine. The chart and your various nav aids like NDB should be more than sufficient. Try to hug the ground and you're going to die of course.

"Suppressing" "insurgents" is a lot of fun in this. As many have said though, it falls way way short when there's no actual suppression. I'll accept it's realistic if my run with the GUV pods doesn't actually hit anyone. But it breaks my whole enthusiasm when that lone soldier stands still in the open field during and after, firing tracers (also a big ?) from his AK. Why can men in DCS not run for cover, or go prone, or crawl? This should be the easiest thing in the world. (also, using the GUV pods in multiplayer is kind of a nightmare, don't do it!) The rockets are lackluster in effect as well. Even a very simplified ground unit "damage model," the kind that's been used effectively in tabletop games for decades, would lead to satisfactory outcomes. As it is, it's direct hit or nothing with most rockets. The cannon, on the other hand, rips. (it also seems to lack HE effect, making it nearly useless against infantry, but other than that a decent momentary burst is guaranteed to put most light vehicles out of action. Maybe excessively so -- doesn't seem like Bushmasters and 30mm have this same capability against other vehicles whatsoever, normally. Fixing this overall model needs to be a high priority. I'd be happy to donate the time to design a very simple skeleton system to do it, even! Then all the weapons and tactics can actually serve a purpose, rather than being a continual reminder of extreme shortcomings.

Not recently moved, not a symbolic link, not using 360. This is new behavior. Previous updates have run without a problem.

Edited and added!

Trying to run the most recent update, upon near-completion I get this error. After further inspection it seems that the updater somehow removed the path/reference to my entire K drive -- it cannot even be browsed by Windows file explorer! Restarting resolves the issue, however, it is repeatable. It happens again upon trying to run Repair (except this time the Repair downloader just vanished without a warning message some small % through). autoupdate_log.txt

Certainly a knock against DCS AI and not the Viggen module. I flew a Ka-50 campaign mission yesterday which involved flying very slowly a few meters above a forest and then coming to a hover. I suddenly notice some flashing orange light in my cockpit, only to discover it's from my wingman's burning wreckage as he couldn't handle such a daunting task. sadnessemoji Unfortunately I don't know what can be done other than hope Eagle is working on it.

I have this very same setup with an X-55 throttle (minus your desk mount -- good inspiration, since my desk doesn't fit any of the major mounts out there and my stick currently rests on an old record player case that happens to be the right height after much trial and error!)

One problem you will likely run into is a lot of missions prepared for the old version of Caucasus map, or simply old in general, now have errors (or maybe I should just call them "gaps") which prevent them from running correctly. I even ran into this on the UH-1 training missions. For that and various other reasons, it's really in your best interests to learn the mission editor! I've spent most of my time just flying with a buddy or two in semi-randomized missions which are fairly easy to set up.

TrackIR helps a lot!

I find both highly scripted missions (Eastern Friendship is a great recent example) and dynamic emergent ones can be more than satisfying, when the proper effort is put in. Unfortunately in DCS this very often seems like a case of overcoming the tools, rather than being in harmony with the tools. The briefings, as has been mentioned many times here, are somewhere between lackluster and truly inadequate. The lack of the basic Mission Planner function in any kind of multiplayer is insult to injury. I look back on something as ancient as Wing Commander and remember feeling fully immersed in the briefings and the ongoing drama of the squadron environment itself, as simple as it was. Unfortunately there's no way to get there with tiny images inside a modal that just seem like a step in the way of "Fly Mission," rather than a critical part of it. In a multiplayer squadron I'd just as soon skip it and make everyone watch a completely external presentation.

I saw it on all sorts of fighters for interception missions and for helicopters on frontline assault missions. Those were the only ones I tried. But to give you an idea, I tried watching an intercept mission with the "mid-game" setup option checked. I watched the red side at mission start and within seconds of start they lost about half of their 20 aircraft to collisions. Not sure if the blue side suffered any similar casualties. Another potentially related issue: loading the non-quickstart version of a mission still seems to start you in the air sometimes. It seemed to me that this MIGHT be the result of being spawned at an airfield without appropriate parking places. The RED starting airfield on Nevada has no parking. And since I'm here, a balancing issue: it seems Blue gets Patriot batteries at each of their airfields, and Red gets... SA-9? LOL.

Getting back into mission design after a long hiatus. Never used MOOSE, but seeing functions I've expected forever in DCS like suppression and effective loading/unloading of infantry certainly makes me take another look! Question on suppression specifically: would there be any way to modify the distribution of time suppressed based on unit skill level? This would model very well to reality and give some good capability to finesse. Of course I say this without knowing the full scope of what is effected by skill level by default! Also, what counts as "hit" for purposes of initiating suppression? Any weapon? Would being on the very edge of the radius of a bomb do it? Or is there some threshold of damage applied that does it?

One issue I ran into on this video, maybe someone knows the answer: I couldn't get the aircraft to respect tail numbers I gave them in the editor. Thus they are all "37." (obviously this was done by the Swedish forces to confuse the enemy and is very on purpose)

I guess the question would be what's the angle on the seeker cone of the missile's radar, and does it weight towards the middle, or just closest, or...?

Yes, I was doing that too but having to lean in a huge amount. I thought "this can't be the way this is supposed to work."