Alexrey

Probably seen by most of you, but appropriate:

That's why it would be nice to not treat the check at a superficial level and actually do it in case our crew chief did by mistake misplace a switch (maybe when he or she got out of the A-10 in too speedy a fashion, or was talking to someone else on the ground and had a lapse of concentration). I understand that a misplaced switch is a rarity, but knowing that all of the switches will be in their correct positions whilst doing the check just doesn't feel like I'm doing anything. All I do now is turn on the A-10C and hit the flight line ASAP without doing any of those checks because I know that nothing will be wrong.

Does that mean that the pilots do not need to perform a cockpit check before flicking switches?

I was just wondering if it is possible to make a script to be able to misplace some switch positions in the cockpit so that we are essentially forced to go through the pre-flight cockpit check before takeoff to make sure that nothing is out of place. Right now I feel as though I have no need to do a pre-flight cockpit check because all the switches would have been "left" in their correct places by the ground crew or pilot who used to A-10C before me. But having to check the switches in case one was left in an incorrect position would really make me want to check everything just like a real A-10C pilot.

Thanks a lot, appreciate it!

For the life of me I can't get them into the same unit. I tried renaming each unit's unit name to "1", but then they became "1", "1 #001", 1 #002" etc.

I put the CC, LN and SR versions of the SA-11 into a test mission but they still won't fire at me. All I get is the Snow Drift contact on my RWR. I thought that the LN was the launcher, the SR was the radar and the CC was the command centre that got information from the SR and told the LN where to fire. Any help would be appreciated, thanks guys.

The manual is a load of sh*t. I know a lot of people will hate me for saying that, but there are just so many mistakes that it is beyond ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, I love the sim and I love ED for making it, but next time they really need to devote more time to the manual. Fig. 227 is just one of their many mistakes. If you mess around with the hook types whilst flying it should become apparent after a little playing around what each type does. The manual does explain it well though (minus the typos).

It's actually very straightforward. Don't let the long post scare you, its just to show you what is going on step-by-step. All we're doing is converting a L/L degrees-minutes-seconds coordinate format into a L/L degrees-minutes format so that we can enter it into the CDU correctly (because the CDU only takes its Latitude/Longitude coordinates in degrees-minutes format and not the standard degrees-minutes-seconds format that we are used to). It's basic maths.

You can also roughly see what the decimal value has to be if they give you the co-ords in degrees-minutes-seconds and (I haven't tested this yet) making a rough estimate for the seconds part should get you fairly close to the target of interest. For example: 10'' = 10/60 = 1/6 = 0.167 20'' = 20/60 = 2/6 = 1/3 = 0.333 30'' = 30/60 = 3/6 = 1/2 = .500 40'' = 40/60 = 4/6 = 2/3 = 0.667 50'' = 50/60 = 5/6 = 0.833 Having those simple references memorized you could then easily know what to enter into the CDU instead of running to the calculator, which would save a lot of crucial time.

Apologies if this is a stupid question, but what exactly are you trying to do by dividing L/L co-ordinates by 60? I presume that you received those co-ords from the JTAC 9-line message? I haven't played around with entering L/L co-ords for a new waypoint too much, but I have tried it once or twice and just entering in the L/L co-ords into their required fields in the CDU waypoint page gave me the correct location of targets and I had no need to divide anything by 60.

Learning the startup procedure honestly isn't that difficult because it follows a very logical order. After two "tutorial starts" I could start the plane up from scratch every time without any trouble because of my above-mentioned point. Just a side note: if you don't like waiting for the INS to align itself you can always change the alignment mode from "GROUND" to "INFLT" which will use the A-10C's GPS system to help align the INS a lot faster than it's standard alignment process and will allow you to move even during the alignment process.

Hey guys, I recently learnt how to get co-ordinates from a JTAC and stick them into my CDU waypoint page. I'm having a few problems though and hope that someone could help me out. 1) What is the importance of setting the STEEP PT dial in the AAP to FLT PLAN or MISSION, what exactly is the difference? 2) Sometimes, once I've entered a new waypoint into the CDU from JTAC co-ordiantes, and then want to enter another set of co-ordinates for a second JTAC target I get one of two errors and the only way that I can rectify them is by turning the CDU off and then on again (which I'm sure isn't very good for the system as I get the "WARM START" error). The first type of error is when all of the fields in the waypoint page are full of asterisks and I'm unable to enter any data. The second type of error is when the waypoint page is stuck on the mark point page and, again I cannot enter any data or change to the standard waypoint page. These two problems have really baffled me and I'd like to figure them out. Any help would be appreciated, thanks guys.

I don't let him hear that part since he'll probably direct me onto friendlies.

Is it possible to get the JTAC to tell you how many targets are still left to kill? A lot of times I think that I've destroyed all of the targets, but JTAC says I'm haven't. I then ask for targets and he says "tanks", gee thanks a lot for your awesome help Mr. JTAC! It's really starting to frustrate me, not know how many targets I still have to kill! Any help would be appreciated, cheers guys.

RAM timing is set to auto in BIOS settings.

No too sure, I'll give them a check and report back. The timings shouldn't have changed since they've been running together fine for the past 2 and a half years. What I'm worried about though is the fact that I did hear something that sounded like a hardware malfunction because of the funny popping sound when everything started going pear-shaped.

Okaaaay update time... I bought another stick of DDR2 800MHz from the local PC shop that originally said my RAM was faulty. I replaced the "faulty" RAM with the new stick and what do you know, the same error occurs! I took it back to the PC shop and they did some tests but couldn't figure it out so they said they'd test the new RAM stick and get back to me. This morning I tested both of my RAM sticks with MemTest and it found no errors, but when I put them both in I still couldn't boot my system. Then I tried putting both RAM sticks in the same "slot section" (dunno if that's the right term) and now my PC boots fine. So I don't have faulty RAM, but a faulty motherboard that doesn't seem to like running in dual channel mode. Really really weird. Dunno what I can do about this now. I'm worried that this could lead to more hardware failures.

That's perfect, so I won't have to worry about any other problems? I know that dual channel mode won't work, but from what I've read that doesn't make that much difference anyway.

Could you possibly elaborate further as to why mixing sticks is a bad idea?

I was thinking of getting another stick of DDR2 800MHz, but realised that that would be pointless since faster RAM is cheaper than slower older RAM. I'm just wondering if having 2GB of Kingston DDR2 800MHz RAM (which I currently have in my system), and then getting 2GB of the newer RAM (to replace my blown stick), for example DDR3 1333MHz, would cause any conflicts. As far as I know the only "conflict" would be that that 2GB of DDR3 1333MHz RAM would be down-clocked to 800MHz due to my other 2GB stick.

Boy am I glad, turned out to be a faulty RAM stick, sorry Asus... I feel kinda bad now.

Do any of you guys have any suggestions for another motherboard that I could buy (not Asus because I'm highly pissed off with them at the moment), that is similar to my most-likely-dead Asus P5Q? This is the P5Q's full description: http://www.sybaritic.co.za/store/product_info.php?cPath=81_226&products_id=26680. I heard that Gigabyte boards are pretty good.

Once they give me back a full diagnosis I guess it's time to find a similar MB to my P5Q (if the MB is in fact the problem), I really hope it isn't the CPU :(.

I love everything there is about aircraft and how they fly, it just amazes me that aircraft can actually fly using Newton's 3rd Law and some pressure difference magic! I'm 22 years old (quite young for this place although I'm sure there are people here who are younger than me) and actually plan on joining the RAF as aircrew once I'm done with university (if there are still any jobs left after all the defence cuts). I'm currently doing my final undergraduate year studying maths and geography and will be doing honours in maths, JUST so I can hopefully one day fly (I know, I should have done aeronautical engineering instead of pure maths). As long as I can have a career that allows me to deal with aircraft design or flight, I'll be happy for the rest of my life. So in short, yes I kinda like planes