Kang

Still even the second picture you included shows they make up for it with having quadruple ATGM launchers, so it seems to me that having ours stand in would be more than reasonable. Thanks for updating that for me. Still, not really a reason not to have the livery, I figure.

Certainly agree, or just decide one way or the other and make it consistent. Some assets have visible crew, some don't.

You can have parked aircraft visible before activation by using the 'uncontrolled' box.

Seeing how Cyprus is one of the very few countries in DCS that is pretty much entirely included in a map and, as far as I know, an active user of Mi-24Ps (maybe not for much longer but that's that), I wonder why there is no corresponding livery included with the DCS Mi-24P. I would like to make it a request.

I kind of agree. Feels like the livery competitions so far have been widely successful and produced some amazing skins. Guess one reason not to do them back-to-back all the time is as risk of those very talented people just not getting into them as much anymore and also the player base sort of losing interest after a while, but it's definitely a good thing to be doing those more.

I would like to have a few more options in the infantry/personnel category. There are of course a lot of active combat units that could be added here, like ATGM teams, machine guns and so on, but I would like to point out a few possible additions that aren't exactly combat-related but would be rather useful for a lot of missions: 1) Pilots This is a pretty simple addition I would wager, as pilots are already modeled and rigged with animation in DCS. It would just be super useful to be able to actually place pilots as a unit, for airfield atmospherics but mostly because it would make setting up CSAR missions for helicopters a lot more immersive. 2) Stretchers Admittedly a bit more work here, but I think that a lot of helicopter transport missions (also looking at the future Chinook) would benefit from teams carrying stretchers as a transport task unit, seeing how medical evacuation and transport is a primary task for most utility helicopters. 3) Civilians I'm aware this is always a bit of a point of debate, but having a small selection of generic civilians would not only be good for transport missions, VIP extractions and the like, but also add a tight ROE-boundary for helicopter strike missions, which we cannot properly do yet.

I assume mostly you might not want to fly missiles over certain areas. The air-launched SLAM-ER gives you a little more flexibility in that regard. With the older versions it is much clearer indeed: people generally underestimate how terrible the early Tomahawk missiles were in terms of preparation, plus the early SLAM were hacked together from old Harpoons and Walleyes and thus a pretty cheap option.

I personally just die, that seems to do the trick quite reliably.

My personal theory is that this implementation is another stepping stone towards making embarkation and cargo more useful in the future, possibly for the release of the CH-47, which frankly does not make a lot of sense without these things working reasonably well.

I think it is a step in the right decision, but for as long as every single transfer needs to be specifically set up in the ME there is little to gain from adding more details to it, as it - to the pilot - functionally makes no difference to just activating a new unit at the target location.

I'm fairly certain that I have now seen a temperature warning on a battery actually disappear again after switching the battery off, so... some successful progress has happened!

Top feature speculations for the 2.9 release: Trucks are now capable of hauling trailers, including towed artillery. Jester AI will now not only judge your landing, but also your parking accuracy (includes planes parked alongside F-14s). The cows are finally augmented by also adding sheep. All radio communication gets routed through an ED server in order to censor out inappropriate words. The updated S-3 Viking tanker features an optional George W. Bush as copilot for no particular reason.

The X display is for selecting whether you want X or Y band on your TACAN. Have you tried just holding the Enter key for a second? That usually does that trick.

Got back into DCS recently and couldn't help but notice that the venerable UAZ-469 has an all-new issue, which is that it becomes completely invisible at its medium LOD. When far away it shows a a 'black, vaguely car-shaped dot', when up close it is a stunning 3D model, at your usual low-intensity helicopter engagement range it just vanishes.

In way I'd also say there was a golden age in the 90s. Of course the simulations had severe limitations in terms of visuals and even more so in terms of actually simulating, but as Yurgon said, there were a lot of them that made up for it with very clever game design, to the point where I still pull up my favourite 1993 flight sim once in a while and, now and then, sigh deeply when I see some of the things that were possible then and seem way, way, way out of league to even ask for now. But my personal nostalgia aside, I think one of the bits that made that a golden age in a way was, that (and no doubt this had a lot to do with limitations at the time) even the ones that were considered 'hardcore simulators' were quite a lot more accessible than they are today in multiple ways. There wasn't nearly the same landscape of seriously expensive hardware going around and besides the 'hardcore simulators' there was a little ecosystem of somewhat more arcade-like, yet still comparable, flight simulation games. This all worked to a point that - at least where I grew up - anybody who was somewhat serious about PC games actually had a 'joystick' (the term HOTAS for stuff you put on your desk wasn't even invented yet), and quite keen to get use out of it. If you then decided that 'proper' simulators weren't quite your style, you could always dive into the space shooters that were popular then and sadly have since disappeared almost entirely. In a certain light I can't shake the feeling that with simulators that have gotten a lot more sophisticated, but mostly the tremendous advances made in simulator hardware, we can do quite amazing things, but quite rightfully it isn't as easy anymore to get people interested in the first place.

Thank you all for the help. My licence has been from the ED shop all along. I'll give it one or two more tries and then just ask ED support; there will be some way to sort this out, I've just been a bit busy lately and haven't had much time for flying at all, so I have been slacking a little in dealing with this, too.

Frankly, I disagree. Adding an actual animated mortar crew is surely much easier done, especially considering how the next problem would be that you'd probably want said infantry to either be mortar crew or engage other units with rifles, but not at the same time. Having proper crews attached to the unit would also circumnavigate the whole problem of deciding how big the operator area should be, which will also leave a lot of people unhappy, especially when the infantry starts to scatter uncontrollably.

This. It isn't that they started including animated crew at some point. It is just completely arbitrary. Some old ZU-23s come with crew, reasonably recent ZSU-57s don't. Just one example. If ED doesn't want to include animated (or even static) crews on the ground units that's kinda okay by me, even if I'd prefer them to be there, but it's irritating how some units have them and others don't and it doesn't follow even the slightest hint of a system.

I generally suggest the Huey.

It is generally a bit odd that some units have animated (or modeled) crew while others are solely the vehicle/emplacement.

There is no denying that it makes for a very fun mission.

No, it's all DCS standalone. But thanks for the input, I hear it might not be a Tomcat issue and more of a DCS problem, as some people at least had the same trouble just hitting another module at random. Shrug?

For a week now DCS has been on about 'authorization failing' for my F-14 and me consequently unable to use it. Is that a global issue somehow or is there something I missed one has to do with a recent update? Oddly enough it only affects the F-14, no other module?

There is a certain truth to this, really, and it doesn't deserve to be lost among the unrelated heated arguments.