Kang

Perhaps those missions have easy comms enabled and enforced by default. Look through your controls and make sure you use the in-cockpit radio button rather than the generic comms menu button. Most common problem about that.

Oh, yes, that is what I originally thought you said, but those pictures seemed like you really meant the headlights. Can confirm the flood lights in cockpit are absolutely useless.

Would be nice for sure. But then, after all these years it's still not even possible to use a pilot model as an infantry asset for CSAR-type missions, and that's a model that already exists with full animations. Not hopeful.

This may sound stupid, but have you adjusted the pointing? The Mi-8 headlights are by default pointing straight down, further so than in the Huey, and thus need to be extended (swung up) in order to appear in view.

I know what you meant. I was a new user once. Did it just like that anyway. The problem you describe comes down to things being in early access for a long time at the end of the day. Otherwise you would have a proper up-to-date manual and proper training missions that talk you trough the procedures. Practicing those is just a matter of clobbering together a simple mission by yourself then. This week saw a major push of things into the 'stable' version of DCS. That puts them out of the fluid situation of being in testing, more or less, and opens the way for manuals and training missions to be adapted to them soon.

Either what Flagrum said, or just incorporate them in missions you previously built.

Look at your options, there is one called 'unrestricted satnav', which lets you use GPS wherever and whenever you like.

You can change all of the presets in the mission editor. Just select the MiG and go to the frequencies tab.

No offence, but that's precisely what I said: you built a mission with the specific plan of wanting to include a necessity for in-flight refuelling. You burn a lot of fuel when going full burner all over, absolutely. You could just as well go for the challenge of actually watching your fuel economy. Yes, obviously you made sure that isn't an option in the mission you built. Again, I'm not saying it's impossible to build such a mission, all I said was: for the vast majority of missions in DCS it is entirely optional.

At least it's specifically what you did not mean, the 'in mission dynamics', rather than the 'in between missions dynamics'.

...and they don't dim at all either.

I noticed on night flights that the wingtip vortex cores seem to retain their daylight visibility. In turn that makes them seem overly luminous at night.

Considering how ground unit damage is generally done... none of the above.

On the whole other hand: what is really to gain? I mean, how many missions actually require you to inflight refuel? Most missions that ask you to do it pretty much just do so for the hell of it.

If one was to be serious about a 'focus on naval ops' for DCS, I would consider it much more important to make the naval assets in the game work. Some ships disappear at range, some ships randomly disappear when looked at from certain angles, ship wakes sometimes get cut off in a straight line after a hundred feet, torpedoes - while certainly being worked on right now - aren't quite a thing yet, anti-ship missiles display questionable behaviour at times... More variety in ships would be wonderful, but revising their function is important.

I'll be honest: I have no idea whatsoever what you are trying to say here.

Even if the answer was that it wasn't equipped, that co-pilot might make himself useful and say a word when the 'LO' light on the radar altimeter went on.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember that the Ka-50 doesn't have a tail rotor to begin with.

My thinking was that for a given aspect angle a higher speed leads to a higher overall deflection, thus any error makes the pipper with higher amplitude. As in, a little unwanted change in G makes it wander much more than it does at lower speeds. But then, what do I know.

I believe the weird thing is how the Harpoon prompts a 4th of July level of SAM fireworks from any ship currently, whereas other anti-ship missiles (admittedly I only looked at the Swedish and Chinese ones) provoke absolutely no SAM response at all.

Late activation is precisely the way to go with this. But you can have it 'T/O from runway' rather than 'from ramp' and it should spawn on the catapult as soon as it's activated.

I'll bite and just ask: what would you envision it to work like? AAR autopilot? Fuel state going up in close proximity to tanker?

Now, as I said, I did like these things in the old 90s simulators, but I still totally fail to understand your point. Having the whole 'picture airbase' instead of a menu doesn't solve that problem. It merely adds to it, because on top of reading the menu and figuring out what does what, you now also have to figure out which 'department' the particular menu you looked for is supposed to belong to (and not all of those are very logical, really), plus - even if that doesn't deter you - as a new player you wouldn't even know which parts of this picture are a thing to begin with. In all seriousness, there is a menu point 'Training' that is quite clear in where a good place to start is. Whoever needs a flashing neon pop-up saying 'Start here!' next to it to find it, is quite frankly most unlikely to have a lot of fun in DCS.

That is true. When travelling at higher speeds the effect is much less pronounced and you will start going out of control rather slowly. In fact, slow enough to watch it happen. If you are flying low and over favourable terrain, you might even manage to drop the helicopter down safely, if you manage forward speed, main rotor RPM and sink rate just right. And you have some luck. Nonetheless you do need the tail rotor to have full control, the Mi-8 will not just keep on flying straight if you lose it entirely.

I take it that given the much higher speeds and often longer firing ranges the whole system is just a little more prone to error. A slight bump on the stick, a little change in angle and it's off again. Getting the automatic ranging should take one task off the pilot's back, as you could now fire from anywhere within the range, but it also meant you wouldn't have that one engagement range you would know what deflection to use at.