LooseSeal

I mean, I find it understandable. They're trying to get the Hornet 'finished' and once it is then work can be kickstarted on the Viper. I see a huge amount of progress on the Viper happening over the next 6 months. I just think... it isn't magic, they've got limited resources and budget and they're doing the best they can, so... patience

Can anyone say how they've approached this mission? I've tried it a few times now but coming up against the same issues. I'm trying to fly low enough to terrain mask against the SA-10, but 2 out of 3 attempts my wingmen have crashed into the ground or each other, or when I tell them to attack they just immediately fly straight up and get shot down. The Springfield SEAD flight doesn't seem to do anything as their HARMs are shot down easily by the SA-10 or the SA-15. Every time I pop up for the attack I'm being immediately fired on by the SA-10 if I come from the south, or the Gauntlet if I come from the east. Not really sure how to do this...

I know there's nothing that can be done about this in the near future, but I just wanted to highlight it so it's considered as part of the planned overhaul of AI combat logic. In the last few months I've witnessed increasingly obvious incidents of the AI firing AMRAAMs into dangerous/congested situations which end up with friendlies being targeted by the missile. It happens particularly in my DCS Liberation games where there's lots happening, then last night after 45 minutes of flying in the first F-16 Red Flag mission it happened to me again (as you can see below). I wasn't even in the fight... just minding my own business and egressing the area. It particularly seems to be the F-15s that are the culprits in my games - but generally speaking, the AI has absolutely no qualms about firing AIM-120s into the middle of a congested area where friendlies are. I've got to think pilots are strictly trained not to fire active missiles into furballs like that. So yeah... I just wanted to highlight that so it could be on the team's list of things to improve when the overhaul happens. Maybe it already is!

I have to assume the current Hornet campaign isn't final. It was released very early in development and only uses very limited weapons. I really think they'll update and expand it at some point. * Fingers crossed * I do agree that ED's modules leave something to be desired with regards to packaged campaigns. Compared to something like the M-2000C campaign, there's no real comparison. And Heatblur are doing the same with the Tomcat. So yeah... I also hope ED put a little more effort into this campaign. I think campaigns are even more important for helicopters actually.

I mean... it is great to have that confirmed, but I would point out that the situation is the same as other recent modules, so I'm not sure what you mean about "forgetting" to add campaigns. As far as I know the Hornet and Viper will have campaigns by the time they're out of Early Access - which is exactly the same as the Hind.

I was just about to say the same. The base of my Warthog stick is not in great condition these days. There's nothing wrong with the grip itself, but the base is just simplistic and cheap manufacturing. If VKB and Virpil weren't so expensive I'd be right in there...

Given the length of time it takes to make maps like Syria or even an island map like the Marianas... it's kind of hard to believe it's feasible. Unless of course they were to embrace procedural generation, but then you get into the territory of a certain other flight sim where everything looks amazing at 30,000ft but when you get down to the ground it looks like Minecraft had a stroke. Not only that, my PC gets very angry with me when flying over Damascus, can't even imagine what a Tokyo or Jakarta would do to it. Something nice to dream about though!

To be honest, if you'd done a quick search for this you'd have seen just how many times this issue has been raised in the past. There are posts about it going back years. In my opinion there's nothing more to be said, there's no way they aren't aware of how bad the damage modelling is (ED plays the game too, you'd assume). I hope it's included as part of the revamp of damage modelling more widely, but I can't see it coming this year. Having said that, destroying ships as part of the dynamic campaign will be such a hassle until it's fixed.

Yes. It was stated in the newsletter at the start of the year that "transonic shock cones" were in their plans. Edit - should probably make clear that it is not related to the clouds.

I would be curious about this as well... How do we align accurately on the carrier if the date is set to early 1990s or before? I've never worked that out... However, I don't see why it would affect CCIP?

It is definitely something I've only noticed in the last couple of months. So you'd assume something has changed somewhere, either in the AI or how the Aim-120 performs, because it invariably seems to be happening with that missile. As for the locking thing - I've only had problems with the Hornet is in TWS mode. In RWS I lose lock much less, and in STT it's usually pretty stable.

Oddly enough... I've been seeing quite a high number of friendly kills recently in general, not in this campaign only. In my last mission in DCS Liberation mod I saw 2 F-15s shot down by other F-15s with Aim-120s. It always seems to happen if there's a furball and an AI fires into the furball, the Aim-120 loses track of the enemy then re-tracks on the unfortunate friendly that just happens to pass in front of it. To me, that's actually what the missile should be doing. The problem here, I think, is the AI (shockingly...). In reality, you wouldn't be firing into the middle of a dogfight in case you hit a friendly - but this is DCS and the AI will do literally anything as long as it's wrong. Not really sure how you could implement those kinds of rules of engagement into such a basic AI...

Yeah... fairly sure I know what this is. Are you taking off from the carrier after a cold start and setting the INS to NAV? If so - you need to put it to IFA, or you'll be off by a few miles as the carrier will have moved by the time you take off. That's the most likely cause!

Yeah, that's going to be a GPU issue I'm afraid. I only have a GTX 1080, which is getting pretty outdated now, but even still... I checked my GPU's performance against yours and this was the result - https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-1650-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1080/4039vs3603 - Half the framerates across the board. Despite the fact that mine was released 3 years before the 1650. It's an issue of bottlenecking really. It doesn't matter how much you upgrade one part of a PC, you need to upgrade it all more or less in tandem. I'd personally recommend saving up for a while and getting a good PC, and for now just putting the settings lower...

Your screenshots should be saved to the Screenshots folder in your Saved Games folder. For me that is C:\users\(user)\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\Screenshots. Unless you're using Steam, in which case it's saved somewhere else, not sure where though.

They could do what you propose and add new features, but that implementation will probably create bugs regardless. Those bugs will need to be fixed. Do they then fix those bugs before moving to 2.7 even though moving to 2.7 may create bugs as well? I'd say you'd end up with 2 rounds of bug creation as opposed to the one, which would just be a waste of the team's time and resources. My point is - the new features you talk of will probably create some bugs anyway as well as the bugs 2.7 will create, so why not just do it all at once and get it over with? You've got to break the egg shells to make the omelette. Also... I'm not sure if I read it somewhere, but aren't some of the 'new features' like ATFLIR on the Hornet being tied to the improvements in 2.7? Or maybe I've just invented that in my mind...

What SAMs are we talking about? There's nothing that says you absolutely must use HARMs... for example, if I'm attacking SA-11s I find it easier to use a guided stand-off weapon like the AGM-154C. The reason being - HARMs are not guaranteed a kill on them for whatever reason, it often just takes half their health away...; the Buk doesn't emit its radar until you're within its kill zone and often turns it off afterwards; and when one Buk is hit the others stay suppressed for about 10 minutes. Better to just acquire them 40 miles out with the pod and launch stand-offs. Much easier. The only time I think you really need 88s is when you can't get specific coordinates for where the SAM is located and need to launch on an emitting radar. You could just change the AIs weapons too. No reason they need to use HARMs either.

First of all, welcome! Also, good choice with PCSpecialist, they are a fantastic company. The one change I'd make is more RAM. Definitely. 16GB will struggle on decent graphics settings, frankly, and that's without VR. 32GB at a minimum but I'd recommend 64GB if you want to future proof it a bit. Maybe even upgrade the GPU to 16GB if you can afford it. Aside from that it's a pretty good setup (better than what I can currently afford!) but I'm sure the more technically-minded will offer further improvements if they can.

I would agree that simply pushing a button, dumping some flares and assuming it'll work isn't enough. Maneuvering is necessary and more helpful if you can put the flares between your engines and the missile.

If you're set on Air-to-Air then I would recommend the M-2000C personally. It's technically still an 80s aircraft, fairly advanced and a good dogfighter but hasn't got missiles on the same level as an Aim-120. Additionally, the Mirage has probably the best training missions and training campaign to get you into it. The MiG-21 is a great module, but the radar might be a shock coming from the Su-27s etc of FC3.

Sadly it is just the DCS AI, and for the moment we've got to put up with it. On the bright side, we have to assume that ED will sort out a lot of these AI issues within the next year or two. There is no way they can release their own Dynamic Campaign without a major AI overhaul. It would be a complete, unmitigated disaster if they did. For me, AI is the one thing holding DCS back from being a brilliant simulator, especially for the single-player crowd out there.

I'm not sure I would bother, Magnificent Sir. This issue has been around forever and you can bet that ED is aware of it. Baltic Dragon has certainly acknowledged it more than a few times, and I imagine it annoys him as much as us. The only change that has occurred thus far was stopping the 'twinkling' in the NVGs, but even though it's more realistic it really doesn't help the mission. The issue, I think, is that boats/ships aren't contrasted properly against water with NVGs in the way land objects are against the ground. Even the Grisha in that mission is extremely hard to see. So yeah, maybe not so much a bug as ED needing to adjust the lighting. Can't see it happening in the near future though...

Do they crash? For me, they usually just fall a bit and then recover. I'm still not sure it's a 'bug' per se, as just another weird way DCS can work sometimes.

Seems normal to me? These are just the SAR SH-60s that fly alongside the ships when missions are in progress. They'll always start in the air beside the ships. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I don't think so...

All I want to see is improved pathfinding/logic for the AI when taxiing. Case in point below... a typical issue when playing Liberation. My wingman won't taxi because he's blocked by the Tomcats who won't taxi because of the Hornets on Elevator 4, and the Hornets won't taxi because of the Tomcats. It's absurd, and in the end they all just sit there while I go off and do the mission. As has been said, it would be nice to have some updates on whether things like this are being fixed or not.