GhostB

Hey guys how about we directly answer the question, disable your feed from the ext wing tanks, wait for the center-line to empty, jettison it and then enable the wing tanks again. These checklist elitists might bicker about it not being procedure, because drop tanks cost money. But you know what the nice thing about the playing a flight simulator video game is, you don't have to pay the bill to replace a virtual fuel tank... Why people let the way they want to play the game get in the way of answering a technical question, I do not know. I haven't managed to find a drag index for the hornet, but someone dredged up one for the 3 bag F15 debate, and the centerline tank on the 15 had slightly less drag than the 2 wing tanks... combined... So you will definitely see a performance increase by getting rid of the centerline first, over doing it the other way around as it will likely nearly halve the added drag from the bags overall. Without even accounting for the fact it will take less time to empty it.

Nineline, care to comment on the relative back burner the radar has seemingly be put on? There has not been a single addition to it except the "IFF" since release, unless you count "We finally made it work, mostly, sometimes" as a feature. I know that's a bit hyperbolic and I don't except you'd actually admit it if it had been but things have been pretty full speed ahead on things like JHMCS which was said to be coming much much later into the cycle, seem to be jumping the queue over base-level functionality for the primary A2A system. It'd be nice to know if we were going to see some improvements and new features to it before wag's video in two weeks showing off the early targeting pod, because at this point I'm getting increasingly convinced I'm going to be dropping JDAMs or being TWS locked by a F14 before I'm TWS locking a bandit myself in the F18. The release of news on the radar apart from "We're going to fix it... this time... we swear!" has been lacking for months.

(No sorry I don't know who that is) Just to further build upon what I said earlier, as Trev mentions above, the lack of NCTR is painful, but I can live without it though... I mean the flanker doesn't have it, and the F15 essentially doesn't have it in 50% of cases these days because basically anything released after the huey doesn't actually have a NCTR profile, because apparently the F15, F5, F18, Mirage and Harrier exist in a separate timeline to the F15C, and therefore the F15 gets confused and is unable to identify any of its NATO allies aircraft or that of its own country and manufacturer... Nor did the designers ever manage to record a profile for the Mig-21, wouldn't ever be needed obviously. But I digress. So I'm flying with my buddies, they are in f15s or mirages, and they call out 4 enemies coming towards us, they declare one is a slow moving helo, theres a 2 ship up high, and a lone fighter just below them... I'm meant to go after the lone guy, they'll handle the 2 ship and we'll ignore the helo for now... Great, so now I'm trapped in a magicians act playing the fool in the classic cups and balls routine, because the I've 25% chance of picking out the correct one, I can't see their speed, altitude or even direction without locking one up, I can only lock one up at a time... But what choice do I have?... Oops, I locked the helo, well I'll just unlock him and select the next one... But wait, I've gotta wait for the radar to reset and redraw the page, and if they contacts were REMOTELY stacked, they'll all spawn in a different order from the last... So I'm basically picking in the blind again, hoping I've got the right one, the options being randomized each time I select a cup to check under. This isn't effective... friend, foe, fast, slow, high, low... its all the same little block symbol... Its hopeless. Why the hell does this seem to be the lowest priority for ED? Pushing ahead with mavericks, JHMCS... Its running before you can walk... Yes, it can technically detect an airplane... Yeah, you can select which contact to lock... I mean, yeah you'll find out speed and altitude when you lock it. Yes, it can technically identify if its a friend or a hostile, when it feels like it. Sure it'll guide an aim7 to that hostile, or if its having a bad day, that friendly. Yeah it can do all that. But god forbid you want to do some combination of those things at once. Its not combat effective, its not nearly just "Oh its a just missing a little polish, we'll come back it after we add some new toys, it'll just be a tiny bit rough for now"... Its pretty much useless outside of firing up the editor, sticking down 2 mig29s in front of you, and kill them, and then resetting the mission, the second you start mixing friendlies into it, or even just start adding different targets with different threat levels to be prioritized, your screwed. This isn't just "OH ITS EARLY ACCESS", so don't go there... Yeah, its early access if don't like it buy it, don't play it. Alright a couple things A) This isn't the progression path that was talked about in the lead up to sales of the module B) Alright I'll stop playing it (I have stopped) but would you mind convincing that other guy who is lighting up my RWR every 20 seconds because hes not sure if I'm a new contact? Like it or not, if your playing multiplayer, weather you own this early access aircraft or not, if you play it personally or not... This "Early access" product is on release branch... its setting off alarms in my cockpit, team killing me or my teammates, and just generally disrupting the comms/gameplay... and if I go back to flying something like the F15... NCTR in my non-early access product... Target type? Unk... One moment while I pull out my 20 point checklist and put on my best Sherlock impersonation, and go through the increasing long list of possibilities, of what it could be based off what RWR contacts I have... Its speed... Its altitude... Known likely targets to be in the area... With the addition of the 18 and soon to be the F14... This list is getting so long its basically getting impossible guess with too much accuracy... this wasn't so bad when answer, 90% of the time was its a bloody Mirage, but its getting stupid these days, back then the excuse was its "Its a 3rd party module, it must be razbam's fault". Both of these are ED products... Support your existing products atleast ffs. This can't problem can't be ED Forum flamed away with comments about it being EA, or it being an open beta thing... This plane is on release branch... You basically cannot avoid it on the main big MP servers... Stop declaring the radar done, patting ED on the back and then bleating HHARRM HAARAAM HAAARRRAM

I mean the radar still, in multiplayer likes to have a freak out and not decide if the target is flying at you, away from you, or is going orbital at escape velocity... Locks still frequently get stuck in these loops and fail, or don't and just spaz out until you manually drop it and try again. The obviously WIP and placeholder IFF is also still incapable of of deciding if a target is friend or foe, flicking back and forth, sometimes rapidly other times after long delays, which always nice when the aim7 that is about 2 seconds down range, is suddenly heading at a friendly which was showing a constant steady foe diamond right up until 3nm at which point I'm better off reading his tail number and checking the scoreboard... and alot of missions do have planes on the both teams for balance reasons, just doing visual profile IFF isn't always an option. Its a WIP and placeholder, that's fine ...ish, but this is a virtual world, you create the collection of pixels that we called a F18 and a SU27, why exactly are you unable to come up with a placeholder system that actually knows what its shooting at? The simple (you could call them placeholder) IFF for the FC3 aircraft don't get confused and flicker randomly within visual range... Nor does it mistaken that enemy frogfoot for UFO changing directions doing 100G spins So much for the initial roadmap and promises of filling out the aircraft as an A2A platform before turning to more advanced modern features like the JHMCS, targeting pod and harm. I don't understand why people feel this shoddy, nearly unusable until this week radar is somehow acceptable and ready to be sidelined in favor of features that were only promised later on the development roadmaps... Why is barely functional somehow praise worthy and worth stringing up a "Mission accomplished" banner on the side of the tower on the Stennis and declaring its time to move onto the harm? Theres no TWS, we can't IFF people without sending off a flurry of "BUDDYSPIKE!?!?" on comms. Every time a hornet arrives to the fight, its like the seagulls from finding nemo all of a sudden discovered some new words. "RAYGUN!?" "BUDDYSPIKE!" "BUDDYSPIKE!" "IS THAT FRIENDLY?" "RAYGUN!?" "BUDDYSPIKE?!" "FRIENDLY 18!?" "BUDDYSPIKE?" "BUDDYSPIKE?!" "DO WE HAVE FRIENDLY 18?" "BUDDYSPI--- I'm dead, it was hostile" "RAYGUN!!!" "..." "FOX 2" "DAMN IT BLOODY IFF YOU TEAMKILLED ME" "IT WAS DIAMOND I SWEAR" Its getting a tad old...

Hey, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are not incapable of putting together an well reasoned argument, and your just are having trouble understanding and translating English. Let me try help. "The only factual data provided is the NATOPS manual, that tells you how to do proper startup and how to take off." The only dactual data provided is the NATOPS manual eh.... So.. so we know HOW your meant to do a proper take-off, but doesn't that manual say "Caution; Taking off with the poorly named AUTO-Flaps will endanger your aircraft and challenge your ability to maintain stable flight" Does it? Does it say "Taking off with the incorrect flap setting will induce X, sorry we probably should of caught that during development, and fielding the platform for a couple decades, we fixed a bunch of other FCS issues but decided we liked this one" Because I'm pretty damn sure the FCS isn't setup in such a fashion to attempt to kill NAVY pilots, they're generally pretty protective of their expensive personnel and equipment. So how about instead of quoting how its meant to be done, as if that somehow eliminates what does happen if its done 'incorrectly'. You don't have the level of detailed documentation that ED has through its partners and contacts... Do you? You have redacted, absent of most of the combat systems flight manual that tells you have to turn the lights on. The correct way of doing it, does not tell you what will happen when you do it incorrectly. It in no way, proves or disproves the accuracy of this flight characteristic... Does it? So how about instead of telling the guy hes simply doing it wrong, when hes acknowledged that its not the correct way of doing it but the behavior still seems unlikely and inaccurate... We instead get this passed along to the development team, who have the ability to consult their licensed documents and their 1st hand sources, such as F18 pilots, who have a tad more knowledge of the flight characteristics than simply jumping up and down on the spot, blue in the face going "BUT THAT ISN"T HOW ITS MEANT TO BE DONE" If you have trouble understanding any of the words I have used, or the concepts I have tried to express, please feel free to ask for further clarification I will be glad to provide further assistance.

At what point can we perhaps instead of trying to prove or disprove the behavior based off if it is or is not in a startup checklist as being procedure, and just ask a simple question. Does this seem like intended behavior from such a late model hornets FCS? Forget if its procedure, would this potentially dangerous behavior, requiring the pilot to take his hands off the hands to correct, be intended in a real plane. If this is intended realistic behavior, I could almost guarantee it'd be documented and ample cautions would be stated somewhere in your hallowed manual. Seriously, the fact it behaves different between a cold and a hot start alone, should be enough for people to drop their checklists and begin to consider that they might need something a bit more concrete to prove this one either way.

I did say effectively, what your suggesting would limit is exclusively to hard-coded static targets, that doesn't really allow for much flexibility, doesn't allow it be used to full effect.

What is the point of this poll, when half of these things depend another option on the list? You can't complete the datalink without completing the A/A Radar and the Tpod. Sure you can datalink friendly positions but your still not anywhere near complete without those being done first, so contacts from those sensors can actually be passed along, and be used to slew your own sensors to them from datalink info. Your not going to be able to effectively using guided bombs, slammers, harpoons without completing the Tpod, the datalink also not being complete isn't ideal either. The path to complete is obvious, sensors > above all, because that's the order you need them there's no point in having weapons or data-links without sensors to detect targets.

So, I don't use any of the anti-viruses Bignewy mentioned, and I had actually disabled what do I do have as part of my trouble shooting, I also temporarily disabled both my windows firewall, and my routers firewall as well. Issue persisted, some days it'd just refuse to connect or show up in the browser, I eventually worked out that the VPN workaround that has worked for me in the past, actually does work, its just really temperamental, one day one location will work, another it won't, but once I pick the right VPN server, bam, I can see and connect to my target DCS server. This issue is unlikely a routing issue however, as A) Any of the VPN locations should get around that, not one on one day but then only another on another... B) Pinging the target IP (IP, not a domain) once per second for 10 minutes, averages 0% packet loss and stable pings C) I actually have access to 2 landline internet server providers, both with completely different routes according to tracert, both get stable pings 0% packetloss to the target DCS server. Really at a loss to explain this, I've had this not occur some days, some days it happens after a crash/restart, others first login of the day it just won't work. I don't even need to restart DCS once I start swapping IPs either by swapping internet connections or connecting the VPN, and again no matter if the connection can, or cannot, connect to the DCS server, my cmd ping will be stable latency with 0% packetloss. I don't understand how this effects both Direct connecting, AND the masterlist, even if I had a bad route to the gameserver, would the master server-list still let me SEE the server? Its two different routes? Perhaps the server list filters out any that fail the local client ping request? This has got to be something do with the DCS network code, external tests/routes work just fine, there's a website running off a domain at the same network address, entering the IP or the Domain name into a will still get you the website.

I'm experiencing this issue every couple of days, where what I believe is after crashing/disconnecting, I simply cannot rejoin that server again. It does not show up in the browser, you cannot manually connect either, it just says 'server offline' This lasts for a couple days before apparently magically fixing itself for a day or so, before doing so again. This issue persists in-between my local computer restarts, mission changes on the server (Unknown how often the server provider/s are restarting their physical machine or game processes?) I've repaired DCS, ensured I am running the same update as the server, emptied out my DCS save game folder to rule out corrupted settings of some kind. I've VPN routed to several different worldwide locations to rule out routing issues (And I can command line ping the server IP externally successfully). Anyone got any other ideas? ED, do you wish to comment?

Delete your shader folders, your using shaders compiled for different hardware, which can cause performance issues and visual artifacts. Someone posted the instructions earlier.

Experienced this in the F15 in single-player yesterday.

Hey Nineline, out of interest, can you perhaps explain to us, how one is meant to take a TRACK of a multiplayer join sync issue? Like seriously, lets think about this Do you want a track from the Bombers point of view? Because he sees it, and if he leaves, well he won't see it again. But thats TWO tracks, its a track of the gameplay, not of the loading screen? What exactly does this tell you? The important bit is the bit INBETWEEN the tracks. Do you want it to from a 3rd parties point of view who joins after the event? I mean he NEVER saw it and joins AFTER so who is say the bomb ever landed? He didn't witness it to track record it, so I don't see what that tells you. Or do you want it from the servers point of view? Also interesting because nothing is synced between a server restart? So what exactly do you want a track of? Seriously. This is not a case where a track file is applicable. Here are the steps to reproduce, Host a server(Are ED aware this a supported feature?), Have Client X drop a bomb on runway, have Client Y join the server, Client X will see and experience the crater, Client Y will not. I get asking for tracks of intermittent, or otherwise hard to reproduce issues of actual gameplay, but this is a 100% occurrence issue of a SERVER system, hidden from the player's system, and a track isn't going to show that. Someone is going to need to physically test to resolve or at least verify a fix for this, just host the damn server yourself and do it, we pay you, you don't pay us. Stop asking paying customers to jump through hoops for simple to reproduce problems, ask for the steps to reproduce, if it sounds subjective or rare, then ask, POLITELY for the track, don't start your reply with a snarky demanding comment towards paying customers. Saying please halfway through a sentence doesn't forgive the snark at the beginning.

This bug is getting beyond annoying, anyone from the ED team wish to at least acknowledge the existence of multiplayer?

A road map doesn't necessarily include any dates, though they could be vague like Q3, Q4 2018. But even without dates, it would be nice to know the priorities, what we should be expecting first, what should be last, and ideally everything in between.