Kozality

Was all too happy to send him some cash for this one as well. Also, the album dropped on Spotify today. As bandcamp doesn't play nice with Android auto yet, it's a nice way to listen to it on the go. =D

Amazing update. I'm gonna have to be "That guy" as well though....can we get some words on the status of the Bk90?

I think the issue here, as with many other modules, (and much of the game community in general) is that "Early Access" and "Beta" is being used way too loosely to denote products that were not ready for release, but cannot afford to sit in development any longer. Whether or not this is the right business decision to make is one for legitimate debate. However, what I think is worthy of debate is just how long a module can remain "in beta" or "in early access" before it begins to resemble indefinite development. Pushing a product as "Beta" implies quality control is still taking place, that of which cannot be adequately done with a limited test environment. But hiding behind a "Beta" label for months or in some cases, years, as a way to justify unfinished functionality is disingenuous. It's worth asking if these games and modules wouldn't be funded if such practices wern't undertaken, but I think it's worth asking the game community in general if there isn't a better way to set expectations on what "early access" means.

I'd like to know as well. But that being said, it's totally possible to do all of those things in multiplayer. Check out Videos 9 and 10 in xxJohnxx' excellent series. He shows you how to input your own waypoints and calculate QFE. It can all be done in game, and our flight does so regularly. I've yet to play much with the custom cartridge in fact. To make this easier, I highly recommend binding the data panel numbers to the number pad on your keyboard, and make the LS key something like ".". It makes it very easy any simple to enter information in on the fly, even in flight. Hope this helps!

You two should both try playing with us on the 107th server. Look it up in my signature below, and join our Discord. You'll find me there. I suspect you're better than you think, and if not, we'll all get there together. Multiplayer is fun, and it's a great learning environment. You'll get skilled quick. Come play. =)

I've started noticing this as well. Don't recall it before, but in the past week or two I've been encountering it. I can level the plane and then hit the altitude hold, and it'll stay level, but when leveling from a standard turn, it never quite levels out. I'll investigate further.

There's some back and forth regarding the effectiveness of bombs. It seems like what it comes down to is what is regarded as a "kill". The game regards a kill as "100%" destroyed, whereas your bombs may have inflicted damage taking the unit down to 50 or 30% effectiveness. You may have completely destroyed one vehicle, but inflicted enough damage on the rest to make them non-operational. The problem, of course, is that this isn't reflected in the score. You'd have to look at the AAR at the end of the mission to look hit "Hits", and examine the Tacview to see what got damaged. Regarding QFE for the Rb-75, it's not necessary, but it does help place the target location indicator. This is really just meant to give you a general indication of where the target is to help steer your approach. Make sure to take the Rb-75Bs, as they have the enhanced zoom compared to the As. The "T" model contains a heavier warhead for things like bridges and bunkers, but doesn't have the enhanced zoom. I agree, picking out vehicles with the RB-75 is rather difficult if they're even remotely in clutter, let alone IDing one vehicle from another. The B model helps, but even then, by the time you get close enough to really distinguish what you're looking at, defenses can be an issue. But you can pick out targets in a field pretty well. Glad to hear the ARAK rockets do fairly well. I was looking into revisiting these, and I might have to do that some more based on the results posted here.

Cap's posted an update:

I trust most pilots in the DCS community are familiar with the Grim Reapers, a fictitious mercenary outfit flying self-made campaigns in DCS and filming them for our benefit and entertainment. Their output is prolific and relentless, ranging from discussions, tutorials, and of course their hour long (or more!) missions and debriefs, with the odd Arma mission even thrown in. Unfortunately, fortune took a slight turn for the worst as the Grim Reaper's leader "Cap" was diagnosed with late-stage cancer a couple of days ago. While the prognosis is positive, he will be undergoing chemotherapy over the next 9 weeks and will spending most of his time in the hospital. Most of us know the toll chemo can take on the body, and during this time Cap and his family could really use our help. A GoFundMe has been set up by the Grim Reapers to help them during Cap's treatment and recovery. https://www.gofundme.com/dcs-community-fund-for-gr039s-cap If you're able, please consider donating what you can to this pillar of the DCS community. Thanks so much!

Gotcha, I see that now. Thanks for the clarification!

I saw in the patch notes that this was "sans dive bombing". Does this mean there's still work to be done for DYK modes?

This seems like one of those ergonomic things then that doesn't translate too well from cockpit to PC. On my hold x45 joystick, I' had center detents for my dials, which would make this a lot easier if there's indeed an axis to bind. I have one wheel on my TM Warthog, and I'll see if maybe I can bind that when I get home. But for those without a wheel, a "reset to center" button may be useful here.

Can you describe in a bit more details what's going on with the crosshairs? What modes did you set, etc. I don't understand what you mean by "not opening and closing". Help us understand. Thanks!

GR.1 is a First-gen Harrier, while the AV-8B is a second-gen. They're really not the same plane at all. I say this not to step on you, Lordzarj, but just in case there's calls for adding the Sea Eagle to the AV-8B. And yeah, no Harpoon. As I posted above, it *may* have been qualified for it, but it's unknown and there are no references to it, and the USMC was completely uninterested in doing so. If it was ever done, it was to satisfy the Spanish and Italian harriers. HARM seems right out. Thanks for sharing the pictures nonetheless! I've only seen drawings of the Sea Eagle, so these were neat to see. I think the Royal Navy retired them though, yeah?

Reading this, I got really curious about the Harpoon capability, since I've seen it referenced numerous places that it was supported. But I haven't seen a picture of it actually being carried, and nothing concrete akin to a manual stating it's a capability. I wondered if it was one of those instances where a claim was made somewhere, and a lot of other guides repeated it without doing an individual check. I ducked on over to AirVectors to see what Greg said over there. Here's the bit on the Harrier II: http://airvectors.net/avav8_3.html "The USMC ended up in some squabbles with the Spanish and Italians over Harrier II weapons qualification. Although the new AN/APG-65 radar of the AV-8B+ was capable of supporting BVR air combat using AMRAAM, or "over the horizon" surface attack using the AGM-84 Harpoon antiship missile, the Marines were slow to qualify AMRAAM and showed little interest in qualifying the Harpoon, antiship attack not being an ordinary USMC mission. The Spaniards and Italians did want these capabilities, and in fact apparently believed when they helped fund the integration of the AN/APG-65 to the Harrier II that adding such capabilities was the specific point of the exercise. AMRAAM was finally qualified for use by Spanish and Italian Harrier IIs through a software upgrade to the AN/APG-65, and photos of their Harrier IIs carrying AMRAAMs are not unusual; the USMC didn't get around to announcing qualification of AMRAAM until 2009. Some sources claim the Harpoon was finally qualified, but if so details are hard to find, as are pictures of a Harrier II carrying Harpoons." Regarding HARM, I haven't seen anything at all regarding it. HARM requires the HTS anyways though, yeah? I'd think that would be a lot farther fetched than AIM-120 or AGM-84 employment. Sources for the article are at the bottom.

That's fascinating. I knew ground targets were possible, but figured it was just too difficult to pick out on the radar scope. I'll have to pay more attention to that. That would make updating the target location via radar fix a lot more useful now.

+1 to this. I was mentioning it in another thread as well. It looked fantastic in 1.5, and I could do radar fixes quite well. In 2.5 however, I often can't tell the difference between ground mapping and terrain avoidance, and tend to use it just for naval targeting. Hope things are looking well on a fix. =D

I was going nuts the other day with this issue myself, but I thought I'd traced it to an incorrectly set QFE. While that helped to an extent, I always use DYK mode with the HUD in High HOA, leaning in towards my monitor with my TrackIR in order to "see over the nose" and view the pipper. It works, but it's not quite ideal.

Skyracer just said in an earlier thread that having the weapon dial to "IR" or "AKAN" should give you the elevation indicator at the top of the radar scope. I haven't gotten this mode much, so I'll validate when I get home. Agreed that it is confusing though. IMO knowing which mode (terrain avoidance or normal) and elevation (steerable even outside of IR and AKAN modes) is all but impossible to me for determine outside of guesswork. It may be that the Viggen just didn't have those indicators. But given that the radar returns in 2.5 are still a little iffy (as I understand, trees still muck with it quite a bit), I often can't tell the two modes apart. I'd recommend switching to AKAN to get the elevation indicator, then back to your preferred weapon in order to center the radar, unless someone knows of a "Centering" keybind.

I've been waiting for this subject to come up as I've been awfully confused about it before. Thanks for clarifying Skyracer that it's the weapon mode that displays the elevation indicator. I didn't recall before what mode actually provided it. The problem I've had is that elevation can still be controlled outside of those modes, with no indication that its going up or down or how far. But I can still tell as in full tilt, the radar sweep becomes very narrow. Is there a keybinding or otherwise for "centering" the radar, or otherwise returning it to default?

As I understand it, that's correct. There's two main things to understand about the Rb04 and to an extent, the Rb15: - The missiles have no ability to identify a target. That is, a radar return is a radar return. - There is no communication between missiles. Each one acts independently of the other. So with regards to launching the Rb04, there's no randomness imparted in single target mode. But since the missiles are dropped one after the other, the missiles are fired under slightly different conditions. Against a single target, chances are that they'll both a acquire the same radar return, but against multiple, it's up to the conditions at the time of launch as to which, if any, are acquired. So yeah. That's pretty much it. As FanOfALF said, it isn't a high-tech missile, as it was designed in the 60s. Target identification is still an issue, there was no real way to tell one ship type from another, so the launch parameters were tuned to raise the chance of hitting the right target based on it's relation to others. The Rb15 actually has many of the same limitations, its varied options give the platform more variables to tune based on where the target is and it's relation to other contacts present, with the seeker tuned to maximize the chance that you'll lock onto the one you want. But once the missile is away, be it the 04 or 15, it's all up to who or what strays into the seeker path first at the moment it goes active when in single mode. Hope this helps!

I think there's a number of misleading terms being thrown about. DCS as an application doesn't utilize two "cores" per se, but rather two execution threads. As to how many cores are assigned to to run those two threads, that is a function of the operating system. The OS scheduler is responsible for ensuring those two threads can run as quickly as possible, and that can result in the thread hopping cores constantly, as someone in this discussion pointed out. Remember that not every execution cycle is necessarly devoted to performing a function that results in updates to the state of the simulation. It takes clock cycles to clear registers, load data into cache, load instructions, etc. If a given operation, which may consist of 10-30 steps (this is a sample figure pulled out of the air), and the core is "cleaning up", then the OS can send an operation to another core provided requirements are met. But it doesn't mean there's an implicit parallelism where there wasn't one. When we talk about making DCS multi-threaded, we the players are usually referring to the core physics engine, and from my admittedly outside perspective, I can see where that would be an enormously difficult lift with little potential payout. So much of the simulation is dependent operations occurring in order that I'd be skeptical as to how much of the work can be made parallel. Trying to merge parallel threads to reassemble order would likely impart so much latency, both in pauses needed and for the additional overhead needed for the orchestrater to reassemble the stream that whatever performance gains there were would likely be erased. It becomes an issue of diminishing gains, and I've seen this with other applications. This is one area of computing where raw, single-threaded performance wins out. For aspects like sound, some graphics, and clients, where there aren't such time-bound dependencies, splitting these functions off can be easier, and that's exactly what I imagine DCS is doing when they've said they're removing graphics from the upcoming dedicated server. It removes a big source of CPU usage at minimal labor cost. If you want to see another case of a similar issue in gaming, consider digging through EVE Online's old DevBlogs...they've been battling a similar issue for years, stripping as much as possible from the simulation thread so it gets as much CPU time as possible. A challenge, to be sure.

Just adding my my "+1" and thanks for the BK90 update cobra. Plenty patient here, glad to see it's still in the pipeline. =)

Seconding this, I cannot recommend it enough. I usually fly with a steno book on a kneeboard so I can tab over to the map, jot down coordinates, and then mash them into the computer. Adds a bit to my startup time, but that's life with the Viggen. It's not much though if you have the keys bound well. The other thing that will save you time is keep an eye out for regular routes you find yourself taking (especially through the mountain passes), so you can stitch together missions on the fly. If you're flying on a server like 107th (where the A2G missions are generally known in advance) then you can spend a little extra time doing up plans in advance, then mashing them in when a new mission comes up, no time in the map needed. It's some work up front, but saves me a ton of time in game when I have the QFE and LOLA of my targets all referenceable and ready to go. Good luck!

I was in San Diego this past week visiting the USS Midway, which was part of "Battle Force Zulu" in the Persian Gulf. They have the maps and screens showing the positions of the ships during operations there, and right away you get a feeling for how crowded it was. Our tour guide, a veteran, spoke to the difficulties of operating there as well. Not only were the AirOps complicated, but it's an incredibly congested waterway with all of the light oil tankers making their way to the small gulf states to offload (lighter ships empty into the ports closer to the strait, where it's then loaded into the larger supertankers for the ocean transit, our guide explained.) On the status boards you can see this with replicas of the numerous radar contacts, mostly neutral or unidentified ships. So it's challenging, to say the least. And the presence of such a close shore means that there's not much warning time from land-based ASMs or the like. The guide seemed to indicate that sailing in there is by no means ideal...but the advantage gained from being able to launch aircraft so much closer (which equates to advantages in warload and time-on-station) made up for it.