BlackLightning

It occurs to me that, during WW2, some women workers used to apply radium, i. e. a radioactive lumionous substance, to dials and their pointers to make them glowing at night. (They were instructed to point the tiny brushes used for the task using their lips and therefore they got ill because they ingested that radioactive substance; they were named "radium girls".) One of the applications was to make instruments of airplanes visible at night without the use of lamps, in order to reduce the possibility that they were spotted. I've watched the Gream Reapers' cockpit familiarization video for the Mosquito and they show a lamp which is supposed to light the dials with UV light, so that the dials, probably being fluorescent/phosphorescent, reflect/emit visible light at night. I think it's unlikely that they spent money for that device in order to reduce light emission even though the plane was so visible anyways because of the exhaust flames, so I guess that in reality the flames were not that noticeable. @Terry Dactil: That real footage is interesting, but I don't know how much we can rely on cameras in cases like this, since their sensitiveness to light intensity and maybe also the range of frequencies that they detect are different from the ones of our eyes.

When I fly the Huey and the Mi8 I do that by using two buttons of my joystick in lieu of the keys 1 and 2 of the keyboard, which make you enter either the pilot or the copilot seat.

I had a problem when loading missions with the latest version, but it seems that it's been resolved:

No, it doesn't, however it seems that I've found out what caused the problem: if I wait until the mission has completely loaded and I see the cockpit and only afterwards I turn on the head tracking of opentrack, then it will work. I didn't have this problem in previous versions, but if it's just a matter of timing some actions differently, no big deal. Thank you for the help anyway and also thanks to cmfrosty, too, for letting us knowing about the issue with the AI F18A.

In my case it doesn't crash; it just stays stuck on the loading screen forever. If I play the Free flight mission, it works on both Caucasus and PG. If I start the mission from the Mission menu or directly from the mission editor, the same mission which worked in the previous 2.5.6.60645 version is stuck loading. It's true that my rig is very limited, but the same mission has been working many times in the past. Actually this night I changed it a little, but I doubt that that is the problem. I've also tried another one named something like "AGM65 qualfication" and it didn't load.

HI. I have installed the 2.5.6.60720 version and I'd like to go back to the 2.5.6.60645 version. Following SkateZilla's guide, Ive tried the following command in the prompt: DCS_Updater.exe update 2.5.6.60645@beta and I've also tried to write "open beta" or "openbeta" or nothing about the branch or even some other tries that now I don't recall and it either doesn't work or it tells me that my version is up to date or that the version I want is not available. Can someone please help me? Edit: I've found out that in the updates list, the 2.5.6.60645 version I want doesn't have a link to a download; I guess it's one of those versions which are not preserved...

Just like Antonio, I've started using this plane only recently (although I bought it on sale some months ago) and I don't see big targets right in front of me. I move the TDC range controller, I double check with the F10 view that I'm travelling towards the target, but nothing appears on the screen. I haven't noticed the FPS drop simply because I have 8 GB of RAM and a 1050Ti and it's usual for me to have, occasionally, about 20 FPS, unless it's a FC3 aircraft.

I wonder whether that’s DCS or the professional version The Battle Simulator. Is it PointControl in the video?

Buona fortuna!

I’m 31 and that’s how I will be some years from now :lol: I started playing DCS in 2015. It all started with a question to myself: <<It’s Sunday, I don’t feel like going out... what can I do? Maybe I could learn something on the Internet... like... hey, I don’t know how to fly an airplane>>, so I started watching videos. Then I wondered whether there was a free flight simulator and which simulator was the most realistic... My flightsim hobby actually had a chance to start way earlier. When I was something like 11 or 12 I was presented with the Jane’s F18 Super Hornet simulator but it was just too difficult and it was all in English, that I knew only at a basic level, so it just sat in a drawer for years. Back then Youtube didn’t exist; I didn’t even know the existence of the word “tutorial”. I wish someone thought me how to use it: I found it fascinating. Really, one of the things that I would teach myself if only I could go back in the past would be how to use that sim.

I think that the option to disable it should have a high priority because like others I am annoied by it. So please if possible give us the option.

AFAIK, when on the ground, there is a certain range of speed in which the nose wheel should be kept free to steer like a wheel of a shopping cart because in that range the aerodynamic control surfaces are effective and so there could be a mismatch between the direction that the aircraft would follow according to the nose wheel and the one it would follow according to the rudder. For an aircraft like the F15, this range could possibly be something like from 70 kts to takeoff, I think. So when you takeoff at the beginning you supposedly keep the aircraft straight using the nose wheel up to say 70 kts and then you disengage NWS and use the rudders only; vice versa, when you land you initially use the rudders and then turn on NWS at 70 kts and use it until you stop. In DCS, the NWS disengagement in the F15 works by keeping a button pressed: it's not an on/of toggle. If you disengage NWS either during takeoffs and landing you will blow a tyre; unless I'm doing something wrong, it must be a bug. I've attached a track file. NWS.trk

I personally do the taxiing exercise also moving laterally and backwards, like I was driving a car in reverse.

IMO the biggest problem in flying helicopters with HOTAS is that the throttle of the HOTAS doesn’t give the feel of a collective. You can use it vertically by screwing it to some wooden board like I do when flying rotary wings (I had threaded holes in the throttle originally: I haven’t drilled them) or you could just velcro it somewhere. It won’t be as good as a collective lever bit it will improve the simulation.

I also used to find the turns, especially the level turn @800 feet, to be maybe the hardest part, until I started to use the velocity vector. In the level turn, in the Hornet I keep it on the 0° line of the pitch ladder and in the Tomcat I keep it on the horizon because the position of the pitch ladder is too erratic. Then in the second turn I try and keep it between the -3° and the -4° lines in the Hornet [edit: I meant that I try to keep it at about that glideslope; the pitchladder is graduated to 5 degrees like in the Tomcat], while in the Tomcat I don’t use the HUD anymore and I (ab)use the DLC. As others wrote, I also find the pointers in the dials of the Tomcat to be easier to use than the digits in the Hornet. For me personally, the velocity vector is the easiest of the instruments in this context.