ouPhrontis

Yep, I have a pair of Razer headphones with mic, all the faux leather vinyl broke up and flaked off everywhere, and the mic boom snapped at a join, before that happened the mic on/off switch became a source of flaky audio eventually resulting in no mic at all.

Indeed, the Pegasus is powerful, really powerful, but if your descent rate is already too high, or you're carrying too much weight, or the ambient temperature is hobbling the performance of the Pegasus, or you're out of water, or all of the above; it won't be enough to halt your descent.

When I found TrackIR bogging down like my head is immersed in tar, switching profiles in the menu you see below would fix it. Also smoothing too high can seem to cause problems, you can see my settings here; Also I'll attach the profile I use for DCS DCS0.zip

The Harrier will not always be able to takeoff or land vertically or short, it'll be down to weight and engine performance figures for the day, water content etc, and a conventional takeoff or landing may be required, like so; Check the NATOPS sections on takeoff and landing types, there are quite a few, each with its own procedure. Harriers also don't like crosswinds, plus recall that critical phase of flight between 30 and 90 knots, check for slip with the vane, slip is bad.

Great points, hansangb. I know it can seem quite daunting to open a PC and start plugging in cables and so on, you've probably already got a spare bay and connectors waiting inside for a new drive, though if not; there's usually a rank of SATA connections on the motherboard, a SATA storage device will have two cables going to it, power and data, a buddy of mine has demonstrated just how ghetto you can get and still get away with it and all things work, by not even having somewhere tidy/designed for stowing the SSD or HDD, he'd just have them loose in the case, or duct-tape them to the inside somewhere. SATA data; You might even already have somewhere in your case to install a new drive without resorting to extra bays etc. Hope it goes smoothly, feel free to ask more questions if unsure.

The whole interview is worth a watch, but check out his comments here (hell, the whole video) at these time-stamps; 31:25 35:58

No complaints about my Corsair HS50, and more importantly; TrackIR clip-pro fits on it.

So as to not have that comment misunderstood and confuse matters for Simicro; better than USB 2.0 for sure, but not better than SATAIII or via PCIe.

Yes, I've done that with several; DCS, Star Citizen, and also Steam directory.

There are two expansion springs, on removal it should remove the detent, especially if you hold the two arms away from the stick notch that sits between them, though as you say; you'd need to come up with some way of adding friction, else it'll be very odd when in flight. If you watch at this point 34:00 he shows that actuation of the arms when the stick notch pushes them away against the expansion spring (this is a video you've probably already watched, but this is the money shot)

Try running modded ARMA2 or 3, with something like joining a server running Insurgency, or anything with ACE+ACRE etc, then once your storage devices have exploded you'll be quite content with the requirements of DCS. On a slightly more serious note, I don't think there's much to be done in size reduction, other simulators occupy similar amounts, or more. Storage these days is comparatively cheap.

On pedals, you can get by without - say twist grip or other - but boy does it make a difference, though if you're only flying fast jets, aside from the Harrier; you can do without, unless you're hardcore preserving energy with coordinated turns in a fight. Rotary wings and VSTOL, it is arguably a must.

Here in the UK (when we had them), they'd fly around 'Mach Loop' at about ~420 kts, >500kts and you're set for bombing, there are performance tables on cruise and such though, which makes for great bedtime reading. From an actual pilot on STO with his GR designated can; full throttle at 10 to 0° nozzle, see ASI come alive, wait for 95 indicated and throw the nozzles back to 55° and you'll jump into the air, weight being within limits (see tables, NATOPS) Oh, checklists; stick to them, this can bites. NWS engaged for all rolling takeoffs, else you'll get up-close and personal with the scenery.

I found the Gazelle slightly easier to fly than the Huey, though the Huey has it's own little nuances it too was easy to fly, I was hover-taxiing around in a matter of minutes with it. So perhaps if flying the Gazelle was a struggle, you might find the Huey a little more challenging, due to the pendulum and shimmy being much more noticeable.

Just to clarify, you pressed MAPM (left-side of the MPCD), followed by MAP (right-side of the MPCD)?

You don't mention storage devices, I assume with a new build that it has SSD, if not then I recommend it because it certainly makes a difference with DCS.

Done, well first off; they're certainly different. The Huey has a little shimmy and shake, that at first in slow flight I was trying to dial out, like you're a pendulum, but it's best not to chase that. Both are really great to fly, I spent an hour just hover taxiing around Nellis. They both hover well, but with little nuances, so I wouldn't say one is harder/easier than the other... just different.

That you even used the term 'tally-whacker' in reference to this photo only increases the Englishness of it all.

Same issue, it halts at the prompt for turning the VHF radio on. This is with Open Beta 2.5.2.18736 It halted for me with the ARN-82 at power on selection, I could get the tutor to continue lessons by dialling the freq' from 107.00 to 108.00. It halted again with power on for ARC-134, I messed with the freq, going all the way up and down and for whatever reason it finally started to progress when I'd put in 120.00, though reset it to 118.00 I think the frequency is arbitrary of course, just for whatever reason; messing with the knob gets the tutorial to progress, else I'm stuck at "now power on the VHF..." step.

In a combat theatre wing elements would be in combat spread, not a close airshow formation. Combat spread being several thousand feet apart and a thousand foot step-up or down, depending. See here, for example (at the time stamp provided, too); https://youtu.be/pQvF7V-VEYI?t=2m10s

The MAPM options menu is momentary, too; the MAPM options are displayed for 10 seconds and then return to the previous display if no other pushbutton is pressed.

That silk scarf alone adds a +5 knot boost.

I had seen a dip of around 10FPS with rain enabled, I sometimes use MSAA, but it can harm frames when there's a high poly count. It's probably hard to read, but it says 32FPS, that's in one of, if not the most frame intensive areas of the map. Those are my usual settings, although for the above Hormuz flight I dropped textures to medium for the city flight, and without altering anything else I got no lower than 30 FPS, with MSAA on it'd half it, though be playable away from busy areas. Elsewhere I'd be getting 55-60 frames or more.

I had at one time found TrackIR to be quite lazy with too much smoothing applied, so I have that value set to 2, which is just enough to dial out unwanted jitter. This smoothing value/computation could be compounding things, also I too have found that too much tabbing in/out of DCS can also cause TrackIR to get very bogged down, but I found a reliable fix in switching profiles. These fixed it for me, but as with PCs; your mileage may vary.