Yoda967

If I understand you correctly, then I believe this was already reported here: https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=224406 Tholozor has offered up a temporary fix, discussion of which can be found here: https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=224773&highlight=JTAC+coordinates

It sounds so far as if you've got 4 way points at some altitude above the surface and you're entering that data into the JSOW for TOO, then altering the target elevation. Chuck's guide has a good tutorial for this, and it shows elevation entry for the WPTs at target elevation. Have you tried that?

Jakal, One of the best ways to learn a technique is to make a copy of a .miz or two that use it and pick them apart in the ME. Any of Sedlo's missions would be a good place to start, and Beppe's Red Flag missions do some neat things, too: https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3302808/ Good luck, and have fun!

Follow up: The SA-15 will launch two missiles at each incoming target. Launching from just inside max range at 25,000 feet, you can get the SA-15 to expend his missiles by making five attacks, each launching one JSOW. You'll need your wingman for this, and don't forget to change the reaction setting to EVADE FIRE, or your wingman will just report "unable" when you order him to engage. Also, your wingman won't engage until after he reports the mudspike, so you'll need to make a run in close enough to get the SA-15 to light up, or launch a JSOW to get in there and do that for you. I also killed a single, average-rated SA-15 with a single JSOW C, and the trick seems to be to approach at 25,000 feet and hold your launch until 15-20 miles from the target. In this case, the SA-15 fired his two missiles late and both detonated behind the JSOW. EDIT: In this engagement, the JSOW approached from a higher altitude and made a number of vertical moves where it would dive then nearly level off, then dive again, finally approaching the target at about a 45 degree dive.

As do I. Defeating defenses is a numbers game. On offense, you gotta shoot more missiles than it takes to induce the defense to shoot their limit (whether by inventory or fire control system limit). If you're shooting at a single SA-15 TLAR and its 8 missiles, you probably need to launch 9 missiles to get him. If your target is a 4-launcher SA-15 battery, expect to need 36 missiles (9 for each launcher), UNLESS you can figure out a way to get them to launch more than once on each of your missiles. JSOW is a glide bomb, and its range is dependent on the total amount of kinetic energy (airspeed) and potential energy (altitude) it has at launch. It doesn't maneuver to make itself a harder target. It simply trades altitude for airspeed in order to keep flying, and eventually, it runs out of altitude. There's very little magic involved. Its purpose in SEAD is to keep aircrews out of SAM Missile Engagement Zones. To be effective, see my first paragraph above. Edit: deleted extraneous statement about guidance

Yeah...I'm sure that some of the guys with more ME experience than I have (particularly the scripters) can come up with a better solution to your original question. I spend most of my DCS time playing with ME to see what I can do with it as is, and everything is a struggle. What works in a scenario designer's favor is knowing how much the player(s) can see from their vantage point and making everything LOOK like it's real. The trick is to get rid of everything the players can't see, because it''s entirely unnecessary. For example, I'm building a SP mission now where the player launches in an FA-18 on a planned 1+45 mission. I wanted some traffic on the ground, so the KC-130 supporting the mission taxis by while the player is starting engines, and if he's paying attention, he'll see the tanker again as he passes it en route to its tanker track. It'll be on station by the time he checks out with his JTAC, and he can refuel on the RTB leg for enough gas to get home. But the KC-130's flight would, in reality, be six hours on station...I made the orbit six hours long, but there's no RTB leg for the tanker. Why should I? The player's sortie ends when he lands back at Al Dhafra AB at about the 1+45 mark. Why would he care what happens four hours later? I recently read an article about the longest-ever combat sortie for an F-16. It happened during ODYSSEY DAWN in 2011 when a pair of Vipers on a SEAD CAP out of Aviano got stuck on station when their relief failed to launch, and then they got stuck on station for a third stint. By the time they landed, they'd flown over 13 hours, mostly boring holes in the sky and shuttling back and forth between their CAP station and the their dedicated tanker. The pilots reported that by hour eight, they'd both used all their piddle packs and eaten their energy bars, and it was an uncomfortable last five hours. Pretty sure that if someone put a mission like that up on the server, there'd only be a handful of folks that would appreciate it. Once I get to where I'm comfortable enough with my mission creation, I might do one like that, just to be cantankerous.

Sirrah, Unfortunately, we don't have anything remotely like a workable fuel planner, but you can use the concept of "flight cycles" to your advantage here, whether we're using a carrier or not. But, for the sake of discussion, let's say we are talking about a carrier operating on a 90 minute flight cycle. What that means in a practical sense is that the carrier starts launching aircraft every 90 minutes, and it completes its launches and transitions to recovery in about 15 minutes. This means that a sortie scheduled for a single cycle lasts about 1+45, which is about the limit for a Hornet with 2 external tanks. Tomcats and Hummers (Hawkeyes) would be double-cycled, launching at the start of one 90 minute cycle and recovering at the end of the next cycle. We CAN double-cycle our Hornets, too, but we'd have to send them to the tanker about the time that they'd be recovering, if we weren't keeping them on station. Specifically, you launch your SEAD CAP Hornets at 0900, expecting them to recover during the 1200 cycle. We'd refuel them at about 1030. So, they fly to their SEAD CAP station and start their orbit (which is set in ME to end at 1030). The next leg of their flight plan would take them to the tanker, and the leg after that sends them back to the SEAD CAP racetrack, where they'd start a second orbit until they need to RTB about 1130. All of that is fairly complicated, though. I've found that the AI is pretty great at a lot of things, and not so much when it comes to the mundane stuff like this. I've read a lot of "how do I get the AI planes to actually refuel from a tanker?" posts, so in creating missions for myself, I tend to make things as simple as possible...unless my mission is being built to simulate a double-cycle sortie, I don't think I'd go as far as to try and make this work.

Having worked in military war gaming for many years, I've seen a bit of how AAR assets are managed, and it's never "fly until you're out of gas". The JFACC *always* knows who's going to need gas and roughly when, so they schedule the tankers accordingly. They know where every drop of that tanker's gas is going before they publish the ATO. The way to get your tanker off station is to set an orbit duration or set a time for it to depart the orbit and RTB.

As far as I know, you switch field ownership either by setting it in ME or by putting your own troops inside the 6500 foot circle depicted on the map while there are no opposing troops also within the circle. (I could be wrong; there might be a way to do it like you suggest, but that would seem like cheating to me, since the objective is to capture the airfield.)

Paganus, thank you, that was a big piece of the puzzle. Exorcet, I hadn't added any hostile units, but I had set the airfield to red control, since the goal of my planning was to simulate a heliborne airfield assault. Turns out, you can't do that...the helicopters won't approach a hostile field for landing at all. I'll have to rethink my airfield raid a bit. Thanks for all the help!!

Moe, Thanks. That's what I'm doing, too. No embarking/disembarking...just fly to a waypoint, land, and the touchdown sets a flag that spawns the stick of troops. Exorcet, I haven't added any bad guys at all yet, just trying to get the two helos to fly the tasked route and trigger the activation of the troops.

I've been trying to get two AI helicopters to land at an airfield LZ and trigger the activation of two groups of infantry (one for each helo). I've been able to get the helicopters to fly the tasked flight paths once and it worked beautifully, but as soon as I add any units beyond the two helos, the helicopters stop flying their tasked path and simply fly a course of 250 off over the horizon. It's not a difficult thing...the miz is below...am I doing something wrong? I'd be grateful if someone could look at the mission and tell me what I might've done wrong. Many thanks. Heliborne_Assault.miz

Still, you might try running a repair on DCS. Let us know how it goes.

Pandacat, The fighters don't need to be in formation with the AEW aircraft in order to act as escorts. The E-2 can simply direct them like any other fighters, so put them in a DCA racetrack pattern above the AEW racetrack, or put them in a DCA racetrack out along the threat axis from the AEW asset.

The first one is easy: When setting up the AI aircraft, mark the check box for "UNCONTROLLED", then add a triggered action to start the AI aircraft.

Back in the day, I was a direct fire spotter on a SPRUANCE-class DD. Never had to do it for real, but also, we never did any training to hit moving tanks. We'd be ~3 miles off the beach, and time of flight for a 5" round at that range is about 16 seconds. The trick was to fire at a point and hope you were lucky enough to hit a vehicle moving into it. (And trust me, at three miles, it ain't easy to hit a stationary vehicle.) Real Naval Surface Fire Support involves a lot of prior planning, including picking points to fire at when a spotter calls for them. We had a procedure for shooting at tanks called "counter mechanized fires" or simply "countermech". The objective isn't to destroy the tanks, but rather to interdict their movement. Typically, there would have several points already picked out -- crossroads, road junctions, bridges, or other choke points where the enemy vehicles would be likely to concentrate. These coordinates would be entered into the fire control computer before we showed up on the gun line, and when tanks appeared, the spotter would simply radio, "TANKS TANKS TANKS! EXECUTE COUNTERMECH PLAN ALPHA" (or BRAVO, CHARLIE, DELTA, and so on). Without any further command, we'd call up the appropriate coordinates and fire a predetermined number of rounds at that point. This works nicely in an F10 menu. You can set up a triggered task for each point you might want to shoot at, and use the F10 menu to generate the trigger.

My understanding is that the LOW/MED/HI flyout altitudes are interim settings anyhow as development continues. For now, only LOW seems to work properly, anyway, though what they call "low" isn't, by Harpoon standards. Flyout altitude should be MUCH lower. It should cruise at an altitude above sea skim, then when the seeker acquires a target, drop to sea skim, which it does only when you set the flyout to LOW..

Did some initial playing around with it last night, keeping the engagement simple (BOL, 5 mile seeker turn on, 60 miles destruct range), and watching the target's reaction. I used Neustrashimy as the target for its self defense abilities. I shot two missiles on each of two passes. The first pass both missiles were set to low, and failed to acquire the target. They passed close enough by that the target fired on them and shot them down. On the second round, I accidentally fired one missile high and one low. The low one acquired the target and dove to sea-skimming. The high one did not acquire. Both were shot down, but Neustrashimy fired 8 missiles at the two of them. Now to figure out how to get my wingman to shoot, too.

The reality is that Harpoon is a relatively slow weapon, and therefore vulnerable to higher-end SAMs like the SA-N-9 (the navalized version of the SA-15). The solution is simple: More Harpoons. Just like the SA-15 on land, the way to kill it is to saturate it with inbounds. I haven't tried this in DCS to see how many it takes, but think double digits. How much fun is that? (I guess we know what I'll be doing for the next couple evenings.) (SLAM-ER is a land attack weapon.)

Thanks, Switch. A good many books have been written to answer that question. The first thing that comes to mind in answer to your question is thrust, which is what determines the aircraft's ability to overcome total drag, and for the purposes of our radius discussion, the induced drag that comes with high G maneuvering. The more thrust available, the greater a fighter's ability to sustain a turn. As you "pull" Gs, the induced drag from the increased angle of attack will slow the airplane, forcing you to increase thrust to maintain the airspeed (and thus the generated lift that is producing both the turn and the constant altitude). At some point, You'll reach the limits of the available thrust, and you won't be able to pull any harder without decelerating. Once that happens, you're limited by the thrust and not by the structural G limitation of the airframe. Corner speed is also design dependent. I'd define corner speed as the speed at which maximum control surface deflection produces a G loading equal to the airframe G limitation. Any faster, and maximum deflection produces excess stress on the airframe. Any slower, and you can't produce enough of an angle of attack to generate G at the limit. I'm not an expert here...there are certainly folks here who are, and I'll defer to them, if they choose to chime in.

I'm not sure what they mean when they say "average turn radius for the T-45". The radius of an aircraft's turn is not a function of the aircraft's design, but of bank angle and velocity. (If you want to see the math for that, look here.) It's important to note that bank angle and G are not tied together. You can bank your jet at 60 degrees and pull 0 G, but in doing so, you'll lose altitude. You've probably noticed that you have to pull back on the stick to maintain altitude when your wings aren't level, and that's what we're talking about here. It doesn't matter what airplane you're flying, bank the wings at 45 degrees and pull the stick back to maintain altitude, you're "pulling" about 1.4Gs. At 60 degrees and constant altitude, you're "pulling" 2Gs. At 80 degrees of bank and a constant altitude, you're pulling 5.8Gs. A level turn with 60 degrees angle-of-bank at 400 knots and a given altitude is the same for an FA-18C as it is for a T-45 or a MiG-29. That's why NAVMC 3500 gives the same separation distances for BFM that you find in the CNATRA 1289.

Was reading recently that Allied ground formations rarely contained heavy AAA, and significantly less light/medium AAA than German formations because by June '44, the Luftwaffe was not much of a threat to them, so much of it having been withdrawn for defense of the Fatherland. That said, 3.7cm Flak guns and the SdKfz 7/1 ans /2 would be welcome additions to the DCS battlefield.

Loved the shot of the HARM displays and the HARM under the wing...nice GBU-31, too.:thumbup:

It can drop LGB's in PB, but we got that just before the holidays and it's probably going to be in the stable version's next update. (Today maybe?)

Have you tried PERFORM TASK > FOLLOW?