Raisuli

Which hasn't stopped me from hanging out in the north, staging BadGuy(tm) helos on a satellite image of an airfield, parking air defense on the Kansas-flat farmland nearby, and working out the best way to defeat the latter. Run through the mountains, or up high? Need to put an SA-10 in there and see if the results change. Love slaloming those mountains. Afghanistan is growing on me, but I also stay away from the sand.

I've had it work, I've had it not work, but in general it works. Or at least it did; mostly I do carrier ops in an F-16 lately and the taxi director gets pretty huffy waiting for me to fold my wings so I run over him to park. I seem to recall finding some magic sauce on requesting takeoff but now I can't remember what that was, and they've changed a few things since then.

DCS isn't even the most annoying thing I run into; I run 2.5d (not VR) and get ~149 FPS most of the time. If that's not enough it's time to check your entitlements! It's those other guys where I get 55 FPS despite a 5090 drawing enough power to run the helium liquification plant at Fermi. I haven't dug into the hardware enough to figure that out, or decided if I even care enough to do anything about it. The overall upshot being it's not time for an upgrade yet, which is good given I built this nine months ago. My last machine lasted five years before I decided to get a performance boost, and honestly all I really needed was a new video card. OCD kicking in again.

That would be a false impression. I got the feeling it's not enough of an upgrade to go through the brain damage of getting my sim machine apart, playing musical parts with two different computers, running my powershell scripts to re-set all the controls, etc etc. That doesn't mean I'm not going through the brain damage, just not in the near future and I might wait for the next gen CPUs. I consciously went i9-14 rather than -ultra just because of the gaming reviews. I don't think that's going to fix the stutters. I keep putting off Windows 11 because they've turned harvesting personal data into an art form and I don't have a ready tool to fix that in the registry, but the information here about tweaking it for games has been awesome. Also noodling a PiMaxSuperDuperDeluxeUraniumEdition whatever the latest VR is later this year, so this entire area is priceless. Lots of great information.

Well, cool. You just saved me a bunch of coin because I've been noodling that exact migration, which would be somewhere around $1500 by the time I got the new MB. Can't complain about frame rate in DCS, apart from the normal 143 FPS to 9 FPS. The Macro stutters are...irritating. In the other SimsThatShallNotBeNamed I'm CPU limited and only getting 50-60 FPS. My 5090 did basically nothing for those because I was also CPU limited on my old 2080Ti.

I'm getting better at defeating the Pantsir; got one defending a BUK. It's a beast. Anecdotally every SAM system is a piece of crap, or a space ship with lasers, depending one who writes the anecdotes. At some point designers have to draw a line in the code and say 'the specs say...' Once that's done it really doesn't matter what the anecdotes are, the one I'm going up against is capable of...<insert results here>.

Karachi is as sparsely modeled as the engineering spaces on the CVNs. It took me a while to recognize the harbor, and even then I had to cheat and reference maps. Never lived there, got to spend some time, and I have to say I really enjoyed the place. Nothing but pleasant memories. A little sad it's just a field of grass, not even a satellite photo superimposed on the terrain.

I just noticed that this morning looking for a base for BadGuys(tm) while I fly out of Bagram. Saw the textures on the map, flew over and it's photo textures all over in that area, put a scout helo on the airbase and only had to climb fifty feet to see through all the grass to the underlying image, but the whole area is Kansas flat so I have to assume there's some elevation tweaking to be done as well. It's like that all around that canyon, so my assumption is that's part of the north map, which is the one I'm waiting for anyway. In the mean time the Blue guys and Red guys are working up plans for the Red assets up there. I'm sure all that will need tweaked if that is indeed part of the north map, but it also gives the red force an airbase, so win all around.

Wait...a $150 (sorry, this is the military, $150,000) solutions aren't viable for military purposes, but anything the air force flies uses this non-viable technology? You did that in sequential sentences? Now I'm really cornfused. TACAN, incidentally, is being phased out. At the rate the US Military moves I expect the last TACAN station to be shut down shortly after the sun enters its red giant phase.

Ahhh, but after the Hawk debacle they fixed it so that can't happen again. Still have my user manual for the Hawk; it was a fun bird...totally get why those mercenary pilots from Oman thought they could shoot through the hanger bay doors on the Connie!

In any steam plant there are a number of components that have limits; think 'red line' on your car's tachometer. The first one to the limit wins and you become [SomeComponent] limited. In this case the limit we were bumping up against was one that could be managed to give us an extra turn or two. Normally a 'liberty turn' is just running the engines a skosh faster than the engine order telegraph asks for. Ahead 1/3, sure, but there's also an RPM requested (and an RPM repeater on the bridge). If you add a couple it's not going to have any significant impact on the plant or power, but it's still going to get you back to Norfolk the evening before we're supposed to arrive and annoy the people with commissions and leave you doing laps off the coast of Virginia Beach all night rather than actually pulling in early. I preferred being out at sea, so no big deal.

You don't need anywhere near that to get spray off the crests, and that alone would turn that mirrored surface in DCS into something you can gauge altitude off. I'm not even going to get into the abject embarrasment that is wakes, or the fact the carrier wake is a copy of the same two screw boat wake used everywhere else in game. There really is a point of diminishing returns between effort and realism. More reference photos. Glassy days, because that does happen (and the Tarawa, since we have that): Turning and burning; 30ish knot wake from a two screw boat. This was also a calm day, but note the spray off the crests. Doesn't take much wind. <OT=TRUE> We did a high-speed run overnight to pick a couple people off a tender crossing to Japan and turned 30(+) knots for (edit) four or five days to get them in helo range...ok, helo range with a C-130 providing navigation and refueling service, of Pearl Harbor. Helo landed and picked up the patients, C-130 orbited overhead. Then we went back to our regularly scheduled exercises, a little bit late. For the record, a boat that runs on marine gas turbines burns about 24% of their gas every day at this kind of speed. Power is a cube function of velocity. One guy got hurt (and a second patient came along just because) and the Navy stopped the world to get them to medical care. The Captain called down and asked nicely for liberty turns, which we gave him because (a) our CO at the time was awesome and (b) if that was us we'd want a few extra turns. A handful of turns doesn't make a lot of difference, but over the course of seven days we were hours early. That was a fun time...one of only three multi-day high speed runs. Fifteen knots is boring. Five is worse. <OT = FALSE>

Civilian boats designed for a smooth ride aren't quite the same as a cork with significant reserve buoyancy designed to take a hit and survive it. Stabilizers and ballasting down and small metacentric heights. Makes absolutely no difference in game, unless you try to maneuver the cans in high seas and lay one over...you only steer one direction when the water is angry. I'd settle for pitching decks. Asking for enough realism to endanger the Ticos is too much

It's a shame ED is pouring so many resources into new toys and not into the game play that makes those toys fun to use. Their priority seems to be cranking out new modules, so crank out a new ocean module. I'd rather buy that than another map. Airfield equipment and personnel...let me get out my checkbook. Static objects that aren't a graphical embarrassment? How much? Meanwhile threads like this are noted and filed with their lunch wrapper. It's also unfortunate that subtlety goes over my head. I have no idea what you guys are talking about with ThatOtherSim

We got a taste of that when Ugra went down to Tel Nof. I'm not taking Sinai as done. Cities like Haifa, Beirut, and Damascus are certainly nicer on the Syria map, but in many ways I prefer OnReTech's airfields. In my case I pretty much ignore national borders and just do missions, so it really doesn't matter which direction I fly and that makes me less sensitive to 'realism' issues. The BadGuys(tm) are there and the GoodGuys(tm) are here. At the end of the day it has everything to do with what you need. Flying a helo? Syria. Fast jet? I'm using Sinai as my desert map now. Plenty of water for boats without hours of flight time, plenty of space and with Massun no shortage of tools to make bases in the middle of nowhere, plenty of airfields for both source and destination (targets).

Unfortunately there are many things in DCS that 'aren't important enough to fix' but were important enough to break.

Still too much. Actually those ships burned asphalt, or Navy Special, or Number 5/6 bunker, which is virtually indistinguishable from asphalt at ten paces on a cold day, and you could always tell if you were downwind. The stink was impressive. But they never (in my recollection) blew smoke unless they were blowing out the pipes. This is the Connie, not the Forest Fire, but they used the same go juice. For comparison, an F-14 in a hurry. Please note a calm, if cloudy day, and the water is NOT A STINKING FLAT PLATE! I was doing carrier operations (in an F-16) and got all annoyed by the water again.

When the hardened aircraft shelters are hit (and a bottle rocket will apparently get the job done; probably fraud involved in those contracts) the ground around the shelter falls away, but the shelter itself is still visible. One bottle rocket is enough to take out three shelters at a time, and my F-16 parked in one of those shelters was nicely mangled. A screenshot is worth a thousand words:

Don't tell Ugra, but Sinai is about to be my goto desert. Syria held that title for a long time, but the base layout in Sinai works better for what I want to do at this point and that ridiculous expanse of desert to the south west is just what I need. So I'm flying the wrong direction to get to my target area. Worked for Douglas Corrigan, so who am I to complain?

Seems a bit tight...hate to drive an A-10 through there. nullnull

We have awesome maps with brilliant details, like reinforced aircraft revetments that look amazing, but I have to start my aircraft out in the open if I want ground units around it. Atmosphere. Navy guys standing on the revetment. Some manned equipment hanging by the driver from the ceiling. Other equipment just floats. Some will show up inside, but it's pretty hit or myth. We used to park aircraft on hangers, too, and that got fixed. This doesn't seem like much to ask, even if the selection of 'ground crew' is almost totally limited to carrier crew who got lost and some Massun guys standing the wrong direction. At least the carrier crew doesn't look like a bunch of mannequins. Ok, the ability to skin the carrier crew. That sounds a lot worse than it is, but they're mostly just enlisted so nobody will notice...

I've been there. It's not that exciting. The diving was amazing, though... Find the smallest Marshal Island with an airstrip and pretend the rest of them aren't there. That's a Diego Garcia simulator.

Honestly since we have Iraq and Afghanistan I think the one most important skinned civilian we need, more than any other, and of course only one copy allowed per mission, is Robin Williams. Fitting tribute. My 'enemy' is always combined joint task force red, because...I'm just like that. I know too many people from the countries normally assigned the task. I'll leave sorting to someone wiser than me. My 'bad guys' are hired for the task, like actors, and always come back in the next mission. I've been accused of many things, being normal is not among them.

+/- how much Magnitude 3 attacks this, and that's completely variable and they do have other things to do, the next trick is to create the .lua to make up for all the missing controls. Might get started on that this weekend, but I'm not the foremost expert; that would be @LeCuvier

I have never been an ensign, but I successfully took off, flew around a while, then landed without scratching the paint or being eliminated. FM is obviously too tame Anything else I noticed I chalk up to EA. Love my Corsair!