Raisuli

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!

If you haven't made it there yet the Royal Military Museum in Brussels is a must! You guys are a few years late, but it's going to be cool to 'fly' out of the same airfields my dad used during the war. I wasn't there, so no commentary on accuracy. Maybe that's why you're late

Are you suggesting we should stop cluster bombing the airshow crowd and render everything but the -97 and -105 completely pointless?

Blue water container ships on the Rhine...if my CVN isn't going to squeeze under those bridges at high water they can't go there either! Kidding aside, I have to agree with focusing on airfields. I don't know enough to know what I don't know or even be particularly confident about things I do so I'll leave most of that to the people who are much smarter than me. What I do is restrict operations to the south even if I'm drawn to water because the airfields seem to be missing. Plenty of civil airfields I use in a pinch, though, and East Germany has been kind enough to let me fly NATO planes from their bases now and then. Very reasonable of them.

Took 632 years to build Cologne Cathedral. Until you stand next to it it's hard to imagine how awesome it is, so I'm very glad someone stuck with it and got it finished. Some things aren't about instant gratification.

I'm forced to fly SP only and have the A-4, massun people, some Navy/NATO ground objects for atmosphere at bases, then TacView for figuring out just how bad I am. I avoid mods to the extent possible. If DCS has better object libraries I'd go down to TacView as my only mod.

I was surprised at how stiff those profiles are. Torque at the joints is the only enemy and used 1010 at the end of the side arms (and gusseted connectors) to manage that; not much load, but they keep the whole assembly rigid. The robotics frame in building 9 at JSC in Houston is pretty much room sized with an overhead crane and still made out of mostly 2040 IIRC. Extrusions are a brilliant solution to simpit frames, but expensive. The bits and pieces and connectors and plates are worse than the profiles!

For what it's worth I used 1020 for the frame on my simpit. A quick look at the specs tells me I can park both cars on the side panel supports and get less than 2mm of flex at the center because I end-posed it. Based on what I see if you're using 2020 you could park your house on that. 2060 would be enough to park an aircraft carrier. Maybe two. It's going to be a lot of money for overkill, but if that works for you then awesome! <edit> For fun I did a 350mm span fixed both ends with an evenly distributed load on 2040 horizontally. Okay, maybe a carrier was an exaggeration, but with a 100,000kg load (more than a typical house) there was about 3.5mm of deflection in the middle of the span. Two 1800kg cars parked together deflects it just over 0.15mm. The same span in 1020 will have 1.65mm of deflection under a 3,600kg load. All of this was because I got the idea from monster mounts (or whatever that is) and thought they were using far, far, (far) too much aluminum for the job, then I did the math. Pretty sure their choice was all about marketing, not engineering.

I ran into one accidentally. Heliport, tank range, urban assault ranges, pretty large training base. Park a helo at 'H FRG 51' and look around north-ish.

The deck crew used to have a little motivation, even without Vulcan. Makes me feel a lot less bad about throttling up on turns, though. Blow a few over the side and maybe the rest of them will start to move a little quicker.

They permit Navy squadrons, should have Navy ranks. Got a medal of honor for aborting a mission because I realized I hadn't set the altitude on a waypoint. Wish they generated a citation. "For showing intrepidity (they love that word) above and beyond the call of duty by being too lazy to change the WP data on the fly at great personal risk..." The purple heart was for doing touch and goes. Not an enemy unit on the map, unless you count the plane captain who probably hurled sharp vituperation at me for the damage being done to her aircraft. When I did the cold re-install all my logbook data was lost, so my new pylote got all those medals again. It's oddly disturbing to me, honestly. Don't mind the rank, they should let us flag out the medals, though. None of it really means anything anyway.