Raisuli

To be a real mission I need to add a bunch of stuff...like actual instructions. Haven't decided if there's enough need for that yet; if I'm only doing them for myself I already know <edit> Yeah, okay, got the script roughed out, now I need to take a training mission apart to see how all that works. I've been flying the carrier pattern all morning and I suck a lot less; remains to be seen how much that will translate to the carrier. Of course all this is off-topic for the F-16; should do some more work on that as well, but I did forget to turn my F-16 autopilot switches off before doing the chase mission, and that always makes flying interesting... <edit>

Bit of feature creep... Took the A-4 out of this version; not everyone has it. Only the F-18 for the carrier break because you'll hurt that dainty undercarriage in an F-16. Don't switch slots; there's no way to turn gates off once they're on, so you'll end up with serious confusion. Quit out and restart if you want to change planes (unless going from pattern work to chase work, where the gates are no factor, or vice versa the first time. You'll get it) For the carrier there's one set of gates for the initial break that descend into the gates for the touch and go. It's only mildly confusing. There are three close together on the runway; the first is the ramp, the second is the three wire, the third is the end of the deck. Fly through the first and third, touch down in front of the second. You'll want to be at mil power before the wheels stop smoking. There's also a couple 'chase planes'. B1B (everyone has it) flies around for 40 minutes; the chase planes are there to practice formations. Take off close, keep up, try to maintain a stable position. There are no cues the lead Bone is going to turn other than the lead Bone turning. A bit like A2AR, where the tanker pilots maneuver around just to be spiteful. Just remember if you have wake turbulence set up that bomber will flip you like a cheap burger, especially if you're in close and slow...like formation landings. And watch your fuel. I didn't give you any extra... Pattern Training vR0.2.miz

Doing really basic flight instruction missions, and I don't really want a separate mission for every aircraft so I overlap them. I can turn helper gates on for the selected unit, but then if I switch slots to try the same 'lesson' in a different aircraft I get overlapping gates. It'd be really nice to turn gates on for the active group and turn the gates off for the inactive groups.

I just finished the carrier version. Holy crap I suck! Start 3 nm away and to starboard of the airfield for the overhead break, roll into downwind, roll into the groove, bolter pattern and original approach are on the same downwind, but vertically offset slightly at first which is a little confusing if you don't know what or why. Three gates very close together on the runway...you better be flying through the first, your wheels should hit at the second, and you better fly through the third...makes it pretty clear how short those distances are! I need to tweak a few things and some instructions might help. Also added an F-18 and F-5 to the basic mission I already uploaded and that needs to be tested, but this is turning out better than I hoped.

Oh. You mean like I used the delete key to get rid of a waypoint I didn't need (twice) and blew up twenty or thirty minutes of fiddling to get my gates perfect both times? The good news is I'm a certified former sailor and am allowed to use language like that, but 'undo' would have been good for my blood pressure, not to mention my self image.

Remember when I said I work on consistency? There's nothing like a bunch of green gates to tell you how inconsistent you are. Leave your gear down or blast off and enter this from an overhead break, which ever you prefer. Tested this in an F-5E and an F-16C, but no promises. Downwind is 1.2nmi from baseline, which oddly enough is what you shoot for in an F-18 to land on a carrier, and ~1500' AGL. Currently set for an F-16 (but you can edit the mission to make it anything you want), Caucuses because everyone has that, Maykop because it's flat, left because...well, partly because I fly the F-18 a lot, partly because I used to use the road as a reference, partly just because. I will almost certainly make a carrier simulator version of this, but need to do the math to figure out the proper grove length for a stationary runway and the altitudes come down quite a bit. Pattern Training vR0.1.miz

Depends. Is your nose dropping because your speed is too low? Bank angle too high? Trim set wrong? Nothing about this is an isolated system. I typically bring -16s around the base leg to final too fast to make nose control easier, then back off to landing speed on final. Is that 'right'? No idea. Works for me, though, especially since the boards are already out. I have never been ordered to the ops shed or given a number to call on landing, even after flying down the Las Vegas strip at mach 1.3. I'm not practicing for a job with the air national guard, so until I get better information or more skill I stick to 'works for me'. You don't even want to know what the LSOs have to say about my chronic overshoots, but I generally end up on the boat.

So, if you really want to improve do patterns in your F-16 (I used Incirlik for this). Take off, leave your wheels down, turn over <that> building. Maintain 1500 feet AGL (set your TACAN, course, and altimeter before takeoff). Fly 1500' reciprocal until you get to <that> TV tower. If there's nothing there put a static object on the ground where you want to make your base turn. Turn final <there>. Lots of stuff on the ground to use as references; streets, fields, buildings, whatever you put there yourself as cues. Maintain level turns and constant altitude. Use the same climb and descent rates. BUT...only do one thing at a time. Today I focus on turning at specific points and don't loose sleep if I wobble a little. Once I can nail those turn points, then I think about altitude control, then I worry about speed control. You get the idea. I've spent hours doing touch and goes. Remember in (non-Navy) aircraft the secret to landing is not to land. Once your good at it switch direction. If you've done left patterns switch to right. I should make a mission for this. Gates are a crutch, but they'll at least get you going the right direction.

If I recall correctly 4 PSI at 100% O2 is enough partial pressure to get the job done. Those 'space suits' run just that; at much more than 4 movement becomes too difficult. <edit> Worth noting at sea level the PP of O2 is about 3 PSI; they add one because suits are hard work... </edit> If you want hypoxia set up an axis on the F/A-18 OBOGS, set it to maximum (I tested a 1-1024 and validated it was at 1024) and you'll die on the ground. Wags said this is working as expected, which does explain why the Navy is chronically short on pilots.

Oh, man. I'm not a pilot, so I have no basis for understanding pilot stuff. I've flown sims for about forty three years, though, and always sucked at them. Landing was just a case of flying at the ground until I was low enough for the wheels to touch. In the last year or so I finally learned how to fly...by flying a sim that cannot be named. Made a huge difference in how I fly DCS, though, because they do teach the basics there, as 'boring' as those basics are. Came back to DCS and suddenly I can fly an F-5E, with no auto anything, straight and level. Level break turns. Landings like I actually know what I'm doing. Well, except in an F-18 where you're supposed to fly at the ground until the wheels are close enough to touch... And when flying doesn't take as much of your concentrations it's pretty amazing what you can find out there where the warheads meet the foreheads Want to do something similar here and actually have the start of a mission to teach departure procedures (not that I actually follow any most of the time), but not sure how much time I want to invest or how much time people want to spend on the 'boring' basics.

It's an upgrade? In any event, Linux isn't a thing until they switch to Vulkan. Probably no point even bothering to wish at this point.

I have all three; if I needed to pick one it would be the F-16 every day of the week and three times on the weekends. Does everything you might feel like doing, including carting 10 CBU-97s with a CL tank and 4 AMRAAMS for some precision area effect fun on the ground and still some left over for pesky aircraft. The only thing it lacks are harpoons and SLAMs; given what it has that's not a bad trade, though. The air to ground flexibility is really impressive. Excellent HOTAS design if you have equipment that can match the switches Freaking rocket if it's light; the thing is a jet engine with fuel tanks and just enough room for one small person Lands on carriers if you don't mind repairing and taking off a little light. Oh, and the scorn of the purists out there. I've been scorned by professionals, so I don't really notice that. AV-8B: The A-10 can carry four of these fully loaded on wing pylons and get them there faster, which should embarrass any Harrier fan. It's a very niche aircraft, but vertical take off is cool. Just remember it only takes off vertically if it's light, as in if the pilot weighs more than fifteen pounds or you load actual fuel on board it's not 'light' anymore. F-15: Bomb truck, great radar, used to be an awesome air superiority fighter until they replaced 800 pounds of fuel with self-loading baggage and slapped eight B-17s worth of bombs on it. Kidding aside it's a cool aircraft, but not up to F-16 standards. Bear in mind none of these are going to win the war solo, so it's just which corner you want to get into. F-16 will get your there first and look way sexier doing it than either of the alternatives you mentioned. Apart from which you can spend the next couple years mastering it...

Would you guys stop getting me all excited about this map? Yes, I pre-ordered the whole thing, but you're ruining my stubborn, hard-line stance on deserts! K2. The big rock. It's not far from the eastern border of the map in general and, well, Wags did brag about their terrain mesh. Definitely Peshawar; when we were in Karachi in '85 one of the EMs went there, probably with the intent on going AWOL into Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, but apparently couldn't get passage and came back. Lots of stories, some of which might actually be true.

You can convert the encoders to axis. There's a couple tutorials for it, don't use Enigma's

Don't forget all the things broken in the rush to get "this week's" Wednesday patch out. Have to admit for all the bumps in the road things are going in the right direction! But I do miss weekly newsletters with actual news, and the snippets of things to come, and all that. The wailing and gnashing of teeth hasn't changed, of course. Wailers will always wail...

Back in the day we would get hints and suggestions, then they had to take something out because of a problem and the wailing and gnashing of teeth was biblical. I get why they don't do that anymore, but it's a shame. Right with you on the F-5, but I've learned to love my steam gauge ugly duckling. It's a lot more satisfying to hit a target or grease a landing in that than one of the Nintendo jets.

I land hornets on the Kuz pretty often. Part of the CVBG off the coast on one of my maps. Of course the Kuz doesn't have cats, at least not the kind that launches aircraft, so it takes most of the deck to get airborne again. <edit> My point, and I made this poorly, is getting OFF the Kuz in a hornet is an adventure and takes more of the deck than the boat was designed to use, particularly with useful load. Allowing Hornets to spawn on that deck is a mod kind of thing, certainly not a native arrangement. Besides, the oladi for breakfast is greasy and nasty; not nearly as good as mine, and the sirniki at midrats is equally inferior.

Who are you kidding, BN; 20th and 21st?? You need better history books! Now to find a way to come up with a "Man Who Would be King" scenario involving jet aircraft rather than Martini rifles. How do you smuggle a squadron of F-18s in a camel's packs? We already know they work find on dirt airstrips because...well, Normandy and Channel. Yeah, I know, I said I'd never buy another desert, but that northeast corner calls to me...

And I don't speak Italian, which is unfortunate given I'll be wandering around Italy in just over a month. The F-4E has nothing to do with your team, however it does, indirectly, have to do with the OP's contention that the price of your product is too high. If only because that got me to look at my purchase history and do some math. If nothing else it shows how insignificantly little a single user contributes to the overall DCS economy.

I decided to ask for a refund on the F-4E for reasons that had nothing to do with the delay, and added up everything I've spent on DCS since I started. I have all the modules other than the F-4 (I'll assume the refund will go through) and a few campaigns. If you add it all up it comes to just under a week of a professional developer's take home pay (at least our developers); that doesn't include payroll taxes or benefits. So I've successfully bought about twenty-four hours of development time, and got pretty much 95% of what you can buy in DCS for it. Seems like the pricing is just fine on the display of my old school HP calculator. Actually, that number is so ridiculously low I'm sorely tempted to cancel the refund. Feels a bit like larceny.

Uh...probably the contact us page. I think I used support when I wanted to give them money for something else. Now you have me doubting myself (which isn't really hard to do, honestly).

I asked for a refund and got crickets back, which makes me think that was a bluff. The way things are set up now it should be useful as an AI aircraft, at least. It will be pretty.

Good! There's nothing worse than 'news' articles that begin 'I'm an <insert subject here> expert and these are the seven things you should never do/say...". I base my decisions on my knowledge and experience, and so should you. Get educated and make an informed choice, or believe who you choose and follow along. The latter is generally the path of least resistance.

I wish it was that simple, but I'm actually in the software business working for a small, indi developer, and I know how it generally works where the code hits the compiler. Right now I'm trying hard to resist the urge to cancel my pre-order just on the Chromium issue. Couldn't care less about the delays, but the more I think about the underlying structure of HBUI as described the less I like it.

HA! You guys made me laugh. We've spent the better part of a year trying to get our heads around the way Microsoft, and by extension it seems far too many other people, save files. Sounds simple. Once you get under the covers it's a convoluted, inconsistent, nightmare. HBUI sounds even worse. In the mean time it'll take another year or two to get good at the Viggen and where I should be with the F-14, particularly since I have two of those now. Take your time, relax, visit with the family, and take some time off. Down time tends to be when the toughest problems get solved. <edit> I should add that it would be nice if you let us know when you embed Chromium in your other products. Always amazes me when people think software written by an advertising company is 'free', particularly after the Facebook iOS SDK debacle </edit>