Raisuli

HA! Poor Reflected has to fly in 2D and can't maintain SA...welcome to my world! Oh, and can you re-write the AI to not jerk around so much? Sorry, I just had to say that. Seriously, since you recommended S&A first I should learn how to fly the -14, but there's a statistically high chance this will be the first campaign I decide to tackle...

No news about the controller issues? Maybe it just didn't make the notes.

My first thought was whether or not an environmental impact study was done before the shelling began. You can't just bomb people back into the stone age without appropriate air and water quality protections. I've honestly never seen a fire like this in DCS (need to play with artillery more), but it's just amazingly cool, and if you shoot upwind it might get interesting.

Always put out the source of the fire. Except in firefighting training. They get mad if you actually do what they tell you in firefighting training. You might want to trust me on this. In a class alpha, which this probably is, an explosion probably won't extinguish the fire simply because the components required for combustion are still present. Once the Taylor wave passes, and possibly even before that, it would re-ignite even if the pressure wave was able to interrupt the cycle. Is this reasonable? Well, what are the floors in those brick and mud houses made of? How about the furniture? Wall coverings? Paint? Bedding? What is the roof made of, and how is it sealed? Tar? Any dry grass around? Stubble from crops that have been harvested? Piles of rubbish? Cars? Get the idea? I've fought a lot of fires, of all kinds, but putting a JP-5 fire out with water was still epic. They say it can't be done, and as usual they're wrong...

Now that we have an Airboss can we get on the 5MC and kick the deck crew into gear? They're still strolling around like tourists gawking at the pretty airplanes...

Yes it is! Particularly in games. There's a FPS my Cow-orkers (yes, I spelled that correctly) play that implement all kinds of stupid things with ballistics that drive me nuts. Just gotta ignore it when they talk me into playing with them; it just doesn't work like that out in the real world. Here? Sure. Why not? I don't pay attention to nozzle position in F-16s, F-18s, F-4s, F-5s...guess I'm a cow-orker when it comes to DCS

...and I still haven't noticed a problem. Too much time spent at the other end of the aircraft, I guess. Sorry about that.

From the comments, screenshots, and videos it looks like this is an EA map with the potential to be the most awsomerist (Awesom-er-est - Adj. - Inspiring the most-er awe) map in DCS. Maybe a little underdone, but the potential is certainly there and no reason not to think they'll get it dialed in! Got a trip this weekend; hopefully when I get back ED will have some of the more egregious issues ironed out and I'll get to see this for myself!

Bindings, and the way DCS manages to make sure no two modules are the same and most of them are missing large numbers of them, are my number one gripe. They then come though and 'help' us by re-assigning binding to devices and over-write what we've done. This includes making us re-add the binding they can't be arsed to put in the modules to begin with. Big reason I don't fly the A-10C; that thing is a disaster. After two or three years of begging, and offering to give them the changes to the F-18 LUA file they added one. One. At that rate the A-10 will have a reasonable binding set some time after the sun goes nova and swallows Mars. The F-16 and F-18 respond to the same physical control differently; one works great, the other not so much. Consistency? Who needs it. This is not computer science. It's not even hard; we're talking about a single text file (.lua) per air frame, and there are plenty of people in the community willing to help. @LeCuvier is a genius with this stuff. Consistency? Different problem, and it's fundamental with ED. As we used to say in the Navy if 2.5 (barely satisfactory) is "Recognizes correct answer when told" what is "Refuses to accept correct answer when shoved down throat"?

<soapbox> I've had this discussion at length with our QA department and the CTO. I'll report bugs they never see, can't reproduce and it boils down to "I use the software, they run test plans". All kinds of details in those quotes that would make this TL/DR, and QA has no intention of changing that because 'using' the software is too fuzzy and hard to document. Which is why most release software is really beta, and beta is alpha, and it's honestly not the fault of the developer, it has to do with the way computers work. Linux was, once upon a time, an exception, but Red Hat has fixed that and now it's as much a mess as Windows. Yea, Red Hat Maybe I should go back to VMS or CMS. </>

Don't really need it. Have FC3 and full fidelity MiG-15/F-86/F-5. Not sure if FC4 gives me two copies of those last three, over-writes them with low fidelity, or just leaves well enough alone. Very little data out there about mixing the two. <edit> Right? Write? Rite? Who invented this English thing anyway? </>

Well, that is interesting. I've seen commentary about F-16 and AH-64 missing a single axis each. Your viper is fine but the Mi8 lost one. Seems like there's some variability.

Might have to replace a few of Jester's color commentary with Monty Python quotes; at least those are funny.

I have...what, almost 400 bindings to mess up? It takes about an hour and a half to get the setup done on a complex aircraft. FC3 I can live without, losing the F-5, as some apparently have, would be irritating. Really want to take some of the updated mods out, really, really want to look at the map, but I had already planned to sit on this for a while to see what's still borken. Might be worth waiting for the first or second hotfix, give or take the reports from the front.

During the cold war the Baltic was primarily a WP lake; too much Poland and Soviet States (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Kaliningrad) with neutral Sweden and Finland to the north. The only passage was a rock garden with Denmark on one side and no help on the other, which isn't to say Sweden didn't pull the America's chestnuts out of the fire when they escorted a crippled Blackbird back into friendly territory. I believe those Swedish pilots got their Air Medals thirty years late, and IIRC they flew a Viggen variant. For carrier aviation to get involved in a European war the best bet would be the North/Wadden sea out by Bemerhaven. It's a stretch no matter how you play it launching off a carrier into a European battle, and if the fight gets close enough to the left coast for it to be easy the war is already lost. Of course with a European map the scenario is what you make it, so put some water somewhere (even in the Baltic) and carrier ops are automagically a thing. This is a game. Details. If we can have submarines in DCS we can put a carrier on the Rhein. Heck, we can probably turn left at the Main and do liberty in Wurzburg. Work our way to the Danube and I'll get schnitzel at Figlmuller's in Vienna.

He didn't eject, he was looking for a better vantage point to observe the bogey. The landing was probably great. He'd have something to say about the rollout later... Your fault for landing too soon after the gear went down. He had his head in a *cough* manual and didn't realize you were on final until he heard the thump, then had to put the manual down, zip up the flight suit, say something offensive, and find the right checklist. All of these have perfectly normal explanations. Nothing to see here.

Europe was a problem for the Army and Air Force. Do need Bittburg for that very reason, but that is a redonkulously dense piece of real estate. I don't think there's a single point anywhere in that area more than 500 meters from a town, village, farm, train track, road, or substation. Well, unless they release a post-apocalyptic central European map that's all desert. I don't see that map happening in any kind of warm, fuzzy detail given the current limitations. The Navy's job was to keep supplies from the US flowing into Europe. Then again, we have carriers on the black sea. Blow up a few bridges and we can launch aircraft from the Rhine, but watch out for Lorelei.

Navy would have had it's hands full with the G-I-UK gap(s). Have to bottle up the Russian fleet and keep the sea lanes open or logistics becomes untenable. Naval air power would be there to support SLOCs, which includes defending against the long range bombers/ASMs. Would have been pretty exciting, especially those first few days. Trust me, in the early 80s that all anyone droned on talked about. He deleted his computer, not his monitor. Just saying.

Wait, what?? I can't hold a hover close enough to pick up a bad case of...whatever that is Laobi always goes on about, but after how many years I've never even heard of this? Now I have to check it out when I get home. I avoid that octagon on the AH-64 because I already know I've already hovered myself into a neighboring map. You misspelled 'Cyrillic' . Just wait until you have to hear the difference between shcha and shcha. Those are two different letters, and SWMBO just laughs at me. Then I make her pronounce TH properly...

I've read in a couple places the WSO/RIO did just more than that. Visibility is crap, but there's the whole IFR thing, so he should be able to maintain a bank, or even orbit a point on the ground. Neither of those seem over the top from a code perspective for a company that models the filaments in light bulbs. HB says no, and realistically he is just a software crutch for lack of a real GIB. There's quite a bit in the pipe for Jester and the aircraft; I'm pretty sure their feature list is pretty full right now. It'll be fun to see where all this goes.

Dang it, you're always one feature request ahead of me! Well...except he's still not going to be my auto-pilot in a pinch.

Jester: We've got a B-1 at one o'clock Me: ...and two o'clock, and...

As far as I know you aren't going to hunt me down at home and beat me with a shillelagh for asking... Airspeed callouts every five or ten knots. Really useful when my head is out of the cockpit but we really need to keep the speed up. Can't imagine a situation where that might make a difference... Supposed to be a two person crew. Crew resource management; I do this, you do that. Come on, Jester, do that. Do something!

I don't recall ever hearing a 'Betty' on a submarine. 593, 637, 688...I heard a lot of bitchin', but no Bettys. Maybe she got added on the 688Is or one of the follow-ons. Of course in my day submarines were made out of wood (and weighed the same as a duck). I, for one, met all current standards for behavior when I was in the Navy. Yup. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Far, far ahead of my time, even as a teenager.

Controls: Screen Red Filter should probably be on/off/toggle rather than INC and DEC, particularly since clicking in the cockpit yields a binary switch. Differential braking doesn't seem to be a thing; maybe that's due to the nose wheels demanding their directional authority, but this seems more pronounced than on other aircraft with NWS so I thought I'd mention it. The vertical velocity meter seems like it's a little over-caffeinated. That might also be expected behavior, but it's really twitchy. Again, 'more than other aircraft', but this isn't other aircraft. I'm fine if it works correctly. There were a couple other minor things that have been bugging me lately, but I had so much fun with that zoom climb I lost track of time and She Who Must Be Obeyed wants her dinner!