ravenzino

I flew TrackIR until tonight... Flew in VR for the first time, took me a little while to get familiar with basic maneuvering when rendezvous with KC-130. Just needed to "recalibrate" the sense of control. Then I started to closing in with probe extended. Failed 1st and probably 2nd attempt, and got it right in the 3rd. Kept tethered since then for quite a while during which I flipped the fuel dump switch to extend the play time. Point is, trust yourself and be relax. I mean mentally... Physically, your arm muscles shall probably be very busy to keep on moving throttle and stick... Mentally, you were prepared and feel relaxed as you know AAR requires your constant input anyway as you indeed will move around and you'll never find a sweet spot to settle in for even just 1 second. So yes, you are supposed to be "either too high too low a little left a little right of the basket". You are on the right track. Keep on practicing, you are very close now. How you would improve from here: 1. You might always find yourself moving around the basket. but with practice, the departure shall be slightly getting less. A super smooth closing-in, however, is less likely to happen. 2. A successful contact is most likely to be, if not always, a "slide-in", instead of "put-in", at least in my case, due to the delay between stick/throttle input and its effect. With your eyes always locked onto the pod and feel everything else using peripheral vision, you start with moving around the basket with your stick while throttling back and forth like teasing the basket in little distance using your probe... then you find a right opportunity where you feel the movement of the probe is probably right towards the center of the basket, so you give a tiny little extra throttle to "slide" the probe into the basket. Once contact, do prepare for immediately re-stabilizing yourself to compensate that tiny little extra movement cause by that tiny little extra throttle. That's it. No magic. The A/P method has some merits as you have one less dimension to deal with. However, you probably will limit that method for "unit practice" only. In my case, I tried A/P and thought it would help me a lot. But in the end, the only benefit I got from that was my throttle/speed control...

And I just realised, to see the 10 degree ladder line, you need to do AAR at a lower speed. When the speed is lower, the VV will be lower on the HUD, allowing more room above to show that 10 degree line.

One more tip: When you staring at the pod, your peripheral vision shall cover the entire tanker, so you are looking at the tanker as a whole. By doing so, you'll have an idea of the change of distance as your eyes can now interpreting/decoding the distance by the change of the tanker's size. Forget about it if you are using VR......

That probably is actually what you should do, well at least in my case. And in my opinion, you probably don't really need a reference point on your airframe. (Or far far less important than you thought) Do formation flying with the tanker for an extended period, make sure you can fluently stabilize and sync yourself with the tanker for as long as you want, and can micro adjust your position around instantly as you desire without having to translate your desired movement of the frame into that of the throttle and stick. I can't stress more on this: your have to get this feeling right, as if you were driving your car and keep a very precise sync with another car in the next lane (relative position, distance and speed) as if you were doing a CCR (Car-to-Car-Refueling. yep, I just made it up :smilewink:). Then, you extend the probe. Do not get into the basket yet. Keep yourself in sync with the tanker and close in in a very low closing speed. The point is to keep everything stable and doing all these things without looking at anything else but the pod. When your probe is very near the basket (using your peripheral vision on the basket while still looking at the pod), and your plane is not bumping everywhere, you now have your reference point. Actually, when you finally get this done, you don't really need that reference point anymore... There are a couple of other reasons why I believe you shouldn't use a reference point on your airframe: 1. the reference point could change under different air speed due to slight difference of AoA 2. basket/probe system allows you to move in a fairly roomy area, so you are probably looking at a reference area rather than a single point somewhere on your hud... 3. when you and the tanker are in a turn, the relative position will slightly change. This would be especially troublesome when your probe is not yet in the basket and you are trying to connect them. I'm not a expert, so I could be very wrong... But this is how I nailed my AAR and I do believe it is the right approach... Hope it helps.

curious +1

Very good insight. Thanks for that! Changing CPU might cause other issues including deactivating windows licence and might as well change motherboard and chassis... so is there a way to test/verify the above theory before I commit to purchase them? I did check individual CPU core. Though one was noticeably higher than others, none of the cores was over 80%. Seems they were not fully stretched, yet... Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Good call. I guess your aerial refueling and formation flying will also benefit from that. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Thanks. Interesting... Will give them a try. I do run both two of the three monitors on graphic card while the third one on motherboard integrated graphic port. Not sure if the monitor that is on the same graphic card but is not used for DCS creates extra workload. It was normally just showing desktop and webpages or manuals. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Hi guys, Some help needed. In short, low FPS when CPU/Memory/GPU/DiskAccess are all low... My PC was originally a Dell XPS 8910 (i7-6700, 8G RAM, Hybrid HDD+SDD, GTX XXX). Through recent upgrade, it is now: i7-6700, 24G RAM (4Gx2, 8Gx2, 2133MHz), 512G NVMe SSD(on a PCIe card) + 1T SATA SSD + Hybrid HDD/SDD, RTX 2080 TI, 750W PSU. 3 monitors on 1920x1080 but only 1 monitor is used for DCS. With the most recent upgrade being the RTX 2080 TI (Gigabyte Windforce, 11G vram), I was expecting the FPS to be a steady 50-70 if not more... However, on the deck of my populated Stennis, or on my populated airbase at PG, or low pass at Dubai CBD, I get only about 25-27 FPS. When up in the air with almost nothing nearby, I can get some 70-90 FPS though. I checked Task Manager, when I'm getting 25-27 FPS. CPU: 35%-60%, Memory: 14GB (could hit 21G sometime, but later on it would drop to 14G), GPU: 15%-25%, Disk: hard to describe in simple number, but the usage chart looks nowhere near intensive, with a few spikes though. Checked NVIDIA Driver is the latest, used "DCS_Updater.exe repair". Tried different missions, in some single mission like the training ones, it was quite good >100FPS, but some others as mentioned above was terrible and hopeless... In game graphic settings are basically aligned with what Wags has shown in one of his tutorial video. All these are in DCS OB version. When using DCS Release version, the result is slightly better and smoother, but still doesn't feel like fully matching the expectation. Result was a bit worse when using F-14, compared with using F/A-18. Any idea of what could be the performance bottle neck?

Recently heard that one of my buddy is selling a couple of his GTX 1080TI, thought it might be helpful to post such info here, for the needed people to consider. Here's his listing on eBay: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/183712420855?ul_noapp=true The item is in good condition and is in VIC, Australia. He can sell to overseas as well, as long as the buyer covers the delivery cost. It is pity that I only know this today while I've purchased my RTX 2080TI just one week ago. Should I know this earlier, I would've taken one from him:thumbup:

Thanks. That makes sense. And good to find out that I haven’t done anything wrong ignoring it...... :D Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

F/A-18C comes with Rudder Trim, on a fairly small nob... Seems not very practical to perform frequent and precise adjustment... So in what exact scenario is it supposed to be used? Googled it a bit, seems rudder trim is somehow useful on small and low speed aircrafts doing like long duration turn&climb... but modern fighter jets are less likely to do any of those I assume? Especially with F/A-18C and its FBW FCS, can't really think of any meaningful use case for Rudder Trim...... I seldom use rudder, let alone its trim... Maybe cross wind landing? That's short and not even worth the effort to reach out for the nob... Someone enlighten me please......

Curious about this as well. At the moment, I dare not to mess up with it, assuming it is still a WIP...

bump up for attention...

F/A-18C A/G Radar - Early Access ?

I'm up for that, even with some additional cost~

No, I've been fiddling around this mission for quite a while, but have never touched Stennis' setting since it was placed there... And object fixation box has always been checked, because if I don't, the object will immediately stack at the center of Stennis. So it shouldn't because of that.

Got a weird issue after updating to OB 2.5.4.28090... Like a lot of people here, I have a practice mission. The latest update gives Hornet the SA capability which in turn, according to posts on this forum, require all the SA capable plane to be reset in existing mission. To do so and instead of deleting the planes and place new ones and redo the scripting, the easiest way is to change the existing planes to other models and change them back again. However, whenever I change a plane on Stennis in ME, all the planes on it will immediately stack together. (attached figure *142.png is before the change, and figure *212.png is after. Notice the only thing I did is changing an F/A-18C to E-2D as shown in the right side panel) For some, it might not be a big issue, but in my case, my Stennis has nearly 60 objects on it... Anyone have any idea on how I can deal with this issue? (I've attached the mission file as well) Raven's Playground (OB, PG).miz

well, just to remark this historical moment...

So it is now confirmed? https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=233486

:thumbup::megalol: I think... I won't be able to drive my F-15C in a serious way any more...

Thanks mate!:thumbup: "Loose" is exactly what I felt, even after disabled "Head movement from G Forces" option... Guess you are probably right, it could be about the referencing system that the viewpoint is base on. Wondering why DCS can't unify that across all the models. Otherwise, on that specific detail, shall we say F/A-18C's experience is more realistic over F-15C or the other way around?:D This probably is a different story at a different level while my initial intention is merely to seek for a mitigation if there's any, but when you actually think about it, although planes are vastly different amongst models, basic aviation / physics details like this shouldn't be model dependent at all, unless that specific model / plane in RL does have something special that could impact the head movement and is therefore worthwhile to be modelled differently...:) Guess "getting use to it over time" might actually be the only option, for now at least... :megalol:

Having been trying to accomplish the same goal for quite a while, but no luck so far. Thought it would be as easy as setting the speed of the helo and carrier to the same, then soon noticed in game that the helo will slowly drift away... Tried to open the "F/A-18C Carrier Takeoff" Quick Action mission file in ME, found nothing in it... weird... Sorry for not being able to help at all. As a formal SW Engineer, I do understand your insists of not using script framework for this specific task. Stubborn, maybe, but it is such efforts and enthusiasts that keeps our SW neat and tidy, collectively providing better performance and user experience... Well, guess the only value, if any, that I'm trying to contribute here is merely showing my support......:D Anyway, keep it up.

I did. Apologies that I should’ve made it clearer. It is the cockpit, rather than the plane, is a bit shaky, which could indirectly but consequently impact my feel of the plane and could result in over pitching / rolling. (Still my genuine inputs but due to misjudgment form those slight extra cockpit movements) Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Hi all, I started my DCS journey about 4 months ago with F/A-18C being my first paid model. Played a lot with that, excellent experience no doubt. Nailed Case I/Case III carrier landing and AAR not very long ago, and still keep on sharping my skill on those recently. Enjoyed that a lot. Now to expand my experience further and to answer my love of great fighters like F-15 and Su-27/33, I start trying FC3 plane. They are noticeably easier to start with, and I even managed to complete my first Boom type AAR in F-15C last weekend. However, one thing that keeps annoying me is the extra "shaky" feeling compared with F/A-18 when "sitting" in the cockpit of FC3 planes and manoeuvring them. The cockpit (not the plane) would move/shake, although quite slightly sometimes, in response to almost any level of manoeuvring action, slight or sharp, which is not very helping in formation flying and AAR. Realism? May be, but still hope I can turn that specific detail off as if I had a very strong neck to keep my head in place and precisely in sync with the cockpit/plane in RL... :megalol: Anyone else feels the same as I do? And how you deal with that other than "getting use to it over time"......:lol: