sweinhart3

yep usually ends in fratricide

A couple hours

Its called Thrustmaster Hotas Warthog. All you have to do is move the throttle to start up using that stick.

I plan to build one as well at some point. I can get away with a $5 microcontroller, a pcb and ome buttons. The biggest issue Iface is creating the actual buttons and the front frame. I dont have equipment to make perfectly square cuts. I have the equipment to program a micro controller an Ive already played with creating the code.

Thanks Chris and Viper. All working now. My upgrade was surprisingly painless and resulted in performance improvement over and above my expectations. I did not have reinstall windows or any other application. Prior to upgrading I created a quick flight to benchmark my old and new system. I saved the track and replayed several times and watched the FPS counter. Old system despite OC QX9770 Extreme chip achieved about 40fps max and dropped as low as 14fps at low altitude. New system SLI disabled max 60fps and dropping as low as 24fps at low altitude. With SLI enabled (alternate frame 2), high altitude was pegged at 60fps the majority of the time but still dropped to 24fps at low altitude. Conclusion: i7 rocks. Definitely worth the upgrade. As far as sli goes, still undecided if really gives any worthwile performance improvement.

Viper I tried to do as you said. I was successful with deactivating BS but with A-10C somehow it didnt work and now I get the following error: Unable to run the application due to integrity fault of the Activation Key. Re-enter a valid Activation Key or re-activate the application. If the error recurs, press "Error report" and send the report to product technical support. Now I can neither run the sim, activate or deactivate.

Ok, sorry but I am still a little unclear on how to deactivate. Ive tried in the past and after installing activations still got used up. I just bought a new motherboard, i7 750cpu, 8GB memory and 2 GTX470 video cards. Tommorrow I will be building it all my OS and software will be moved to this new configuration. So how exactly how do you deactivate your current installation.

I would like to see some tactics training missions as well. I havent seen anything that teaches you how to properly enter into a hot zone without getting yourself in trouble or how to dogfight. I realize the A-10 isnt a fighter aircraft but there will be times when evasion from a hostile aircraft will be nessesary and engagement of enemy aircraft might be your only option. The AA training mission doesnt show much at all. Something showing the proper techniques for missle evasion would be a plus too.

One problem I can see that I struggle with, is no matter how well you get know the systems, I have yet to see a single interactive tactics training lesson. Real fighter pilots and people that have read books and had a lot of experience will always win. On my part, Ive read about tactics but I have never been able to see it work or how its done. What is needed perhaps is some kind of scripted mission where AI performs various sets of scripted manuevers and the player is taught basically simple Top Gun training. Im starting to get a decent grip on A-10C avionics and basic flight but if you ask me how to push the flight envelope in manner that put myself at an advantage to the enemy, I wouldn't be able to demonstrate a single thing.

I read a post the other day by Matt that beta 4 will model the gun properly and will be possible to destroy tanks from top and rear.

I thought of that after I posted but its not entirely true although might as well be. ONCE I managed to kill a tank with guns after expending half my ammo. Havent been able to replicate it though but it is possible.

Id say it works for training purposes right now. Many of the weapons are still bugged. CBUs rarely hit their targets, LGBs miss a lot, rockets seem to have little area affect, and imo mavs still miss far more than they should. Next beta supposedly is going to fix a lot of this.

Actually the led output of it is simpler than the input stuff. I havent made a workable switch yet and you have to program for every switch position. Indicator lamps are far easier. Pretty much 1 line of code for each. 8 segment displays are also fairly easy because DCS simply outputs the value that needs to be displayed and OC will automatically convert that to the corresponding led segments that need to be lit. Special characters may be a different story however and may require some additional firmware coding.

I have a problem where the instructor says press space to continue but no matter how many times I try space doesnt do anything.

I center mounted mine but its attached to my chair so that I would not have to modify the stick.

I use trim all the time. You can keep the aircraft fairly level hands off after you trim but you have to maintain your speed. If you accelerate or decelerate the aircraft will ascend or descend accordingly. I find trim particularly useful to keep it from banking cause it tends to want to bank left or right as you unload your ammo.

I attached a short track of the landing mission. I couldnt get the instructions to advance and would have ignored them anyway. You can see my technique and its really rather easy. I didnt mess with navigation and just flew the plane. Edit: Ill have to attach it a little later. The website seems to be broken and the attachment button doesnt work. Edit: here it is LastMissionTrack.trk

Make sure your using speedbrakes. Its a lot more difficult to bleed airspeed if your not. Personally, as soon as I am on final, I deploy full airbrakes, flaps and landing gear and then power up to maintain airspeed. Havent crashed yet in an undamaged aircraft. Keep your nose at a slightly positive attitude and maintain speed with the throttle. Watch your AoA and airspeed. As others stated, keep your velocity vector where you want to touch down. Soon as your over the runway reduce to idle and maintain your pitch and youll eventually find landing to be easy as pie. I havent yet bothered with ILS or tacan or DMEs. In modern aircraft, use of gps easily makes you lazy. In the real world, knowing how to use that stuff is important to supplement your navigation skills, but if your just learning, I wouldnt sweat that stuff just yet. Also unlike modern civilian commuter and transport jets, A-10 uses older equipment that doesnt incorporate autopilot features for enroute modes or ILS or maintaining speed. I heard though the airforce is planning to add that stuff in future upgrades.

I would say the Warthog is as exclusive to A-10 as Cougar was to F-16. Yes it resembles the controls but nothing says you cant use it in any other sim.

Im not sure which version mine are but one of them randomly disconnected and reconnected even though they are connected to a powered usb hub. I plugged that particular one into a different powered hub and it hasnt disconnected since. Weird. V2 likely uses a different brand chip or updated chip stepping. Nothing the user would notice.

Any chance you will share the files when your done? Ive been procrastinating trying to write my own files since I heard Export.lua wasnt working.

Here is attatched track. It is only a few seconds long. I wondered if this was a trackir issue so I tried both 32bit and 64bit executable since the 64bit doesnt enable Trackir. Both do exactly the same thing. The sim loads to what it used to but about 2 seconds in, something causes the view to zoom out to some preset setting and Im not touching a single button.

Its completely different with my setup. But I also had a hard time getting the sim to run without hanging. Took 4 tries to get a mission to load up and noone else has complained about this so maybe something wrong with my files.

Yes there is. Use Notepad++. You can download for free.

I fly unlatched at all times and have not had problems with the plane having any yaw tendancy to one side or other. IRL Im pretty sure it would be a safety issue to latch them together. If an emergency situation were to take place like an engine fire, you would need to be able to manipulate the thottles independantly immediately and not be struggling to find the latch to unlock the throttles.