coolts

I really wish i had a set of G940 & X65's to compare against the Hog. Then i would have a broader base of comparison. BeachAv8r’s future articles in SimHQ with road-tests of the main HOTAS rivals from the viewpoint of a RL pilot should be very illuminating in that regard. In my little review I tried not to comment on anything I had no direct experience of, which isn’t much in the HOTAS field to be honest as apart from some basic joysticks, the stock Cougar is all I’ve had, and that took £30 worth of new switches, etc. as when I got it 2nd hand it looked like it had been under the sea for 2 years! It was in a wretched state and smelt of “damp garage”. After a bit of a refurb and re-grease though, it served me well. If any other stick that I have had experience of had suffered that much abuse, I doubt I would have been able to resurrect it. TBH that ability for TM products to be taken apart by the jobbing mechanic with a bit of soldering know-how and modded, etc is strength to be celebrated. How many Dell monitors are moddeed? How many mice? In my black and white world you should be able to gauge the quality of a product with the senses. The hog looks and feels the part. It breeds confidence in the budding A-10 pilot. The competitors are the G940 & X65 in that price range. The ED factor helps TM a lot in this instance. If ED were releasing DCS :Fulcrum for instance, would I have bought a hog stick? That’s another question and in that regard it would be hard to criticize the hog stick for being a replica, as after all, it’s a HOTAS with lots of axis and switches. Only the lack of rotaries could be grounds for grumbling, but I hardly used them on my Cougar TBH. Once the TARGET software is patched, I will start delving in to macros and seeing how it matches up against Foxy. I totally disagree. As for "better use a keyboard", that’s one of the plain most ridiculous statements I’ve heard this week. My badly mistreated Cougar that I refurbed had the same pots, and they were fine. It’s all down to personal experience. My unmodded Cougar opened my eyes to how a Proper HOTAS could improve my enjoyment of flying. There seems to be a fashion of the vociferous minority condemning the Cougar over the broadly content silent majority. Democracy favours the loud until its voting time, then the pundits are shocked. ;)

The "wobble Hijack”, was me mate. I wish i hadn't opened Pandora’s box! The base issue here is for us all to gain familiarity quickly with what is, after all, a completely new piece of kit. Knowing what is a design limitation (the tiny play), and what is pretty obviously a fault, (broken switch. Etc.), will help us all. Rasputin’s issue was demonstrated as hardware when he plugged into a different machine IMO. That’s black and white. Return to vendor. Don’t even bring TM into it. Now can you all please stop examining your throttles under a microscope :joystick: and just enjoy the damn things. They are amazing pieces of kit. :pilotfly:

Due to the WIP, I don't think we have Chocolate & Strawberry flavours of JTAC yet. Just Vanilla :megalol:

It seems like the JTAC unit must be manually targetted at an enemy unit in the ME before it will give any information. Not very dynamic IMO. Can anyone confirm this, as when i havent had them in "attack group" mode (with line connecting them in the map), the JTAC isn't available.

Serial #: 0273 Location: Bristol and still at bloody work

To me, the force required is just something to get used to and, your right, it make mistakes less likely. I only put it in the 'against' list as i know many will complain about it. They did about the Cougar and that had buttons a moth could push those buttons. I think pointing out that there are real life girl pilots may put most off from complaining. Its a man thing ;) The slew hat is taking a lot of getting used to. Beta2 seems to have fixed the wild movement when zoomed in but i havent yet had time to see whether the STAT page can control the slew rate.

Bollocks to TM, who did you buy it from? Its the vendors responsibilty. And no, dont cancel your pre-orders. Read my review. The throttle is amazing. The play is tiny. My Cougar stick used to move into the next room before registering any input! :joystick:

Having seen enough porn photos of the real cockpit there are two rubber flaps to the side of each throttles travel-slot-thing (technical term), i assume partly to stop dust and sandwich crumbs and a side effect will be the reduction of play. [from the DCS A-10 manual]

nooooooooo. Ive not killed santa or the easter bunny and my name isnt GRINCH! ;) Just wanted to know if mine was dodgy and glad its not. I can handle a few small imperfections for gods sake i drive an Astra! Absolutely loving the HOTAS though. It's light years ahead of my cougar which was itself miles ahead from my saitek evo.

And back and forth on right one? Not a problem when linked. I had a little look with a torch into the shaft innards, (ooer), and you can see how each throttle’s 'play' is caused by a different slight slackness. Shouldn’t be difficult to fix and it doesn't spoil the setup for me it’s just that i wanted to know i wasn’t sat on the only buggered one. If you think about it. As there isn’t a hugely powerful centering spring as in the stick which prevents play there, its inevitable to have some play otherwise friction would wear away the parts far too quickly. A little tighten should do it but I’m not opening mine up first….

and back and forth on right one?

Small throttle play Guys can you please confirm that with the throttles separated you see; 1-3 mm for and aft play in the right throttle 1-2mm side to side play in the left throttle Basically, if everybody has it, then it’s a general small design flaw and I can live with it. If it’s only some of us then I am going to return the unit to Amazon whist I am in my 7 day returns grace period for replacement. This could probably be fixed with some internal tinkering, but for £330 and an invalidated warranty? Bollocks to that.

stick base plate 23x27cm throttle 15x26cm the base plate is 4mm thick so you can rest stuff on it, (you may have to), unlike the cougar

lets just do our own bloody changelog! after dinner. stupid bloody digestive system

just install as admin over the top. when the game loads after instal it runs the x64 version so your Track ir is buggered. quit and run the x85 game instead. cant find a changelog explosion smoke borked on my card but switches and TGP slew now fine with TM HOG TGP IR fixed..... back to the game. off to test mavericks and LGB's MAVERICKS ARE FIXED. GND STABILIZATION WORKS. I MAY HAVE TO START SMOKING AGAIN AS A CAN OF COKE JUST AINT CUTTING IT! ooh battery switch works. cold and dark really is cold and dark now electrical dependencies fixed. dont forget that inverter switch guys or you aint goin nowhere! JTAC speaks!! (with a strangely Wagnerian tone ;) [labrat #273]

MMMMMMMMMMMM new manual MMMMMMMMMMM new music TGP IR mode has had vaseline cleaned off lens. now nice and crispy. that is worth a new beta in itself for me!

600kb/s estimated @ 52 "microsoft" minutes to go. Torrent link dead as mentioned. I wasn't expecting this. Good job i've got the day off! [ducks behind cover] ;)

hmmm. Ive just tried it again and i can't contact the JTAC with the comms menu. All i get is what sounds like Wags doing triggered warnings about 'hostile mortars, etc'. Im not to fussed ATM as its a beta after all.

Your talking about a "release candidate". Whole other kettle of fish right there. :smilewink: Anyway Viper, shoudn't you be waiting by the front door in case a certain parcel arrives? You don't want to be answering a forum post and go to find one of those "you weren't in" cards! :thumbup:

I see what you mean, although the main problem with just releasing beta #2 and saying "there you go guys" with no changelog would be that the already crammed forums would just explode all over again, and siphoning useful info from all the noise would be next to impossible. There would have to be a new “Beta 2“ sub-forum and the moderators would have to look at each post and decide whether it was a; Beta 1 issue Beta 2 issue RTFM issue Read the FAQ issue A “what’s changed since beta2 and what’s still to be done.txt”, would hopefully ease a lot of that traffic and workload.

Cheers guys. That was a gigantic weekend long brainfart that just had to come out otherwise I would have had indigestion ;) Put it this way. After 3 weeks of assigning A-10 controls to various switches on my cougar i had just about achieved a “one pass and haul ass” Maverick success rate. Within one day of the hog i can successfully launch 2. Once you teach your fingers, it’s so much easier. Once ED sort the Mav’s I reckon that I will be getting 3 off the rail no trouble. The time taken is in switching back to the TGP and reassigning SPI and re-slaving the mav after each launch, (all the while remembering what is SOI). Much easier in the hog. With throttles separated, I get 2-3mm back/forward in the right one and 2-3,, left to right in the left one. Friction doesn’t affect this, just the actual travel. Can you confirm this? As if mine does and yours doesn’t, Mr Amazon is getting an RMA. TBH, my previous sticks were such pieces of crap that even an unmodded Cougar was like some kind of geek nirvana, and the force required to move it just make it feel more ‘manly’ ;) Don’t forget that the TGP/mouse stick sensitivity issue is ED’s WIP to fix. Try it out in the TAD. Its spot on. TARGET works if you set your location/keyboard to US, (i know I know its a bug). All i want TARGET for now is to set some MACROS for views, etc. Do you have the same slight wobble-when-separated as me mate? BY THE WAY DUDE...5-1.... 5-1 CHRIS HUGHTON IS A GEORDIE!!!!! (Apologies to any Sunderland fans out there. I have some Morrissey records and a bar of soap that might see you through this difficult time) I’m not going to criticise anybody who doesn’t want to lay down £330 for a stick. Paying £400 for my bloody car insurance the month before put that into perspective making me think, “Hang on a minute My Cameron/Clegg whatever your bloody names are, that’s my money!” The Hog is my one man rebellion against the British tax system! I know what you mean mate. Mind you, there a quite a few RL girl A-10 pilots so I wouldn’t complain too loudly when they are at the bar ;)

Cheers CG. I am tying to slightly wean myself from the TGP as I need to increase my "outside time" a little. Too much heads down in the cockpit is a little worrying in terms of my SA. I used to do that with ths SHKVAL and had some very intimate liasons with terra firma ;) I remember there being a JTAC, but can he update with new enemy locations as they are triggered or are JTAC a one shot scripted affair? I guess its early WIP. Good to know the Padlock is WIP as well, i thought i was losing my marbles. <Mower> You have won todays most random statement in a thread award! Do you like them peeled, boiled, mashed or roasted?

Con3para PM’d me asking what I thought of the hog so far. I guess he got more than he asked for...;) (Compared to my un-modded cougar and previous sticks, basic saitek cyborg & cyborg evo ff) I can only compare to my previous experience and would be very interested at others impressions versus their “significant other HOTAS”, especially a modded Cougar, G940 and X65, as well as the CH of course ;). As a high end product it’s not fair to compare this against the X52 IMO as the costs clearly differentiate the market here. STICK: FOR · Even force to extremes. No more herculean effort to get max G’s from stick. Makes landings and take offs a piece of cake compared to the Cougar. · Accurate as hell. Makes gun play a real pleasure. I can now get great accuracy scores over the old stick. When properly trimmed the stick is leagues ahead of anything I have ever tried before, (but that’s not saying much). · No centre play at all. This used to drive me insane on the Cougar, and the Evo, and the Cyborg. In fact every damn joystick I have owned apart from my Atari stick in 1982 has wobbled somehow. I am now liberated from wobble! (Ggrrr apart from the throttle – see below). · Accurate as hell #2, (I can draw pictures on the screen in the cougar joystick analyser!) that speaks volumes. You can go anywhere in the air. If the airframe is capable and you have the finesse, the stick WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN. This is a revelation to me and I can now see what all those lucky guys with NXT and FCC modded Cougars were on about. You have it here in the Hog! · Heavy, stays put. Made to last. Potential home defence weapon. Nuff said. AGAINST · Big. This doesn’t bother me but it’s taller than the Cougar was. I’ve got big-ish hands. · Buttons are very stiff. Military grade based on real USAF weightings. You either live with that or don’t. I don’t mind. I’m getting used to it. I will build stronger fingers. · Big footprint. If you have small desk..... Your keyboard can rest on the base plate though as its only a few mm thick. Couldn’t do that with the Cougar! THROTTLE:FOR · Very well built. Its industrial quality. This looks like it was taken from the real hog, (without the dangling wires). Using this for home defence would require more strength than its worth, plus a VERY lenient judge, (“sooooo you intended only to incapacitate the intruder did you?”). · Metal apart from throttle shafts. Switches are really cool and go “clunk” like all proper switches should but seldom do. Think about the ‘death star’ firing sequence. That’s what I'm talking about. · Lots of switches and hats. You simply could not use any more without finger grafting or until future evolved intelligent octopi or millipedes learn how to fly sims. And with A-10c with its hats and boat switches, need I say more? · Out of the box A-10 compatible. No fannying around for weeks just to get the damn thing to take off. Plug in, switch on, and take off. This cannot be understated. What ED/TM has done here just show that the ENTIRE industry has had its head stuck right up its own arse in this regard for decades. Built-in HOTAS profiles please from future sims from now on. I don’t care if the game devs or the HOTAS devs do it, as long as someone does. This is the way forward. The top 3 or 4 HOTAS systems should have this done for them at least. The amount of time we all spend farting around in Foxy, etc.......its geeky fun yes but it’s not why we are here is it? (Rant over, move on...). · Proper lift idle detents. No cougar CLIKCLAK..... CLIKCLAK to wake other half. This is replaced with proper lift detents. Silent, cool as hell and very professional. Did I mention cool as hell? Yes I did. It was worth mentioning twice that. The ‘Cool ‘ part. · Split throttles very sturdy and smooth. Silky smooth. Like warm butter on top of a.....[stop it]. Even pressure, no grinding, like a Cadburys caramel advert. After its been lubricated. · No sticking like the cougar did. As I said above, it takes almost the same amount of pressure to move as it takes to keep moving. Compared to the cougar which was like pushing a stalled tractor over the top of a very large hill. All hard work at first followed by a “oh that just got easier.....oops.....sorry”. AGAINST · No rotaries. I use the right hand side axis for zoom view. TBH this pissed me off at first but I didn’t really use the rotaries much in any case when I came to think about it and radar elev / range can always be mapped to something else in FC2 / Falcon. · Not very ergonomic. The Falcon / Cougar throttle was moulded to a human hand. It was futuristic and sexy as hell. The A-10c / F-15e throttle is a beast. You have to mould your hand TO IT. There’s no middle ground. You will get used to it. After 3 days I am now getting comfortable. This is a Hummer versus a Porsche in terms of design aesthetic. Both have strong points IMO. · Slew hat designed for your middle finger. I don’t know about you but my middle finger isn’t that manoeuvrable ;) It makes target acquisition interesting. Again, another thing to get used to. Real hog pilots must do. · Some centre play in the throttles in split mode, the left on has 3mm side to side and the right one 3mm back and forth play. I just noticed this in the last few hours. About 3mm back and forth with no output. Hmmmmmm. Not sure if it did that yesterday. Annoying. Might just be a “settling in thing”. I will keep an eye on this as it seems like the Hog Achilles heel may well be the plastic throttle uprights. Time will tell and I haven’t compared this slight play to the G940 or X65. Others can comment on this. Overall impression I wrote quite a bit in the ‘against ‘, sections yet overall I am happy with the hog and would buy it again. It’s human nature to nitpick and for £330 I am entitled to expect (semi) perfection IMO. This HOTAS has totally redefined the way I hunt and fly in the A-10c. As it was designed from the real A-10c controls, this probably shouldn’t have surprised me as much, but after 2 days solid playing I have moved on more in terms of proficiency and enjoyment from the sim than I did in 3 weeks with the cougar. It is simply that much of a game changer. This is ‘now’ however. No one knows what ED will do after A-10 and £330 is a lot of money, (more than I have ever spent on anything PC related that didn’t have NVIDIA or ATI stamped on it), and the symbiosis between stick and sim simply won’t be the same with an Apache or F-16 for instance, for obvious reasons. This has been mulled over before in other threads and whether this detracts from the hog in the long term, (it’s hard to compare as no other HOTAS apart from its predecessor were ever 100% based on a real set of controls AFAIK), will only be answered when we start to produce profiles for other sims and see how they get on when released into the wild. Would I buy one today with what I now know? You bet I would ;) Back to some tank plinking. I don’t need guided munitions now. I can drop a mk82 on top of a tank commanders head from 4000ft with my hog! And that’s entertainment.:thumbup: Cheers guys Coolts

I’m potentially being a bit dim here but I can’t get the padlock views to work. In Falcon, i used them a lot when assigning targets to wingman and for lining up attacks without using labels. I was trying out the “defend camp yankee” mission, as I did it with labels the first time. Now I have got the stabilisers off my bike so to speak, I managed to take out the mortars as I got a visual on the smoke from their guns. But that was it. I was 'driving miss daisy' for ten minutes after that until someone took pity on me and shot me down. Now, bollocks to that. I looked up the key commands for padlock views; Lock terrain View (num + RCtrl), Cycle padlock, (num.), and unlock view (numlock). I’ve tested the key combos in the options menu and I have “padlock” on in the settings. They do bugger all in game. Nothing. Then it hit me. I’m using TrackIR. In falcon that meant that the, ”padlocked” objects get a box round them. Is there any such function in DCS or am I missing something? Can someone explain the practical use pf padock in the DCS world? Here’s what the BlackShark Gui manual says; “PADLOCK. When enabled, you press the padlock enable key to keep your eyes on the vehicle or ground point in the center of your view.” **EDIT** Oh look, at the bottom of the screen. "padock" - similar threads. grumble. found nothing when i did a search. grumble. website hates me. grumble. ;) **EDIT 2** Nothing new there.

Chill guys. We are just sunday daydreaming with our personal wishlists for fixes in the next BETA. If it was out yet, none of us would be here :megalol: