jmarso

Hornet. Viper. Pff.

Should be one of the presets, all of which are listed on your kneeboard card. (If I could remember off the top of my head I'd put it here, but I don't remember.)

Question 3: You do not have to say 'Jester' prior to giving him commands.

I think you might mean 'Armstrong', which is a command for everyone to check their master arm switches to 'on'. A call like "99 Armstrong" would translate to: "Everyone in the strike package, Master Arm switches on."

Well, if nothing else is going on (you just want to get the jet started) you can accelerate time and it all gets done really quickly, regardless of how much switch-throwing there is. I'll usually base it on how much I need to do. If there's some weapon or waypoint programming I want to do, I'll ususally zip-time up to the part where the inertials are aligning (we're talking the Hornet now), and then go back to 'normal' time and do my button punching while the inertials are spooling up. Unless I know I have a long transit and can do all that stuff in the air.

I find it interesting that this 'bug' isn't a bug at all, but instead is forcing us all to learn something we didn't know about JDAM and the aircraft's weapon systems. :D

A possible workaround would be to equip Flip with dumb bombs instead, and explain it in the designer notes. Telegraphs what is coming, though. Players might find it fun to roll in with Cajun and take their chances. Players can also do this on their own at mission start with the F8--> re-arm menu during startup.

I think you would want to create a trigger at mission start, and then in the actions column select 'do a script file' (or however that reads) and select moose.lua from the location you've put the file on your hard drive. The script will then begin at mission start and 'do it's thing' throughout the length of the mission.

Always auto-start, and then accelerate time so it's done in a minute or so. As I've stated elsewhere, I fly for a living. DCS, for all it's 'realism', is a game, and I play games for enjoyment. For me personally, sitting for 20-30 minutes running through checklists, startup, systems checks, bit checks, etc is not a 'fun' thing to do. So I don't do it, and am thankful for the option not to. If manual starting was a requirement for the game, I wouldn't play it. For most missions, I'm happiest starting on the catapult, ready to salute and go with minimal pre-launch hassle.

I'd recommend leaving the radar 'off', just to be safe.

If you are auto starting in the beginning, the radar gets turned on during the process. I ran into this, and basically had to auto-spam the keys to turn the radar off, and managed to do it timely enough not to trip that flag. The other thing I stopped doing was turning on the radar after WP3- I waited until I got the code-word to go ahead with the mission. Don't know if that made a difference or not. Last but not least, made sure I stayed a little below the minimum posted altitude for each segment, which are listed on the kneeboard cards. It took me a few tries but I finally got the 'go' instead of the 'scrub.'

Now I'm going to have to go back and try this. :D

I found this bit confusing also. First play-through turned into a real goat-rope. Having read the book, I sort of understood what was happening but translating that over to DCS was problematic.

If you check your kneeboard cards in game, you'll find a list of brevity codes for that mission; I think it's the page right behind the one with all your frequencies and presets. Stuff like 'Flashlights', "Tabletops', and so on are listed there, along with their meaning.

That's it! Thanks! :thumbup:

They'll refer to it as "BRC", which means "Base Recovery Course."

For anyone who has this bad-boy on order, I'd be real interested to hear your feedback once you've got them delivered, up, and running.

I'll second the motion that some form of additional feedback for G-pull is needed. On a HUD, you can see it right in front of you, so no issue. In the 'Cat it's a strictly heads-down item, and sitting in an office chair there is absolutely no tactile feedback. As a RL pilot that's one of my biggest problems flying sims- no seat-of-the-pants feel for what's happening at all. I like the idea of modulated grunting- a nice auditory cue that would actually add to immersion.

General question: Did someone post some sort of script when the SC first came out that allowed you to use the comm menu to generate different variations of static aircraft on the deck? So at mission start you could configure the deck for a launch with static aircraft, then re-spot it for landing through the comms menu before returning. I swear I saw a post about something like that but haven't been able to find it.

No, it's fiction. However, it's very realistically written by a former strike lead and squadron commander, so it reads almost like actual events. This is something that a lot of prior military authors do when writing military fiction- create fictional units for their main protagonists. In Raven One, the Valley Forge isn't a real life carrier either, nor is the Coral Sea as depicted in Captain Miller's second book: Declared Hostile. (There was a real world carrier named Coral Sea, but in the book it's clearly a different ship than the real-life CV-43.) This allows the author a little more creative license, and also adds insulation against unwelcome comparisons being drawn between real world units (and their commanders) versus their fictional counterparts. In fact, in Raven One the entire air wing is made of fictional squadrons.

General: Finished the campaign last night. As a former Navy officer (P-3 pilot), I can say that I haven't seen anything else anywhere in a flight sim that even touches on the realism of this campaign. Extremely immersive and enjoyable. Now for the nitty gritty... The Good: Overall, the whole package is easily the most immersive, realistic mission package I've seen for DCS. Real world scenarios, situations, and on-the-fly tactical changes you would expect to encounter in a dynamic operating environment. Scripted to follow Kevin Miller's novel, you really do feel like you're in the jet of 'Flip' Wilson, intrepid Ops-O of the Ravens. The custom skins, especially the CAG bird, are gorgeous and just add to the immersion, right up to the names of the Raven pilots being painted on the sides of the jets! The voice work is superlative and really turns the whole thing into a grand slam. The prompts for communications and the kneeboard packages also help to keep the player where they need to be during each mission, and somehow, your wingman manages to actually be useful in conducting strikes and not running out of fuel and crashing. Baltic Dragon has taken the DCS mission editor and worked some serious voodoo with it, I mean like Jobu with cigar and rum level voodoo. Personal side note: as a former P-3 guy whose warfare specialty was ASW, it was a special kind of fun to hit a submarine with a maverick. Not going to say which mission. :thumbup: The Bad While the heavy scripting is essential to the storyline and scenarios being presented, it does sometimes hamper the player and removes freedom of choice. For example, in the mission where you are launching the JSOWs, I was directed to turn and engage incoming bandits. Well, when that happened I was literally 20 seconds from letting my weapons go at the primary target, so I delayed that long as a tactical decision in order to release the JSOWs, get the weight off the jet, and be better positioned for a dogfight. Without getting spoilery, that bit of tactical innovation on my part basically borked the entire mission, and I didn't find out until much later how and why. All comms from AWACS are scripted: you can't ask for updates on your own. Same thing with controlling your flight and wingmen: you cannot exercise any freedom of action with them; they're scripted. This campaign makes a GREAT DCS companion to the book. That said, you'll feel lost in a couple of places if you haven't read the book. Fortunately, I already had, a couple of times. :thumbup: Lastly, being a new release, there are a few bugs to work out, some of which have already been addressed in the DCS User Files section. These will be worked out in time, I'm sure. The Ugly: Need I say it? Air-to-air refueling. If you are a guru at this, no sweat. If you are like me, the gymnastics you'll go through to avoid that tanker are legion. The missions that require it have a save-game feature, but at this time it appears to be a WIP. That said, AAR is a real-world requirement for operations, and this is the most real-world campaign you are going to find. Summary: STELLAR product, well worth the price of admission and then some. Real-world immersion, with the caveat that you'd better hone your real-world DCS skills to git 'r done. This product is NOT for beginners. If employing the advanced sensors is a problem for you, or you can't fly formation, or navigate and trap at night, or AAR, stand by to get frustrated. I have to admit that I sometimes had to watch a few tutorials between missions to figure out how to employ stuff I hadn't used before. (I play mostly in the F-14) In addition to being fun and challenging, this campaign made me a MUCH better DCS Hornet pilot than I was when I started it. Can't say enough about the voice-work and story integration. When you first picked up DCS and the Hornet as a single player, this was the campaign you were waiting for, even if you didn't realize it. 9/10 due to existing bugs. 10/10 when those are resolved. Bravo Zulu to the whole team! HIGHLY RECOMMEND Last thing: If you play DCS Hornet, you should go ahead and read Raven One before you play this campaign. It's worthwhile in and of itself, and you need to know what a bastard Saint really is, so you can hate him appropriately when you're playing! ;)

Trim requirements change with speed, due to the speed of air moving over the control surfaces, the exact same way that you need larger control inputs at lower speed and smaller inputs at higher speeds. So if you are trimmed straight and level with an asymmetric load at 300 KIAS, when you get into the landing pattern you are going to need more aileron trim at those speeds. If the weight load is so asymmetric that you can't 'trim it out' using full aileron trim, then you are probably out of limits and need to jettison something. As a player in a game, jettisoning stores doesn't cost you real money or ass-chewings. If you are an inexperienced pilot having control problems with asymmetric weight on the jet, go ahead and jettison as necessary to even it out. I promise, nobody cares! ;) They'd probably kick me out of the air wing in real life if I NEVER came back with my drop tanks the way it seems to happen when playing DCS! ;)

:thumbup: Muchas gracias. Great work, BTW. There are some frustrating aspects to it with it being so heavily scripted, but you've worked some magic with the mission editor that frankly has me scratching my head. Good stuff.

The downloaded one works fine. I never tried the old one because this fix was already in place by the time I got to M8. Works great. People who keep posting this as a bug, I think, aren't aware of the available fix.

If I choose the option to AAR do I have to actually do it, or just choose the option? As in, can I say 'go tanker' then just go back to the boat?