jmarso

Noticed this as well and assumed the briefings were given in Local time vs. Zulu. Obviously, all the aircraft systems work in Z time. Ideally, all business should be conducted in Zulu. Iran's 'local' time is pretty screwy. Their standard time is UTC+3+30, which means they don't even sync up on the hour with Zulu (GMT/ UTC) time. They also have that curse of the debil known as daylight savings time, so for the summer months their local time is UTC + 4+30. I have no idea what time U.S. naval ships use for 'local time' in the region. My guess would be whatever Bahrain and 5th Fleet HQ is using, but I never deployed there so I can't say.

Played through this a few times, and there's a lot going on here. It's pretty heavily scripted, and I'm missing something because the campaign won't advance. What specific actions must the player accomplish/complete in this mission to advance to mission 11? Thanks.

+1. Bomb fall line was dorked up, too. Practically sideways.

Those dang, horny pukin' dawgs! :eek:

I run a 3440x1440 screen and have no issues at all.

+1

Really enjoyed this mission. Took me a few tries. I loved night ASUW stuff in Janes F/A-18 and I'm loving it here too. On the first, I got waaay low on fuel due to hanging out long past bingo and dorking around with the Mav-F and FLIR, neither of which I'm very proficient with yet. Landed at Khasab with less than 2000 lbs and tried to refuel to go back to the boat, but the Omani's wouldn't refuel me, so game over. :( Second and third tries were going well but I got blown away by missiles from the frigate. Note to self: don't forget to configure your countermeasures, meat. (Take three was just bad luck. Full CM and the SAM bagged me anyhow.) Fourth try: Accidentally jettisoned my stores on the way to the combat area. Oops. Reboot, nugget. (Dropped a couple f-bombs as well as my stores, there.) Take five: Victory! Locked out burner so I couldn't use it, took it real easy on gas, and finally worked out my switchology on the mavs and FLIR. Made it back to the ship and bagged the night trap with about 2500 lbs left, no tanking. Thank God for the auto-start and time acceleration features. I'd have abandoned this campaign after about two missions if I had to plod through the whole startup and alignment deal in realtime each time. Thankfully, with these features you can blow through them. I still prefer missions that start on the cat, although with the SC, getting hooked up and shot off is a pretty cool sequence now. I know the immersion/realism junkies consider a hot start to be heretical, but I fly IRL and sitting doing checklists and bit checks isn't my idea of fun when playing a game. For folks having visibility issues on the speedboats, there are several mods out there (most of which are made for VR players with lower-resolutions in game) that put small, colored markers right under friendly, enemy, and neutral contacts in game to aid getting eyeballs-on. While something of a cheat, it does make things MUCH less frustrating on these night missions.

IIRC, 'ladder' would be a reference to a pilot's 'fuel ladder,' which is a term based around where they expect to be fuel-wise at a point during the flight versus where they actually are. Say, for instance, you take off, and your pre-flight planning indicates you should hit waypoint 2 with 9000 lbs of gas, waypoint 3 with 7000 lbs, and so on. This planning is your 'fuel ladder.' Then, when you are flying, you look at your gas at waypoint 2 and see you've got 9300 lbs. At this point you are 'above ladder,' or in the vernacular, 300 lbs 'fat.' Now say you plug burner for some reason, and hit waypoint 3 but now your gas is at 5000 lb. You are now 'below ladder,' and being 2000 lbs below ladder it's probably fair to say you are 'low' as well. Not sure how this relates to brevity codes, but that's how I'd treat it in the campaign. A 'ladder' call would mean you are basically 'on schedule' with fuel. 'Low' means you've burned too much and are starting to think about a bingo or heading to a tanker.

I've noticed that I have to request chocks out before doing anything to start up the jet, because waiting to pull chocks until after start, the answer is always 'unable.'

I'll give that a whirl. Domo arigato!

Any word on the save feature? I just ran into this- got the message that the 'save' had happened, exited without tanking to restart the mission behind the tanker with full bags, and it cycled me to M4 instead.

QFT, and true in all walks of life! :thumbup:

Heh. Preach it! :D

That's unfortunate. Perspective matters, eh? I got to spend 5 weeks in Sig on my first deployment and freakin' loved it. That was back when Operation Sharp Guard was going on in '94. Things were quiet in Iceland, so we backfilled the Sig squadron with two planes and crews because they had the same on a rotation out of Jeddah. I was hoping we were going to get Sig as a whole squadron for the second deployment, but wound up split site between Kef, Roosey, and Panama. Kef was definitely the sweetest part of that deal, believe it or not. No regrets about the experience, not living on the boat was nice, but in the 90's, post Cold-war, the VP community was dead-ending hard, and the P-8 wasn't even a gleam in anyone's eye yet. (Timing wise, I never would have gotten to fly it anyway.) VP experienced a rebirth after 9-11 in the ISR arena, but that was a couple years after I was already gone. Now ASW is a 'thing' again between China and Russia, and the community is apparently thriving. Glad it survived, but as in most things, timing matters. Any correlation there between the retiree lifers vs the guys who got out early? :p

Lived at Fallon a year when I was a kid, but not ever on AD. Two Kef deployments (both split site for the squadron but I was in Kef 90% of the time), followed by a tour as a Primary IP in Corpus, then punched out. Sort of paralleling your experience, I had way more fun in the training command than I did in VP. My goal after that was to go C-9 TAR but the board kept picking me up for P-3 TAR instead, so I wound up dropping my letter and punching after EAOS. The detailer offered me VPU a couple times (thinking I wanted to avoid the boat), but he wasn't hearing me. I think a shooter tour on the big boat would have been fun, but had no desire to go back to VP as a DH or in any other form. No regrets.

:thumbup: Well, if you were an east coast guy then we probably chewed some of the same ground- places with odd names like The Brass Nut and the Fly Trap... ;)

Sounds like we were AD at roughly the same time. (I was a YG-90 P-3 driver) Just out of curiosity, what year group were you?

Just a thought, but ED might consider adding one more free aircraft to DCS: something like the T-6 Texan II, or PC-7, as not only a starter aircraft, but as a trainer which newcomers, particularly non-RL pilots could use to 'cut their teeth' on: a plane with relatively simple systems and forgiving handling characteristics. In addition to basic airmanship, a trainer can be used to learn how to spin (and recover from spins), the differences between spins and graveyard spirals, how to recover an OCF aircraft that's departed the envelope, and so on. Something to give flying newbs a fighting chance when they strap on an analog beauty like the Tomcat for the first time. Reading some recent threads, just learning how to fly in a non-arcade, study-sim environment is throwing some newcomers for loops. (Proverbially speaking :P). I know the counter-argument- 'it's a combat sim, learn to fly on something else if that's what you want.' Still, a lot of people comment on how they often enjoy just flying the planes, or landing on the boat, or whatever catches their fancy. The maps are beautiful, particularly at certain times of day, and it's not all 'chaff and flares city, baby!' for everyone all the time. A free trainer to get people engaged and interested might entice them to break open the wallet for more paid modules. If they have to pay for other software to learn the basics, then there's no guarantee they'll look at DCS for the free stuff, much less the paid. Just food for thought.

Played one of the missions so far. Good stuff.

Some basic pointers for flying in general, not just a particular airframe: 1. Nose attitude (pitch) controls your airspeed or AOA, whichever you are using as a reference. When you use the pitch trim, you are trimming for a specific speed or AOA. You power setting will then determine whether you are climbing, level, or descending. 2. Power controls your rate of climb / descent. 3. The combination of the two equals performance- i.e., every change in pitch will require a small power adjustment as well, and every change in power will require a small pitch adjustment to go along with it. 4. Don't try to fly the airplane with trim. More to the point, you fly the airplane, don't let the airpline fly you. 5. To practice handling, try a maneuver called the 'level speed change'. It's taught to students in primary flight training, but the steps below are modified for the F-18: 1. Fly straight and level, clean, at 350 knots. 2. Reduce power, maintain altitude and heading, and drop the gear when your speed goes below 250 kts. 3. Set the flap switch to full, and allow the plane to decelerate to the amber donut on the AOA. Maintain altitude and heading. Use the pitch trim, and adjust power so that you are flying straight and level with the gear and flaps down, amber donut on the AOA, maintaining heading. Get stabilized in this configuration. 4. Advance power to mil, raise the gear and flaps, and allow the plane to accelerate while maintaining altitude and heading. Reduce power back to where you started as the airplane gets back to 350 knots indicated. The goal of the exercise is to maintain altitude and heading through the configuration, speed, and trim changes. Aim for less than 50' of altitude deviation and less than 5 degrees of heading change during the entire exercise. Once you can do that, shoot for on altitude and heading throughout- no deviations if you can swing it. Do this over and over until you're comfortable with it, then add in the approach turn and practice at that as well. Once you get used to the transitions and handling the jet in these different configurations and trim settings, your pattern work will improve accordingly. The key thing is just to practice a lot. Remember that the flight models are pretty realistic, and if you aren't already a trained pilot you'll have to work a bit harder at it until you get the hang of it. Happy flying!

Make sure you're logged in. I had to do that before the 'BUY' button appeared.

The Black Sea is not a place any CVBG commander would feel comfortable operating, ESPECIALLY in an environment of heightened tensions with Russia. The Gulf is bad enough, even given Iran's less-than-stellar capabilities in the 'symmetric' domain.

All I can say is that a severe over-G routinely screws up my HUD. When that happens it never comes back and works right for the remainder of that flight.

I LOVE that switch. It's like giving me 4 1000 lb AMRAAM's for the 'close in' fight, and the Pk at those knife fighting ranges goes WAY up. Particularly useful in a 'vs many' scrum so you can fire and maneuver defensively against the stuff being shot back at you, instead of having to hold the nose on a single bogey so a Sparrow can track in STT. If I'm carrying a load of 4 Phoenix 'in the tunnel' into a fighter sweep kind of fight, one of my currently favorite tactics is to order my wingman (or my second section) to engage from long range, to get the enemy scrambling. I then usually pincer low myself, supersonic sprint on the deck to get into the phone booth, and start slinging 54's at close range in boresight mode. I've killed up to six planes in a single engagement starting a fight that way, before all was said and done. LOVE that switch!

This discussion begs the question for me: Why do people set a ripple time in microseconds versus a ripple distance? The latter I can visualize; I never understood what the other did for me, so I never use it.