Richard Dastardly

Lovely stuff mate hopefully I'll be able to unpack all my flight gear for release... Was it you or someone else working on R09 Ark? I entirely lost track of that one over the years.

36hrs of attempting to pay for the Kiowa via paypal - multiple cancels, multiple retrys at starting the payment on the same order, even tried multiple browsers. It took two attempts and a couple of hours to pick up Kola in May, but this is unprecedented. Been completely fine for the last I don't know how many years until these two.

I struggled until I started practising tight formation work. Doesn't matter what you're in or what you're formating on, it's just getting the right picture & the right amount of anticipation. I still can't hook up with the S-3 unless it's in a turn though, I can't seem to work out which way it's facing...

That's the rather similar A-7.

Well, there was an intention to build CVA01 and possibly a 2nd one ( I wish they had, we wouldn't have the terrible carriers we have right now :S ) - assault carriers with WW2 levels of armour was a good idea. What would have been more interesting was if they'd managed to get the P1154 working, supersonic aircraft able to deploy on anything with a landing pad might have changed naval aviation considerably.

And more to the point the French ones were modified for even smaller carriers. Single seat & rather worse radar than the Phantom though & the RAF would never have taken it ( and then we got teh SHAR 1 with a modified radar from a Lynx ). The air wing with Phantoms & Buccs would have been miniscule too.

At least there's more margin for error than when I was trying the Hornet & the Tomcat(!) on Melbourne ( neither wanted to trap anyway ). But that's another thread's topic. I wonder what sort of force you'd need out of those cats to get a Phantom back off again, they're not amazingly long...

After spending £100m on "studies" in the early 2010s I think they decided the cheapest way to get a CATOBAR carrier would be to build a new carrier. Yeah, the carrier project was a *magnificent* example of procurement... CATOBAR doesn't mean "no ramp" either, with the width of that deck there'd be room for both. Sigh. "Easily" as in "less work than HMS Victorious" perhaps - talking of MoD carrier farces!

Given the percent of F35 built by BAES and the level of partnership that's pretty much guaranteed ( plus the RAF would like it ). There is a plan to put an EMALS on for drones now, which I guess is also going to need wires, so maybe it could trap a, um, navalised Tucano? I'm vaguely sure the original idea was that the ships were meant to be easily convertible, that they're not really has to be yet another MOD/BAES collusion/cockup rather like the propulsion system...

Centaur seems to have been fitted with what I presume was rather optimistically called a blind-landing radar at some point, but this seems like a rabbit hole I don't have time to devote to falling down at the moment. I guess being talked back also worked. Seeing a pic of a US F-4 on Hermes was an eye opener, I bet that crew held their breath when they were launched off again...

Did we ever get to the bottom of these? I notice it's a long running thing that nobody seems too concerned about ( it also happens with other mods ) 2024-05-24 14:07:43.460 ERROR Scripting (Main): plugin: HMS Hermes 1969 by Joey45 unit replace HERMES69 not allowed 2024-05-24 14:07:43.466 ERROR Scripting (Main): plugin: HMS Hermes R12 by Joey45 unit replace HERMES73 not allowed 2024-05-24 14:07:43.466 ERROR Scripting (Main): plugin: HMS Hermes R12 by Joey45 unit replace HERMES81 not allowed The carrier seems to be functional, just wondering if it should be *more* functional somehow. I did go through all the lua I could find, the only reference to the unit names in all-caps I could see was the liveries. Thanks for keeping this going, btw! The tower seems to come up very bright on my system - at first I thought it wasn't actually being textured but apparently it is. Can anyone recommend a pack of deck vehicles btw? I've got the Forrestal & Supercarrier ones but the latter are a bit large & even the Forrestal ones don't really seem to fit that well. Also - did these have landing radio guidance similar to ICLS at any point? even frigates have radio GS guidance for helicopters, I'd be a bit surprised if a carrier was stuck with just TACAN.

Petro swearing at you & asking if you want to reset the sights you clueless idiot should surely be an option, having to leave the pilot seat when there's a gunner in the gunner seat is a very strange concept. Must admit I've had a hard time with him too, but I've not put much time in the bird recently. Evidence will be provided if it turns up.

I try and slow down & get configured in a turn, rather lessens the effect of sudden trim issues when you can roll in/out of it.

Or the TF-51, which will teach you all about rudder trim too. I've had engines out but afair always along with the rudders being shot off - the aircraft is recoverable with just vstabs, but trying to trim in yaw is obviously not going to do anything!

Flew it yesterday for the first time in a long time, at full load it does need a hefty amount of boot to stay straight on liftoff but I've not tried a lesser load yet. Seems ridiculously fast, though - I don't know what the precise Vne for this model is but I'm quite sure I was constantly above it with torque to spare ( very heavy, too ). It does at least feel heavier than I remember, that's a good thing.

I have a TM stick & virpil base, doesn't seem any harder than the last time I flew a lot ( years rather than months ), even coped with a bump about 2ft from plugging in. I find the FPV useful but I've trained my brain to anticipate when I'm using it, so I tend to be able to snap level easily. One eye on the tanker, half an eye on the FPV, half an eye on everything else... If someone wants a handy reference about where pre-contact is, I forgot & had to find it. Tanker wake turbulence is even more fun these days. Edit: having said all that I was having an unreasonable amount of difficulty plugging into a S-3 earlier... until it started turning, for some reason it was easier in a slight bank. Something about it made me overcontrol though. 2024-04-30 21-15-56-1(2).mp4

Well that can drift too... but I spent a while messing around & rudder drift probably isn't going to provoke these levels of roll.

Might check your rudder pedals too just in case they're sending a little rudder by accident. IIRC the FCS should manage rudder coordination, but it won't trim out constant "human" input ofc. I'll go try and replicate something like that with just rudder, the a/c might just yaw & not roll, I don't remember.

Was causing me some issue trying to retrain - coming in just a little high ( meatball maybe halfway up the top half of the FLOS overlay if you're using that ) & aiming a little shorter than before seems to be doing the trick, the float seems to arrest the ROD enough - although I'm years out of practice so I'm not exactly accurate yet. Not something to do if you're borderline on weight though, I was a bit surprised to break a gear but then realised I was pretty much fully loaded... Edit: tried trapping a F-5 on the same training mission I've been using ( fair bit of turbulence ) - aside from needing a shallow approach so I don't just smash the gear to pieces, it went straight to the deck without any deviation. OK, so it's got tiny wings, but that doesn't stop it getting thrown around in turbulence still...

Is there a fuel or stores imbalance? wake turbulence is both in options->gameplay & a mission setting but it's not really as smooth as that anyway. I hadn't flown the Hornet for 4 years until a couple of weeks ago & it's still rolling right as it used to, I just trim it out & forget it.

Doing a fresh install of the dedi server, it's been a couple of years so I've forgotten just about everything - how do you tell it where your client install is so it can pull data files? it's trying to download 123GB, which I'd rather it didn't... Could I just link my client install as <server install>/_downloads perhaps? ( Edit: no, terrible idea, it'd delete the client install - will try making a copy though ) Edit 2: copying whole client into dedi server location & renaming to _downloads worked perfectly, if you ignore it's complaining about extra files.

You can *see* if dogfighting was now impossible by just trying it. The problem in a dogmatic - and bomber-focused - institution like the inter-war RAF and it's interface with government is making your voice heared. If you've ever had to deal with the government here then you'll likely know it's still exactly the same now. Britain had a whole empire to defend, it wasn't just about Germany. You can't really wash away every opinion as "it's easy now with hindsight" - too many forgotten lessons from WW1 had to be relearned in WW2, and honestly far too much doctrine across all services was based on wishful thinking rather than intelligence gathering & practical tests. The pressure carb just needed someone to see there was a problem first, there were people intelligent enough to devise it, if only someone important enough had asked or if only someone at Rolls had sat down and looked at the problem from a bit further away. And no, I don't believe german-style mechanical fuel injection was necessarily the best solution at the time, it's not the simplest. Too many people assume glibness when someone doesn't want to write an essay, so enough of that thanks.

There was a thread elsewhere about NFs in general - my grandfather was intimately involved with centimetric radar development ( patent level ) so I've always had an interest, but I honestly don't know how attractive any NF would be to use - 99% of the time you're going to end up staring at either blackness or the instruments wondering where you are. In the Mossie NF case a lot of hours were spent patrolling the RAF bomber stream to try & catch LW NFs, which I guess has interest of it's own but walk through a full mission of that & see if the whole thing is something you want to do a lot, and also something possible ( we're talking hundreds of heavy bombers here even if you do part of it to patrol! ). As I said elsewhere I'd buy it because of my connection, but not really sure how much I'd fly it.

For completeness, if you omit the MH you'll still get a MH serial - but you can set XV or ZY or whatever sort of RAF serial you like too. Works exactly the same on the Spitfire, on the RAF liveries for the Mustang & Jug you can set the code letters but not the serial. Or at least I haven't found a way to set the serial.

It sputters a bit rather than cuts totally with a gentle pushover, it's more of a warning now. The Merlin like everything else was the usual British mix of genius & frustrating mediocrity - the Spit & the Mustang don't suffer because the ones we have came after there'd been time to sort the details like carbs out. One might argue there was plenty of time to do that earlier, but well, I live here & I can understand it perfectly...