Richard Dastardly

Having read a book on the F3 recently I'm a bit more enthusiastic about a late one - but that would a) run into issues getting data on systems, I suspect, and b) well, there's still the tomcat. Early F3s, yeah, let's not go there :)

You're covered for the IL-2, it's single engined :) ( I suspect you were thinking of the Pe-2 ). I'd not turn down any of the others, although I can skip the P-38. Modifiers to split a stick so to speak would seem a great idea - can we please get a nice choice of bindings? including toggles and proper three way switches if needed, they're still missing far too often. Not having the individual axis reset after you go back to the combined stick would also be great.

Well, it's what, 7 clicks or so and then sorting the data cart to start - not really a need :) Someone else asked about it the other day, I couldn't find any sign of an auto-anything.

I think either the damage reduction has gone too far, or some other things need adjusting - I spent five minutes dogfighting an AI Ka-50 with the fixed miniguns, I hit the rotor head, the tail, fuselage, wings, pretty much everywhere, and no apparent damage at all. Eventually I hit it with two HE rockets & it fell out of the sky, but all that minigun hail would have done *something*, especially around the rotorhead & engine area or the tail. It could be the Ka-50 is a bit tough and the new incoming damage model will correct that ( the WW2 planes certainly take damage from .303/7.62 ), but it seems almost pointless to carry them right now.

It's very fast for any propellor aircraft of the time! but yes, what an amazing piece of engineering, and as always with great British things very nearly didn't happen thanks to The Authorities. I guess to be fair to them it is a pretty unlikely concept & there were a *lot* of wacky ideas to filter out during the war. Being one of my fav planes ever, also pumped. Might go dig up the original IL-2 again just to fly one to pass the time... Perhaps four? a Lancaster is quite a thing to hear flying around, I can't imagine what hundreds of them in the sky at once sounded like...

The Spit or the 109 - first time I landed the Spit it was perfect, and I've never managed to do it again without some mishap or other. T/O is fairly simple, remember to hold the stick back to lock the tailwheel and if you have rudder pedals ( if you don't, boy are you masochistic flying those things ) disable that takeoff "help", it really doesn't help. The Viggen is probably the one I wrestle with most out of the jets, it gets really unwieldy when it's on the edge of stalling & if you want to short-land it that's where you have to be - it's not exactly hard, it's probably the most awkward though. The Harrier is a dream, super easy.

Used to get at least 10 pairs a day over the town I grew up ( along with Hawks & Hercs, and then visits by just about every NATO aircraft you can think of ). The GR1 avionics seem to hit the sweet spot for gaming, enough info & automation to help & have fun features but enough input required to keep it really interesting. Reading a few things about the F3 recently & that would also be an interesting plane in it's later versions, but it does rather slot in the same spot as the Tomcat.

Sharkey Ward has a bit of a mixed reputation... Was interesting reading about the rivalry( not all good natured ) between the two carriers, and how the Hermes crews seem to get more out of the radar than the Invincible ones.

It'll have to wait until myriads of details become declassified too.

Debug log is singularily unhelpful for telling you why your spawn crashes the game :p well, I suspect it's all on you, while I know Lua & something about how models and scripting interacts generally, I'm not up to speed with DCS. Thanks for the work!

Clipped wings just meant unbolting the wingtips, you could bolt high altitude extended ones back on iirc . There wasn't any thought of saving aluminium, there wasn't any particular shortage on the UK side ( certainly unlike Germany ). That whole "Saucepans for Spitfires" campaign in the BoB was a propaganda effort to let the general populace feel involved.

The F8 had MG-131s in the cowling instead of the 17s, though. With all the extra stores racks too I think it'd be an interesting change. I guess a Sturmbock would be a pretty good ground strafing machine at least :)

I think you'll find the EE Canberra had a rather longer service life than the B-57 licensed copy btw - 1951-2006. I'd like a Hawker Hunter myself - introduced 1951 and still active as contracted OPFOR. Westland Lynx heli, 1971-in service is another long lived machine.

I guess you can't have spawns visible to only helicopters or only aircraft?

Landed Tu-160s seem by far the hardest thing to kill :p

It was brought to my attention I'd not even mentioned this before ( I thought I had, so apologies again ). That was from a thread about Harriers, so 81 version specific & the last beta version from user files - I've since built a new mission to test. Harriers spawn fine in all 4 selectable slots whether in motion or at anchor ( which they weren't before for me, but I think I might put that down to DCS being DCS ), however helicopters still fall overboard no matter which slot I spawn them in or which helicopter.

Yes, there were A-8 bomber destroyer versions. I don't think they'd be all that nice to fly - the 108's ballistics aren't great and the Sturmbock versions were very heavy & not something you'd want to dogfight in ( which is why they had 109 escorts ). If we want a heavy 190 let's go all the way with an F model - that's basically an A with some underside armour & a bit of strengthening, and a lot more A2G munitions.

I thought I'd brought it up in the mod thread already actually - apologies.

Wise words dealing with DCS :P There is an AI C-47 in progress - that already needs some sort of flight model. I do agree that there are enough unfinished projects right now, but this is about the future. I'm still voting C-160 I think, the more I see it the more I want to fly it.

Last few times I tried I've just fallen overboard on spawn, but admittedly I don't think I've tried since the last round of carrier fixes. Might have something to do with being in motion also. Pointing the aircraft at the target isn't really any different to using unguided rockets, and back then don't forget most attacks were done at very low level so getting close to the target wasn't so frowned on as today ( in 1982 manpad threat was also tiny ); additionally the Harrier has the worlds best dive brake if you wanted to point from altitude! however yeah, they wanted to bomb Stanley from high level because of the local Roland system & weren't having any luck until they got some Paveway kits, reading between the lines they seem to have got the kits and what amounts to advertising blurb rather than a manual... I guess the thought process went "well, we have a laser on the aircraft, so..." But yes, as compatible as the Ka-50 for us to have buddy lasing. Would have been an interesting if desperate field mod to make it compatible somehow :p

The SHAR 2 radar was a properly developed AI radar - not sure if that had any A/G mode like the II+ ex-Hornet radar does, it certainly had look-down over land which was a long way in advance of the SHAR 1 radar which was a modified Seaspray anti-ship radar from the Lynx, of all things. It was only intended to spot larger targets & being originally anti-ship at least worked reasonably at sea... unfortunately it was very rushed. The SHAR 2 Blue Vixen radar became Typhoon's CAPTOR ( somewhat ), so I doubt we're seeing that anytime soon. To round it up the Indian SHAR1s operating from ex-Hermes got upgraded with an Israeli AA/AG radar. Reading a Falklands book at the moment ( Hostile Skies ), it seems the GR3 could laser designate - presumably with a fixed laser. I was always under the impression they could just receive, so did the GRx also have a spot designator? Hermes mod is well worth a look - unfortunately you can't spawn on it yet though. Regardless of that it's another deck to fly off. Edit: Blue Vixen did have air-to-surface capability.

Or just decouple the mechanism of fuel/arm/repair from physical objects - even if you made an invisible FARP object that had no collision but just proximity detection it'd enable nearly everything we ever wanted to do with field bases.

I don't own any version of MSFS, so count me as a statistic in the "won't be" column. That said I use Windows for gaming just because there's no sensible alternative - you can run a windows VM on a unix desktop with full 3D at only a very slight performance decrease ( a few % ) these days, so that's the best of both worlds. Servers are vastly less work than game clients - part of the problem with DCS is there hasn't really been a seperate server ( in fact the current dedicated server still doesn't appear to be a seperate piece of software ), just the client run in a mode that turns features off. A dedicated server would involve branching the code *somewhat*, but it'd be mostly removing unused sections of code entirely, and it's quite probable what's left would be fairly OS-agnostic. I could suggest the team working on that could look at Combined Arms & AI in general too, because that'd be a fairly big part of what's left... Last thing to point out is there's a number of games which run in client-server fashion even in single player single desktop form. I run DCS like that myself because it means all the AI can run on a different CPU core - it costs 3GB more memory but it's improved performance considerably.

British PT equivalent is the MTB ( motor torpedo boat ), or the MGB which is just a version without the torpedos & more guns. German side would be E-Boat which were generally slightly bigger, not to be confused with German Torpedo Boats which were a sort of small destroyer. The Italians had a lot of small raiding craft too, no-one seems to remember that ( and I suspect the Russians had something along the same lines ). As you might expect with the small distances in the Channel/North sea, and the Med, coastal forces saw a *lot* of action. One of my relatives was a Coastal forces Commander, didn't make it through, sadly. One of the British destroyer types might suit Normandy better - while we didn't build one type the entire war, most of the progressive builds were only minor modifications of the previous ones & they served with Commonwealth navies as well. Incidentally you can look round inside HMS Cavalier ( C-class ) on Google Street View, if you're interested - https://goo.gl/maps/rh7odTTvtj8eZdN4A

The UK ones had Sea Eagle many years ago & the German Navy ones carried AS-34, so you'd not be short of anti-ship no matter which IDS. Modelling a variant that has seen action might be a good idea though. The Luftwaffe have only done recce with theirs, I think?