nomdeplume

Maybe a related thing - I've noticed RWR spikes (in A-10C) and LWS warnings (in BS2) persist for some time after you've put terrain between yourself and the enemy unit. For example in Black Shark, if you put a Roland ADS and then play pop-up games with it, you'll get the warning as soon as you put your head above the hill and it gets LoS to you (as expected). If you then drop down behind the hill and keep resetting the LWS, you'll continue to receive new warnings for some time even though there's no way it should be able to light you up if you've got a hill between you and it. I haven't actually timed it, but it's long enough to be easily noticable. I've been thinking maybe it's an optimisation to avoid having to continually check LoS, and instead only do it periodically, so the warnings persist until the next check cycle. But it does seem as if you get lit up the moment you exit cover, which implies those checks are done continuously. So, maybe it's a general AI 'hack' in that the AI still "sees" targets for a short time if they break LoS, in order for it to not instantly forget all about the target. Easier than trying to implement a "search mode" whereby they try to 'guess' where a target may have gone - that'd require some pretty impressive machine logic. It does have some unfortunate side-effects, though.

I think the UNIT and GROUP AI ON/OFF are intended for ground units, not air ones, but it's not entirely clear.

I don't think the unit AI stuff really works for aircraft. Or, it may control targeting and suchlike, but not startup/takeoff procedures which are heavily scripted. I'd try setting the AI aircraft to 'uncontrolled', then give them a triggered 'start' task. Then if you want the AI helicopters to be active in the mission, have a trigger execute the triggered start task on them and they'll to spooling up and go about their business. If you never run the triggered start task, they'll just sit on the ramp quietly minding their own business, which seems to be what you're after.

I think it's just a case that the (tremendous) cost of designing, installing, testing, documenting and maintaining a radar system and associated avionics, as well as training the pilots to use it, would outweigh any benefits, given that unlike us, the USAF is not limited to deploying a single type of aircraft. The A-10 is highly specialised for CAS missions. It can of course do lots of other things, but if the mission isn't CAS-related you'd normally send something else. The USAF has several all-weather aircraft equipped with air-to-ground radars already. It probably doesn't need another one, especially a very slow one. I don't know what kind of navigation systems all-weather fighters have, but I suspect you'd want to provide the A-10 with more capabilities in that regard if you're truly going to call it an "all-weather" aircraft. But the main thing is that the aircraft's role is CAS, and dropping ordnance on a radar contact is pretty risky at the best of times. It's absolutely terrifying in most CAS-type operations where friendlies are likely to be close to the target. So it's probably a lot like the BVR missiles - a great idea in theory, but in actual practice the rules of engagement would likely prohibit their use 99% of the time.

Yep I'd say you're right. Just did the instant action and it definitely says '1' now. Screenshot on page 326 of the manual still shows 10, although if you're reading the manual you'll know it's just a static field anyway and not worry about it. :)

Can you make a screenshot? According to the manual the value shown on the TGP is a static field. I looked it up for this thread not long ago. I haven't tried switching on the TGP before the EGI to see what happens if it's not aligned or if it changes at all.

Any chance you could find that post, as I'd be quite interested to understand more. Using the radar altimeter to derive the altitude of your target would be extremely limiting and result in inaccurate delivery except in the rare case you're flying over complete level terrain at the same altitude as your target. This post provides the best explanation I've been able to find: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?p=1027688#post1027688 From this, it is possible to set the system to use the radar altitude but it's not the default setting, and seems like it'd only be useful in pretty specific scenarios: a) your EGI or other systems are broken/returning bad data, but not broken enough to prevent the IFFCC from calculating a solution b) your target is at a similar elevation to some terrain you can happen to be flying over at release time and c) you don't know the height of the target (because then you can just create a waypoint and use that for the target altitude, which makes life easier and more accurate).

Is this shown at the lower-left of the TGP display? Are you waiting for your EGI to become aligned before switching to nav mode during startup? It will take 4 minutes, and INS NAV READY will begin to blink on the CDU (the text will appear before then to indicate it's marginally aligned, it starts blinking once fully aligned).

Just to be sure, have you restarted TrackIR and then launched the sim to see if it picks it up? And, are you getting the indicator light on the TrackIR receiver to say there's a supported game active? You could try removing C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCS BlackShark 2\Config\Input\ka-50\trackir and see if the game re-detects it.

To my understanding, the impact point is calculated by taking the aircraft's current position, orientation and velocity, and tracing the path the weapon would take if it was released now until it intersects the terrain. The aircraft position comes from the EGI; the terrain elevation is taken from the map system (stored elevation data) when in DTS mode, or from the steerpoint altitude (i.e. pretend the world is an infinite plane at that particular elevation). [sits back and waits to be re-educated...] All the altitudes there are MSL (or something similar). If they used height above ground level you wouldn't be able to get an accurate solution if you happened to by flying over a hill or a valley prior to your target, i.e. just about all the time. The only times the system struggles to provide an accurate impact point (winds and such notwithstanding) is when the impact point is in wildly varying terrain. I think this is due to 'pipper smoothing', i.e. it doesn't jump wildly all over the place if it's tracing a path across uneven terrain. Or it may just be difficult to calculate. You can make CCIP deliveries from well above the maximum altitude for the radar altimeter - so long as your dive angle is steep enough. Of course, you probably can't see what you're bombing from up there all that well, but that's nothing a cluster bomb or string of half a dozen Mk-82s can't fix. :D

The .miz file is actually a zip archive which contains certain files that the simulator looks for. The bulk of the mission information is contained in a text file called "mission" (no extension) inside it. You can extract it using 7-zip or WinZIP or rename the .miz to a .zip and use the zip capabilities built-in to the Windows shell. Edit the file using notepad++ or some other text editor (not sure if Notepad will break these files, but there's plenty of better editors available). The file is actually a Lua script which defines a bunch of data structures which are used by the game engine. Just have a look through it and find the section with the weather settings. You might need to try saving the mission with a few different settings and looking at the resulting mission file each time to work out how it's saved (I've not looked at the weather part specifically). Once you've made your change, overwrite the 'mission' file in the .miz with your updated one and try loading it. Just keep in mind that, even if you do it right, there's no guarantee the sim will 'correctly' handle unusual values. You might want to try to manually editing the file to include different but 'valid' settings in order to verify your procedure is correct, before moving on to more exotic values.

It won't show if the impact point is off the HUD, so are you in a steep enough dive? You can also enable either 3/9- or 5-mil CR mode, which will give you a dashed reticule if the impact point is off the HUD. In this case you can press and hold the pickle button to designate the point you want to hit and then follow the steering cues to the release point. Not sure offhand. You can see when you lose it because the radar altitude readout will be removed from the HUD (in the lower right, above the steerpoint data block). I think it's either 3,000 or 5,000 feet. CCIP drops aren't dependent on the radar altitude though, for obvious reasons...

The original release didn't have an interactive tutorial in the DCS A-10C style. It had narration that assumed you were keeping up and pressing the correct things, but I think the interactivity was limited to 'press space to continue', and I'm not even 100% sure that was there. It was very cumbersome if you missed a step or did something wrong. Additionally, the tracks failed to play back correctly in later versions. That's why they switched to a video of the tutorial. Edit: upon further reflection, the original training was implemented as tracks that were played back and you could listen to the narration and watch as the actions were performed. Or, you could hit escape and take control, and then listen to the narration and perform the actions yourself. The 'press space to continue' was new in Warthog. In Black Shark, if you fell behind or got confused, you had to restart the training mission. At least with a video, you can rewind. The Warthog tutorial system is a massive improvement, but also has its problems: a few bugs that prevent you proceeding in the tutorials, and problems with playback after patches changed things. Plus, I think it took a much longer time to create & test the tutorials. I hope they continue down that route and can apply lessons learned to make things easier for themselves while still providing that level of interactivity. Mind you, "watching then doing" has one benefit of forcing you to remember what you're doing, instead of blindly following the highlight. Another edit: I largely agree with Luigi below. Although good training is important, it's also something you only do a few times, so the amount of time and effort that goes into creating and supporting the interactive training seems difficult to justify. At the end of the day, you need to memorise the steps in order and understand why you're doing them. That just takes good ol' fashioned learning.

No there's no (AI) FAC/JTAC support. I think the Russian doctrine is completely different to what was included in Warthog. I haven't seen anyone mention any plans for adding this. Edit: this post is slightly relevant/interesting.

The copy protection system has changed since Black Shark 1 was released... note the dates on the posts earlier in this thread! You'll need a separate purchased copy (i.e. serial number) for each simultaneously-running copy of the sim. So, you can install it on more than one system (up to your activation limit), but you can only play it on one system at a time.

Ummm. More information? I can't really understand your question. What about it makes it seem stronger than 3m/s? I assume you're using static weather?

Probably a mix of reasons; one that hasn't been mentioned yet is that it's probably a bad idea to announce it before the feature set is confirmed. I mean, the moment they say "the next DCS module will be <x>" there will be a flood of questions: "will function <a> and weapon <b> will be modeled?" and "will we be able to do <c>?" and "what version of <d> will be included?" and so on and on and on. Until they've actually "finished" it answering those questions will be very dangerous because of the backlash if it turns out they can't implement everything they initially planned to. Plus, people's imaginations tend to run riot and some people may start believing they're going to get all sorts of things that aren't/never were intended to be included, and be disappointed when it's not available in the finished product. So for that reason, keeping the time between announcement of the aircraft and the announcement of the features of the module should probably be kept to a minumum; ideally they'd be done at the same time. IMHO.

Yes you need to re-download. The files have changed and as much as a pain as downloading another 4 GB might be, it's not worth the risk of ending up with a mostly-working installation with strange subtle bugs nobody else has.

The training missions are in video format and can be downloaded from the DCS website: http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/downloads/video/ When installed they'll appear in the training section of the menu. There's also a button there to download them.

Some of them are armed, although they tend to be named thusly e.g. "Armed watchtower" so it's fairly obvious which ones are. I think the barracks is, too. There's no difference in their in-game appearance though, i.e. you can't visually tell an armed watchtower from a regular one. I would guess they've been put into 'ground vehicles' due to their shootiness, and also so you can use them in templates. I also noticed the AI begun treating static units like regular units somewhat recently (well, a few patches back, or maybe in the betas?) so there's much less of a distinction then their used to be. Maybe they'll scrap static units altogether seeing you can disable group and individual unit AI.

^^ bang on. It's described in the manual as "INS Performance Rating. When using INS for targeting pod pointing, this value indicates how accurate or inaccurate the INS data is. This is a static field in this simulation." Flight manual, pages 326-327. Edit: since patch 1.1.1.0 this field now shows '1' in the sim rather than '10'.

I don't think the game is supported on systems with four megabytes of RAM. :)

No reason not to implement it though. It's something I definitely miss from Falcon. That and having friendly air defence systems show up on your RWR. Always feels like you're coming home when all those Russian SAM symbols are replaced by Patriots and Hawks on your RWR. :)

For the purposes of movies you can set an AI plane to fly a route and then fly formation on it yourself; that'll let you get as close as you like. For a four-ship it'll be hard though, since the AI will take evasive action if it comes too close to another aircraft. Maybe worth a try though, just copy and paste an existing aircraft with a slight offset to its waypoints.

Could you provide a screenshot and the location on the map where this occurs? If you make a new empty mission and have your jet start at the same location do you see that problem with the building occur? The mission files themselves don't specify anything about the map other than which map to use. If the new building is part of the updated map then there's nothing the mission file could do make it appear or not appear.