Bahger

I must be missing something here because I hear my flight reporting but they will not acknowledge, or comply, when I give them orders. Realistic radios, all radios switched to "Transmit", UHF to "Both", no problems communicating with Tower on AM, JTAC on FM. Here's the deal: The "Defend Camp Yankee" brief gives 124.00 AM as the freq for "Bore" flight (player is flight lead) but, while I can hear their comms, they cannot seem to hear me, although they fly obediently in trail. Plus, I was under the impression that flight comms were on UHF, but there is no response when attempting to communicate orders using either the UHF or VHF AM mic switch. No UHF freq is supplied for the flight in the briefing, so I had assumed it was the default. No UHF comms with #2. The odd thing is, I had this problem in another mission, too. What am I missing here? Something simple, probably. Thanks in advance for your help.

Hmm, well I searched and searched...if I get it again I had better find it, or I won't receive another target, right? One more thing: In the SP version my wingman accompanies me but will not respond to comms on the default UHF freq. Is there a flight freq that I've missed?

Brilliant mission, Grimes, you really got under the hood of this ME and tuned it! I couldn't find the ammo dump, wah. I'm pretty sure I inputed the L/L coordinates properly, I even did it twice, coming up with exactly the same location. I know it's heavily camouflaged but my SPI appeared to be nothing but a forested crest. I took a look at it in the ME; my SPI was approximately correct but when I ran the cursor over the location, the coordinate readout was a little diffferent than that given by AWACS. Might there be a discrepancy?

+1

Yeah, that enables you to practice using both formats via radio/text messages plus JTAC, very helpful.

Thanks Chizh. I'm going to avoid both AI runway starts and helo formations in mission design pending confirmation that a patch has addressed these issues and hope I do not run into too many more AI/ME glitches of this severity. There is so much that is truly spectacular about this product but these problems interfere with its potential to be taken seriously as a simulation of the modern battlefield.

No logic conflicts, Insekt, because no hard TOTs with mandated ETAs anywhere on the route. Check out the attached test mission: 4 Helo flights, all with default cruise altitude (1640ft MSL) and airspeed (108kts) values: - The 2 southern flights comprise (i) a single unit and (ii) a 2-ship. Both flights get snarled in the "circle after takeoff" glitch and neither can reach the plotted airspeed, managing ~50kts at best. The single unit does better but after appearing to climb out, starts orbiting for no reason. Neither flight can follow its flight plan nor get anywhere close to cruise airspeed. - The 2 northern flights comprise (i) a single unit and (ii) a 3-ship. Unlike the southern flights, both of these are air-starts but the 3-ship cannot fly faster than ~ 47kts in formation and never approaches its cruising speed. Only the single-unit flight, air-started, behaves as it's plottted, reaching an acceptable 108kt cruising airspeed and heading straight for its first waypoint without needless orbiting, formation snafus and slow-as-molasses airspeed. It's bloody awful.

Try it, ED. A 3-ship of UH-60s will not cruise faster than 47kts because it appears that the AI cannot manage the formation. Something else that worked fine in the Betas now appears completely borked and the only workaround I can see is to limit my Blackhawk flight to one unit. AI Hogs circle constantly after takeoff. Helos cannot form up and cruise faster than a Ford Focus in 3rd gear. How can the AI be such a mess? How can ED expect longevity for the sim when the AI, and therefore the possibilities for mission design, are in this dreadful state? How can this have passed muster for the Release when functionality in both cases cited above was 100% better in Beta? It's really rather sad.

What fairly old-school SAM variant (it's owned by militia, not state-of-the-art Russian army) should I put in a mission which offers a reasonable challenge yet is defeatable by maneuver/jammer/CMs? In other words, a system that would not absolutely require SEAD cover?

Essentially, yes. TMS/Up/Short then TMS/Up/Long on the datalink symbol will select this object and make it your SPI, guiding you to the target location. Inputting the navigational data into your CDU, or at least writing it down, is a backup. If for whatever reason the triangle fails to appear, you can use this nav data to create a waypoint that will similarly guide you to the target area.

Edit: Oops, posted below before reading Tharos' helpful post. So I can get an elevation readout by placing the TAD cursor over a spot, with TAD as SOI, presumably? I assume this shows up in all the fine data on the TAD screen when an object is superimposed with the cursor? Where does elevation show when marking a target? Well, you can't always know what target elevation is, especially with non-prebriefed targets such as those you might get from JTAC. I will settle for this as an imprecise art and attempt to "eyeball" dumb bombing targets, adjusting my airspeed/dive angle for altitude "on the fly". As ever, practice makes perfect... As for the waypoint altitude debate, I'm responsible for opening that can o'worms. Using ground-level markpoints for targets is the solution, I believe, in spite of a slightly increased pilot workload, especially as it means that, by setting WPs at altitude as nav markers, not target markers, I can playtest all missions in the ME using AI only. Returning to the subject of the thread however...even WPs placed at ground level, or MPs that are ground-level by default, do not contain any info re. MSL atltitude from which an AGL calculation can be made...unless I am mistaken.

Hmm, so there is no way to get AGL altitude above 5k, even via the IFCC option? Well, it makes sense, I suppose, difficult to imagine accurate radar altitude output at 10,000ft. In r/l I guess we'd have elevation details on terrain charts.

Thank you, how could I not have noticed that? Duh.

Thanks a lot Darrenl. Do you know if I can run this mission in SP or should I just fire up MP and host a server?

I find I can be most accurate with CCIP bombing using 10,000ft in the HUD altimeter readout as a starting altitude for the dive. However, I've been practicing against targets at sea-level. Is there any way to display my AGL, as opposed to MSL, altitude in the HUD so that I can maneuver accurately to a 10k reference altitude AGL, i.e. over a ground target that might be a couple of thousand feet above sea level?

Can anyone direct me to a practice .miz for this? I can use the ME but do not know how to program the tanker to orbit/transmit appropriately. Thanks!

I just wanted to thank A-10 guru WarriorX and expert simmer Ghost _Unit13 for a superb experience in our 3-ship MP sortie this morning. We did a cold start, a good formation takeoff, hit AWACS and, with instruction from WarriorX via TS3 voice comms, inputed the given L/L coordinates into the CDU. We then prosecuted a Maverick attack on an enemy convoy. I hadn't played a flight sim in mp for almost 10 years. This is how it should work... ...until it didn't. Unfortunately, when the host expends certain munitions, a client drops out (this happened to Ghost, I was unaffected) but I will leave it up to Warrior, who has more experience of this glitch, to report it in the MP fourms in A-10 tech support.

I'm not talking about the JTAC (UTM) format here; Thanks to WarriorX I now know how to input JTAC coordinates into the CDU as a navigational backup plan for target location if the datalink triangle does not appear. My question is: There are two other target locations supplied by scripted radio message in this mission, I think these are MGRS and Long/Lat. Can anyone advise re. how to input these formats into the CDU? I know Effte has posted excellent r/l information about this but all I need to know is how to input them into the CDU so that I get an accurate TAD reference. Many thanks.

Ell Then why doesn't it say that in the title of the thread?? I give up.

There is no problem. As I keep on telling you, you cannot get an AI wingman to attack a bridge. It's not a bug, it's a design feature, whether you like it or not.

I haven't tried it yet but I'm sure it must be possible, once you have got your target from JTAC and made it your SPI, that you can have your wingman attack it. I think there is a comms menu command to get your wingman to run in at your own SPI.

I can't comment on (i) Speed's script, (ii) multiplayer or (iii) anyone's misunderstandings of radio procedures but I am very well-versed in the Mission Editor and, unless Viper or another dev corrects me, I think I can say the following with some confidence: The AI cannot be made to recognise a bridge per se as a target. The only objects that can be made to function as targets for AI in mission planning are those selected from a long list in the Editor, assigned ownership (i.e. Red/Blue) and placed on the map. Obviously this does not apply in MP, when you can identify a bridge as a target and get a human wingman to destroy it but in SP you have to "cheat" it in the ME as I wrote above to get the sim to acknowledge a bridge as a target (i.e. place an invisible Red unit under it and name it "Bridge" so that it shows up as such in debriefs) because permanent objects on the map, like bridges, cannot be assigned as Blue or Red, or owned by a coalition. The frustrating thing about this is that destroying a bridge still has the desired effect, i.e. slowing ground forces down and/or causing them to take a longer route to their objective, but to address the OP's question directly, in my experience, no, you cannot task AI to attack a bridge or any permanent object on the map whose ownership cannot be assigned in the ME.

This is really helpful, WarriorX, and exactly what I was after. I know how to set up for a JTAC-directed attack on a target but have always relied on the datalinked triangle, which has become a little elusive in the Release version of the sim. I don't know if the SADL Net settings are the full story here. Either way, it's important to have a backup MO via data input of coordinates from JTAC and your explanation of how to do it is the best I've read yet. Does the new waypoint show up at ground level or at altitude? Rep inbound. Your Radio Tutorial and Mission Data Card have been invaluable to me since the early Betas. Thank you for all your effort and expertise.

It's given in the non L/L format, that I do know. I think.

Well I'd love to play with this script of yours and report back on its adaptability to SP. If it makes it possible to task either the player or AI flight members onto a bridge named in the ME and receive credit for destroying it, it'll broaden my range of mission objectives for SP greatly.