Exorcet

Most aircraft can detect missiles, F-16 included. AA missiles have lower RCS and are less likely to be detected. You can sometimes lock your own in dogfight mode I believe.

There is some divided opinion for sure, but for me the F-16 flies itself on the tanker more or less. You have the best canopy, you can see everything. You will disconnect if you move too far but the same goes for the refueling from the S-3 or MPRS, I just find it much easier to get out of position with those since you're not flying dead center, have to deal with turbulence, and don't have a clear reference like the tanker lights. Longer range radar with wider azimuth is pretty significant. The Hornet also displays more on the helmet sight. Though I agree that the F-18 has some serious weaknesses. The lack of altitude display for all contacts is a major one. It seems like many F-18 pilots like to use AZ/EL to compensate, but I've always seen it as a waste of a MFD screen (but to be fair, the Hornet has more screens). The workload to get the radar to display relevant information on the Hornet is much more, bordering on the point of being distracting, and it's easy to forget to store your settings per weapons. The symbology on the Hornet is harder to read as well, at least for me. The F-16 has sharp images and makes good use of color. FCR + HSD are essentially the perfect SA layout.

The F-18 Pros: More screens Great low speed handling Less performance loss from heavy payloads More powerful radar and slightly better SA overall F-16 Pros: Better cockpit layout, screen displays, and HOTAS functions Easier to refuel More performance which aids positioning in air combat Overall I'd say the F-16 is more intuitive mostly because of the better cockpit, but if you can learn one you should be able to learn the other.

AI multiship bombing is just bad. The AI is terrible at dividing up tasks and also working as a team. Separating strike flights into single aircraft is a good strategy. As far as why your mission plays out as it does, did you check the group attack option? This makes all members of the flight attack all targets. If it's not checked the tasks get split up. Another issue might be formation and waypoint spacing. The AI needs a good bit of distance between the waypoint where it gets the bombing task and the target. Without enough space the AI will get confused and tends to fly all over. Formation also impacts this, Grimes was nice enough to do a lot of testing on that subject: https://imgur.com/a/dcs-ai-flight-formation-behaviors-2-7-17-TLFegLW

I can't access DCS at the moment so I might have made minor errors, but you could use an event handler to do what you want. https://wiki.hoggitworld.com/view/DCS_func_addEventHandler It would look something like this: name = "playernamehere" player = Unit.getByName(name) zonecheck = trigger.misc.getUserFlag(1) Getlaunch = {} function Getlaunch:onEvent(event) if zonecheck == true and event.id == 1 and event.initiator == player or zonecheck == true and event.id == 23 and event.initiator == player then trigger.action.setUserFlag(2, true) end end world.addEventHandler(Getlaunch) "name" is the variable containing the player unit's name (as found in the mission editor) which must be wrapped in quotes and is passed to the variable "player" which points to the player's unit. "zonecheck" exists to check if the player is in the zone. It is set to retrieve the value of flag 1 which would be set in the mission trigger list to turn true when the player is in the zone. Flag names are arbitrary so it doesn't have to be flag 1, but the flag name must be consistent between the triggers and event handler. The handler starts with "Getlaunch =" and checks that "zonecheck" is true (is the player in the zone?), that the event happening is shot (event 1) or shooting start (event 23), and that the initiator of the event is the player. If all of these things are true at once, flag 2 will be set to true. Again this flag can be named anything. Add another trigger to the mission that to play the message to stop shooting when trigger 2 is true. Alternatively you can add a message output directly to the event handler with outText or one of its derivatives: https://wiki.hoggitworld.com/view/DCS_func_outText https://wiki.hoggitworld.com/view/DCS_func_outTextForGroup trigger.action.outText('Stop shooting', 10, false) As an example where the message "Stop Shooting" is displayed to all players for 10 seconds with the option to clear other messages set to false. Summary: Add zone and player unit to map Add trigger to set flag to true when player is in zone Add trigger to add event handler to mission Add trigger to send message when event handler flag is set to true (or add message to event handler)

Forget overheads. Group close is the only formation where wingmen won't waste crazy amounts of fuel. The option to call them into this formation should be present in the F10 radio commands always. If you know the ME you can set the formation there at least.

If this is added as a change in behavior for all aircraft it can destroy existing missions. In the mission I make I ensure that planes are timed to take off properly. Adding a few seconds of delay could throw things out of sync in a busy mission. So this would need to be an option, or we'd need real ATC to keep the airport running. I don't think it really makes sense as a default and is probably best left as a special option somewhere. If you wanted to do this now, ground vehicles can be used to block aircraft during taxi. You could try to place them on runways as well. I don't think the AI will stop their takeoff for anything, but they might stop just before the takeoff point if a vehicle is positioned precisely.

With the recent update to include more dynamic MP spawning, I wanted to revisit this request. The new spawn system appears to be MP only, but it might have some of the needed functionality to dynamically spawn AI aircraft (I can only guess). Most of the AI that I place in missions is supposed to represent a dynamic enemy response so having an airbase controller to do this for me would make for potentially more convincing enemy action and save me from hours of playing waypoints, aircraft, and triggers. I strongly believe that some kind of automatic AI mission planning would greatly enhance DCS mission building and between the dynamic campaign and the new dynamic spawns I hope that it also aligns with work that ED is currently doing.

I have no idea why DCS makes the manuals so hard to find.

DCS at present automatically assigns runway based on wind, but this is problematic when the AI taxi speed is fixed. Fighters that are supposed to scramble to protect the base take forever to taxi and put up no resistance to enemy aircraft. To get around this a mission maker needs to set the wind to manipulate AI spawn behavior. Can we have an option to just force the AI to use a runway direction instead? Ideally ATC would be fixed and taxiing and parking improved, but until then forcing the AI to use a specific direction would be a workaround.

Was speed set to TAS? Also your thrust will drop with air density which drops with altitude, so even a plane has a 1:1 SL thrust ratio (which often quotes uninstalled thrust, which is another problem), you can't just point it straight up and expect to accelerate.

I don't want to hijack the thread, but if they're going to address this, might it be worth it to slightly overhaul the weapon in zone triggers? For one they can be combined into one trigger with a drop down for weapon type. They could also use a general option. The trigger is good when you have a set situation and know exactly what weapon will be used, but if you don't know that you need to add many conditions with many weapons. Why not an "any option", so example any missile in zone, any bomb in zone and perhaps some suboptions like air to air missile, guided bomb, etc. A field for the group/unit launching the weapon, target, or weapon side would be very useful as well. I've had situations where I wanted to know if the player specifically has fired because there is a weapon hold situation for the player's coalition. Being able to set the side or group to monitor would make that much easier. Actually come to think of it with those details it would also be nice to detach the detection from zones and be map wide as well.

I haven't run into this problem, but the request is a reasonable one. Personally I'd like ED to take a page from XPlane: Having an image of controls available is really good. I think for the actual bind's DCS columns are better, but the ability to open an image of your controls would be great.

Yes, but even if threat estimates were adjusted you still couldn't treat the adjusted line as a safe boundary. Things also get tricky as RCS gets reduced because then you have the situation where if you do get detected you're in the NEZ for the missile, and if detection is probabilistic there is no way of knowing exactly when you'd be detected anyway. This makes it so you kind of end up with a fixed ring anyway, or one that doesn't adjust that much. Intelligence should also be taken into account, exact threat positions might not be known (if we're talking about information shown in mission briefings or on the F10 map). All of that said thinking about it more there could be some uses for dynamic rings, but the current fixed rings shouldn't be removed as an option if dynamic ones are added.

Static rings are fine. Missile range nor radar range can be pinned down to a precise figure. The rings are there to give you an indication of when you might be in danger, not to tell you the exact distance you can fly at to avoid being fired on. Radar detection itself is probabilistic. This is why radar ranges are often paired with a detection probability, like range at 50% chance of detection. I guess for experimenting, adjusting rings might be nice, but they're not all that practical for an actual mission.

Detection range variation with azimuth already exists. I don't think stores RCS has been implemented, but I agree on the need for it.

Training is important in DCS for the same reasons that it is important in real life. Don't be afraid to go back into learning mode when you have to. Use existing training tools or make your own with the ME or some notes. It's perfectly reasonable to go through a refresher course when going from one module to another, even if you have a lot of experience. Also remember that if you've learned something before, relearning will probably be faster than learning from the beginning.

You can't add members of a flight to different airports (ie helipads) so these only support single flights. We're long overdue for better color options, not just for heliports, but also units where you have to go through one by one to select the appropriate camo. We should also really have map placeable airports.

The problem seems to be related to Late Activation. If I load the mission into the ME and try to play it, it will never load. If I load the mission into the ME and then uncheck late activation on the player flight, US F-16C Main, it will load. If I then go back into the mission and check Late Activation, the mission will work. EDIT But this might only work once. I made some edits to orbits and mission time and now have relaunched the mission again and it's stuck on pooled tasks.

This did not work. I've added the log file if that helps. dcs.log

We have training bombs with smoke, not sure if you've seen those.

The mission attached will never finish loading. It stops at "Wait for pooled tasks - 1". I have tried three times now. No mods are installed. The mission was made by Saving As from another mission after deleting units to allow for quick testing. The original mission is able to load successfully. F-16C IHC Sirjan CAP A routing 3.miz

Tankers at ground speed is one of those AI things that makes anything but calm weather unusable. The default aircraft speeds are also totally unhelpful and add work if you end up switching a plane type, please allow them to be disabled:

The distance does look to be offset from the nearest surface from testing. For good measure I fired on a MiG-31 from the front and behind and an AIM-120 exploded consistently from both directions. I hadn't realized before that the proximity fuse also always detonates, I thought direct contact was possible but it appears not.

I wasn't sure if this is better placed in the mission editor wish list, or here. It's not about the mission editor itself, but the campaign creator. I'm finally getting close to finishing and going through the process of making a campaign instead of one off missions has left me with some thoughts on the campaign creator, especially when it comes to organizing missions. It would be nice if we could change the date and time of a mission in the creator directly instead of having to open missions one by one. The same goes for the briefings too. This would make checking continuity of missions much easier and also allow for mass corrections or copying and pasting of updated information between missions. Variant missions would be nice to have as well. For example, taking one mission file and then having the ability to tell the campaign system to store an alternate version of the file with a different time of day, or weather. This could also be done at the mission level and should be an option at that level too, but having it available in the campaign creator again helps with seeing the overall picture. Another desirable feature would be the ability to make missions as one time only. Currently the system is supposed to jump between stages and randomly pick a mission, but there are some that wouldn't make sense to play again. There are probably a few more that I forgot, but the theme here is to have the ability to make changes while seeing things zoomed out to the campaign level instead of the mission level.