Bushmanni

It will round to the nearest 10.

You can manually enter HOT elevation by first pushing DATA rocker so that the DTS changes into blinking altitude reading (altitude of the currently selected steerpoint), then write the desired altitude to the scratchpad using UFC or CDU and press enter. If you don't like to manually input it down or use the rocker to change it in 10 increments you can create a markpoint (remember to use laser) over the target and select it as steerpoint so when you push DATA rocker it will give the correct altitude as initial value. TGP gives basically GPS altitude of the point in the ground when you measure the range with laser, otherwise it gives the same altitude as DTS would. Radar altimeter gives height of ground under your aircraft and it can't see the ground if you dive in steeply or are too high.

DTS can give you wrong target altitude in some cases. DTS database has lower resolution than the DCS terrain and in places where the terrain slope changes abruptly DTS can give wrong enough altitude to make it impossible to hit close enough of a tank to kill it unless releasing from a very steep dive. I have also encountered some areas where the terrain is flat but the DTS altitude is still tens of meters wrong. You can easily test the difference of DTS and DCS terrain altitudes by first making a mark point on ground using TGP without lasing, and then another while lasing and comparing the altitude coordinates of the two markpoints. You can get accurate terrain elevation by lasing the spot on the ground with TGP. The aircraft knows it's position by EGI and with TGP you can measure distance and direction to the target hence it's possible to calculate the 3D coordinates of the TGP target very accurately. You can either read the elevation from TGP and input it manually or create a mark point, select it as steerpoint and enter HOT elevation mode and it will automatically suggest the mark point elevation.

If you used the quick mission generator it has a tendency to create stupid missions like putting some AI fighters or ground attack planes in the air that come and kill you within a few minutes. You need to either select no enemy air assets or manually edit the generated mission and delete troublesome units.

Thats good to hear.

Does the script give different table with every run of the mission or does it give the same "random" table every time? I'm suspecting the latter as the line you removed is supposed to prevent that but DCS might have some measure already in place behind the curtains.

There are also historical examples of the opposite like Israel. The wars they fought are the historical example that the current tech and training emphasizing doctrine is based on. History is full of examples of properly trained and better equipped troops winning against seemingly more stronger and numerous opponents. Most western nations can't use Zerg rush strategy anyway because of political reasons so they need force multipliers to get results with less.

Here's a working version. I added the line COMMTABLE = {} to initialize the child-table where CHAN, ID and FREQ variables are stored. I also removed the randomization from CHAN so it picks the channels in the same order as they are in the table. You should remove the print() when you put this in DCS. "math.randomseed (os.time())" could give you an error as I have never tried os functions in DCS. At the moment I don't know any other way to set the seed number for the random number generator through lua so if this fails you need to set a flag to random value in ME and use that value to set the seed in script. You can try this code out with lua demo. http://www.lua.org/cgi-bin/demo

If your enemy is capable of shooting down your satellites and AWACS A-10s and F-16s are hardly going to be of much use either but you would need something much more sophisticated like stealth planes that can actually survive the battlefield. Besides militaries around the world have been aware of this possibility since the satellites and AWACS have been invented and they definitely have put some thought on it and developed back-up plans. Obviously nobody is going to share them with us as that would make the plans useless. Some of the options that have been discussed is to have back-up satellites in storage that can be launched within a few days to replace the destroyed ones. Besides while satellites make the life easier they hardly are necessary for kicking enemy butt. Only drones are dependent on satellites but you wouldn't use them against capable foes anyway. When two capable forces slug it out there will be more casualties on both sides than if they were fighting some third world country but it doesn't mean their equipment is stupidly designed or chosen for such a battle. War is bad business in general and only the stupid or desperate (mostly dictatorships in both cases) have been willing to go to war often against superior enemy during the few last decades and that's how it'll be in the future as fighting a fair battle is just waste of lives and resources.

The basic intuition of amateurs thinking about tactics and strategy is to think about "choreography" ignoring the fact that the enemy has a will of his own. When you see someone fall in this trap you know he shouldn't be taken seriously. Depending on his attitude you might want to educate him but often it's pointless. I think most bigger drones are operated through satellite link. In order to hack it you would need to gain entry between the drone and the satellite which would be much harder than just shooting down the drone. Then there's the possibility of encrypting the signal. The current operational drones are so easy to shoot down that there's no point in trying to hack them. Electronics can be hardened against EMP and no-one would have put critical functions under computer control if they would be easily busted with a distant nuclear explosion or lightning strike on the aircraft. Nuclear weapons are going to be delivered by missiles and airplanes relying on electronics to to guide them to the target and these systems need to function even if there are already bombs going off somewhere (not too) near. You can bet on that these thing have been thought about by the designers. Of course large enough burst of gamma rays would bust just about anything but you won't be able to cover the whole enemy airspace with such radiation levels but the effect is going to be local and contained and most likely you are going to have more problems with thermal radiation and the shock wave destroying the airplane before having problems with gamma rays destroying the electronics.

For-loop is constructed as follows: for i = startValue, endValue do somestuff end where i is a local variable (inside the for-loop) which value runs from startValue to endValue. In my example the variable n is the end index which you should set to be the number of channels you intend to randomly create. table.remove() gives the removed element as a return value so by assigning it to different table as a new element effectively moves the element from one table to an another. table.remove() will also shift the indices after the removed element down by one so they will run from 1 to number of elements without gaps. So if you want to add the channel names in numeric order you just pick the first element every time from the channel table. The algorithm I presented should produce the kind of table you are looking for after you add all the missing pieces. If you are new to building tables then I might add that you need to add a line "COMM = {}" before the for-loop to initialize the COMM as a table so you can add new elements.

Use table.remove(). For example: for i = 1, n do randomNumber = math.random(#CHANLIST) finalTable.CHAN = table.remove(CHANLIST, randomNumber) randomNumber = math.random(#FREQUHF ) finalTable.FREQ = table.remove(FREQUHF , randomNumber) ... end With every iteration this removes the used values from the table so they can't be selected again. Obviously this will alter the CHANLIST and the other tables so if you need to preserve them you need to make a copy that you give to the algorithm. Additionally for this algorithm (as presented) to work you need to remove the extra index in CHANLIST so it looks like this: CHANLIST = { [1] = "CHAN 1", [2] = "CHAN 2", [3] = "CHAN 3", } This algorithm can be made to work with the tables you have now but it's just more unnecessary code (if assuming the tables don't really need to be like they are now). My main point was to present the idea how pick random values from table only once. If this isn't enough feel free to ask. Description of table.remove(): http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#pdf-table.remove

When the servers fps drops low everyone starts to warp around. The fps issue is related to amount of tracer rounds on the screen as if you look away from the shooting the fps suddenly jumps back to normal (at least this is how it works on my computer (2500K & GTX570)).

The strange thing is that even if your throttle is not at auto position, the governor is still in control somehow. As OP stated, you can fly with throttle at idle and rotor RPM stays in the proper range for flying. If you raise collective when idling on the ground the RPM will suddenly rise to flying RPM. I haven't tested this actually with the latest version but this is how it was when BS2 moved to DCS World and apparently still is.

IRL the amount of dust kicked up depends on the terrain and weather so there's no "correct" effect for this. There's videos around that show much more dust and also ones with pretty much no dust at all. It would be nice if the effect would scale with the situation though.

Are you talking about the trim wheels at the base of the joystick? They mechanically turn the potentiometers so only way to 'disable' them is to physically immobilize them with tape or glue.

You can use Lua-demo to check syntax or operation of a piece of script. Obviously it won't recognize DCS functions but it's still pretty useful thing. http://www.lua.org/cgi-bin/demo

I'm working on a script to make ground units to go into hiding and as such I'm wondering if it would be possible to have access to the air picture generated by an IADS network to trigger the hiding. Necessary information would be location, speed, bearing, timestamp and some kind of information about the nature of the contact. Actually the air picture would make it easier to build other scripts based on IADS like GCI and such.

Wow!

We have already seen these other games multiple times over the years, there's no need to redo them. ED is doing something new and pushing the genre forward which is time consuming and doesn't happen without problems but that's the way it's with every bit of new technology. We are having some delay with new planes and maps as the core technology that will allow a faster pace of releases is being developed currently. This means also more bugs with core functionality. ED is working to deliver exactly what we want but it will take some time and bug smashing.

Apaches seemed to do just fine against vehicle based and radar guided AD systems in OIF as the Apache would avoid or detect and kill those assets before they could see the Apache. Ambushes using MANPADS and/or lots of infantry with heavy machine guns on the other hand were a different story. Before OIF one of the Longbow Apaches missions was SEAD which is reflected by its mission equipment (AN/APR-48A Radar Frequency Interferometer). 2007 doctrinal manual uses term J-SEAD ie. Apaches aren't meant to kill AD systems alone but together with fixed wing SEAD. Particularly the high flying FW SEAD platform will find the targets and assign choppers to kill the ones that can be killed more easily with a chopper. Ka-50 on the other hand has no equipment meant for hunting down proper AD systems while it does have the NOE flying advantage that makes the helicopter great for some specific SEAD missions. Doing some kind of SEAD with Ka-50 is theoretically possible but in real life only a suicidal maniac would attempt it.

Anyone else remembered the feeling of cold starting the Hog for the first time?

Those designs look no more funky than the A-10 initial concepts except for the floatplane(??) design.

Strategy games are best played as strategy games instead of flight or tank simulators. Having horribly abstracted world is a serious immersion killer at least for me. I'd prefer fever intelligently behaving units than lots of make believe crap. What's the fun in plinking enemy units that are neatly lined up and merely try to shoot back if they happen to see you? What I'd like to see is them acting intelligently to keep you from killing them (hiding and/or calling for help) and shooting back in a realistic manner (human like spotting and aiming ability, cooperative tactics) or maybe even trying to ambush the player.