Bushmanni

First, it's great to see that now there's an option for choosing if you want to have the hull or the turret not moving in the hull-turret relation indicator. The problem is, if the turret and hull are not aligned at mission start, the indicator will have a permanent misalignment. In the track I choose a tank that is facing different direction than the others in the group and when I take control of it, the indicator is messed up. indicator_problem.trk

Yes, happened to me also. Fps reduced to 3-7 and effectively forcing me to quit the server.

I had been flying some time with an A-10 in an open server when couple of new guys chose Su-25T:s. When they fired their gunpods, in my client side the pods never stopped firing. Result was <10fps when looking at their direction for the rest of the session. The problem was obviously only on my side as the gunfire didn't do any damage to anything and the pilot flew like there's nothing weird happening. Track is more than 1hr long before this happened and it was MP so no chance that I could try to reproduce it. But this problem effectively forced me to quit the server. Sorry, wrong forum. Moderator, please delete.

I have tried killing an Abrams with Ka-50 30mm and I was able to kill it with about 70 rounds when shooting it's rear from about 20m distance. I ran out of ammo when shooting the front armor. edit: I used AP for this test. I wasn't able to kill the tank from any direction with HE. This test was done with some earlier version about year ago.

Tanks have a health bar but the damage taken depends on where the tank is hit ie. tank gets more damage from rear hit compared to if the same weapon was fired from the same distance and would have hit the front. I think there's some more to damage calculations as I haven't yet seen a tank being taken out by .50 cal machineguns. Don't know if it would be possible though.

TV's tend to have more input lag than dedicated computer screens but you can find TV's that don't have problems with it. The thing is that it's not always easy to find out how much input lag a certain tv has. I have Samsung 46" LED 3D TV and couldn't play flight sims without it. Input lag in 3D is horrendous but in PC/DVI mode it's mostly unnoticeable and slight annoyance only in reaction time based fps games. You can't see the lag but with experience you can "feel" it. I still enjoy playing fps games with it and can kick butt despite the minor lag. With flight sims there's really no difference other than seeing targets better and enjoying the experience a lot more than with a small "proper" computer display. The picture quality after adjusting picture settings in my TV is better than in cheap monitors.

I would hope the mission designers would pick a system that suits the needs of the mission and not just stick to some "this is how it must be done" kind of system. In a small mission I would prefer having everything set up so that you don't need to tune radios at all except maybe for the tanker if it's MP mission as there's just no need to listen in when someone is trying to get filled up. If the frequencies get crowded, then I'd like to have more frequencies used to de-clutter the airwaves. The basic principle would be to maximize information available to player without overloading him and minimize the need to tune radios. Make it as easy and efficient as possible. The system Jona described sounds sound to me for a typical mission.

You can eliminate the built in dead zone of the Shkval by using custom curve for axis and using 5 as the first value. Any slight movement of the hat will then make the value jump over the deadzone giving nice fine control near the center position. I have a shallow slope most of the way and then suddenly turning into a very steep one near the limits to give a fast slew ability if I push the hat all the way. My custom curve for Shkval axis is like this: 5 6 8 10 12 16 22 30 41 60 100. 5-30 are values useful for aiming, higher than that is only useful for fast slewing to quickly change the rough direction of the camera.

Putting throttle and RPM to lowest setting and doing a 300kts dive for about 15-20 seconds will cool the engine, or at least the oil, very quickly but I wonder if this is actually enough or will the reading just drop temporarily? I had mysterious engine seizures a lot when doing automatic ramp starts. I could lose engine in a dogfight (no damage to the plane from gunfire) sometimes only after 5 minutes. With airstart I only got one engine stoppage because of running out of fuel in the selected tank but otherwise was able to keep flying normally and even with using WEP for 10-15 minutes. Is there some engine control the autostart doesn't set properly that you are supposed to do on your own?

+1

I edited my post regarding using "info" as there was slight error. You need to press "info" when the cursor is touching a marker to get more info about it, just moving it close enough doesn't do like I erroneously had stated previously.

Well, I really hope we don't need to do this anymore with future updates. Imagine having 10 aircrafts (or vehicles) and losing all the configs for them with update and then manually re-applying your control maps again. This is something ED needs to consider as it's potentially a very nasty problem for many in the future.

While I understand the need to ditch old controller config files when new features require update to the file structure most of the information content still stays the same, like which joystick button does what. It's pita to redo all the configs for all the aircraft always when a update happens. While I hope there would be less of this with new auto update I still suspect the config files need to be updated just as they have been previously. With more aircrafts coming it's becoming unfeasible to redo all the configs manually and as such there needs to be automatic system for translating and transferring the old config files to the new system. Otherwise we are soon in a situation where it's completely impractical to do any configuration within the game as it's already testing nerves.

Just like with any other waypoints. I put the letter of the markpoint on the scratchpad and press the add waypoint button on the CDU and there it goes.

The Ka-50 fuselage (like pretty much any helicopter) has it's aerodynamic center forward of the rotor but in forward flight the tail will keep the nose pointing forward. If you fly with high enough sideslip you will stall the tail and the nose will start to turn away from the direction you are moving. If you lose the tail you have a chopper that likes to fly backwards in any situation.

In real life there's plenty of situations where you would need polarity switching but I can't figure any where it would be useful in DCS. If a tank is hiding in a shadowy place and then drives out of the shadow it's going to be most likely cooler than the ground until it warms up and hence you would need to switch polarity to get a lock on it. In DCS this isn't modeled but the tank is always hotter than the ground. There's also no camouflage or things like that that could necessitate polarity switching or prevent getting a lock altogether. I don't know what kind of algorithm is actually used in real life for auto image tracking, but it certainly isn't proper pattern recognition. Most likely it's simple edge detection. Here's how edge detections works. You scan a line of pixels in an image and calculate the rate of change in luminance (or some other variable that works). If the rate of change is higher than a preset threshold you declare there to be an edge. Edge detection can be two way or one way, ie. it only detects transitions from black to white or white to black or both at the same time. If you detect edges in both ways you get a signal for both upper and lower or left and right edges so you can't distinguish them. When you you detect only in one way you get only one edge. If do this for up, down, left and right directions (four times total) you get a bunch of pixels for every edge. You can calculate how much the pixels in one group of edge pixels are spread around and if they are spread less than a preset amount you can decide that they represent an edge in a image and their outwardly weighted average position is the position of the edge. This way you get a screen position for all four edges of a bounding box surrounding the target. If the preset sensitivities for image edge detection and edge pixel group spread are too high the calculated target position will jump around the screen too much because of noise and if the presets are too insensitive the algorithm will require more contrast to get a lock. Because of the way the algorithm works you need to tell it a rough position for where it should be looking for the edge hence you have the tracking gate size controls for IAT so it will pick the correct edge from the many there likely are in the image. And because it will detect edges in only one way you will need the polarity switch to lock targets that have reversed polarity. The image edge detection is computationally easy to do and runs relatively fast, especially if the processed image has relatively low number of pixels. Reducing resolution and cropping the to be processed image to contain only the area where the edge needs to be found you can have pretty small images to be processed. The question is if this algorithm can be tweaked fast enough to handle multiple pods and missiles tracking targets at the same time and leaving enough resources for the rest of the sim to run. With multiple cores I'd think it shouldn't be too optimistic. Maybe the GPU could be used for this also. But of course there's also other things to use these cores for so it's more of a design question.

I do this triangulation by flying towards the SAM radar and using TGP to create a markpoint directly ahead of me far away by boresighting TGP and then slewing down or up to just close enough of horizon to get some kind of range reading. The exact routine is to line up to the radar, create a overhead markpoint and one with TGP, turn left or right 90-135 degrees depending how close you think you are to the radar and get some distance from the radar and previous markpoint then turn towards the radar again and create the second set of markpoints. This way I can get the markpoints created very fast and with minimal heads down work with CDU. You can use markpoints for flight plan so it's very quick job to get it done.

Isn't K-14 collimated which means the angular size will always be the same no matter what your head position is?

You can also use the real A-10A flight manual as the speeds are the same for C model. There should be a link in the manuals and documents thread.

Mils are used for all kinds of gunnery because they are very handy for that because they are approximately 1/1000th of 2 * pi ie. full circle is 6000-6400 units depending on the mil system used (different versions used in different countries). This means it's very easy to do calculations with objects distance, angular size and physical size. If you know two you can easily calculate the third. An object which angular size is one mil is 1000 * physical size amount of distance away from observer, ie. 1 meter wide object would be 1000m away. With mils it's possible to do these calculations quickly without calculator and possibly in the head with some practice as there's very easily comprehended relation between angular and physical size and distance.

There's no overheat warning for laser, or any other temperature measurement system for it. You just wait for the cooling cycles and thats it. Laser fires only when you release the uncage Shkval or "O" button so no fear of overheating the laser by continuously slaving Shkval to HMS.

Cruise missile coming in at 900km/h or even supersonic is quite different target compared to A-10 at 500km/h. You will also need to blow up the missile to small enough pieces to not get damaged by the debris of the missile. All it takes to kill A-10 is cut his wing or kill the engines which doesn't need that much hits. Ka-50 and Apache are both pretty much similarly easy to kill with 30mm in DCS in my experiments. Couple hits to cockpit or tailboom and they are done. Center fuselage is bit tougher as there's more material to chop off and you can kill both engines easily only from above behind. The biggest problem is like said that the AI is super good shooter. He's even better than the lead calculating systems in Ka-50. The weapons computer in Ka-50 doesn't consider closing velocity if the target is coming straight at you at the same altitude but AI gunner can still take this into account. The super good AI can also shoot WW2 plane's guns as accurately as a modern radar equipped fighter could. My experience is that it's very hard to judge helicopters velocity vector unaided if it's doing anything else but flying level and straight. Other thing is that pilot in Ka-50 has very poor visibility up and would most likely lose sight of the fixed wing attacker if he flew above him or at least would have to work very hard to keep him padlocked. Most likely the Ka-50 pilot wouldn't know when the aircraft dives. Some time ago I tried dogfighting with Ka-50 against A-10s and P-51s online and the Ka-50 was pretty much the superior machine to my surprise. While you couldn't catch anyone it was relatively easy to kill anyone who tried to shoot at you. You could always force a head on engagement as you could turn on dime (literally :lol:) and do that very quickly and would most likely win as you can aim with HMS and correct your aim very fast and hence get a hit on enemy from longer range. The fixed wing opponents mostly missed unless they got to fire from very close but basically nobody managed to get close enough from front sector before getting killed or having to turn away to dodge the shells. If anyone tried to come down from high you could make a properly timed turn and spoil the aim and he wouldn't have time to correct before having to pull up. All this was possible though only because of labels as you can't see anyone coming down from high or behind otherwise.

Not Batumi bridge but series of more interesting ones. (bridges at 4:10) There's three bridges close together in the center of Sochi along a river that runs through the city. Fly under all them at one go with 300+ kts starting speed. The middle one must be flown through canted as wings won't fit through otherwise. The middle one is also interesting in other ways.

Sure, but I use the centered HMS reticle mod so it won't play back correctly without it. Ka-50 vs. 4x Apache.trk

While it's true that you need to learn to use TIR and get used to it it's also very crucial to build your own profile that works for you. Good profile can make a difference like between day and night.