rossmum

It's on the left side rail, by the signal flares. If the SPO-2 isn't enabled in the mission (via ME settings), the control panel won't appear. It's only present in missions where the maker has enabled the system.

The new textures were exported through a newer version of the DDS plugin, which isn't backwards compatible (the reasons why are beyond me). If you have an older version of the plugin, you won't be able to open them properly, but if you save in the older format it still works fine ingame. You might need to either update the plugin or, if that's not an option, find a friend who has the new version and annoy them into converting them back to a format you can edit (like I had to). I should still have the copies I had sent to me kicking around, I'll send you them and leave this post here for anyone else who might be encountering the same issue, so they have some idea what might be going on.

It's ASP_1001 through 1003. The file structure changed when the ASP was remodelled.

Yep - slots will still be open but there are no planes left to spawn in. Try another type, or maybe another airfield (it's possible for one airfield to run out of a type while another still has some left).

Aside from the need to kill DCS, that sounds like what happens when all F-5 airframes are used up - but DCS doesn't usually lock up when that happens and you should be able to exit the server normally.

It'll be a lot more powerful but not quite as good as it is off a MiG - remember, the R-60 barely has any reach down on the deck as it is, and now you're firing it from a platform moving 300km/h or slower instead of 800+. The helicopter is also physically much larger and less agile. I think it'll be fine, probably mostly used for self-defence/escorting transports rather than hunting fighters. I am still not real happy about the Mistral as there's very little counter to them besides flying high, but ultimately the missiles have similar low lethality to the Stinger so there's not much point arguing one way or the other at this point. If the Mistral stays in, the 24 should be very good at dealing with them - much better than trying to hit a passing fighter before it leaves your engagement range. As things stand, it probably won't have them for a while anyway. Re: M60s - no, they're not controllable, unfortunately. M60A3 vs T-55 would be a much better matchup than M1A2 vs T-72B mod. 1985, but it is what it is.

Whatever was causing performance issues in Two Towns, it affects my new PC even worse. It gets worse as the mission progresses and only takes effect when looking directly towards the blue town. I can't figure it out, but there has to be something to it as other people were experiencing it as well and it only happens when looking that that spot, late in the mission. Like the smoke layers just keep spawning on top of each other or something. Brought me from >80FPS to about 15, then back up as soon as I looked away.

Yep, what Northstar said. I'd rather have historically relevant variants than a MiG-21 that's doing its best to be a budget F-16 - you still won't match the newer jets in any respect, but there are also virtually zero scenarios where a LanceR/Bison would fit. They would also take much longer to develop due to complex avionics. Personally I'd like an F-13, PF, or PFM (or some combination thereof).

Red can't spawn enough Mi-8s on Behind Enemy Lines, last I heard only 2 spawned in before running out. Server's been up for ages so maybe it's getting hinky from not being restarted?

The engines are quite close together and also individually quite weak. You will get asymmetric thrust effects, but they're much more subtle than most aircraft. The F-5 is probably the closest comparison - it's in a similar boat.

Went to take some screens from a trackfile, Search & Destroy the other day - no red tanks visible at any objective, only air defence, from mission start. Looks like none of our tanks spawned in at all, so blue started with 2 objectives held and then 2 neutral to capture. I confirmed it with Tacview as well. Our helicopter guys didn't notice and so spent the rest of their time slinging EWRs and more SAMs. Not sure if it was a weird one-off or something more persistent - mission worked fine last time I played it, but it certainly answered the question of how we lost the mission so quickly.

L-39 can indeed get the R-60M, but not R-60. It doesn't have it in some missions due to the possibility of 21s yoinking the missiles for themselves - not that they should need to. As far as the Harrier goes, it's worth keeping an eye on its development as Razbam have been showing off a work-in-progress hotspot mode, which projects markers onto any heat signature spotted within the HUD's FoV (I think it's an extension of the NAVFLIR system, but don't quote me on that, I'm more a Sea Harrier kinda guy). It's already fairly powerful as a strike aircraft, but once that feature makes it into the live version of game it might be time to initiate an early retirement... just not sure what we'd replace it with. More A-10As? Also, is there any chance we could bump up the amount of R-3Rs a little? It's the 21's signature weapon and only as good as its target allows it to be - maybe double the number of them, and dial back the R-60s a little. Would be interesting to see MiGs reverting back to R-3R/R-13M1 as missions draw to a close, or stop taking six of the little fellas per sortie only to waste all of them or get shot down without firing.

I don't mean to come off the wrong way, but if you're going to demand sources of other people, "seems" is not a word that you want to be using to describe what you think the problem is, and isn't likely to motivate any action from the devs unless you can produce actual empirical evidence. Subjective "feeling" can be useful to describe things but it isn't a good basis for making adjustments to a simulator - engineering documents are. In any case, the 19 is a very light aircraft with a good TWR (actually stunningly good, for its time - it's about on par with the MiG-23's later variants and Mirage 2000 at full fuel and combat loaded). It's fast to build speed but it runs into a wall around 1,200km/h IAS, and won't get much above M1.3 even in a flat out sprint at high altitude. The Phantom, on the other hand, has a much higher top speed.

This occurs with old liveries that have not been updated to match the new external model. The only fix is to get the creator of the livery to update it to the new template - the textures are mapped differently, which is why this happens. A few of the old official liveries are broken at the moment, but as far as I know at least some will be replaced by updated versions in the near future.

We had the same problem on red (again) - someone neither on SRS nor reading/responding to chat, moving units around. This would normally be an annoyance, but he repeatedly moved our air defence away from airfields, and at one point we lost Sukhumi for a good 15 or so minutes because every single unit was moved off of it so it flipped to neutral. Between this happening during crowded sessions, and the now repeated incidents where players not on comms take control of air defence and begin teamkilling with it, I'm honestly starting to wish we had a whitelist for CA slots. It's getting ridiculous. I don't have the guy's name but I know some of the other guys likely do, especially our long-suffering tac commander who had to clean up this mess all while trying to GCI as well. Regarding lives - twice now I've joined to find blue outnumbered near 2:1 because they've somehow run themselves out of F-5s with hours left to run in the mission. Maybe I'm barking up an impossible tree here - I couldn't script my way out of a paper bag - but maybe adjusting the airframe limits to be much lower, but replenished on a timer, might help prevent this. It kills the server when it happens and it causes a lot of general headaches, both for people connecting to find no modules they own are flyable, and for people who have to explain the limits every time to stop people screwing around or disconnecting midair. Maybe 20 21s/F-5s total per team, replenishing every 2-3 hours - I feel like that would be a huge improvement to the longer missions in particular, so one side doesn't get run out of planes right away while the other then fails to complete the objectives to finish the mission, deadlocking the server. 29s/14s could stick to existing limits with no replenishment, maybe. Also: a clarification on the rules might be in order ingame. I had a pair of ACG guys flip out, call me all sorts of things, then disconnect without waiting for a reponse because I strafed them on a frontline airfield in Battle for Sukhumi, because they were taking so long to get off the ground we decided to go look for things to shoot up. I know it says "main airfields" in the rules, but I suspect some people interpret that to mean "any airfields" and think it's some kind of muh e-honour anti-vulch rule or something.

Once you lock the target it transitions from B-scope (which those markings are for, they are indeed range markings along the Y axis and are indeed kilometres) to C-scope (?) with ranging data - it's like the Hornet's AZ/EL page. Putting the target directly in that little crosshair like you've done means it should be smack bang in the middle of the pipper. From memory, the X axis markings are kilometres offset at approx. 15km range - but I could be wrong, I need to double check. They're not degrees because the radar scan zone is about +/-30 in azimuth. In search mode, with the target not locked, you should see that contact just below the '10' marker.

D E F E N D B E S L A N

I know moving goalposts is a favourite pastime of yours, but the discussion was whether it was possible to load 8 missiles, not 6. Saying it can't carry "up to 8" doesn't exclude it from being able to carry 6, it means it can't carry 8 - unless you use both types of R-60 - and we can't on this server as the M is restricted. If you had made this distinction, then sure - but you didn't, probably because it would undermine the point you're trying to make, which would be too inconvenient. At no point has anyone said it's not possible to load 6 R-60s, it's a common loadout. I'm not sure why you brought this up other than as a strawman. The gotcha attempts are cute, though.

At risk of going further off-topic - no. The difference isn't just wiring in the pylons, or stores separation issues, like most DCS fantasy loadouts. The difference is an entirely different radar, operating on different principles. The RP-21 supports the Grom, the RP-22 physically cannot by means of its most basic operating principles - and in any case the ability to 'lock' the beam to a fixed point shouldn't really be a thing, either. The guidance system the weapon requires to function is not present on the aircraft, and the aircraft is not wired to carry and release the weapon. In any case, the Grom was not an especially successful or well-liked weapon, and that's likely why there wasn't a serious effort to adapt either it to the new RP-22, or the RP-22 to it. To bring things back to the topic a little - given the fictional nature of the campaign and various other concessions, I'm not too worried about the Grom being present, to be honest - we also have an (upgraded) Bradley three years before its initial entry to service, and M1A2s two years before the IPM1 began rolling out (M1A2 coming much later), Strykers, and T72B3s complete with RPG cages and Relikt ERA packages. I suspect a few of these are gameplay concessions because of our relatively limited roster of ground vehicles, but the point is, the Grom is probably less immersion-shattering than 2016-model tanks rolling around. Just chalk it up to fiction - if the campaign was trying to be totally true to real events or correct procedures, etc., then I'd be more inclined to agree.

Having those functions in general connected to a separate game mode would be nice, especially as many server admins either don't own the module or simply don't know which features to enable or block.

Fingers crossed that the ASPJ and its track-breaking function will usher in a new age of actually functional ECM in the game. It'd really be nice to have a reason for, say, two MiGs in an offensive sweep of four to be carrying jammers for mutual protection, or to help suppress Hawk sites.

It cannot. It can carry 4 R-60 and 4 R-60M. Whether or not this is realistic, I've seen it done twice ever - and that was because R-60Ms were available. With the current weapon restrictions, there is no way, no how you can carry 8 missiles. The loadout menu will allow you to select them, but the ground crew will only load 4 missiles. It's possible this has changed since I last tested it offline, but I doubt it - I certainly have not seen it done with 60s only, and the last time I saw it done with 60/60M mix was a little over a year ago. (excuse the chain posting, I've just moved and have to play catch-up here) The big problem here becomes that when one team is mostly composed of players from a different timezone (the classic DDCS problem) or one team loses morale and throws in the towel, you then get a horrible imbalance which nobody can correct, because they're already faction locked. There will also be people who, if you can limit the ratio between teams, will simply leave if their preferred team is already full. On the upside, though, there's a lot less potential for people abusing CA slots to spot units or use SAMs to grief people - which has been happening a surprising amount over the past two or three months.

Yeah! Except the bit where some of us have been saying we would prefer the Ka-50 and Su-25T gone for quite a long time now. Smart weapons turn the ground game into essentially the same thing it is on other servers for red, and force blue to rely almost entirely on the Maverick because they don't have a comparable platform (the Gazelle is hardly an equal to anything packing Vikhrs). But yeah! If you ignore that tiny little detail, you're totally right. Lose the victim complex, it's not a good look. "Hate speech coming in" because you want it to - or you wouldn't put that precise invitation there.

Make sure you're contacting the right EWR. Callsign 1 will only reply to MiG-19s and 21s. Callsign 15 is there to talk to MiG-15s and won't respond to anything else. The MiG-15 operates on a completely different frequency band to anything else on red, so the second EWR is necessary for anyone flying it, but also means that sometimes bogey dope callouts (especially using the shortcut) go to the wrong station. A lot of people never realise they're calling a station that physically cannot hear them. Stay above 5,000m when you suspect you're near an Avenger. Otherwise, you're already doing all you can. Strikes should be made from >5000m slant range, so naturally they're going to be imprecise but it's just what you have to deal with. S-24s still usually find their mark from a safe range, at least. The Stinger is impact-fuzed, no idea why, but that's also something you have going for you - it has to hit you directly to detonate, and quite often they'll sail by harmlessly or detonate in your burner plume. They're very hit or miss weapons, you either see 4 or 5 of them come right at you but take no damage, or one swats you right away. The radar can be turned off if the CA guy knows what they're doing. Take this with a grain of salt as I haven't put the time towards empirical testing yet, but it feels like Strelas are more easily duped by fares (at least, slightly). On the other hand, they tend to hit quite hard and don't need to actually physically hit you to activate the fuze like a Stinger does. Both are scary, but I'm a lot more concerned about Avengers than Strelas, personally (and not just because I mostly fly red). I would be absolutely behind this... if anything blue had could fire earlier (like, 9D/E) Sidewinders. If you take away the R-60 you then just flip the advantage the other way, because the AIM-9P is a vastly superior missile to the R-13M1 and the ability for the MiG to carry four is more of an idiot trap than an advantage. The R-60 definitely makes shots other missiles won't, and sticks to a target quite well through manoeuvres, but you're paying for it with a much shorter range and small warhead, as well as bad flare rejection. I also don't really think the average blue player will benefit much when the F-5's signature move is to dump both missiles at under half their minimum range, panic, and then complain about the 9P being garbage only to ask "what's uncage?" when someone asks them if they did it or not. The setup we have now isn't so much skewed towards the MiG as skewed towards people who know how missiles work, IMO. F-5s who launch at the proper range, with uncage, will have no trouble deleting MiGs at ranges where the R-60 won't cut it. They just need to make sure they keep that little bit of buffer distance between them, so their weapons are still effective but the R-60 isn't. Getting into a low-speed 1 circle fight with a 21 is a really stupid idea, but that doesn't stop a lot of them from doing it anyway. As it is, I sit in GCI and watch some MiGs dump 4, 5, even 6 missiles at a single fleeing target who is clearly out of range. A few weeks ago I spotted one absolute hero launching his entire supply of R-60s from more than 10 kilometres away. New players will slowly learn with experience like we all did, or they'll fall into the second category: you can't fix stupid. The key is to try and build a mental picture of where the 14s are, and then use that to stay away from their nose and ideally out of their radar's view. Most of them tend to fly quite high and try to crap down Sparrows from the heavens, so you can use that against them and terrain mask off to one flank, then use the contrail as a visual reference not just for position, but where they can and can't see. If the 14 spots you over open terrain, you're going to have a bad day - but the AWG-9 is pretty easily notched, especially by a small target like the 21, so just hang a hard turn perpendicular to their radar beam and dump altitude. As long as you're below them and do that, they will almost always drop lock and their Sparrows will go stupid. For longer shots, where that may not be as much of an option, remember that the Sparrow only has a limited manoeuvring potential before its fins lock up and take advantage of that. The 14 is far superior in any kind of turn fight, so your best bet is to approach from a blind spot (at least, what passes for one, with Jester) or hope they get distracted by something. Pairing up with another MiG is a huge benefit against a Tomcat and will usually result in one of you getting the kill. E - As for the AH-64D - it's going to have capabilities that couldn't even be dreamed of in the 1970s/80s, even more so than the Ka-50, and knowing ED you will not be able to lock those features out to at least try and simulate an A (even though you can't anyway, just from the jump from analogue to digital interfaces). Razbam remain the only dev I can think of who seem really keen on giving mission makers the tools to adjust an aircraft's capabilities to fit different time periods or scenarios, ED show no interest at all. Personally I don't think either the Apache or Ka-50 should be in, or the Kiowa (again - analogue to digital is a quantum leap, there is no 'well it's close enough' when dealing with that), but then we're left with the situation of red having flying artillery while blue only have a light scout with a couple of HOTs. I really, really, really wish it'd been an AH-1S or 1P. Hell, even some of the A-10's weapons are a bit sketchy, the TV displays are far clearer and easier to work with ingame than the actual things were in the old days, and the 25T was built in single-digit numbers and only employed in limited conflicts years after the USSR collapsed. I know it'll make air to ground a lot more challenging, and probably frustrate a lot of people, but honestly it would be a godsend to have a ground game that is in step with the air game - people having to work together, be talked onto targets, and employ less sophisticated weapons effectively to get things done. Currently the air game plays like a mid 1980s confrontation between second rate powers while the ground game plays pretty much like any other server, just without the added headache of JDAMs and JSOWs. On that note, the M60 needs to be player-controllable and I honestly don't know why it isn't... ED strikes again. Controllable T-55, a perfect fit for our time period and setup, but no M60 to match it, so we're left with T-72Bs from the mid 80s fighting M1A2s from the 90s.

It depends on operator and/or where the aircraft was last overhauled. The cockpits would be repainted with whatever colour was on hand and close enough usually - everything between a cornflower blue and a dark teal. The most common colours were either teal, or a blue-tinged teal. Some aircraft had a little of column A, a little of column B due to replacement of parts or partial refurbs: