rossmum

Being able to "lock" the fixed beam to a point on the ground (or anything else) is not a realistic feature and has kind of carried over from the module's origins. In real life, you have to hold the reticle on the target and make whatever corrections necessary to the aircraft's attitude to maintain that point of aim. The missile will go where your nose goes, that's why it's called a 'fixed beam' and why the weapon was neither popular nor widely used (and in our case, we were given a 'what if' scenario because the bis' radar was incompatible with it). As far as I'm aware the realistic ASP feature only prevents the gyro pipper from magically slaving to IR missile seekers or locked radar targets.

It's perfectly safe. Highly unlikely you're going to have issues with malware on github unless you download something that should be setting off warning bells anyway.

Any progress here? I've come across examples of this issue in videos nearly 2 years old, IMO it's the biggest problem the module has currently and I'd like to see it fixed so I can go back to enjoying it rather than swearing at it when I'm on the other team...

I asked Dolphin about this a while ago, and he gave the impression that it's how the real thing behaves - that trimming hands-off is exceptionally difficult and you're almost always maintaining a little pressure on the stick. I haven't handled a real 21, but I had similar impressions from aircraft I have flown with electric trim systems, so it wouldn't surprise me.

That's an enormous amount of work (whole second cockpit, MP sync between controls, new external model with whole new nose section, adjustments to fuel load, different systems, different engine, new FM) for an aircraft that is only 'combat capable' in the vaguest sense. I'd rather an F-13, PF, PFM, or even MF. Any of the single seaters would be more relevant, more useful, and about the same amount of work (possibly less). A 21UM AI or static object would be nice for missionmakers, though, as Soviet fighter regiments always had some trainers on strength.

Presumably because then the MiG-21s would use them all up, four at a time. The R-3S modification for the 19P also came quite late and wasn't all that common, and we don't have a PM to lob RS-2U beam riders at things.

As hilarious as the I-16 is, don't forget - you can add 109s as stand-ins for Czech Avia S-99s on red. A lot of European future NATO nations also still flew Spit IXs at the time. Looking forwards to trying out the new mission when I get home. If only we had three factions as an option in DCS, there was also a particularly interesting engagement in the late 40s where RAF Spit 22s operating from Ramat David got bombed by Egyptian Spit IXs which also ended up tussling with Israeli Spit IXs...

For Fight Island specifically it's a good move. You need a lot of things moving on that mission and unless someone very dedicated hops into the commander slot, the mission tends to turn into a bit of a mess as some units are moved up and others are left way back at the far end of the island.

I don't have Normandy but see the flashes constantly on Caucasus, PG, and Syria with jets.

There are issues with wheel collision and the suspension at the moment (wheels are clipping through the ground and the suspension is bottoming out very easily). Taxi slowly and take turns with care until it's fixed, that's about the best you can do until then. Heavier loadouts will be worse than others, so bear it in mind when selecting them.

Doing so would limit choices severely depending what missionmakers set for available aircraft, I'd rather the opposite to be honest. Enabled nations for liveries can be adjusted in the description.lua file of each livery, and by deleting the entries other than the one you want, it'll restrict it to that particular nation. You could also rename the livery to include the name of the country at the start so they're easier to find in the list.

The 14 replaced the Mirage because the Mirage's fly-by-wire is absolute god tier and allows it to fly circles around every other aircraft on the server, without even trying. In terms of armament it's a pretty decent counterpart to the 29, but the FBW is just too good. The 29 can perform some reasonably similar feats but requires perfect airmanship to do it (and a very well dialled-in rudder axis), and none of the other aircraft can really follow what the Mirage can do, not even the 21. The M2K when it was on the server was easy mode, even restricted to Magics only and could still fight comfortably when down to guns. The only real threat was if you got smacked by an unexpected head-on R-3R or if a MiG got very lucky with an R-60. We really need the 23 and F1

No gsync/freesync here either, clearing fxo/metashaders doesn't affect it, nothing - like I said, I've only ever seen this happen when something explodes. The explosion effects seem to be triggering it, particularly when an aircraft is destroyed (haven't tested with ground units). I'm running a 1050Ti, but I'm still on reasonably old drivers (436.38) as I primarily fly the MiG-21bis and heard that newer drives cause unplayably low framerate. For what it's worth, people I know on up-to-date drivers experience these same flashes. I don't remember when they first appeared ingame, but I think it was somewhere around 3-6 months ago. Likewise, I've also noticed some fairly severe screen tearing/artefacting when clouds are present - particularly on missions with a total overcast, rapid camera movements in cockpit (with TrackIR in my case) cause black flashes and ghosting/tearing of parts of the cockpit. Haven't noticed this second issue with clear weather so much - still saw some mild tearing in some modules, but no black flashes. This second issue has been present for only 2-4 months, at least that I've noticed.

...That's not really how this works. Many bugs enter the game specifically because something that a module relies on is changed either within the core game code, or from an external source (e.g. how a particular display driver handles something). "Don't touch it again" is a good way to ensure something breaks again in the future, and why all modules require periodic adjustments and fixes. Nobody is going out and breaking the radar just for funsies, the radar specifically broke because something changed in the way a particular display driver interacted with DCS.

They have less in total, but that doesn't really count for much if one or two 14s is capable of killing multiple aircraft before ever being brought down itself. I think you are missing my point here somewhat: if we assume a skilled pilot, who only takes good shots and the missiles track correctly, and the Tomcat doesn't immediately dump a massive cloud of chaff and flares (which the R-27 will dive for immediately) - then each MiG-29 has two shots to fire, at medium range. The R-27 isn't going to perform once merged. The F-14 has 8 missiles, all of them all-aspect, the AIM-7M and AIM-9L are quite CM resistant, and it also has a massive reserve of CMs and its own magical missile approach warning system (in the form of Jester). Even if you get an IR shot away at the F-14, Jester will call a launch and from there it costs the F-14 nothing to just dump 10-15 flares and watch the missile sail harmlessly by. Every time I have found myself in an offensive rear-aspect position recently with the MiG-21, the second the R-60 leaves the rail, out comes a flare dump (even if the shot was taken from his blindspot or I know for a fact he was busy watching someone in the opposite direction to me) and the missile is trashed. The R-3R was the best way of dealing with them but until the radar fix is patched in, it's not viable at the kinds of altitudes most fights happen on the server. It's easy to say it's a player problem, but a) it's not, and b) even if it was, that still doesn't account for the situation that it's going to cause. You could put the best players around in the MiG-29s, they're still going to be very limited in what they can do without a GCI, a wingman, or both - and that's not an option during low population hours. I don't think there's really a good solution with the toys we currently have to play with, but limiting when the slots unlock helps. Like I said, against multiple players who are coordinating, the F-14s are surprisingly vulnerable and so far it seems the MiG-21s have had the greater success in killing them. On the other hand, when there are only a few people on the server or when blue outnumbers red by a significant margin, they become an absolute nightmare that you can do virtually nothing about. I'd imagine blue players have similar experiences with MiG-29s in some other missions, although less severe, as it lacks the quasi-MAWS and the R-60 forces it to get well within retaliation range after both R-27s are spent.

E - whoops. Disregard this post

Still not a fan of the way the missiles are set up in S&D. It's not so bad when the server is populated or blue are outnumbered, but during low pop hours usually one or both F-14s are taken. That's 8 all aspect missiles each against 2 per 29 and none for any of the 21s (the radar is currently INOP below about 5km, hopefully fixed next patch - so the R-3R is a deadweight any time the target dives). Due to the mission cycle, the server is often empty or slowly beginning to populate during S&D, and having one or two MiGs fighting a 14/F-5 pair or god forbid, 2 F-14s at once, is not especially fun. Can't get any ground attack or slinging done without getting jumped, and it's exceptionally hard even for a pair of MiGs working together to survive, let alone mount effective CAP. For the past ~2-3 weeks, I've been joining into one or two 14s flying a holding pattern just outside of the FARP's air defence coverage and picking off anything that moves. I still think this mission should be given an exemption from rear-aspect restrictions (and only this mission) purely based on how silly it is to fly a 29 with two mid range missiles only. If ED ever give us base model R-60s for it, it should be less of an issue (although the Tomcat still has 8, just by virtue of having no rear-aspect missiles available to it either). The Su-25s also totally lack defensive missiles and so require an escort to survive, which then means less available fighters to deal with the Tomcat-enforced no-fly zone. This brings me to the second point: a single F-14, unless ganged up on by 2-3 aircraft while alone, can pretty much lock down the server until the teams fill up and red begins coordinating larger sweeps. IMO the 14/29 slots should be locked until a minimum number of players is reached, and honestly the second 14 slot should only unlock once the server is very near full. It's been a long time since I had a chance to play the mission on a full server but I recall it being reasonable. It really isn't during low pop hours and it's pretty much wholely and solely because of the F-14s. On missions where red were able to dedicate 2-4 MiGs to dealing with the Tomcats, and particularly with less experienced players flying said Tomcats, they performed surprisingly poorly; the opposite is true any time population is low.

I would map brakes to a paddle/lever if you have one, don't use a toebrake axis - firstly because that's how the real aircraft is set up, but also I've had friends run into a situation where they've accidentally opened the brake valve just enough to drain it over the course of a flight. With brakes mapped to the paddle, you should really never even come close to running into a low air situation unless you forget to return the gear lever to neutral. If you do realise your air pressure is gone, the emergency system is independent. Pull the handle on the instrument panel to actuate the emergency brakes but be aware, you still won't have a chute.

This issue seems to have some relation to explosions - I see it almost every five minutes playing in my usual PvP haunts, and have seen it directly coincide with other aircraft being destroyed, but saw it only once (around the same time someone crashed) while on Aerobatics Online earlier. Have not seen it in missions with no combat. I've heard other people arrive at the same conclusion too.

Regarding LotATC - there are apparently ways to restrict it to GCI slots only, I'm told? Might be worth looking into. Even if there isn't, to be honest, I feel like people being able to run it on a second screen isn't that big of a deal. Consider that we don't have enough GCI slots (let alone actual GCIs) to perform the real practice of one controller per element, plus the delay and lack of more specific info (type, player ID, etc.) - I don't think it'd have a particularly negative impact, and human GCIs should be focusing more on strategy than just basic callouts anyway. The bonus of human GCI not being able to micromanage to an absurd degree (and people not being able to prioritise aircraft by specific type or know who they're going into a merge with) would more than offset any issues, IMO. As it stands, about half the experienced GCIs we have usually have to wear two hats by doing CA stuff as well, let alone trying to manage 20+ aircraft instead of a flight of 2.

Not referring to that issue here - rather the radar seems to be missing targets it should see. It's possible an attempted fix to the existing performance issues may have broken something else.

I've noticed this. I'm still trying to figure out the exact problem but it seems to be altitude-related. Need to do some more testing so I can fire off a more useful report.

Blue does not need radar SAMs over Hatay. It owns the airbase. It has enough Linebackers to protect the immediate area of the airfield from treetop height all the way up to about 10,000 feet. It only takes a handful of semi-competent F-5 pilots basing from there to put up such an intense barrier to red helicopters and strike aircraft that the only way they can get in, is to send a big fighter sweep beforehand and hope it buys them five minutes of uninterrupted killing time while the F-5s fly back out from Incirlik instead. The only way blue can lose Hatay is to either be severely undermanned versus red (which is uncommon, and apparently the opposite was true in this most recent run of the mission) or to be so grossly incompetent as to be losing fighters over Hatay faster than they can replenish them from Incirlik. The entire mission is much easier for blue to win or at least draw out, than it is for red. This has been abundantly clear every time I have played it (both as a blue UH-1/F-5 and as a red MiG-21/Mi-8/Su-25T). You are also making some pretty serious leaps to claim Su-25Ts cannot be stopped. I sure got stopped plenty last time I flew it, both by hidden Linebackers loitering around the fringes of Minakh, and by F-5s at Hatay. Blue also has the A-10's Maverick which is a whole other mess of issues in itself, and has proven extremely effective at killing red air defence across various missions. It's a small mercy that this mission doesn't also include the Harrier, since they're even more effective at wiping out SAMs. The last time I flew the Su-25T in the mission, the only reason I was able to stop blue capturing and holding Hatay was because whoever was doing their CA side of things kept moving tanks in literally one at a time, probably manually driving them. This meant all I had to do (after dying to Linebackers about three or four times and finally declaring the area the attack starts from to be off-limits because of the risk of another Stinger hit) was orbit around the airfield and look for dust plumes, then kill any I saw. On a few occasions, Leclercs were moved into the trees and I could not damage them no matter what I tried. I had to wait for them to leave cover before I could hit them, even if I knew exactly where they were, because the trees on the Syria map have such enormous and impermeable collision models that they act as a shield to anything below their canopies. It should be needless to say that by this point we had well and truly lost all our T-55s. The only units we had on the base were a handful of Shilkas because someone had flown one in to recapture it. If all of the Leclercs had moved in at once, or at least a couple from different directions simultaneously, several would surely have got through and captured the airbase, at which point the task of finding the offending unit becomes a lot harder. The A-10A does not have DIRCM (as far as I know) but it absolutely does have an abundance of flares. DIRCM is nice to have but it won't save you. I still got either damaged too badly to continue fighting, or outright shot down by Linebackers with my DIRCM on. Red does have a fairly substantial amount of air defence over Minakh but they also have pretty poor ground forces there. If Ka-50s/Su-25Ts focus on supporting them and blocking blue's attack, they can hold Minakh but at the expense of having virtually no hope of ever capturing Hatay, unless the entirety of blue decides to switch away from fighters or they all end up disconnecting as soon as they feel like they're not going to have an easy win. The ease with which F-5s can base out of Hatay and lock down that entire valley, especially once red's Strelas are gone, is better than a thousand SAMs - believe me. SAMs miss and can take a while to reload. Even two or three F-5s rotating out of Hatay can absolutely stonewall red. Even if a Mi-8, or a couple of Mi-8s, get through, it's unlikely they'll be able to deploy units close enough to then kill the Challengers and capture the base without those units being spotted and killed. MiGs have a harder time basing out of Minakh, because a) Avengers and Linebackers don't spike you before firing like AI Strelas do, and even if they did your RWR won't tell you what's coming or where from, and b) the MiG's heat signature is so enormous that even flares are of limited use, compared to the F-5 which can get away from IR SAMs with relative ease as long as it knows they're coming. What's more, the F-5's combination of good RWR and excellent forwards visibility make it a bit more able to perform its own limited IR SAM SEAD while also patrolling the valley around Hatay, something I found out by experience. It can also locate and kill EWRs easily, something only the Su-25T can really do on red. As for the last bit... If we're going to start slinging more of this passive-aggressive "red vs blue" nonsense, hats off to blue for ensuring I won't be flying for them to balance the teams next time red is stacked. It really does say a lot to join the server and find yourself alone against 2 F-14s and a further pair of F-5s, and no effort be made to remedy the imbalance even after I switched to sling loading and the Tomcats suddenly had no fighters to kill. After getting on blue numerous times where I've been planning to fly the MiG-19 or 21, just to balance the teams, it really does make a hell of an impression.

I take back what I earlier said about the F-14A. It's fine when the teams are relatively even and there are enough fighters to deal with it. When 2 F-14s (flying as a pair) and 2 F-5s are facing a single MiG-21, as the only player on the entire of red team, it's not quite so fun. Honestly I think the 4th gen slots should be locked until the server either hits a minimum number of players total, or the opposite team does. And yes, I could've got in a MiG-29... but 2 R-27s against 4-6 AIM-7Ms and 2-4 AIM-9Ls is still an ask. When balancing out missiles means the 29 gets a single pair of medium range missiles just to avoid the 21s taking R-60Ms, and the F-14s can bring their full load, I think it's a good sign that either the entire mission (S&D in this case) needs to be set all-aspect or the 4th gens need to be reconsidered. On other missions where it does have its R-60Ms, it's fine.

Is it possible you bumped a key that's bound to the trimmer power switch? I've had that happen with a few things in the 21, especially while trying to type in chat and forgetting to click the window.