rossmum

That would blow out filesize and loading times severely, I don't think we'll ever see that (and to be honest, I'm not sure I want to). Bugs accruing on the canopy from longer low-level flights is really the limit of what I'd ask, and that requires a bunch of coding the game doesn't include so I doubt we'll see it. I just use custom cockpit liveries if I want one that's newer or more weathered than what comes with the aircraft, honestly.

Time and experience is really the key. I've put hundreds of hours in and I still accidentally pull a little too hard sometimes, but you really do develop a feel for it - I need to look at my AoA less and less, and usually by the time it's getting close to critical, the enemy is in front of me and close enough that I can look at him and watch the needle out of the corner of my eye.

VVVVV Look at this post again VVVVV As Hiro says, the solution to this is just experience. You develop a feel for how much you can pull the stick at any given time, and if you feel the wings starting to rock, back off the pressure. I've noticed the aircraft now begins a much more subtle wing rock around 31-32 AoA and usually departs around 33 or 34, so there is a little subtle hint that it's coming now. I don't like sounding like a broken record or an RTFM guy (because I never RTFM myself, I learn by trial and error), but the 21 really isn't going to hold your hand for you and most of the problems people have with flying it come from either not understanding the aircraft's design considerations, or just not really having a lot of old fashioned stick and rudder experience in general. It's not a Hornet which can pull AoA all day, it's not even a 29, it doesn't have any kind of built-in AoA limiter. The only real assistance you have is the SAU (which is a liability in combat as it damps out your inputs too much) and the ARU preventing you from pulling 20G and shedding your wings and several vertebrae. This would be the case if there was a buffet to feel, but there isn't. Stick force and trim position are what I actually need to feel here, so I have a better sense of exactly what I'm pulling.

Virtually all Soviet fighters did. It was a required feature. The reason the MiG-23 has such insanely engineered landing gear was to fit wide-track, rugged gear into such a slim fighter, with no ability to fold it into the wings due to being variable geometry. Even Soviet airbases were extremely austere compared with Western ones - forget about FOD walks, the runway was often made of uneven pavers, unkempt grass and crap lying around everywhere, etc. DCS doesn't really do them justice.

It's still a bit experimental, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Once it's fully functional it should be nice - but still a big difference between a nice grass field, and a ploughed one! At least, in real life. Judging by the DCS Hornet's offroading ability there isn't ingame :(

The Warsaw Pact, particularly USSR and DDR, as a contingency in case airfields were hit... though not to the extent of the Swedes' routine roadside dispersal. I'm not sure Caucasus in particular has many roads suitable for the 21 or 23 but since I'm a lunatic and will attempt to land the thing on any relatively flat surface, it'd be neat to see in a future mission maybe.

Incredible run this morning on Battle Over Sukhumi (right up until DCS crashed on me, about 6 or 7 hours in)!

Looks like a custom livery that's still using the old format. Changes to filenames will cause it to load the default (Serbian) livery overall, with some parts of the mesh showing incorrect portions of the actual custom livery. The default ones all work on my end, but all my old custom ones look like that.

Watching the AoA gauge is your 'quick fix' for avoiding it. Keep it below about 33. I'd like some more 'feedback' as it were myself, as glacing away from a target can cause me to lose sight of them permanently, but without a FFB stick that's your best bet at the moment.

Likewise. Equipping SPRD pods also caused some strange repeating/stuck sound issues, but I've had similar with other modules (including FC3 aircraft and the F-16) at apparent random so I don't know if it's connected or not. I haven't checked to see if the sound aspect is reproducible yet.

Reproduced. Seat and pilot have missing texture, upon separation the pilot regains his texture (chute underside still transparent, top of chute looks almost metallic silver/grey). Seat remains with missing texture after separation.

Bingo - and loading a series of smaller textures is faster than a single large one.

Over the past 2-3 months of reviewing Tacview tracks from when I've been on, I've only seen one or two obvious instances of going back to spectator - I'm sure it happens, but I don't think it happens as often as people think. More often you see people either RTB as you'd expect, or sometimes run out of fuel and belly land (which I'll occasionally do if it means saving an objective or a teammate, or if my math brain is just a potato on a particular day and I misjudge it - but I always try to bring the aircraft down with as little damage as possible, in friendly territory). There are a few things I like as ideas, but I'm not sure of the practicality of (either due to the necessary scripting, or the realities of one person being able to muck things up for the whole team). Each airbase having a finite number of airframes of a certain type which are only replenished, say, every two hours would be one thing - but again, all it takes is one person wasting them to screw the whole team and hand total air superiority to the other. This could possibly be partly alleviated by considering crash-landed airframes as "recovered" if they're within friendly territory - but this in itself is probably a pain given DCS' lack of a true 'frontline' a la Il-2. I always try and recover an airframe out of habit no matter what state it's in, so maybe that's why I like that idea. Pilot death/capture locking out a slot until they're 'rescued' by a helicopter pilot or AI as per the version of CSAR being tried for the ATWG COIN experimental server is another option, maybe only requiring the CSAR deployment if they land within enemy territory (we can assume they just hitch-hike back if they land on friendly soil). This may cause people to jump slots, though, which results in the same problem as the above - and the more impatient ones might just leave. A straight up limited life system like Blue Flag doesn't work out very well with a game as crash- or desync-prone as DCS, IMO, and is the reason I almost never play there - I get sick of losing one, two, or all three of my lives due to connection loss, game crash, or someone rubber-banding into me on the parking area. If you set the lives limit higher (say somewhere between six and ten) or the renewal time lower (maybe an hour or two instead of six) it should get around this, though. Of course the other option is DDCS-style life points, e.g. starting out with 10, a MiG-21 costs 2 points on its own, R-60s and R-60Ms cost a point each, then set the life point gain rate to whatever. I'll be honest, even if you implement a lives system, I don't think it's going to get people on SRS who aren't there already - more likely it'll just see more of those of us who are on it flying as pairs or threes, which isn't a bad thing. Might serve to make the community a bit closer-knit if we're relying on each other a bit more directly :D The BF system isn't foolproof - on at least one occasion I lost lives to ground collisions, because it considered me 'airborne' for just long enough when I got hit (probably from the force of the initial hit, the other MiG was teleporting all over the place and contacted mine at warp speed). Spawning in craters also seems to count as a death.

A lifepoint system that limits available aircraft (or loadout) isn't too bad, IMO, like DDCS has - the problem with finite lives as per BF is that if you get killed by planes warping into you on the ground (as I did 3 times in a row a few weeks ago), or your game crashes, or your connection drops (which mine will at least once per day), you're unable to play for the next 6 hours. On a server with a more limited playerbase than GS or even BF this will kill population very quickly, while restricting players to older weapons might cause people to play a bit more carefully, e.g. restricting MiGs to R-3s and/or R-13s and F-5s to GAR-8s/9Ps.

The Chaparral was great... as a red pilot! They were super easy to bait into enemy aircraft. I haven't had to deal with Avengers so much, so we'll see how that goes :D Another awesome time earlier today. The server seems to be populating much more and staying active later than it used to, which is great.

Unfortunately the Hawk issue comes from the massive disparity in air defence, which was a real factor at the time anyway. With that said, Kub was typically attached to ground formations rather than used as a purely static defence - layered S-125/S-75 pairs for fixed defence at airbases, and then S-125s replacing Kub as the sling loaded option, could work maybe? I'm not sure which specific variants we have in DCS, but it should only outrange the Kub by 10 or so kilometres, and have about 10-20 less than the Hawk.

By the way, is it at all possible to put rearm/refuel facilities at the two small airstrips north of Kutaisi, or maybe sink a FARP partway into the floor so a plane could taxi onto it to rearm? I ask for entirely altruistic and not at all selfish reasons :D

North of Zugdidi/Senaki.

I really like this idea, tbh, though depends how complex it is I suppose. A similar resupply system could also open up airfield fuel/ammo dumps as potential targets without it crossing the 'unconventional funny tactics // merciless griefing' boundary I mentioned before, which would encourage even more ground attack in order to stall the enemy and establish local air superiority (especially if your team is short-handed compared to the enemy). Yes, channel 0, 124.000.

I have to say, the combination of EWRs with missions that require helicopter or ground attack work with still having some decent fighter slots is pretty close to ideal. I have options for things to do, and it helps force me to try new things, but I'm also still able to enjoy what I'm actually good at and enjoy most. Providing CAP and running intercepts are where I'm in my element and that's still very much an option. I guess I would usually fall under the airquake label, I'm usually on comms and/or bring a GCI with me but at the end of the day I just want to put planes in the ground because the wild and wooly WVR fights we get in the server are something you seldom, if ever, get anywhere else. Air superiority really does have a value all of its own as well, as numerous times over the past few months we've been able to really put the enemy on the back foot and prevent strikes against our objectives by preventing them being able to get more than a few miles from their base. This is really where more options for helicopter guys to complete objectives elsewhere shine, it stops them all ragequitting and gives them a chance to find a way around it without artificial impositions. When it comes to the new rules, and restrictions in general: I know some people are much more easily frustrated than me, so I get why airfields are also off-limits, but IMO anything beyond "don't crater parking spots or the runway at the main enemy AB" might be a bit overkill. If people don't want to set up SAMs/AAA or provide air cover, they shouldn't expect their secondary airbases to be so safe, and arguably it's more frustrating when someone circles around just out of line of sight and shoots you down right after you take off than if you catch some rounds while starting up at a secondary airbase your team just captured. AWACS being invulnerable is probably a good move, unless they're replaced by a new one flying in to station (say from offmap) so there's only a brief gap in coverage. I'm guessing this is probably more trouble than it's worth scriptwise, though. More than once I've seen players immediately beeline for the enemy AWACS at mission start so I'm glad that's being discouraged - all it does is make life harder for everyone while failing to prevent a human GCI from still giving fairly effective support based on airfield EWR installations. Both of the above issues could probably be alleviated by a bit more layered air defence over the main base, but given the short distances involved it's probably pretty hard to do without messing too much with the flow of the mission, and too many SAMs generally results in lag issues. Maybe a lot more MANPADS sprinkled within say 5-10km of main bases could help, I don't know. More and particularly unpredictable low-alt air defence might coax people off the deck as well, it'd be interesting to see.

Some incredible flights earlier on S&D (the Tacview is insane!) and Two Towns. Blue put in some serious work on the former, the latter was a bit red heavy but still saw some enjoyable encounters. Honourable mention to Tolovay, who somehow managed to survive this (Nellus tried to save him, RIP) -

I did a cheeky AWACS snipe the other day on Sail Ahoy, but only because blue did it to us first, literally right at the start of the mission :noexpression: Maybe placing them higher and further back, with some more layered air defence on the approach might work? The latter could also serve to protect the home air bases a little better, and maybe even begin forcing fights a little higher. Coverage might not be as good for AWACS though, at least near mountains. First of all, the Viggen has a unique problem - if it gets killed, RB-04s, RB-15s, and BK-90s despawn from the game. So when you die, you lose your chance to hit the target even with standoff weapons you've already fired. Second, red tend to mount a very aggressive air defence over the water (they certainly do when I'm on). It's most likely they just kept getting intercepted over and over like Nellus said, I haven't seen them just respawning to 'get back to base' faster. As for the Viggens always getting through... I beg to differ, when we have GCI. I think last time I flew the 21 on Battle Over Sukhumi, it took one guy 11 Viggens to land a single RB-04. The Viggen is fast, but a well-arranged intercept will put the MiG either head-on where the Viggen is an easy target for an R-60M, or abeam of it where you can put a short burst of speed on and catch it. If you try to catch it from behind it'll just outrun you. With high alt at M1.9... the 21 is just as fast, if not slightly faster, at that altitude and climbs to it rapidly. I wouldn't be so sure. Again it just needs a good GCI with one or two cooperative pilots.

I've done that a couple of times, now. Lots of visits to mountain villages for tea... yesterday's (chasing a conning space cadet F-5, seemingly headed for Gudauta) ended next to our FARP by happy chance. I kind of wish aircraft despawn was delayed after a player re-slots, just so our helicopter guys could see what a gentle landing it was :D

Screenshots taken from just before I hit peak of climb - Full combat load (2 R-3R, 4 R-60M, 800l tank, 3000l internal fuel, full gun). Departed Nalchik 0702, reached peak of climb at slightly above 70,000ft around 0715, landed at Sochi at 0720 with about 300l of fuel remaining after some mild aerobatics on the way down. No emergency burner use at any point and I actually screwed up and bled some airspeed that I could've used to try shooting for 75 or 80, and my belly tank jettison was delayed. With a clean aircraft I have no doubts I could attain those numbers. Regardless what you're flying, you're never going to be able to reach anywhere near your aircraft's ceiling if you just try maintain a constant pitch angle. Air density and engine performance are kind of important.

Ok, you force me... :lol: https://clips.twitch.tv/HappyHilariousTrufflePeoplesChamp