Iron Flag updates July 2025

[Yurgon]

With the recent 2.9.18.12722 patch, the Iron Flag Campaign received a bit of an overhaul. It wasn't mentioned in the patch notes, so let me give you an overview.

Subtitles

Last year I tested some Iron Flag missions and noticed a few discrepancies between what the voice actors said and what was shown in the subtitles. With Baltic Dragon's permission, I thought "Let's quickly correct that".

Well. Iron Flag has a lot of voice-overs. I mean a lot. Clicking through the Mission Editor turned out to be unfeasible, so I extracted the dictionary file from each mission archive. But that has everything in seemingly random order, so for every voice-over sound file I listened to, I then had to find the correct line in a file of 2000+ lines, which made the process unnecessarily slow. With a bit of bodging a couple of scripts together, I got all the lines ordered by their index so from DCS's point of view, everything was correctly identified, while for me it was in the proper order, making the process a lot smoother.

Along the way, some common typos showed up, and for the most part it turns out that the voice actors just loved to go off script and change a little "We'll go ahead and" into "We're gonna", and a lot of stuff like that. Same meaning, different words.

The campaign's instructors, BIFF and LOTUS, have particularly long lines of dialog, reaching from a simple "Two" or "Gotcha" up to around 40 seconds of dialog in a single transmission. For improved readability, these were split into paragraphs where applicable.

In a lot of cases, these long lines of dialog were then repeated in the so called "action text" that prompts players to take a certain action. These are now split into much shorter chunks, omitting a lot of the free text around the actionable items, and were formatted as lists that, I hope, will be easier for players to follow than those super long lines.

At this stage, if you find any typos, spelling or grammar mistakes in the subtitles, they're 100% mine (if I didn't introduce them myself, then I missed them. Well, except for some freestyle English that the voice actors spoke - the subtitles only reflect what they say ).

BIFF's datalink

For a long while, the instructor's aircraft (BIFF in most missions, and LOTUS in mission 9) have been AWOL from the datalink. Somewhere along changes to the whole datalink system and the introduction of new Advanced Waypoint Actions, it just stopped working. Adding new AI controlled aircraft worked fine, but with dozens or hundreds of triggers bound to the existing jets, replacing them with fresh ones just wasn't an option.

The issue had been reported to ED, but with a fix still not in sight, I decided to dig into it, trying every Advanced Waypoint Action I could think of, but it just wouldn't work - BIFF and LOTUS just never showed up on TAD and HMCS.

Well, if new aircraft do and some old aircraft don't, there's got to be some difference, right? And if the Mission Editor doesn't allow to edit the difference out, then maybe looking at the raw mission file might?

So, long story short, I just copied the entire Advanced (Waypoint Actions) block from a fresh A-10C aircraft over to BIFF's and LOTUS' jets respectively in each of the 12 missions (10 regular ones, plus two shortened versions of the otherwise very long Mission 06), and voila: they're back!

Additional fixes

In some missions, the position of radio transmitters was changed to improve the quality of radio transmissions.

There may still be a few cases where the radio quality of other transmitters degrades a lot and makes them much harder to understand. If you come across any of those, please let us know!

In a few cases, changes and upgrades to the A-10C II module invalidated some voice-overs for what was a completed and finished A-10C campaign before the A-10C II was released. Where this makes an actual difference, NOTEs were added to subtitles and/or action texts.

Small QoL improvements

A bunch of smaller Quality of Life improvements were snuck in as well.

The briefing images showing the flight plan have been slightly changed to make the waypoint numbers a bit easier to read in all missions.

The datalink, now that it's working again, was updated and both player and instructor aircraft should have the correct GRP ID and OWN ID data from the briefing already set, as well as a sensible CALL sign, which is now the first and last letter of the flight call sign plus number in flight, so Tusk 1-1 would have TK11 preset for instance.

A dialog about radio presets that appeared twice (once in M01, once in M06) was removed from the second occurrence.

The weather in one of the missions was changed and should now be within legal limits for the assigned approach while still offering a challenging flight through thick clouds, with Nellis Runway 21L only becoming visible roughly 300 feet above minimums.

The short versions of Mission 06 were updated to have plausible fuel values (these airstart missions used to begin with 100% fuel).

There used to be kneeboard images showing the entire HOTAS tables for throttle and stick. These are now part of the module's default kneeboard, so they were removed from the missions.

Credit where credit is due

I want to thank Baltic Dragon for trusting me not to break these missions.

Of course a huge shout-out goes out to Doughboy - I learned so much from this campaign!

New members in the tester team who ran many of the missions countless times are Jakes, MadDog and Nexonix01, thanks for all the help!

tl;dr

Datalink is working again for the Instructor Pilot jet; a few kinks were ironed out; most subtitles were updated.

Thanks for reading.

[Bealdor]

Thank you for this great campaign overhaul! Loving all those changes.

I got some radio feedback for mission 1 and will continue to collect bugs from future missions. If you want me to create a separate thread, just shoot me a message.

1) The actual radio presets of the ARC-210 don't match the documentation. See screenshot:

Nellis Departure is missing and all the presets from ATIS to Approach are offset by one channel. Looks like either 251 or 262 MHz were added accidentally to the preset list.

2) When contacting Departure for the first time, Biff's message immediatly cuts out after ~1s and the answer from Departure can't be heard and also wont come up in the message history:

3) The following messages are either completely missing audio / just static or the volume is very low with lots of static:

 

And final image:

 

Let me know if you need more info.

[Yurgon]

Excellent report, thanks!

3 hours ago, Bealdor said:

1) The actual radio presets of the ARC-210 don't match the documentation.

The ARC-210 isn't used a whole lot in the campaign; the presets come from the legacy A-10C version where only the ARC-164 would have been able to dial in those freqs, and these presets should all be correct for it; but you're right of course that the ARC-210 presets should also be set. Shouldn't be too much hassle to also name them.

3 hours ago, Bealdor said:

2) When contacting Departure for the first time, Biff's message immediatly cuts out after ~1s and the answer from Departure can't be heard

Will take a look at that!

[Bealdor]

4 hours ago, Yurgon said:

The ARC-210 isn't used a whole lot in the campaign; the presets come from the legacy A-10C version where only the ARC-164 would have been able to dial in those freqs, and these presets should all be correct for it; but you're right of course that the ARC-210 presets should also be set. Shouldn't be too much hassle to also name them.

I get what you're saying but I'm 99% sure the presets on the ARC-210 were fine a few months ago when I played through the campaign the first time.

TBH I always use the ARC-210 instead of the ARC-164. It's much easier to use since it displays the actual preset's frequency which the ARC-164 does not, unless you click the status button which is highly annoying.

[Bealdor]

Feedback on Mission 2:

So this mission worked basically flawlessly. I made sure to check out every optional F10 menu question and they worked all fine.

I have only found 2 very minor issues.

1) Preset 8 (Guard 1) is set incorrectly on the ARC-164 radio:

All the presets on the ARC-210 are correct in this mission btw.

 

2) The only messages that were either cut out (red) or had too much static noise on it (yellow) are:

The "One, gear up" message cuts out after "one", or better said you only hear static where "gear up" should be.

That's all I could find really. So top job on the overhaul for this mission!

 

Not sure when I'll be able to play through the other missions because my schedule is pretty tight for the rest of the week but I'll make sure to post feedback here after every mission I played through.

[Yurgon]

Another great report, thanks!

3 hours ago, Bealdor said:

1) Preset 8 (Guard 1) is set incorrectly on the ARC-164 radio:

This one is correct as is; Guard 1 is in the VHF AM frequency range and the ARC-164 can't go that low. So this preset is only available on the ARC-210.

Not sure if there's a good way to signify this in the kneeboard without making it a good deal more complicated. But as far as I remember, there's no need to tune into the Emergency freq anyway.

3 hours ago, Bealdor said:

2) The only messages that were either cut out (red) or had too much static noise on it (yellow) are

Thanks, will take a look at that as well.

[Yurgon]

On 7/28/2025 at 10:54 PM, Bealdor said:

The actual radio presets of the ARC-210 don't match the documentation.

An update of all radio presets is now in internal testing. Just a bit more consistency across all missions, a fix for this issue from M01 plus named presets in the ARC-210.

On 7/28/2025 at 10:54 PM, Bealdor said:

When contacting Departure for the first time, Biff's message immediatly cuts out after ~1s

Yeah, I saw the exact same thing. The unit used as transmitter was trying to sneak behind a mountain. Gave him a jolt to gain good Line Of Sight, should be good now.

On 7/28/2025 at 10:54 PM, Bealdor said:

The following messages are either completely missing audio / just static or the volume is very low with lots of static

Yup, another case of the actual transmitter unit being in the wrong place, good catch!

All fixed internally and now in internal testing. I can't give an ETA for an update, hopefully soon.

Edited 6 hours ago by Yurgon

[Bealdor]

Wow, thanks for the quick update!

4 hours ago, Yurgon said:

An update of all radio presets is now in internal testing. Just a bit more consistency across all missions, a fix for this issue from M01 plus named presets in the ARC-210.

To be clear, should I hold off on reporting radio preset bugs until this patch arrives and focus on bad radio transmitter positions or do you want me to continue posting everything I find, even if it's probably fixed internally already?