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DCS World: Hardcore Aircraft Porn

Using Attack on Titan music, I see.
 
2.7's been released at last with actual clouds and stuff in it to obsolete my week-old laptop.

No Mossy or Hind but they can't be far off. Looking forward to the Corsair whenever it drops mind. Bubbling around in the Warbirds is a lot of fun.
 
Oh, another very belated post. Recently we saw the release of several campaigns, and the free Marianas Islands map for Open Beta Patch 2.7.4.


But that's not what I came here to talk about.



It looks like True Grit was dropped or merged with Heatblur. And now we have a really slick vid for the Eurofighter module.

Edit:they had to take the video Dow, riparoni

Also I picked up two kills in an internal fight so it was a pretty good DCS day all around.
 
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Mosquito Mark VI just launched into EA ---







An interesting thing to fly. Different from anything else in a lot of ways. Very easy to handle, take-off and land compared to the other 1940's planes.
 
Sadly people are more pissed off about the data Export functions now somehow triggering integrity check.

For those who are unaware, this basically lets DCS output certain data, like your airspeed, or the contents of your MFCDs, to external clients. It's how many players set up their cockpits. Now it seems they can't get into some of the more popular PVP servers.
 
So after getting some proper headtracking (that isn't overpriced as hell like TrackIR), a VKB Gladiator HOTAS (well, technically HOSAS) system, and the F-14 and F/A-18 add-ons through the "Maverick" sale, I'm finally ready to get into this sim for real. And I must say, as someone who spent countless hours playing Jane's F/A-18 back in the day, sitting in the Hornet cockpit and hearing that deedle-deedle of the Master Caution alarm takes me back, man. (Of course, the Jane's sim featured the Super Hornet, whereas DCS is just the C model, but there are lot of similarities regardless).

But I've noticed something a bit odd with the guns. Here is the F/A-18C firing:



Note the yellow tracers, and fairly wide dispersion of the rounds. Now here is the F-15C's gun:




Again, yellow tracers and a wide dispersal pattern. Now, here is the F-14B's gun:



Notice that it now has red tracers, which are much fainter (and also, fewer rounds are tracers). And the gun seems to be much more accurate than the other two aircraft, even though all three use the same M61 Vulcan cannon.

I'm wonder which one is more accurate? (The F-14 module is made by Heatblur, whereas the F-15C and F/A-18C are both made by ED, so that might have something to do with it).

Also, during the F/A-18's carrier takeoff training mission, I spotted an S-3B in a very strange spot:



 
It's been a longstanding complaint, IIRC, that ED tends to nerf the MOA of the cannon armament. Heatblur's one uses its own third-party ammo definitions, so that's why it's so much tighter.
 
Hello, it's me again harassing your browsing.

The MY Squadron crew has been running the Pretense campaign on our training server for a bit, and reception has been quite warm.

It's a dynamic battle, with a bit of MOBA blood in it. Pretense - Dynamic Campaign v1.3.3

In other news, the Indonesian community is hosting a mini tourney with sponsored prizes. Will get back with links when I get them.
 
So I decided to go full-bore into Heatblur's F-14 module after getting a set of VKB rudder pedals, and I think this is one of the greatest modules in the entire game.



Here's the cockpit. It's worn as shit, and there's a strip of Scotch tape over the buttons on the ACM panel so they don't fall out. There's an Angle of Attack indicator, but it's in AoA units instead of degrees. What's a unit of AoA? Fuck knows; it was probably thought up by some engineer at Grumman working in a cupboard somewhere.

And check out the HUD. You might be wondering where your speed and altitude are on it. Well, guess what? You're not getting any. This is peak late 60s/early 70s tech, where everything is in a weird state of transition between analog and digital. Case in point: the VDI in the middle. It's basically a fancy attitude display indicator, only it has these little trapezoids that continually move towards the bottom to tell you that yes, this is the ground part of the display.



The AWG-9 radar is ludicrously powerful, able to pick up targets at over 100 nautical miles away. But, of course, it's late 60s analog tech, so it requires a whole other person to operate it.

And there's actually flying the thing. Yes, you have thrust for days (at least in the B model), but the F-14 is very much NOT a fly-by-wire aircraft. Yes, there is a stability augmentation system, but it's extremely primitive by modern standards. The plane will give you everything you ask of it, even if it kills you. Pull too many G and you'll rip the wings off. Try to roll at a high AoA and you'll find that the plane suddenly rolls in the opposite direction, eventually turning into a flatspin.

It's the best.
 
It's the S-tier for DCS.

Probably the best thing about the module is the feedback it gives - all the little audio-visual cues that tell you exactly what it's going to before it does it. Provided you pay attention it.

None of the other DCS modules really do that. Not to the same extent anyway.
 
So, I finally got one of the warbirds - the Spitfire - and well, let me tell you, they weren't kidding about how much more challenging they are to fly compared to more modern aircraft. What's amusing to me is that, of all the planes I've flown in DCS, the Spitfire is the closest thing to the one aircraft I've actually flown in real life - a Cessna 152...and that was a dinky little plane with a 110 hp four-cylinder engine, and the Spitfire has a big stonking 1700 hp Merlin V12 handcrafted by an army of lonely British housewives and animated by the spirits of John Bull and St. George.

Oh, and the engine has magnetos, and must be primed before starting. That's right, this monster engine is fired up like a lawnmower. But now you have to get to the runway, and that's not as simple as it sounds, because the way you taxi the Spitfire is through differential braking. Simply put, you apply left or right rudder, and then apply the brakes, which will cause the braking force to go to the left or right wheel. Oh, and this thing's a taildragger, so it's hard to even see where you going, necessitating you having to weave back and forth along the taxiway while sticking your head out of the window to see what's ahead.

The huge amount of torque, combined with the narrow landing gear, makes even the simple act of taking off a challenge. The moment you start throttling up the aircraft it will pull to the left, so you add right rudder to compensate, and you can easily end up overdoing it and causing the aircraft to start swinging to the right. And given the narrow landing gear, this swinging about can easily cause you to whack the wingtips on the ground. Your only hope is to keep the aircraft straight until you hit 90-100mph and you can finally lift off the ground. Unfortunately, my first few early attempts looked like this:


Ehh...that'll buff out.

Of course, when you finally get airborne, it's a whole different story. The Spitfire handles beautifully. There's virtually no adverse yaw, to the point where I never needed to touch the rudder pedals to maintain coordinated flight.

Oh, and you know how most aircraft have "NO STEP" markings indicate where you're not supposed to step on? The Spitfire instead has "NOT TO BE WALKED ON":



It's so delightfully British.
 
The trick seems to be ... to get the throttle up to to takeoff boost (+8 from memory) smoothly, but as quickly as possible and just boot the rudder rather than hold continuous inputs. Stamp on it when it tries to get away. Let it know who's boss.

I tend to trim a little closer to neutral on takeoff so it tries to fly its own tail rather than requiring me to lift it. Doesn't seem to give as much yaw when it does that.

I used to have a video somewhere of someone nailing a very overconfident Mig-21 player by using a Spitfire....... right before getting a missile up the arsehole.
 
And now the second half of the equation: landing the Spitfire, which...isn't as hard as I thought it would be. Hell, on my first attempt I managed to get down safely (albeit scraping one of the wings on the ground). The basic method I came up with to get the plane down is as follows:

- Use rudder trim to centre the sideslip gauge, because landing at a crab angle will cause a twisting force that can cause you to scrape the wing on the ground
- Once the gear and flaps are down, adjust pitch trim so that you can maintain on-speed AoA without having to fight with the stick. Believe me, landing is MUCH more difficult when you have to fight with the controls to keep a constant pitch.
- Memorise the position of the horizon relative to the cockpit when the plane is on the ground, because you'll need to put it in that position when landing in order to ensure you touch down on all three wheels at once. If you land on just the two front wheels, you will almost certainly bounce, and if you bounce...well...let's just say that bad things will start to happen.
- Once you're rolling along the runway, you'll have to start doing the same rudder dance that you do on takeoff. But here's the thing: you cannot relax until the aircraft is stopped. In fact, the trickiest part of landing is when the plane starts slowing down to the point where the rudder is no longer effective, because that's when it starts getting really squirelly, and you'll have to use differential braking to avoid going into a ground loop. But those brake inputs have to be extremely brief blips of the brake lever, otherwise you'll over-correct.
- I actually found that I didn't really need the wheel brakes at all to stop. In fact, because the Spitfire's centre of gravity is so far forward, using anything more than the briefest blip on the brakes runs the risk of tipping the plane forward, striking the prop against the ground and utterly wrecking your engine.


One Spitfire back on the ground, NOT in a flaming pile of wreckage.

I don't own the module, but I'm curious as to how the Bf-109 handles, because I've heard that, in terms of warbird ground-squirreliness, it's even worse. According to the manual, 10% of all Bf 109s were lost in takeoff and landing accidents between 1939 and 1941, for a total of 1,500 aircraft.

(I also wish they'd make a Mitsubishi A6M Zero module, but I rather doubt we'll be seeing it any time soon since you'd need a Pacific campaign as well as a whole host of other aircraft that were only used in that theatre).
 
I found the 109 easier because you can lock the tailwheel. Start with the rudder full-in, give it a lot of throttle to get the rudder active and it'll go straight. Maybe a little tap on the brakes. No need to go all the way up and engage MW50 but that does get fun

109 lands a lot easier - it's slower with the automatic slats helping keep it controllable.

It doesn't trim as nicely and can be a bit of a pig in the air. But it has a lot of power under MW50 and is very light. It's basically all motor with one big fuck-off cannon in the prop.


They crash when you're too gentle with them and afraid of them.
 
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Being doing quite a lot with the F-16 Viper lately, and as part of learning process, I decided to create a mission where you take off, navigate to a destination, and then land successfully with the overhead break. Considering that "take off, get to destination, and land" is about 90% of aviation, I figure this ought to establish a baseline level of competence, right?

Since I had just got the Syria map, I decided to make a mission where I took off from İncirlik, flew over Aleppo and Homs, and then landed in Beirut. Sounds simple, right? Well, everything was going to plan until I was on final to runway 17 at Beirut-Rafic Hariri airport:



That's right, there's a mosque located right on at the approach vector, and if you fly the proper glidepath you will smash straight into its minarets. I wound up having to quickly roll to the right and then snap back onto the proper heading to actually make the landing. For this reason, I have dubbed it the "Troll Mosque."

I'm wondering if I should submit this as a bug on the DCS forums, considering that Beirut in real life does not have such an obvious violation of zoning laws:

 
This is why I'm concentrating on hellochoppers nowadays (whenever I get back to swimming)
 
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