Recent air combat sim recommendations?

Bit out of my price range.

It looks like I might get to enjoy it tomorrow instead of Tuesday. One of the benefits of living in Arizona, is that most things ship from California, and get here relatively quickly. Not same day like Amazon :), but still pretty nice. The card is already in town, so it just depends if UPS goes ahead and delivers it tomorrow, or waits a day.

I bet you are excited like a kid on xmas eve :D

I’m currently flying the Mirage 2K campaign missions. Been doing fine until the first one where I actually meet serious opposition; Of course I ended up a flaming wreck first chance I got :/

Somehow I missed this post, that’s really cool! Does it cancel the in-game pilot’s voice as well, like when you say “ground power on” do you then hear the game saying “Chief, turn the ground power on”?

Yeah you can tell VAICOM to surpress the pilots’ voice.

Me: “chief, ground power on”
game: (tiny beep indicating it understood the command) “wilco, ground power on”
Me: “tower, request engine start”
Game: (beep) “cleared for startup wind 270 for 6, active runway is 32, QFE 956”

and so on.

My girlfriend is making fun of the expression “Bogey Dope” which I tend to use a LOT in an increasingly tense voice as the shit gets thicker.

AWACS is crutch for decadent Western imperialists, comrade.

Glorious machines of the people will also allow bogey dope call if GCI or awacs is present.

Wait until she has to date a guy who doesn’t even know what that means. Then she will be sorry!

She will miss those hot summer nights turgid with the simulated angst of bogey doping and bandit splashing!

Ah, yes, when Juffo-Wup fills your fibers.

@midnight.mangler : “request picture”

We got two kids and are “not married” so she wont likely do much dating. My pc is in the living room, a couple meters away from the couch where she sits knitting and watching project runway.

DCS patch hit today, adds the SA-2. Ancient big ass but very iconic SAM. Much fun to fly around.

Il-2 also got patched today. Lots of work done to the effects. Also some sweet optimization done. I took shadows from medium to high and the game overlay “HUD” got fixed. It no longer eats a third of your frames.

This wasn’t in DCS already? boggles I mean, dodging flying telephone poles is flight-sim PB&J. Then again, there’s no Phantom II to go with that MiG-21, so yeah I guess.

Oh there’s so much about DCS that boggles the mind. But it’s the only game in town.

There’s huge gaps in the AI unit lineup. It’s closed as a clam for modding in AI units. Over half the AI units look ancient, like they’re ported over from some ancient dead game. The other half are freaking gorgeous. Take a close look at a Su-24.

Holy fuck you fucks, if any of y’all are still on the fence on DCS hornet or the persian gulf map, they are doing a free weekend! Get your hornet on bitches!

The irony is it would take the whole weekend to be able to learn how to look at the Hornet’s cockpit without crying. Or maybe not! I sure intend to find out if I get time, great move by ED here in anticipation of the bundle they’ll be selling soon.

If you take a hot start from the carrier you can be flying around with zero effort. Shooting stuff is only a very tiny bit harder. Finding stuff yet another bit. Landing that thing back on the boat… in one weekend? yeah good luck with that :D

I highly recommend taking advantage of the free hornet weekend, especially if you have VR. Just sitting in that cockpit and looking around justifies the download. Persian Gulf is also an amazing map and worth the bandwidth. I recommend opening a mission in the editor and changing the time of day to sunrise/early morning or sunset/late afternoon. The shadow work on the dunes and mountains (and in the cockpit) is beautiful.

Speaking of Mission Editor, I’ve been plugging away at Time Pilot. The whole campaign is sketched out and I’m working on mission 5. Schurem can attest to it’s suckiness as he has been kind enough to test each mission.

I’ve been doing most of this work through steam streaming to a Mac where I do not have a Hotas (or VR) hooked up. You can definitely fly this thing with mouse and keyboard. Don’t let the lack of a fancy stick discourage you from downloading for the free weekend.

Like the picture - domestic bliss and tolerance of our niche hobby. My wife is similarly long suffering. In fact, when we started dating many, many years ago she was working and had cash and I wasn’t - I was a poor ass PhD student. She bought me Jane’s F-18! That was when I realised she was a keeper. We been married ten years ago this December!

Yes I must confess I have had too many distractions of late and my good intentions to get stuck into time pilot have been derailed. This weekend I hope to get back in the saddle.

I’ve started hitting up tutorials on Viggen and am really starting to fall in love with this bird. It was probably mentioned upthread, but the damn thing has a radio controlled missile which allows you to steer it to your target while in flight. The motor remains glowing bright red so you can see it at distance to guide. lolz.

It also has a standoff guided cluster munition and a ground radar that’s all glowy green in your cockpit. It has the ability to shoot exhaust backwards for super short landings (and the ability to back up). The HUD is smart and beautifully minimal. Recommend taking a look at this video review if you are curious. Is of an older version of DCS World (the outside graphics are now much better), but the cockpit is about the same. Really impressed with the quality of the review, which goes over the unique stuff mentioned.

One thing that is missing on all these videos are the propor starting and landing procedures in wartime. The Swedish Airforce planned to abandon the regular airbases and disperse the aircrafts to roadbases all around Sweden. Those roadbases consisted of a 500 m roadstrip and a wooded area and normally 2 aircraft were deployed at one base.This is the reason for the STOL performance of the Viggen. If you want more of challenge when you fly this aircraft, start landing and taking off from the actual roads on the map. Here is a video that shows them in action. The grey aircrafts looks like the fighter version JA37 that has a different set of avionics than the AJ and AJS version.