I managed to take off from the carrier but have not yet attempted to land. This will be the bird that gets me to stick with it, I think
The landing part is indeed much harder than the taking off part. Iāve stopped smacking into the fantail in the Hornet, but I still usually need three or four tries to actually catch a wire.
More important, what songs should go on my Spotify āCombat Flight Simsā playlist? Got the obvious ones from Top Gun and Iron Eagle, probably will grab a few from the Guardians of the Galaxy playlistsā¦
I installed the beta last night (to its credit, it copied the files from my non-beta installation and then patched those, vs. re-downloading 160GBā¦) but the download of the beta portion was going slow, so I left it running and went to bed.
Forgot to turn off the speakers, so woke up at 2 am wondering where that beat was coming fromā¦ My downstairs office, where the DCS menu music was cranked after it finished loading.
dude, you do not need to run two installations of DCS anymore. The āstableā and ābetaā versions are only one version # apart these days. Thereās this utility I namedropped (but should have linked) that will do the change from one version to the other. No need to worry. No need to re-do control setups twice.
Anyway, re music, well the tomcat comes with its own soundtrack. Press left-shift-M to turn on the in-cockpit walkman. That sound is perfect for that plane.
I often listen to podcasts (such as jell-Oās fighter pilot podcast) while flying, but pause them on the busy bits of the flight.
When flying stoned I like to listen to pink floyd or chillacious classical music (on those flights I always skip the fighty bits, just A to way up there to B).
Landing the big cat is imo actually easier than the bug. It has a very nifty thing called Direct Lift Control (DLC) that you can map to your HOTAS. It allows you to move up or down on the glideslope (mostly down) so itās far easier to correct a too-high approach. It aint pretty but it sure does work!
You sir, get cookie! well done bro!
Had no chance to play yet. Started to download the module tonight through the DCS updater - but the torrent is unusually slow - I have 33 peers but like 10kbps download speedā¦ Nothing wrong with my internet connection as far as I can tellā¦ Wierd.
I wish the HUD had altitude and airspeed info on it.
But it doesnāt. Its a very old machine. Can you imagine how utterly space age it was in 1977?
The D model, the so called super tomcat got all kinds of sweet late 90s gizmos such as a real HUD.
One thing I noticed was that I was unable to complete the cold start tutorial because I couldnāt move the hydraulic transfer pump switch to the shutoff position as directed. The switch itself is actually not visible to me, hidden partially by the switch guard and partially by a belt buckle of all things, and although I was able to blindly move it to Normal, it wouldnāt move to Shutoff with either left or right clicks. I had a similar issue with the emergency flight hydraulic switch, which is somewhat obscured by its guard cover as well, although I was eventually able to get it switched off. I havenāt tried again because cold starts are not entirely my idea of fun.
Also how space age is it really compared to the F-4 or F-111? They seem pretty similarly sophisticated, just going by the cockpit displays, I mean.
The F-14 occupies a weird place in the generations of fighter aircraft, like between the Phantom and the Eagle.
āIraqi fighters routinely retreated as soon as the Tomcats ālit them upā with the AWG-9.ā
Its actually a contemporary of the eagle, though the eagle was updated far earlier in its life. The C model eagle that the air force flies (let alone the E!) are far more advanced than the tomcat when it comes to the human interface.
F-4 and F-111 are quite a bit older than tomcat. And iirc that shows in their cockpit ergonomics. The tomcatās RIO has this huge round display that will allow him to have an almost AWACS like situational awareness, especially if they have a datalink going. That must have put the fear of Allah in the opposing air force indeed.
Insanely fast bird, insanely deadly bird. I love it. Love slinging phoenix to punch stuff out of the sky two states over. Then turning & burning like a mofo and plonking it on a deck in the end.
Thatās a beautiful shot mang.
Tried the gun tutorial last night, and even with Jester calling out targets, and even with cheating using the map to try and make intercepts, it is extremely hard to make visual contact with enemy aircraft.
Very briefly, just before the jump from the 1.5.x graphics engine to the 2.x.x engine, they had Falcon 4-esque model scaling, which worked brilliantly and made dogfighting fun. Then, they dropped it when they switched, and now itās crap again.
oh man yeah those missions have labels forced off, just to spite us old folks/VR users/Old folks wearing goggles.
Heās right on our nose, burn that fucker! What? where? no! i cant see him! two o clock! four o clock! fuck where the fuck is he?
Iām glad itās not just me. I actually went into the options looking for labels to turn on like in Il-2 BoS, but I couldnāt find anything that looked like the right option.
dot labels is the thing you want, but its forced off in the F-14 tutes. they might just fix that.