I dream a lot about schurem, too, but it ain’t about flight sims 乁(♥◡♥)ㄏ
One thing I have a terrible time with is matching speeds. I overshoot, undershoot so quickly I lose sight in no time.
That’s a hard thing to get right. Luckily in the hornet you can pull a metric fuckton of alpha. That’ll slow the thing right down. You can’t do that in a viper for example, or a kitty.
*alpha: The difference between the angle where the nose is pointing and how the air is meeting the plane. You pull on the stick, you increase alpha. Easily visualised in the HUD by the difference between the Flight Path Marker (the little plane icon) and the gun cross.
So what do you do when you are about to overshoot? Go up, roll and pull. Usually you don’t want to pull too hard, because burying the stick in your gut will bleed your speed. But sometimes, that is just what you need. Or sometimes you don’t give a fuck because those extra 20 degrees will end the fight.
This sort of shit I could far more easily teach in Fight Club.
How’s the bombing coming @jpinard? Made shit blow up yet?
There’s gotta be a free “Art of the Kill” .pdf out there somewhere
Let St. Bonanni be your guide
I’m about to load up. BTW, I had to hotas/throttle setup because… I fell out of my chair. Sitting on 3 or 4 pillows with almost no sides is just too unbalancing. So I got one of these to see if I could make it work my chair (it does!) so I ordered a second one for the throttle:
(I know it’s laughable, but I had to use kleenex to build up the hand rest because my hands are so small)
Nice job! Before I dragged in the car chair that I fly from, I used a fold-up lawn chair and two footstools to hold the HOTAS.
WHOA. I just discovered the root of all my problems in DCS, why stuff only seemed to work half the time, and why I was so confused! If you can help my change this I’ll be golden.
I have my HOTAS pinkie setup as a modifier switch. So like, chaff/flares is on my throttle hat, and the modified version is spyglass zoom/normal zoom. I was in training and wanted to zoom into my gauges. So pinkie and throttle hat left. But then when I did throttle hat left with pinkie not engaged it still zoomed. It wouldn’t switch back to chaff until I hit the pinkie switch again. I want the pinkie to modify only when I’m activating it… not all the time until I click it again. How do I do that? Have it work like a shift key and not a toggle?
Uh. Whoa. Huh.
Yeah. So a “shift” key in the DCS controller set up is just that. It really should not be a toggle. In fact, AFAIK it’s impossible to make it behave like a toggle. However, I would not be at all surprised if your HOTAS can. So try another button for shift? Or indeed one of the toggle buttons on the HOTAS?
https://www.amazon.com/Fighter-Combat-Maneuvering-Robert-Shaw/dp/0870210599
It even has a Hornet on the cover.
Hmmm crap. OK I’ll see what I can do.
Man, just when I think I’ve got my controller setup perfected…
I’ve never heard of this one before, wonder if it’s any good:
https://www.amazon.com/18-Hornet-How-Fight-Controls/dp/0004720091/
Super cheap, too. Of course the Tomcat one is like $200. :P
Figured it out and this is actually pretty cool (maybe you all know this already).
On the modifier page, you can add your joystick button to both the left and right side. Well on the General and UI setup pages I had the pinkie on the left-hand column, but on the F18 modifier page I had it listed on the right. So apparently anything listed on the right is actually a toggle for modifiers instead of a shift. Set all 3 to the left side column and now it works!
The interesting thing is I could setup a whole bunch of mundane tasks under a button that acts as a modifier toggle and double the number of doubled commands I can assign.
…And give yourself a headache trying to remember all of them. It is hella cool though ;-)
I just wish you could set a setting and click a button to “apply to all compatible aircraft.” So you could set things like axes, airbrakes, chaff, flares, weapon switch, etc. on one plane and CC: it to all the others. If it doesn’t apply to a plane, ignore it. Would make it SOOOO much easier to consistently config all your planes.
Then just go back and set aircraft-unique stuff, like the F-14 settings, etc.
Oh man Art of the Kill. What wonderful memories.
I wish someone would translate that to Russian and provide a copy to today’s AI programmers.
Also this book while they’re at it.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0870210599/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_fabc_SO4aGb41DG2DE