Recent air combat sim recommendations?

Already linked it!

How do you edit the loadout of your fighter when you make a quick mission in DCS? When I go to advanced and choose all the different kinds of ground attack missions it keeps saddling me with the same stupid loadout. 4 sidewinders, 2 drop tanks, and what appear to be to HARMā€™s. I want to practice dropping cluster bombs.

In the waypoints tab, click the bomb icon, 2nd one from the left. Soon as I have my coffee a screenshot shall elucidate.

Got it - thanks!

Iā€™m assuming you all have the cockpit rendering at default and not ā€œevery frameā€?

Indeed, 1024 tho. It helps when fiddling with the camera. Have you done that yet? Itā€™s one of the most satisfying things you can do with an aircraft; dropping a laser guided bomb on the left hatch of a T-55 from angels 25.

Not yet. Working my way up to it.

BTW, when I max out my throttle Iā€™ve never see the afterburner light. Am I supposed to?

Depends. Did you turn off afterburner detents in the options screen?

Iā€™ll have to double check but I think itā€™s on.

Turn it off. In the MiG-19 and F/A-18, going to burners involves an extra button, or in the hornet, lifting a pair of grips on the throttle base. This makes sense IRL, as you really want to be deliberate about turning the blower on. It can make the difference between having a beer with the boys or a long cold, lonely and dark night in a raft on the ocean about 300 miles short of home. But its a game, just the slight bump at the end of your throttles range should be enough.

So if I turn it off, do I need to assign a button to afterburners?

Nope. Well on the hornet you get to turn the need for an afterburner button off. Finger lifts are what theyā€™re called iirc.

I wish I had the Thrustmaster Warthog HOTAS. That would solve so many of my problems.

The hotas you have is a fine one. The Thrustmaster one isnā€™t all that better, and definitely not 300$$ better. If you feel like spending big on a HOTAS, import one from the former Soviet Union. Those guys make the best flying hardware. https://virpil-controls.eu/ or https://vkbcontrollers.com/. I have a Virpil stick and it is the dogsā€™ danglies.

In your second link, why donā€™t they have a throttle listed too?

Can I ask why the thustmaster one isnā€™t much better? Just over-rated, or has some drawbacks people donā€™t often talk about? Pretty amazing the better system is coming from the former Soviet Union. Howā€™d that happen?!

World class engineers with no high tech industry to work for anymore. So they struck out for themselves. Virpil and VKB are among the companies started by some of those people. Virpil also has a throttle, VKB doesnā€™t. The quality of the sticks are fairly evenly matched AFAIK, and truly a notch above the Thrustmaster Warthog stick.

The moving part of a Warthog stick is a gimbal made of plastic. Itā€™s a ball in a socket, and that ball isnā€™t even perfectly smooth. When I took mine apart, I found a seam running 'round it, from the mold. Sanding that away and greasing it with silicon gel did make it a better stick, but stillā€¦

The Virpil stuff is all precision machined metal. So smooth. So precise. Just perfect. I can shoot the balls off a Mexican Bull Fly at 3000 feet with that thing.

I still use the throttle from the Warthog set. Itā€™s not perfect, but itā€™s metal, has a ton of switches that feel pretty good and is the de facto standard throttle. In fact I also still use the metal stick handle from the Warthog because Iā€™m a cheapskate and itā€™s motherfuckinā€™ metal man!

Flight-simmer: TM Warthog sucks, buys Russian ultraboutique flight stick

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Iā€™m not saying it sucks.

Iā€™m just saying that as a stick, ie a gimbal and sensors, it is not a huge improvement on the X52 Jeffā€™s rocking now. For its price, it should have better internals imo.

Yeah but you sanded and silicon-ed the TMā€™s balls, man

You walk the walk, mein freund

That I do, and proudly so.

And I didnā€™t even stop at thatā€¦ I even got an enlargement for it. Yeah baby, a Joystick Enlargement!

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Silliness aside, extending the length of your stick is something I can wholeheartedly recommend. Even if it means taking a hacksaw to your beloved hardware. It makes precise movement easier and dissuades the user from pulling it to the stops all the time, which almost always makes for better flying.

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Would that only work for a center mounted flightstick (between the legs)?