Hey bud, how’re you getting on with the game? You got it to load?
Let me dump a little random tidbits on ya.
In the main menu, click the cog wheel to go to the options. Here you can tune and tweak your graphics settings. It’s fairly well explained. There’s also a menu where you can set certain game options. Stay away from ‘easy avionics’ and ‘easy flight model’. They suck, don’t work, and don’t really improve the accessibility of the game at all. Do keep labels on, but perhaps not the full ones, as those easily become a mess. Try ‘dot’ or ‘short’ labels. Later you can hack into a file and tweak it to your hearts’ content. This is PC gaming after all.
Allright. Now. Don’t click Mission, Quick Mission Generator or Campaign just yet. Either Training or Instant Action. When running the training, for the love of all that’s unholy and metal, don’t force yourself to do them in numerical order. Brrt first, or at least second after ‘making turns and flying straight’. In the instant action menu there’s things like ‘Runway take off’. Use that to do your regular ‘I wanna go fly my hog’ thing where you just open up the throttle and fly the thing.
Now there’s going to be some terms. AoA is an important one, angle of attack. It’s the angle at which the air hits your wing. The slower you fly or the harder you yank on the stick, the higher that gets. It has an upper limit, above which, your plane will go ‘fuck it’ and become a brick. Or a leaf. Or some unholy abomination that combines the worst traits of both. So. Respect your plane when it starts beeping at you for pulling too hard and/or flying too slow. Take it easy. It’s a big truck you’re driving, almost as big as a boeing 737. Your hog will talk to you. It will go ‘beeeeeep’ in a highly annoying fashion to tell you you are pulling for maximum turn performance. The beeping will become a more annoying beep-beep-beep-beep if you are starting to pull too much AoA and you need to back the fuck off or Bad Shit™ is going to happen to you. There is probably a volume control on a panel down by your left leg somewhere where you can turn its volume down and just listen for the wind over your wing. When that starts to sound rough, you are in the ’ beep beep beep’ part of the flight.
Another acronym I want you to know is CCIP. Continuously Calculated Impact Point. It’s a very fancy bit of tech where the hog’s computer figures out from knowing where it is, where it is going and how fast, what the world is shaped like and what the ballistic properties are from whatever murderous bit of metal you’re hurling at the bad guys, where it will end up. And it indicates that point on your HUD (heads up display). It does it for guns, rockets and bombs. It can be freakishly accurate. Especially compared to the olden way of doing it (being all nerdy and precise about speed, dive angle, altitude and dropping a whole fucking carpet at once). Find out how to do this, as it’s fun and it’s useful. CCIP. FTW.
Now soon there’s going to come a point where you can take off, navigate, make something explode, navigate home and land. It will take patience and perseverance getting there, especially if all you know is War Thunder or some ancient sim you flew when you were a kid. When the basic stuff is starting to come easy, go look into more high tech ways of putting warheads on foreheads. Maverick missiles. Laser guided bombs. JDAM. Most of that is operating the target pod and this is wild mad fun, but also heavy on the switchology. You will need to learn a whole language of TMS and TGP and LGB and WHOT and whatnot. Worth it? Oh yeah. Nothing beats getting a pinpoint hit with an LGB.
