Wonder why I was having so much trouble with it? Anyway-

My thought was to take the blank map zoomed in to the active periphery of the mission so that you can get enough detail to see various cities and features. For roadkill for example I wanted to zoom in to the cities on either side of Sochi. That seemed to give the detail I envisioned.

I had yet another experience with a phantom SA10. Kind of a cool scenario actually- I was circling at about 24k in the Fulda gap mission trying to draw out some of the smaller SAM radars while keeping my eyes outside scanning for other activity. The BB radar was chirping slowly so I knew it was watching me and I had some attention paid in that direction. Good thing I did- because I noticed a white finger reaching up from the distance about where I expected the sa10 site to be. I put it on my 3 and dispensed chaff, then entered a steep dive to about 18000- so that I didn't ostensibly drop into a whole other missile envelope while still within reach of this sa10 site. Anyway I evaded a couple of rounds and then tomcat joined up wanting to hit that sa10 site. We both went after it and while he did most of the damage I got a few licks in as well.

But I'm quite certain that's a bug- but I'm sure I've been locked up by sa10s before. I know GG mentioned it before in the FG mission and it sounds like he's "connected" so I'm hoping that'll get fixed.

Well, realize that even though it's a bug, it doesn't mean things will be easy for you in the future. For example, I bet that SA-10 was sitting around all alone, instead of with layered MERAD and SHORAD on the aproach axis.

Also, whenever the AI gets some loving, you might not realize there's a SAM some place until it flips its radar on, already STT on you and launches a missile inside Rtr .... ugly.

I made a change in White Bird this weekend - to all of the air defense radar-bearing groups that come on-line - previously, a group would Activate and it would be able to shoot right away, now the group will Activate but with ROE = Weapons Hold, wait 90 seconds and then switch ROE to Weapons Free. Hopefully this will give a bit of an RWR warning, but it's pretty quick. I still need to observe that the newly activated radars do indeed radiate when in Weapons Hold, fingers crossed. BTW, that 90 seconds can be adjusted for each group that comes on-line during the mission... I could add messages from our spies that announce newly activated groups and locations.

Also, thinking that in White Bird the F10 View should not include the Red objects since all of the enemy locations are mapped by our spies. This would knock out the ability to use F7 in flight, too, and that logically implies that Labels will also be forced Off.

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Had family day yesterday... then good progress on the new 'Riders ot Storm' mission last night. Springtime thundershowers and fog. Time to brush up on my ILS and TACAN... made the landing through the fog but ran off the end of the runway because I had to turn further to the runway at the last minute and landed more than halfway down the strip.

WC

I'm so glad you said that. Ugh... WC has such pleasantries in his latest mission. I was FINALLY starting to feel like I was getting the hang of things- anticipating trouble and getting myself out of it passively by going around or over instead of actively by basically running out of decoys, ordinance and fuel before I even reached the target. I was busy fussing over some bad layering I'm getting with my TIR5 (probably a refresh issue- I'll bet vsync might help come to think of it) with nothing on my threat board... when within about 5 seconds I'd been locked up and engaged by an errant SA8 site. They did so with great gusto- firing enough missles, so fast that I figured that the general had offered sloppy seconds to the SAM crew that shot down an A-10. The result had to be no piece of aircraft too large to be placed as a trophy on a mantle. This crew definitely got top honours in this competition.

All I can say is I'm getting REALLY, REALLY good at my Control-E-E-E key combination.

I was whining at WC about it... I feel kind of bad for it now because that's just the way it's going to be with a product like this.


Another issue I'm having GG- and something maybe you can give some clarification on... when I maneuver the reference of where the missle is in respect to my aircraft seems to change... For example- I start with it on my nose, go to turn 90 degrees and dive and throughout the maneuver it just stays where it is on my RWR or ends up behind me somehow... it's all over the place?

My thoughts were that it was because the threat is being interpretted true to the perspective of the antennae- So when I bank hard and dive the threat direction may appear on the RWR differently until you level off again. If I bank hard right on a threat in front of me- before my nose swung around would the threat appear on the left side of my RWR because it's relative to the aircraft in level flight... so when I bank the aircraft that way the RWR interprets the signal coming in as if the aircraft were still level. If I dive steep, the threat may show to be directly beneath (above) me.

(Sorry- I'm sitting here with a roll of tape acting as a radar and my hand out in the shape of a plane trying to figure out where the threat would appear to be coming from through various maneuvers so I can explain this properly. Brutal, I know)

Is there a trick to being able to anticipate how the threats will appear on your RWR when you're not flying straight and level? Is it even supposed to be that way?


Is this making any sense at all?

Yep, that's where the 90 second delay idea came from. I'm thinking message alerts would be beneficial, too.



Try pressing the PRI and SEP buttons on the CMSC?




WC

Think a real crew will wait beyond their minimum reaction time to open fire? It's far, far, faaaaar shorter than 90 sec.



That could make sense in some cases.



If you see you won't be landing where you're supposed to land, you go around

Or maybe there's just too many SAMs. That's a common theme in a lot of missions (unfortunately, since they're meant to run for hours on end, it seems to be a necessity. But then, why not provide multiple targets instead of plastering a single one with so much coverage that even a stealth fighter wouldn't get through?)



The display is roll-stabilized but it isn't perfect. If you roll the indication may 'shift' and not display correctly. Turning away from the indication should not be done by RWR - use contact flying. See the indication, look out of the cockpit 90 deg away from the indication, see the terrain features, turn your plane to point the nose at said features, then roll out and THEN adjust where the threat is at.

Also, if you are overflying a threat, bearing to it may change very quickly.



Yep, something like that.



I know that in the real aircraft this displacement isn't supposed to be as bad. But I also can't tell you how bad it actually is, for obvious reasons. I will see if I can bring this up with ED, and maybe they can limit how much roll affects this problem. There should be some roll stabilization applied to these signals. After all, your antennae might be aligned on a specific plane, but the aircraft itself also happens to know its own attitude, so ...

I wonder about that GG? I was a HAWK HIPIR & CWAR radar technician in the early seventies. It would be 5 minutes on Standby before we were supposed to press the radiate button. There certainly was some time necessary for the magnetron to begin to operate, and the radar would not go from cold start to radiate right away. I would think some delay would still be necessary on modern designs, too.

In White Bird, these radars are down because of poor maintenance and the severe weather and troops operating outside in the cold. Geez, that reminds me of one frackin freezin cold night in 1974 on the DMZ in Korea up above Uijeongbu and me and Buzz, a guy from West Virginia, were trying to get something up in the antenna of our HIPIR fixed. He was in a real pi$$y mood and threw up his hands and said to me, "What the f*&^ is this, are we the f&^%$#@ Glory Guys?!" It took a lot longer than 90 seconds to get that antenna to radiate.

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I could see the runway OK. It just happened to be 75 feet to the left by the time I made it out through the fog. Walked away...

WC

That's very cool, I might have some q's for you

However ... these new SAMs are not your 70's SAMs. Especially the mobile guys with lesser power requirements can drive around on stand-by if required, and then radiate as needed. This is part of the premise when it comes to an IADS - it's how they ambush you. hat equipment has to warm up to operate is one thing, but once it's humming along, you just leave it on standby until you actually want to radiate. This is how blinking and other tactics are accomplished.



That makes some sense, but I wouldn't do it for -all- SAMs. It's your mission though, so



Safety/Airmanship: U - Not qualified to operate aircraft

I had a little more opportunity to go over Gameplan and quite frankly with the right maps I think it could work really well. There are enough icons to get by- though a "missile" icon might be nice-

The scenario I imagine is similar to what is available to us through the TAD with broadcasting SPI. That's good for marking a target but not really that great at marking anything else. When we're with a regular group of guys I see a benefit of being able to figure out the location of different threats and or targets with gameplan. Guys who come in late can see the current lay of the land... which can be updated quite regularly-

What I'd like to see is a "touch to delete" feature as opposed to having to delete a bunch of things by dragging them to the trash can. I had some success "flicking" things to the trash but other times it just put down more icons.

Arrows, routes, orders... titles... all worked quite well. The maps as they're uploaded need to be reasonably focussed- zoomed in. I suspect the file we load won't be able to zoom in with the increased level of detail that we can zoom in with in the game. When I was zooming out the ARMA2 map I noticed the icons got much bigger... though the boxes / zones stayed the right size. Just be aware an icon might look enormous and cover a large amount of space if zoomed out on your current map.

And I guess what I'd like to know is- when we upload the file are we uploading the FILE or are we just using a screenshot of an existing map as it appears on the screen? The maps I was using from ARMA2 are such that the same level of detail is available just in larger and smaller fonts... With A10- as you zoom in you get into more and more town / area name detail- with added roads and building graphics available. THAT is what I think we'd need- so when a guy spots some armour amongst buildings he can zoom in, place the icons and allow others in his flight to zoom in, get their bearings, and then proceed to target with their TGP- if they even have one!

Anyway, just thoughts. Anyone else want to weigh in?