This campaign was released Spring 2023 and I was gifted it last week by Sinterklaas.
It has you flying a USMC AV-8B in the mountains of inland Iran.
Later I might write a longer article-style review here and a fairer comparison to the other top-notch DCS campaigns that I have flown but for now, I just wanted to say that this campaign has really sucked me in.
It is very enjoyable, robust, great voice acting, fun characters and a lot of documentation.
I should figure out how to do screenshots in OpenXR or just save replays and go through them later. Iâm sorry, I donât have any.
Wow wow wow love it!!
I normally fly DCS once or sometimes twice a week.
Now I have flown 4 missions (each lasting 1.5 - 2 hours) in the past 6 days.
I just started on this one as well. Itâs great, but I havenât managed to progress past M1 yet. Canât leave that target unbombed, but itâs &%*#(@ hard to get.
His other campaigns are really great as well, he has one for the A-10, the F/A-18 and the F-16.
It took me embarrassingly long to learn that when you are under type 1 control from a JTAC, the JTAC needs to visually see you with their eyes, so you have to fly below the clouds.
But while this undoubtedly hurt my score, it never stopped me from progressing the campaign.
I didnât have trouble bombing that target in mission 1 though. Took me a while to find it but with the smoke and then the TGP, it was easy. You do realize you have laser guided bombs right? And that you can designate from orbit, then go to INR track (SSS aft long or cycle aft), turn away and set up for a new long pass with the target still designated, right?
On my first run I never found out how to get a ccrp queue. (needed to long press wpt incr. button but got called away before browsing chucks guide was complete)
On my 2nd run, I got blasted by a MANPAD because I flew below the cloud
On my third run, I forgot to set the fusing, so I dropped inert.
On my fourth run, somehow both bombs went wide. Perhaps I masked the laser or got cloudblocked on a crucial moment.
This weekend iâmma have a fifth and if needed a sixth run
Thatâs a familiar one! In the last mission, I just saved a few future kids from being crippled by forgetting to set the fusing when I switched from Mk-82 to Mk.20. Luckily I was able to take out all required targets so in hindsight, it was perfect planning.
Somewhere I have notes on the âtypesâ for JTACâs (thought I posted on this site somewhere) extracted through a lot of trial-and-error. If memory serves, in addition to some weapons criteria, thereâs a range variable in there too. Be nice if this was documented.
Getting a JTAC to reliably get beyond Type 3 requires hacking the system; if there is no clear LOS they are useless no matter how far away and how much of a ruckus the enemy is causing. In an urban environment Iâm using only the drone. Assuming the era you are simulating has drones of course.
Still WIP.
Ok, an excerpt from my DCS junk-drawer of [hopefully] useful information (discovered over the last few years) about JTAC stuffâŠ
FAC/JTAC Designate Range Criteria
AFAC
WP 8NM
IR-Pointer 3NM
Laser 5NM
WP-Laser(?) 8NM Think this means Laser-guided WP rockets?
Ground-based JTAC: Laser designation max 3NM.
You can assign the task to the JTAC anytime but the above designations wonât be used until the JTAC is within the given range, ie; an AFAC can be assigned to attack a group anywhere but if you contact them when they are outside those ranges you will get a âType 3â and âNo Markâ - cus they canât see the target yet (or you I imagine).
Not sure if they ever change the designation, after the first call with âNo Markâ, once they do get within range. Even if they do youâd need to communicate this to the player - they would have to RTFM. Best practice is to wait until the JTAC is within designation range then tell them to âcontact JTAC frequency 123.4â
[EDIT: Yes, they do update the Type; after getting Type 3 I waited a while (a lua script that checks on this) and upon contacting them again got Type 1]
Weapons Request Criteria
Since 2.8, JTACs can now name AGM-65E and AGM-65F (e.g. ârequest AGM-65Eâ).
Devs told me that JTACs are programmed to ask for cannon when the target is âsoftâ (truck , light tank). Example: if you target a T-72, JTAC will ask for GBUs. If you target a truck, JTACs will ask for cannon (unless your ammo is depleted). This is expected behavior.
Iâve found that the above is true IF you are packing MK-8xâs. With Mk-20 Rockeyes he will ask for them with soft targets. Obviously not tested every possib
An issue is yet to be solved: when an aircraft carries a gunpod, JTACs answer ârequest [nothing]â (reported in another thread).
Which is why Groundpounder Sims made his own JTAC system, completely separate from the DCS JTAC logic.
Just like his ATC around FOB Juliet, it works very robustly and intuitively, with less steps, actually getting talked onto target by a human voice, and clear hints on what to do in the top right of the screen at any time in the process. Useful if you get lost.
Have a look at the intro vid, he does a demo somewhere in the middle.
I know heâs used it in his earlier campaigns and iterated on it for this one. So there must be some mission design flexibility, though itâs probably not 100% âruntime dynamicâ.
I imagine that he might want to keep it âcompany secretâ instead of opening it up to the public, but you could ask him. He goes by ChillNG on the DCS forums.
Cool. Yeah, Iâm pretty sure Iâve got the âhowâ part down (or am getting closer every day). Itâs a time thing.
The DCS JTAC is a fill-in until I write my own version. The icky part is, at the moment, identifying landmarks; if you stick to one location you can get very detailed ("bad guy is behind that red building, west of the taco standâŠetc).
DCS isnât setup to do that dynamically soâŠcompromises are required to take it from, say, a village in the Falklands to a patch of desert in the NTTR.
I have a âplanâ (compromise) that hopefully will fall somewhere between:
Highly detailed, yet static, and
Barely useful (that comes with DCS outta the box).
CAS, thatâs not scripted per se, is a complex task, both IRL and trying to code it. Not sure Iâll pull it off, yet.
Getting RED/BLUE ground forces to simulate even a simple fire fight takes some slight-of-hand. Details the user doesnât need to know
Air-to-Air seems more straight-forward.
Secretly (guess not anymore ) Iâm hoping to see more Air-to-Ground stuff get created in the hopes that it will become more popular (relative to the A2A stuff that seems to be predominate) and thus ED will notice?
It feels like this is what Groundpounder does. His framework is probably a Lua function that takes target coordinates and an offset to an IP, with custom voice recordings (not dynamic) for the 9-line and IP description.
The shared logic is probably just the âstate machineâ and the feedback after the 9-line and remarks. (âCome leftâ, âAbort, Iâm blindâ, âcleared hotâ, etc)
Nothing near as complex as what you are trying to do, but once crafted, it does provide a really nice experience. He goes for replay value through the points system (for combat and procedures), rather than creating actual fully dynamic random missions.
Thereâs definitely a market for fully dynamic and random CAS missions so I hope you can get it working!
My Text-to-speech engine (lua stuff embedded in the miz file) can handle the ânumbersâ - callsigns, range, bearing/heading, etc, plus at the moment generic target descriptions[1].
It would just be more âcolorfulâ with some localized references. HUGE time factor though going through and idâing these things so the âplanâ is to eventually create landmarks at a reasonable scale; instead of âthird building west of the bridgeâ, think, âx meters NW of bridgeâ. Assuming Iâve pre-identified this bridge. Thatâs the time sink.
[1] tweaking the audio is tedious and usually comes near the end of a benchmark; once you get used to it it sounds fine, IMHO. Itâs not Alexa butâŠAlexa canât do a 9-line Hmmm, âHey, Alexa!..â
