DCS F/A-18C (Open Beta) Initial Impressions AAR

Flight Sims
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My first impressions after a whole 45 minutes of entire play time (live a little!).

  • I love it.
  • If the US Navy needs a place to put a Bouncy Castle for birthdays etc, then I would recommend the back of the carrier. Would have saved a lot of lives.
  • Throttle feels nice and responsive, but my goodness is there a ‘plunge’ at low speed that you need to catch.
  • The Harrier seems liked a really nice warm-up for systems familiarity, given the family McD’ness.
  • Sounds and audio (betty, flyby etc) are fantastic. Seriously good.
  • Only ever flow it in VR :vr: and it works well, with (as others pointed out) a lot of static aircraft causing some perf dips. Cockpit looks great. Can’t read the map but everything else is pretty good.
  • In VR the IFLOS / ball is about 1 pixel of nothing. Very hard to use. Also, the levels of detail on the deck markings on the Carrier are too grey during the day, making it very hard to line up even in good VFR. A tiny tweak in LOD needed here I think.
  • The Stennis is on 127.500 AM for manual Comms2 fans. Took me ages to find that. Unless changed in the mission editor then it is also channel 1X by default in TACAN.
  • A weird funny was that I had an old mission with the ‘wrong’ old CVN-70 Vinson carrier set up to play around with. I was using that (because I just flipped the aircraft to F/A-18C Lot 20 from the Su-33 I was playing around with) and had all sorts of weird shadow-world spock-with-goatee non-bugs. The Hornet TACAN channel 55X would come up but not allow a course line, the number of bolters was extreme (could be me though) and I couldn’t use the ‘U’ key to set up a launch. Obviously user error, but I mention it in-case anyone else makes the same mistake. Use CVN-74 then, Doh!
  • I didn’t bother setting up an axis curve for pitch/roll so resorted to using guns on the poor A-6 S-3 refueller. I need to git-good on that obviously.
  • The systems are remarkably intuitive and easy to use so far. Start-up is not too weird to remember. As all things should be, etc.

Great fun and a good start.

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