I did get that you meant them Jedi, but every company in every business has this problem. The goal should always be to figure out who you want your customer base to be and cater to them completely.
So I have done a complete 180 on the WW2 endeavor. While I love getting into the cockpits and flying full fidelity warbirds, I have realized that is the only part I like. For someone who was so excited for the Normandy map it has become a complete disappointment for me. It is too small and the field choices are terrible for any scenarios that make sense. Add to that the whole idea of flying 1944 Allied aircraft against late 1945 German aircraft and it just becomes a museum show for general fly-ins. I am much more excited for the new IL-2 offering. At least there I can see the plan.
I bought Normandy to create 1980s Cold War missions. But the visibility is really poor, so picking out tanks among the trees and towns is near impossible. IR, even more so.
Same here. I have no plans to purchase any of the DCS WW2 modules other than the already purchased Normandy map which I mainly use for Sabre/Mig-15bis stuff. My go to WW2 flying is soley with IL-2 BOS and its modules.
That’s not necessarily a problem with the map though. There’s a reason FACs and extensive planning and briefing processes exist in real life. There’s also a case to be made that DCS overstates the effectiveness of air power, especially in a high threat environment without the luxury of loitering for hours at a time with a high powered TGP.
@near_blind makes a good point. Historically, air attacks on armies in the field have been extremely difficult (other than in the desert perhaps). I have read of F-4 crews deployed in Germany that they have often been unable to spot tank targets in training sorties until being on top of them, obviously unable to attack them. Also while we are used in DCS to hover with helicopters and attack at maximum weapon range, actual average engagement ranges in central Europe were considerable shorter. The Soviets planned with average tank engagement ranges of just a couple of hundred meters. So Normandy might actually be a first glimpse at much more restricted European battlefield conditions.
DCS is often all-or-nothing with regards to air power. Either air defense is so strong to completely restrict access by aircraft. Or aircraft are able to systematically take out air defenses and then loiter and mop up everything and everybody. Historically, the number of air defenses was often considerably higher than what we see in even the hardest DCS missions (MANPADS by the hundreds). Yet their effectiveness against aircraft could be limited by applying appropriate tactics, which at the same time severely limited the offensive effectiveness of the aircraft. The biggest impact of air defense was often not that of shooting down many aircraft, but of reducing their effectiveness. I feel that the cluttered ground environment of Normandy for the first time gives us a gimps at this mechanic. If you fly at >100ft/M0.9 you are virtually immune to air defenses. At the same time, your ability to spot and attack targets is almost completely neutralized. If you want to attack something you will have to unmask first. It is a fascinating relationship, which I hope gets further enhanced with improved AI in the future.
The stats from Vietnam for fighter aircraft hitting and having weapons effects their assigned target is ridiculously low if you dig into the research for it. This is why they would send an entire formation of fighters to try and hit a single building or complex or bridge and come away many times with limited or low effects. This is primarily due to 1) the delivery method, 2) dumb bombs circular error of probability or CEP.
In flight sims we have a pretty generous model for dumb bombs, they are really very very accurate in every flight sim. Real world not so much. I have seen dumb bombs land several building lengths long or short with a great designation and a clean release from a pilot. The only way to hit anything reliably with dumb bombs is to saturate the area, essentially throw enough cards at the hat and although all will probably land close, if you throw enough your odds of getting one or two in the hat go up dramatically.
Both of these things combined (remember these were targets that were usually prebriefed so FINDING the target was usually not the challenge) were why you could drop 100 or more Mk-82s (four ship of A-6’s or F-4’s loaded to the gills with MER’s and TERS) on a single building or bridge and come away with it damaged, or partially destroyed at best.
If you dig further along this track and start looking at the popular conception of CAS in WW2, it didn’t really exist for American forces anyways. There was generally very little or no coordination at the unit level when engagements on the ground occurred. Most (All I can really think of) battlefield air support in WW2 was INTERDICTION ( behind the engaged enemy troops at reinforcements and logistics) not CAS (in proximity to friendly ground forces).
Digging further into this you will find that pilots vastly exaggerated their claims when engaging things on the ground. Not any fault of their own but because of the inherent difficulty in determining weapons effects on something from the air in a brief engagement. Again if you dig into it and compare german reported losses vs Allied fighter pilots reported kills you can have wild number differences like a single fighter squadron claiming to knock out 10 Tigers and 30 other tanks in a single engagement. When the Germans didn’t have SINGLE TIGER TANK within 100 miles and only reported 3-4 APC’s moderately damaged.
So overall do I think with Mk 1 eyeball while over normandy and engaging tanks and APC’s with .50 cals and dumb bombs and rockets, while they are engaged with allied tanks and apcs and ground troops you are going to be able to effectively spot and target and get weapons effects in your P-51? Realistically no, not a likely scenario at all.
The “fracturing of the community” concern is valid. It is impossible to overcome without entirely gutting the model. If you want a relatively cohesive community, build a continuous universe, a la Elite Dangerous. Just take us, Mudspike. I have flown online with just four or five Mudspikers. A few of you fly together very regularly. Most do not fly online at all. I find that I seize a scenario and focus on it entirely until I can no longer even stand the thought of it. The most recent incarnations of this cycle have been the new Su33 and the kick-a$$ Buddyspike '80’s flag campaigns using NTTR. In both cases I had to tailor the game to serve what I find fun. When I felt comfortable enough to fly with other Mudspikers on the Buddyspike map I had a blast. And it is moments like those that make spending hundreds on a flight sim worth it.
I will never be part of the “single player community” again (strictly speaking DCS here). For voice acting and oddly contrived scenarios I turn to Call of Duty. But I fully understand why others feel differently. They couldn’t be paid enough to suffer online retards and the frustrations of Air Qwake. So long as both of us continue to get some satisfaction from our respective corners ED wins and so do we.
My biggest specific concern is the horrid network behavior on the servers I frequent. I just cannot fathom why there needs to be three seconds of kicks and stutters every time a new player logs on.
EDIT: Reading the above I see that I didn’t finish my point. My point is that the community is already as cohesive as it will ever or be or, arguably, even NEEDS to be. We are adults and take enjoyment from these products in different ways. I have never played online with @BeachAV8R but though this forum I feel a connection. Unlike @Linebacker I HATE guns, but we have a connection. Forums like this one let us share paths where possible and sometimes steer each other onto paths which we otherwise may not have discovered. This works in ED’s favor.
Bogus, we get it OK! You obviously love the Mig-25. But even you must admit that the Soviet practice of using humans to steer bombs to impact was barbaric.
This is a good summary for my bomb runs in the F-5.
I heard of Stuka being in contact with some sort of FAC during the Battle of France. But I get your point and it makes me feel better when I check my mission log on the debriefing screen.
If we continue the quest for realism we would end up with nine out of ten sorties were absolutely nothing spectecular happens.
I’m primarily talking about the American experience. I have less knowledge of the German and Russian fronts but I would assume the same is true simply due to the fact that they had less radios on the ground and similiar organization and coordination issues. Not saying it wouldn’t have happened. But the saving private Ryan moment of a tiger tank getting blown up in the center of a town in the middle of a heavy contact danger close firefight with us troops? Highly unlikely, and the guys on the ground would have no way of asking specifically for that CAS in a manner that would be of use in a meaningful way during the firefight
Maybe for CCIP. Iron sights are different, at least for me. The blast from a Mk82 nearby a unarmored truck is a 50/50 if it’ll knock it out. So yes, I’ll end up dumping a ripple of 5 to saturate. Follow up with HEAT rockets to clean up, if possible. But I think the blast radius needs adjustment all around.
Klarsnow’s talking about ballistics. Things like how cleanly a bomb separates, how quickly it stabilizes in the slip stream, a plethora of atmospheric conditions can all drastically effect the trajectory of an otherwise properly delivered weapon. DCS doesn’t bother with this except a simplified winds model.
If you account for all variables you will shack 100% of the time. That’s not how things work in reality.
Blast effects are… also not what you would expect lol. Dropped a 500 pound bomb in the back of a pickup truck full of ISIS once. Shacked the truck, turned into a fireball and rolled off the road.
Driver then rolled out of the drivers compartment and took off running into the night despite a 500 pound bomb exploding less than 5 feet from him.
Multiple instances of dropping on a building and having the bomb just miss to one side by a few feet and have no effects at all on the building. I’ve dropped on troops in the open and had individuals survive a bomb exploding in the open while they are standing up within a few meters.
Blast effects are weird and not always what you expect from bombs.
And yes near blind is right, I’m saying with a perfect release aimed at say the center of a house, no matter what the method, the inherent imperfections of the bomb itself will far more often than not result in a clean miss.
