@chipwich - I looked it up, and like most things on retrospect it’s nicely obvious now.
GOSTT = GO STT, as in you have an AIM-7 selected so it’s saying go single target track (STT) mode if you want it to work. Nice. 
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Killed a convoy that was approaching our new FARP, but not before I was reminded the hardway that BMP’s carry missiles.
Made some in roads at Ras, took out the SR and Firecan, along with a few other things. However the AAA is significant still.
But hey if you can walk away to EE…
Dropped an Mi-8 headed to Ras after I got a new bird, and called it for the moment. Good luck to @chipwich and @Derbysieger on the fight.
And one from last night, fun times flying the Apache in the dark.
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Daohhhhh! Of course, thanks.
I could only stay on for maybe 30 mins, but made two logistic runs from Al Dahid to London. Dropped 17,000 lbs of supplies and 60 A/G missiles.
When I left, @Derbysieger was hunting an insurgent convoy headed to Al Dahid.
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Ras fell, @Derbysieger did some excellent work in his Hawg, I just ran clean up in the Apache.
We had an enemy convoy sneak down to Al Dahid, but the blue AI solved that problem. @TeTeT ran some supplies over to replenish it, and picked up some downed pilots, and then loaded up the Huey to run the zone supplies for a capture, but we ran into a pair of MiG-29’s.
Unfortunately my Hellfires did no good, and I got shot down, and then TeTeT. He beat me back into the air in a Huey, and I fired up an Eagle. With the help of @miRage, Tetet managed to sneak in for the capture.
I firewalled the throttles and extracted a little revenge for both Tetet and myself.
As it stands Ras is fully upgraded, and we got a message that there is a convoy headed S from Charlie about 2 minutes before I logged off.
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Only had time for about 45 mins today, what with not watching the football properly etc. Here’s what I learnt:
- When it’s dark everything is a bit more difficult for people not that familiar with stuff like where the ground is.
- Combined Arms works fine with all this. I spawn in as a Tactical Commander (At Ease people, this isn’t going to my head) and I could badly drive a M1A2, set paths and routes and tell Anti Air stuff to shoot down things annoying @BeachAV8R trying to land.
- I am probably the worse person in the world at getting off Mavericks on moving vehicles and using the GMT radar to find things. Back to the Caucaus and that X runway to go work out what I am doing wrong with that flow. I couldn’t hit the side of a barn, especially at night and it was moving.
Given how effectively a 4 piece armor group was at defeating that convoy heading South for K.A.S blue base, I reckon a legitimate tactic might just be to take an armor group North with CA and fight that way as well. I might give that a go for a change of pace e.g. helo support with some land units..
We have so many unspent group credits (10,000+) so some armor units placed not to lose progress on what we have got already is worth it I think. Otherwise it’s going to be like an RPG where you fight the final boss and have 4,300 potions left unused..
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The supply run into Ras was a close call in the second run as well. I think the Fulcrum ran out of missiles…
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The theme for the evening was SAMs streaking past my cockpit.
Hoped on this evening to @BeachAV8R @fearlessfrog working on the Chemsite. I setup a couple of FARPS and grabbed a down pilot, before I took a break to eat dinner.
After I got back, I was solo. They had cleared out all the air defenses at the Chemsite, so I just headed out to get rid of the light stuff.
After that it was just the two big buildings, nothing some 1000lb’ers can’t fix.
Red air did not appreciate that, and an SU-27 expressed their displeasure. Needless to say, that required a respawn.
I still had one factory building left, so I took a few minutes, reviewed @Chuck_Owl excellent guide for the Harrier, and went back and leveled it with 2 1000lb LGB’s.
From there a few random enemy attacks had to be dealt with. I saw there was a mission to escort a convoy to Charlie, so I figured why not. That was quite a fight for that FARP.
I think all those smoke trials are from either SAM’s or AAA on my initial approach. I believe there were 4 missiles in the air, face on at one point. Fortunately the Apache is hella maneuverable and carries plenty of countermeasures. A full load of Hellfires later, and the tally was 5 SAMs and 4 grounds units, which I believer were AAA.
It took two more full load sorties to clear the area out, though the last one I ran 2 pods of rockets for the light armor and troops. Soon as I was done, who showed up? Our good friend Mr. Mi-8.
I burned some points to get a CAP flight up, but didn’t need to have worries, the Tomcats were on it.
So, at the end of the night, Chemsite is eliminated, Charlie is captured, and we have FARPS in place to push N, as well to start working on Fujaihara.
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Awesome report @jenrick - glad you could finish up the Chemsite. That area was a bit of a tutorial and practice range for me as I finally figured out how to fight in the JF-17 at night. Of course, every time I went heads down to look at my targeting pod imagery I would look up to see Su-27s or Mig-23s bearing down on me.. 
I’ll post up some pictures in a bit….
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Finally had the chance to join this amazing server. I’ve been reading about all your sorties and couldn’t wait to find the time to hop on. I was all alone but decided to run CAP a little to protect all the assets you have been working for and supplying.
Some jeffs are harrassing a base of ours along the UAE coast (don’t know the names of all the bases). One got shot down by a Roland, the other heading straight for me.
As I try to shoot him, I think I see a smoketrail of his… Then I remember Schurem saying that if you take a hot F-16 here, the chief forgets about the RWR and the counter measures..
His missile just barely scraped by me has he went down..
Next I headed east to play with a flanker that has been patrolling there all day. I am keeping an eye on the coastline because it appears infested with SAMs everywhere, even when you’d expect to be safe due to proximity to friendly bases.
I had to tail him quite a bit to get into range.
He turned into me at short range so I shoot him again.
double tap.. time to bug out. All this time a pair of frogfoots were heading for our bases. One also getting it handed to himself by a roland but another is still in the area. I circumvent suspected SAM areas and go to our base to try and help.
Ended up finding him limping around at very low level.
That completes the assigned mission of completing three frags.
going to put her down at the base the frogfoots were attacking
We got paid
Fin.
Thanks so much! This is one of the most fun things we did on mudspike in the last few years I’d say. can’t wait to hop in with others.
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Great to see some CAP action there..! 450 credits is good work. Hope to catch you on the server in the near future… and don’t worry..none of us can pronounce the base names either.. 
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Had a long weekend of soccer tournaments..so didn’t get to fly much. Hopped on last night for a bit with @fearlessfrog and @jenrick and spent most of my time trying to come to grips with fighting in the JF-17 at night. The east side of the PG on the Gulf of Oman is a dark expanse and flying out there at night is no joke. I fiddled with settings and finally managed to find the proper exposure/contrast levels for the WMD-7 display. Now that I have them memorized I’ll be good to go at night…
It was still late afternoon in the server when I joined..so I took a load of LD-10s and SD-10s over towards the Chemsite to scope it out before the sun went down. The factory was hard to miss..still ussing the CCD display on the targeting pod since it was daylight…
This was one of those cool VR moments that doesn’t really translate well in 2D because the image looks so distant..but in VR it isn’t. After returning back to Ras Al Khaimah (RAK) I was sitting on the ramp refueling and rearming with more appropriate weapons when an enemy CAP aircraft came in hot overhead. The base Roland air defense system activated and a missile streaked overhead and hit the MiG-21…the plane came plummeting down across the field and the plane impacted a couple hundred meters away and burst into flames. A minute later the MiG-21 pilot landed just outside the fence near where I was parked. It was so surreal looking…
Getting sorted out with new weapons…
DCS does twilight really well…
Finally got the G and L settings of the pod or display figured out so that targets weren’t being washed out by brightness…
Another return to base to see of the of the CIW type guns trying to shoot down an enemy missile that was shot by a Su-25. Too bad the base doesn’t play that eerie air raid audio you see on some videos…
Back over the Chemsite it was time to go to work. Nothing more satisfying than watching a laser rocket strike and seeing the bloom of an instant cook-off…
We did finally discover that with Combined Arms you can control (somewhat) the base assets and have them move to contact against enemy armor when they come knocking on the door. @fearlessfrog took it a step further and went into the Tactical Commander role and was actually driving around in a tank..although the dark night made that somewhat difficult. It was amusing to hear he warn me that the tank platoon was crossing the runway… 
It was a short session for me last night..but was happy to read this morning that @jenrick finished up against the Chemsite. Fantastic news!
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(cat reading newspaper meme)
“I need to fly the Apache again..”
It’s been a while for me, is George the Front-seater pretty good now? He’s almost certainly going to be better than me at targeting stuff so I’m thinking he’s probably smart now? Last time I did the Apache was years ago, and spent most of it trying to get @BeachAV8R to be sick (no luck).
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It’s pretty decent, can’t really complain. In my experience a good(!) CP/G is better than George in everything except spotting, it’s really noticeable on heavily forested maps. On desert maps like Nevada or PG it is not that big of a factor. If you have a crew that knows each other I would say it’s always more effective than George. Survivability is definitely much better with a human CP/G who knows his stuff since he will reduce the workload of the pilot significantly.
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So, following a deep dive in the manual and over on the official forum, yes with caveats. The flow for George as CPG and his actions therein are predicated on how a US Army CPG would execute them. That can be different than the general expectations on how most of us might expect things to go.
One thing that had vexed me occasionally this week was the Lima (radar) hellfires. If you set weapons free, have George select a target, you’d think a missile would come off the rail when in range right? George will take your target hand off, lase it, go “hmm out of range” and wait for you to tell him to do something. The SME on the DCS forum discussed that yes real world you could tell your CPG, “take the shot when we’re in range”, but real world as the PiC your job was to not say “shoot a Lima” until you were in range. If you’re having your CPG shoot the Lima, you are having him use the TADs to get PID, and you should already have the range from the FCR. The CPG’s job is to get back to looking for things that might kill you (SAM’s, AAA, etc) until you tell him what to kill. In practice in DCS, no big deal, just press the engage button (I believe its multifunction select now) again, George will re-lase it and if in range kill it. But if you don’t know the logic behind the process it seems sort of broken.
Then there are the massive changes to how much George can do, which is awesome, but its kind of obtuse behind the 4 way menu, and the manual section is thick. You can miss little stuff, like multiple engagements require you end with the cursor on a designated shoot target, before you short press right. George will wait for weapon impact before re-engaging if necessary, and will not cycle to the next target until the current one is dead. If you watch Apache guncam footage, this is accurate in how it’s used, first, adjust, fire. It’s just might be different than the “hose 'em down!” we’re expecting. For guns for example you can get George to re-engage before burst lands by pressing the engage button again. If you have clustered infantry you can use this to put 3-4 bursts on target.
There’s all kinds of useful things about being able to tell George where to looks based on waypoints, target points, direction of the nose, the usual pilots sight etc. I appreciate the ambiguity in his target detection, as running in hot the other night to fend off a red attack on R.A.S., I knew we had blue ground forces. All George could tell me was that there was a ground unit, and as I knew our units were SW of the runway, I could go ahead and authorize the shot before we had a PID. In something where blue and red get a lot tighter range, it would really make for some sweaty palms trying to figure out what you had.
I was listening to a podcast the other day and found out the Apache was certified for 120 degrees of bank, and have been taking full advantage of that with all the SAM’s headed my way lately (might have even gotten the Chinook to 90…). I can’t imagine a human in VR would have appreciated that much.
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Thanks Gents, good stuff. Going back into DCS I still have all the AH-64 pilot and George stuff like hats controls stuff bound, which is a good sign. I’m thinking with a brainy George I’m going to need a minimum of being able to:
- Fly ok and use that fancy mode trim for hover etc - do you move while shooting or literally stand off still? I used to be able to put it in a spot and then hands off to fiddle with buttons, so I’ll work on getting that skill back first.
- Bind countermeasures stuff. Like arm the thing and then have chaff/flares ready to go. Do you use programs or just mash? I used to just mash I think.
- Use the George ring thingy - I remember you could get him to scan and then a target list used to appear, with threats at the top. I’ll watch a video but that used to work ok before. I think he’s got lots more options now in inner/outer short/long press stuff. Hellfire range is like 6km or so with George using the LO style I think or is he good at flinging them high now?
So yeah, any tips etc for the essentials, otherwise I’ll just do a bit of practice and see how it goes.
EDIT: watched a couple of videos and I can now kill stuff, some of it enemy units. George being the color ‘green’ for free fire seems unintuitive (red maybe?), and the local airbase has some complaints.
At Costco with the wife, so I’ll give you much better answers when I have a keyboard.
-I am a running fire guy, I’ll hover if I need to. With the Lima and FCR it’s not as necessary as it used to be be with the Kilo. The assists work reasonably well to hover, but you still have to fly into it.
-For countermeasures I arm the MWS/CMS and activate the chaff from the ASE page. I don’t even have buttons assigned for manual dispensing or program activation. The computer does a good enough job that all the times I’ve been shot down it was my own stupidity, not a fault of the systems.
-George has a lot more features now. You can set hi, lo, direct. I think he’ll send them out to 8nm.
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George features coming in the next DCS update.
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I’m hopping on the server now..and I just reset it it..
2240 UTC-ish…
-The assistance modes are quite helpful, just understand that they have about 3-4 different submodes that kick in bases on speed/altitude/etc. Attitude mode at speed tried to keep the nose pointed at what heading you set it to (either when you engaged it, or when you breakout with the controls). I pretty much leave it on all the time unless I’m landing. Altitude above I believe 40 knots, is baro altitude, so pay attention to your ground clearance. Altitude requires the most baby sitting, and with it activated, you’ll find you need to deal with the SCAS getting saturated fairly regularly if you’re trying to align track and heading. You can trim to a pretty level attitude without it active and rarely have to mess with the SCAS.
For hover assist - attitude and altitude, I don’t remember exactly where they transition to a hover hold type mode, but it’s fairly slow.
Far as fighting the Apache, there’s not a lot of cover in the PG right now anyway, so I don’t really worry about vertical masking. More so I want room to maneuver to get my countermeasures between me and a missile and to generate angular change for things like tanks shooting at me with their main gun. If we had some city fights or up in Iran where it’s hillier that might change. Even then I don’t want to be going crazy with the rate of descent, as to quote “the ground will kill you a lot faster than the enemy.”
One thing I’ll add to what I wrote above, I set the ASE page to only swap out my MFD screen when I get a tracked. If you leave it on search or even acquire you’re going to constantly have that screen swapped out. Just too many electrons in the battle space currently.
Long press the multifunction button with George and he’ll start a sweep with the TSD from far left to far right, near to far and repeat. If you’re not expecting trouble it’s a decent way to avoid being surprised. As far as fighting with him, I haven’t gotten to fancy with things (as I need to do some off line practice first), I just point search off the PHS in the direction of where I think the bad guys are, and wait for him to find targets. I back that up by using the FCR in the same general direction. George will spot out further than the FCR, but the FCR works better to get a general picture of whats going on versus George just reporting targets.
Far as shooting with George I am going to change how I’m doing things after my research on how he works. I used to leave him on fire at will, but going to change that up somewhat to minimize the engagement time frame. In fire at will George will wait for impact, and then re-engage if the targets not dead. That can be less than optimal with any fire and forget ordinance (anything other than Kilo’s).
So my modified workflow with George-
Kilo’s - Leave him on fire at will. I’m taking long range shots usually or engaging a specific threat and not worried about anything else shooting at me.
Single high danger target (ie a SA-8 in a pack of trucks)
-Use the point search off the PHS to get him oriented in the right direction.
-Pick the target I want to kill (don’t do a multitarget engagement, pick just one)
-Get in constraints
-Let George shoot until whatever it is, is dead.
After that if I’ve got Kilo’s to spare and a reason not to use the gun (say something like a T-55), I’ll use George as above, but in multitarget mode. That way he’ll kill each target, then go to the next one automatically.
I generally try to avoid Kilo’s if there’s a bunch of stuff that can kill me, as having to stay in constraints makes survival exciting.
Lima’s with George
Ideally I’ll use the FCR and just start rippling missiles off without George involved. If I want to be sure of what I’m killing, or if I’m on pass 2-3 and there’s a bunch of burning wrecks out there already, that’s where George get’s involved.
On the run in
-George in weapon hold
-Use the point search off the PHS to get him oriented in the right direction. You can also use the FCR to cue George, but with the clear weather and daylight on the map it’s easier to just look there and cue George.
-Pick the target I want to kill (don’t do a multitarget engagement, pick just one)
-Get in constraints
-Engage button to launch
-Immediately use point search again to repeat the process on the next target.
-Break off before you’re in the enemies engagement zone, and setup to do it again.
This lets you get off 3-4 missiles in a short amount of time, as George isn’t waiting for them to impact this way. It does require you to be more hands on.
Rockets
Only using these on targets that can’t one shot me, so I can be a bit more cavalier about it.
-George in weapon hold
-Use the point search off the PHS to get him oriented in the right direction. You can also use the FCR to cue George, but with the clear weather and daylight on the map it’s easier to just look there and cue George.
-Pick the target I want to kill (don’t do a multitarget engagement, pick just one)
-WAS rockets myself for a coop engagement - this gives you laser ranging so you can lob them in from quiet a ways with the pivoting pylons.
-Match the TADS cross to the IHADS reticle, center the beam, make sure it’s solid
-Shoot rockets - I usually shoot volleys of 4, and maybe two volleys. 4 is short enough to stay matched pretty solidly while rockets are launching, anything more and I’m usually drifting off too much for my tastes. 8 rockets usually gets me a kill.
-Soon as I get my second volley off, I point search to pick a new target.
-Repeat till their all dead, or it’s time to break and do it again.
Gun
Soft targets that can’t one shot me (though it will work on light armor like the Scorpion).
-George in weapon free
-Use the point search off the PHS to get him oriented in the right direction. You can also use the FCR to cue George, but with the clear weather and daylight on the map it’s easier to just look there and cue George.
-Set multiengagement and pick everything I want to go away.
-Engage button, wait till burst is finished, and then press it again if the target is going to take multiple bursts (like say a BMP). Most light stuff (BTR/BMP) 3-4 10 round bursts, Scorpion I think too 50-60 rounds. Troops, I do 2 bursts just to hopefully get a few of them at once.
-If it’s not dead yet, George will keep shooting at it, so I just take my time, and fly to maximize my engagement time without getting to slow and stable in case something pops up that is going to try and kill me.
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I was having a bunch of fun in VR but then that F2/F10 issue got me.. The perfomance is great but then I get unsolvable hiccups after pressing F10 or F2 perhaps just one to many times. I completed my sortie, landed, then went back in in 2D to join the fray.
Enjoying the sniper ATP in AA mode. really lets you see what the bandit is doing from far away.
giving beach a little escort. Don’t know if he knows I am here. I was not on comms due to noise abatement rules in the house. He is probably executing some sort of master plan..
… Of first employing glide munitions (he’s a bit above my canopy)..
.. followed up with an ARM shot.. All I saw on the ground were very big booms. And some streaks coming up in absolute futility. Meanwhile FF was down in the weeds wrangling it with the enemy in his Apache.
I got called off to intercept some bombers but the SAMs were taking away my kills again I still brought back a few hundred credits to employ against the enemy. I should really start looking into the logistics of things to see what I can buy and how we can transport it to the front.
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