LOL!
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Did you get all those screens from a track replay by the way?
Fantastic AAR!
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Off-Topic Question(*) for gallery: I am starting to use DCS tracks a bit more to work out how I died. If I Control+Z etc to speed up time then is it typical that it isn’t actually a replay? I swear sometimes I win a dogfight and then watch the track, speed it up a bit, and then I am showing as died. This is either the multiverse version of DCS or the track isn’t accurate if speed up - which is it?
(*) Our first ever topic derail! 
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Tracks, especially client side ones, are notoriously fragile and prone to breaking. Speeding up time exacerbates the problem.
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Yeah, that was why I asked because traditionally, very complex track replays don’t usually stay “true” over time and end up going all whacky. I’d be very impressed if @Fridge’s track played back well enough to grab those accurate screens!
The mission we were flying has deceptively few moving parts. The only persistent, moving “ground” units are three naval groups. Everything else is spawned in dynamically by the user, and we only had six clients, seven SAM sites, and two MiG-23s. Still, I’m pretty impressed it stayed true for an hour long flight.
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I used to analyze my flying on 104th a lot by replaying the tracks for tacview. What worked best was replaying them at 2x or sometimes 4x speed but no more. if you do that then the simplest track will go haywire!
Actually ya. That’s how I did it. I recorded the entire mission in Shadowplay from my PoV, spending most of the mission with my head in the cockpit trying to hit all the right buttons. For this AAR I then went back to the replay and spent the mission in an outside view looking in (so to speak), and recorded it all again. The track replays have been working well for me as long as I try to not fast-forward to aggressively. I never go faster than having all the things moving smoothly in-game. If it gets chunky there is a high likelihood of it messing up.
I always copy it to a backup location in case things go sideways and I have some small hope that it was the replay action itself that was borked and not the replay recording). That worked for me once. In another instance few years ago when doing either the A2A Teamwork article with @near_blind, I think my replay borked and I had near_blind send me theirs and it worked for longer than mine did (or maybe it was the MiG-21Bis AAR that I never seem to get back to: ).
Been lucky so far.
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What you want for that is Tacview. That gives me the best picture of what is going on with regard to observing a fight and what I might have done wrong. It is easy to fast forward, rewind and move around. The tails that it ads to things are great and you can see a lot of stats on the aircraft that are beneficial to understanding what is happening.
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is tacview prone to the same problems as replaying a track ?
Nope. Never. Tacview exports it’s information separately. I mean if it’s export messes up, or the server host has disabled exports, it will not work. There is also a time delay that hosts can add so that you can not view a Tacview replay immediately and see the Battlefield enough to help your fellows ‘cheat’.
The problem with the DCS replay is that it is more than just a replay. You can take active control of an aircraft at any point and continue on as if nothing after that part happened. Instead of recording lat, long, orientation, etc, DCS is trying to record the simulation state. Any little bug that shows up in that process is going to result in a rapidly divergent ‘replay’.
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The only thing about Tacview and certain MP servers (104th and the like) is that to see other planes etc. you need to run the track first, so you end up still having the replay inaccuracy issue.
Wonderful for single player though!
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Yeah. That’s because they have the Tacview export turned off on the server. It is understandable, because with Tacview you get the God’s eye view of everything but annoying when you want to learn what you did wrong.
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Agreed - annoying especially as I’d never abuse it and only use it for debriefing…but it is understandable that they don’t want to risk it as someone surely would.
OpenConflict was great in that regard - they didn’t block it and it was super interesting to go through the flights afterwards.
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That was great!
I laugh so hard at the jettison part 
And I couldn’t agree more with your fanboi rant, DCS certainly isn’t perfect but what a freakin’ amazing sim!
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Well done Fridge. Hats off for your efforts. That must have taken some time.
I’ve said 6 x Hail Marys, written “I must learn to loft bomb.” 500 times, and spent 4 hours on the range practicing conventional bombing since Weds. Not consuming craft beer during multi missions would help as well. Old habits die hard.
I’ve taped this to a mirror in the head as a shameful reminder of what happens to unprepared warriors.
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Jane’s F-15 and the little patch map and the DPMIs made loft bombing pretty easy…of course, we probably had about 1/100th of the switchology back then. Ah…nostalgia…
Blasphemy!
Real intelligence analysts will only say “probably dangerous”…most likely that is…we never say anything for sure…just say’n…maybe…
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