I'll get back to you tomorrow, but I should be up for that. Haven't flown the eagle in a while though, so gonna be rusty.
edit: I'm game. Hopefully I'll get a chance to get a few quick flights int he eagle before to refresh but if not.. oh well. Hopefully my crappy rural internet I have for a few more months will suffice
I'll get back to you tomorrow, but I should be up for that. Haven't flown the eagle in a while though, so gonna be rusty.
edit: I'm game. Hopefully I'll get a chance to get a few quick flights int he eagle before to refresh but if not.. oh well. Hopefully my crappy rural internet I have for a few more months will suffice
So I Guess this fizzled:) If you try again at some point pop me a message.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Sorry, Saturday wasn't a good day for me. Very long day. I might be able to do something this weekend, but I've never flown the F-15, so I should probably do that some first.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
It fizzled because I could never get my router to let DCS's ports through. Tried for like two hours with a buddy to get people connected to me, and no amount of black magic would make it work. Once I get the technical issues ironed out, or find someone else who wants to host, I'll try again.
Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
I probably shouldn't say this since it makes me look hella dumb, but I decided to try out the F-15 tonight. Loaded what I thought was an F-15 mission and started in the air. Immediately started trying to do some hard turns and it would immediately stall. After scratching my head and thinking maybe the F-15 wasn't quite what I expected, I decided to just find a runway and try to land. First I thought the cockpit looked more like the A-10 than I expected. When I started looking around, I glanced behind me and thought "Wait a minute... are the engines supposed to be visible from the cockpit?" Then I noticed the wings were straight instead of swept back. Then I realized I had clicked an A-10A mission by accident.
I later tried an actual F-15 mission but both were a cold start and I had no idea what to do, and I couldn't find an auto-start key. I guess I'll be taking the manual to work tomorrow.
The good news was I did find a runway in the A-10 and did a very nice landing without having anything mapped and just randomly guessing at keys to do things. I also had a terrible approach, but I think you have to really try to crash the A-10.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited March 2015
The F-15 is easy to start, just figure out what your Electronic Systems On button is (I think it's lshift-L but don't quote me on that), and left and right engine start (should be ralt + home and rctrl + home on the engines). That's it, the F-15 isn't a PFM, so it's really easy to start up.
e: And like most jets, you can't start both engines at once. Need to let once engine get above ~25-30% RPM before you fire the next one.
The F-15 is easy to start, just figure out what your Electronic Systems On button is (I think it's lshift-L but don't quote me on that), and left and right engine start (should be ralt + home and rctrl + home on the engines). That's it, the F-15 isn't a PFM, so it's really easy to start up.
e: And like most jets, you can't start both engines at once. Need to let once engine get above ~25-30% RPM before you fire the next one.
right on about the start (although I believe it's RShift+L) , but not quite the fm. The f-15 was upgrade to PFM however still has SSM (simple systems modeling) rather then ASM (advanced).
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Just took the F-15C for a spin. Man, at full afterburner that thing just wants to fly. The climb rate is pretty impressive after mainly flying the A-10C. I do kind of miss the TAD, though. I flew it around a bit and did a beautiful landing (seriously impressed myself). Now just to figure out what everything in it does. I watched a pretty good tutorial on the long range radar and feel pretty confident in using it.
And apparently the F-15 can start both engines at once. RShift+Home does that, and it seemed to work fine.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited March 2015
The important radar modes to know and understand are the BVR mode (or mode 2, after the key you press) and Vertical Scan (or VSS, mode 3). The others are useful, but less so than those two. Longitudinal and bore sight have their uses, but they are a more advanced use case.
e: As an example, on my HOTAS, with my F-15 profile loaded, boat switch forward is my quick to BVR mode switch, and also changes what my radar change mode key does (rotates the radars in a different order). Boat switch back puts me in VSS and has me cycle the radar modes in a different, more close combat friendly, order.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
I think I have my hosting issue solved. I had this ghetto setup where Comcast had given me an all-in-one telecom modem, even though I don't have phone lines and never requested a router. So I had a cable modem/router plugged in to a router plugged in to my PC. When I requested that they give me a straight modem, or bridge this crappy router in to modem mode, they said no. Oh, okay. Two Amazon Prime's later and I have my own cable modem, and will be sending you back your hunk of shit and not paying you 10 bucks a month Comcast. How you like them apples? Should have just bridged it for me.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
So I ordered a new video card and monitor this morning. A GTX 980 and the ASUS RoG 1440p G-sync monitor. The graphics card I picked up as a general upgrade, and with an eye on EDGE (DCS 2.0)...but the monitor, with G-sync and 1440p, was selected almost exclusively because of simming. More pixels = longer viewing distance in DCS, because ED refuses to put in a dot-compensation algorithm, meaning that past certain distances, the pixels meant to represent an enemy plane or ground vehicle simply get culled out. More resolution makes that distance longer.
For EDGE, they are considering doing dot compensation (which nearly every other flight sim does), but for now the only way to up your reasonable view distance and get it closer to realistic distances, is to up your resolution.
The G-sync is an obvious no brainer for DCS right now, which not only runs bad, but tears horrendously, which are the poster children scenarios for adaptive refresh rate.
So yeah, flight and space sims have sucked about 1600 bucks out of my bank account over the last three months, between my HOTAS, pedals, TrackIR, and now the new monitor. It's all stuff that should, with proper care, last me basically forever...but dang. I just want to forget that number and go drop some bombs.
It's a set of pretty good training missions for DCS. They haven't been updated since 1.2.4, but as far as I can tell they still work (though honestly I haven't tried the combat missions since reinstalling DCS, just Free Flight). He seems to have it setup for the A-10C, KA-50, P-51D, Huey, and SU-25. Too bad he doesn't have the FC3 planes added.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
So something I've kind of toyed with but never really got too heavy into is things to do with a second monitor and/or tablet and/or touchscreen netbook, mostly with DCS. Anyone here doing anything interesting in that way? I've used stuff like Helios in the past to display some gauges and whatnot, but haven't really gotten too crazy. Just kind of wondering what are some options and what might be useful.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
I've looked in to it a bit. There are actually full MFD/MFCD programs you can get for iPad and Android that take an export from DCS. They can be a bit of a pain to setup, but once they are working it's neat. I saw pictures of a guy who had setup the A-10C's MFCD's and UFC via two iPads as the MFCD's and what looked like a Nexus 7 or similar 7" tablet in t he middle as the UFC.
I haven't looked too much on the second display side, as for me the real neat part of exporting is being able to also interact with the control display, like a real MFCD or UFC, and I don't have touch enabled monitors.
One of the main problems with using the export functionality is that a lot of multiplayer servers disallow exporting because there is a lot of "cheaty" stuff you can export. So it's fine if you're doing a lot of coop on friends servers, or a lot of single player, but not so much if you want to go run PvP on the 104th or whatever.
Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
For right now I just set up the F-15 to export the radar display to fill my second monitor by creating a new LUA file. You can do a lot more with the A-10C and KA-50, but I guess you can't export that much with the FC3 planes. Oh well, having the radar over there should be good enough for now. That was mainly what I wanted, anyway.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Anyone interested in some Falcon BMS this weekend? I can guide you on how to get it setup if you need help. Was thinking of doing some real basic coop, maybe a SEAD mission or something.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Let me tell you guys about the AIM-9X and the HMCS in the F-16, and why it makes me never want to fly another jet in close air combat, ever.
Not only is the F-16 pretty much the most agile jet you can fly in a combat sim right now, the AIM-9X's off bore sight capability is hilarious. If I can get you in any sort of trail position, lag, pure, lead, whatever...and I can see you with my eyes (and thus the HMCS), I can snap shot a 9X and have a good kill chance. At the very least, I'm going to cause you to panic and attempt to defeat the missile, hopefully putting me in an even better firing position, since at 360 knots I can out turn pretty much any other jet in the sky. Damn shame I normally only carry two of these things on a flight, since the AIM-120 is so important for BVR work.
DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
edited March 2015
DCS World sale and a sale on Rise of Flight as well. It's a good week for buying planes on Steam. I'm really in the market for a nice X Plane addon though. Rise of Flight is a decent contender too, I need to spend more time with that.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Good sale for sure. Unfortunately I just did a motherboard/CPU upgrade on my machine, so no spare cash. I'd be pick up the Mig-15 and Mig-21 if I had the cash (I bought the Sabre and Mustang on the last sale).
IanatorGaze upon my works, ye mightyand facepalm.Registered Userregular
Last time I played around with FSX:SE I took a 172 up. I got up to altitude but wound up with a slight leftward roll. Does anyone here know what might cause it and what I can do about it?
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Does the 172 have aileron trim?
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IanatorGaze upon my works, ye mightyand facepalm.Registered Userregular
I don't know that it does, though I may have accidentally done it while messing with my takeoff pitch trim.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
So there are some rumblings that EDGE (DCS World 2.0) is basically eminent. The ED hype machine has started to spin up, with videos on how to create terrains and maps with the new tools, and the scuttlebutt is that the only thing ED has left to implement is a multiplayer browser that is integrated in to the new single-executable design of the game. We might see alpha/beta here soon, and possibly release over the summer.
I absolute cannot wait for EDGE. Not only will we get the new NTTR and Straight of Hermoz maps, we'll finally have a flight sim built from the ground up to run on modern CPU's and GPU's.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
You know what though? Fuck StarForce. Seriously. Because of their shit activation system, I'm down to 6 activations left on FC3 because I basically had to burn one last night to fix their terrible crap.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Been pretty focused on Falcon BMS lately. Really starting to come to a better understanding of the F-16. Over the last few days I've been setting up a pretty complex Voice Attack profile for communicating with AWACS, ATC and tanker as well as my wingman, flight and element. The basic principle is to setup a series of prefixes and suffixes to make building commands easier on consistent. So for instance, I can say 'two' (one of my prefixes for wingman), 'close up' (suffix for the Wingman group), and Voice Attack will string together the commands needed to open the wingman menu, navigate to Formation Control and then press the appropriate key to tell my NPC wingman to form up.
This is super, super useful in combat. When I'm running a SEAD mission and I'm doing wild weasel, I can lock a target on my HSD as it locks me, datalink it to my wingman, then say 'two, attack my target' and he'll lock and fire AGM-88's at the SAM installation I linked up. I also communicate with AWACS this way, so I can say 'sentry, request picture' and I'll get an AWACS picture response back...or 'sentry, vector to nearest threat' and AWACS will vector me in to the nearest A/A threat.
The more I play Falcon, the more I salivate for DCS to get a modern multi-role fighter. The F/A-18 can't get to DCS fast enough, and if my prayers are answered, we'll get a Viper after that. As much as I love A/A in the Eagle and A/G in the Hog, I really prefer the multi-role mission, where I can fight my way in to the target, drop my ordinance and then fight my way out.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited June 2015
So I put the finishing touches on my Voice Attack BMS profile last night, and I have to say, I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. There is no repeating of commands, I use conditionals and text variables to drive what command set I'm using, and which menu it should use. So there is only one 'rejoin' suffix, that is smart and knows what prefix I used to call it up, and will open the correct menu and hit rejoin, regardless of whether I prefixed it with 'two' for wingman, 'three' for element or 'flight' for the entire flight. I even support the special pages, like Flight's Flight Management 2 and Element's Combat Management 3 and 4 pages, which are unique to those prefixes.
I also added tower and tanker command pages last night, so I can basically now do all single player communication in the game using voice attack, never having to take take my hands off the HOTAS.
Next up is getting my iPad to mirror the MFD's and allow me to control them pressing touch OFB buttons on the iPad screen. There is a piece of software out there to set this up called TouchControl, but I'd like something much more plug-and-play, so I'm writing it! No idea if I'll finish, but I've made good progress. So far I have a Windows Service that takes a 60 FPS stream of the extracted display windows from BMS and serves them up over the network. Next is to write an iPad app that can snatch that stream and display the images on the iPad. I'm learning Swift and iOS development as I do this, so that part could take much longer than the Windows side (which I wrote in C#, which is what I do for a living, so my spool up time was non-existent).
The idea will be that the amount of configuration required to simply mirror control of your MFD's and UFC to an iPad should be minimal, at the cost of absolute customization (which TouchControl gets you). So I'll probably support a few basic layouts. A "single iPad" layout with the DED and UFC nestled between the MFD's, where the buttons will be smaller but will work if you only have one iPad. Then I'll probably have an "MFD's on iPad 1 and UFC/DED on iPad 2" layout as well, since I actually have two iPads and can do this. Maybe even a three iPad layout for people who infinite money and three iPads. No plans to support Android, as this is really just something I'm doing for myself that maybe others will find useful.
e: Oh, and DCS World 2.0 went out to beta testers yesterday. It's happppennnninnnngggg. As soon as ED releases the F/A-18, I'll be spending a ton of time in DCS.
IanatorGaze upon my works, ye mightyand facepalm.Registered Userregular
Steam Summer Sale has lots of good stuff on discount.
X-Plane 10 is half off ($30) as a Daily Deal.
FSX: Steam Edition is half off ($12.50). Not as good as the five bucks it's been on sale for, but this time all the extras are half off as well.
Finally, DCS stuff has a lot of modules for 60% off with a few 30s and 40s here and there.
Twitch | Blizzard: Ianator#1479 | 3DS: Ianator - 1779 2336 5317 | FFXIV: Iana Ateliere (NA Sarg) Backlog Challenge List
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
I can't recommend the Saberjet and P-51 modules for DCS enough if you don't already have them. Tons of fun. Nice change of pace from the much more complicated A-10C. A lot more pure flying.
Is there a DLC guide for DCS World? I mean, it looks like some of the DLCs include some of the other ones?
Yes, and no. So basically the Flaming Cliffs 3 aircraft, which are not full simulation aircraft, can be bought separately, usually for 9-10 dollars. To see which those are, just look at what's included in Flaming Cliffs 3 and extrapolate.
The other modules (like A-10C, P-51, F-86, Mig-21, Mig-15, Black Shark, et al) are NOT included in any pack, but ARE full simulations, with full flight models and as close to 1:1 modeling with their real life counterparts as possible, including fully interactive cockpits.
In this way, DCS acts as both a study-sim and a more basic flight combat sim.
Flaming Cliffs 3 is generally something most DCS players should own, if they don't already, as the aircraft included are great starter aircraft for new pilots. The F-15 is not a full sim F-15, but it does give you enough of the feel that you are correctly learning to use radar and avionics, skills which translate to more complete aircraft.
Posts
edit: I'm game. Hopefully I'll get a chance to get a few quick flights int he eagle before to refresh but if not.. oh well. Hopefully my crappy rural internet I have for a few more months will suffice
So I Guess this fizzled:) If you try again at some point pop me a message.
I later tried an actual F-15 mission but both were a cold start and I had no idea what to do, and I couldn't find an auto-start key. I guess I'll be taking the manual to work tomorrow.
The good news was I did find a runway in the A-10 and did a very nice landing without having anything mapped and just randomly guessing at keys to do things. I also had a terrible approach, but I think you have to really try to crash the A-10.
e: And like most jets, you can't start both engines at once. Need to let once engine get above ~25-30% RPM before you fire the next one.
right on about the start (although I believe it's RShift+L) , but not quite the fm. The f-15 was upgrade to PFM however still has SSM (simple systems modeling) rather then ASM (advanced).
And apparently the F-15 can start both engines at once. RShift+Home does that, and it seemed to work fine.
e: As an example, on my HOTAS, with my F-15 profile loaded, boat switch forward is my quick to BVR mode switch, and also changes what my radar change mode key does (rotates the radars in a different order). Boat switch back puts me in VSS and has me cycle the radar modes in a different, more close combat friendly, order.
For EDGE, they are considering doing dot compensation (which nearly every other flight sim does), but for now the only way to up your reasonable view distance and get it closer to realistic distances, is to up your resolution.
The G-sync is an obvious no brainer for DCS right now, which not only runs bad, but tears horrendously, which are the poster children scenarios for adaptive refresh rate.
So yeah, flight and space sims have sucked about 1600 bucks out of my bank account over the last three months, between my HOTAS, pedals, TrackIR, and now the new monitor. It's all stuff that should, with proper care, last me basically forever...but dang. I just want to forget that number and go drop some bombs.
DRAGONs Training Pack
It's a set of pretty good training missions for DCS. They haven't been updated since 1.2.4, but as far as I can tell they still work (though honestly I haven't tried the combat missions since reinstalling DCS, just Free Flight). He seems to have it setup for the A-10C, KA-50, P-51D, Huey, and SU-25. Too bad he doesn't have the FC3 planes added.
I haven't looked too much on the second display side, as for me the real neat part of exporting is being able to also interact with the control display, like a real MFCD or UFC, and I don't have touch enabled monitors.
One of the main problems with using the export functionality is that a lot of multiplayer servers disallow exporting because there is a lot of "cheaty" stuff you can export. So it's fine if you're doing a lot of coop on friends servers, or a lot of single player, but not so much if you want to go run PvP on the 104th or whatever.
Not only is the F-16 pretty much the most agile jet you can fly in a combat sim right now, the AIM-9X's off bore sight capability is hilarious. If I can get you in any sort of trail position, lag, pure, lead, whatever...and I can see you with my eyes (and thus the HMCS), I can snap shot a 9X and have a good kill chance. At the very least, I'm going to cause you to panic and attempt to defeat the missile, hopefully putting me in an even better firing position, since at 360 knots I can out turn pretty much any other jet in the sky. Damn shame I normally only carry two of these things on a flight, since the AIM-120 is so important for BVR work.
DCS: Flaming Cliffs 3: $39.99 to $11.99 (70% off)
DCS: A-10C Warthog: $39.99 to $11.99 (70% off)
DCS: Black Shark 2: $39.99 to $11.99 (70% off)
DCS: P-51D Mustang: $29.99 to $8.99 (70% off)
DCS: Fw 190 D-9 Dora: $49.99 to $14.99 (70% off)
DCS: Bf 109 K-4 Kurfürst: $49.99 to $14.99 (70% off)
DCS: Combined Arms: $19.99 to $5.99 (70% off)
F-15C for DCS World: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off)
Su-27 for DCS World: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off)
Su-27 The Ultimate Argument Campaign: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off)
A-10A for DCS World: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off)
Su-25 for DCS World: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off)
DCS: MiG-15bis: $49.99 to $19.99 (40% off)
DCS: F-86F Sabre: $49.99 to $14.99 (70% off)
DCS: UH-1H Huey: $49.99 to $14.99 (70% off)
DCS: Mi-8MTV2 Magnificent Eight: 49.99 to $14.99 (70% off)
DCS: C-101 Aviojet: $59.99 to $17.99 (70% off)
DCS: MiG-21bis: $49.99 to $24.99 (50% off)
Hawk T.1A for DCS World: $39.99 to $19.99 (50% off)
Twitch | Blizzard: Ianator#1479 | 3DS: Ianator - 1779 2336 5317 | FFXIV: Iana Ateliere (NA Sarg)
Backlog Challenge List
Twitch | Blizzard: Ianator#1479 | 3DS: Ianator - 1779 2336 5317 | FFXIV: Iana Ateliere (NA Sarg)
Backlog Challenge List
I absolute cannot wait for EDGE. Not only will we get the new NTTR and Straight of Hermoz maps, we'll finally have a flight sim built from the ground up to run on modern CPU's and GPU's.
This is super, super useful in combat. When I'm running a SEAD mission and I'm doing wild weasel, I can lock a target on my HSD as it locks me, datalink it to my wingman, then say 'two, attack my target' and he'll lock and fire AGM-88's at the SAM installation I linked up. I also communicate with AWACS this way, so I can say 'sentry, request picture' and I'll get an AWACS picture response back...or 'sentry, vector to nearest threat' and AWACS will vector me in to the nearest A/A threat.
The more I play Falcon, the more I salivate for DCS to get a modern multi-role fighter. The F/A-18 can't get to DCS fast enough, and if my prayers are answered, we'll get a Viper after that. As much as I love A/A in the Eagle and A/G in the Hog, I really prefer the multi-role mission, where I can fight my way in to the target, drop my ordinance and then fight my way out.
I also added tower and tanker command pages last night, so I can basically now do all single player communication in the game using voice attack, never having to take take my hands off the HOTAS.
Next up is getting my iPad to mirror the MFD's and allow me to control them pressing touch OFB buttons on the iPad screen. There is a piece of software out there to set this up called TouchControl, but I'd like something much more plug-and-play, so I'm writing it! No idea if I'll finish, but I've made good progress. So far I have a Windows Service that takes a 60 FPS stream of the extracted display windows from BMS and serves them up over the network. Next is to write an iPad app that can snatch that stream and display the images on the iPad. I'm learning Swift and iOS development as I do this, so that part could take much longer than the Windows side (which I wrote in C#, which is what I do for a living, so my spool up time was non-existent).
The idea will be that the amount of configuration required to simply mirror control of your MFD's and UFC to an iPad should be minimal, at the cost of absolute customization (which TouchControl gets you). So I'll probably support a few basic layouts. A "single iPad" layout with the DED and UFC nestled between the MFD's, where the buttons will be smaller but will work if you only have one iPad. Then I'll probably have an "MFD's on iPad 1 and UFC/DED on iPad 2" layout as well, since I actually have two iPads and can do this. Maybe even a three iPad layout for people who infinite money and three iPads. No plans to support Android, as this is really just something I'm doing for myself that maybe others will find useful.
e: Oh, and DCS World 2.0 went out to beta testers yesterday. It's happppennnninnnngggg. As soon as ED releases the F/A-18, I'll be spending a ton of time in DCS.
X-Plane 10 is half off ($30) as a Daily Deal.
FSX: Steam Edition is half off ($12.50). Not as good as the five bucks it's been on sale for, but this time all the extras are half off as well.
Finally, DCS stuff has a lot of modules for 60% off with a few 30s and 40s here and there.
Twitch | Blizzard: Ianator#1479 | 3DS: Ianator - 1779 2336 5317 | FFXIV: Iana Ateliere (NA Sarg)
Backlog Challenge List
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Yes, and no. So basically the Flaming Cliffs 3 aircraft, which are not full simulation aircraft, can be bought separately, usually for 9-10 dollars. To see which those are, just look at what's included in Flaming Cliffs 3 and extrapolate.
The other modules (like A-10C, P-51, F-86, Mig-21, Mig-15, Black Shark, et al) are NOT included in any pack, but ARE full simulations, with full flight models and as close to 1:1 modeling with their real life counterparts as possible, including fully interactive cockpits.
In this way, DCS acts as both a study-sim and a more basic flight combat sim.
Flaming Cliffs 3 is generally something most DCS players should own, if they don't already, as the aircraft included are great starter aircraft for new pilots. The F-15 is not a full sim F-15, but it does give you enough of the feel that you are correctly learning to use radar and avionics, skills which translate to more complete aircraft.