Ruggbutt

I put a small fridge in my office so I didn't have to go the extra 30 feet to the kitchen to get something to drink. Something is seriously wrong with me.

For my gaming rig: AMD FX-57, nVidia 7950GT OC (512mb RAM) 2gigs Corsair DDR400, 2 37gig raptors, 500gig Caviar, 250gig Caviar and a couple of DVD burners (16x). Controllers are two X-Keys Pro, CH Fighterstick, Pro Pedals, Pro Throttle, Throttle Quadrant, DT225 Trackball, TIR 4, Logitech Z5500 5.1 surround, two 17" Viewsonic LCD's with Magic Touch overlays, TouchBuddy™ software (clickable pits for any game), 27" Viewsonic monitor and a Buttkicker gamer. The desk cost me about $250 and I built it from melamine. The connecters are killer and cost $70 of the cost of the desk. They're threaded inserts so if need be I can take the desk apart over and over and it will be tight each time I put it back together. All connectors are stainless steel (yeh, I went overboard). My TouchBuddy™ setup uses client/server mode so I'm running TB from an AMD 1800 Athlon with 1gig of RAM and an nVidia 5200 vid card (2 VGA outs).

For both of those sticks you have to buy a separate rudder. The CH Pro Throttle has a minijoystick on it that can be used for rudder.

S!

Rhetorical question. He's a serious flight simmer.

That's highly unusual. What version of Lock On do you have?

Welcome to CA, Bulldog.

There really is no cheap stick that's worth spending money on. ;) You'll have to step up to get something workable.

Ask away. I've been doing this LOMAC thing for 3 years. ;)

In the russian planes at the bottom center of your HUD is a range marker, it defaults at 10(k). You estimate how far the jammer is and it sets that profile for the HOJ missile to fly. I've gotten plenty of HOJ kills. ;) HOJ shots don't follow a lead pursuit course like they would if you had a radar lock. So they're shorter ranged but you can still get a kill, especially if your bandit keeps closing w/out manuevering to get within range. In fact, I got 2 ER HOJ and 1 ET maddog kill in one sortie. I think I still have the track of it somewhere.

Beam them. Put them at your 3/9 o'clock. In LOMAC it's actually about 3:30/8:30. The way this works is doppler is modeled from the real radar systems. Doppler radar measures speeds coming or going away from the target. IRL there's something like a 70knot filter that ignores anything moving at that speed. So when you "beam" your opponent, you're not moving towards or away from him you're traveling laterally. Which is filtered out and thus you "disappear". Practice it against AI. Don't load any radar missiles, just IR but the AI will still use his radar. Practice notching him. I can break an air or ground radar lock at will using this procedure.

I see too many people online turn their ECM on as soon as they're wheels up. That makes them an easy target because it transmits to everyone where that aircraft is. If EWR or AWACS is in the mission, all I do is wait for you to get into range and even if I can't lock to fire I'll just fire an HOJ (home on jam) missile. You get no launch or lock warning, and your radar guides the missle for me. That being said, I only use ECM rarely and it's in just a few circumstances. The other thing you need to understand is that when you turn ECM on for your whole flight, friendly a/c cannot ID you as being friendly. I have a hot key setup requesting that people on my team turn off jammers, and for the most part when that shows up in team chat they usually do. The ones that don't after 4 or 5 attempts get shot at. It's just not me doing it it's most people who are in squads who will fire an HOJ on someone who refuses to turn their jammers off. Say we're head on and we've fired on each other roughly the same time. Depending on the missile that you've fired and the difference between our altitudes I may wanna go completely defensive, split s and run away from your shot. I'll kick on the ECM because then you won't know which direction I'm headed nor my altitude as I evade you. If I'm going away from you and I'm out of burn thru range even if you shoot at me I'll be out of range for a tail shot. If we're a two (or four) ship and we've been spotted, one of us might go ECM on so that it's hard to lock the other guys in our formation. Be advised, that in certain circumstances (especially with the Russian planes) that if you fire a missile with ECM turned on the missile won't track. I'm seeing that about 40% of the time, your ECM emissions make it difficult for your missile to follow the radar lock. I've seen this with SARH and ARH missiles both. Secondly, when you have jammers on you're forcing the bandit to close WVR (within visual range), where his shot has a higher PK (probabliltiy of kill). Say I'm flying against a guy who is at my altitude or lower but he's jamming. I can tell by the launch warning and what's on the RWR/SPO if it's an active missile or not. If I'm flying an F15 I know my AMRAAM has a similar range to the R77. So I lock the jammer and fire. I don't have to support my ARH missile with my radar till the missile goes autonomous. Again, the guy jamming is helping me by supporting my missile shot. ;) Use ECM sparingly but most importantly use it wisely. More often than not I get kills on enemy using ECM because most that use it don't use it properly. Unfortunately LOMAC doesn't model ECM the way it is IRL. Reason being that ECM technology is highly classified. I rarely use ECM and on the Su's I don't even load ECM pods most of the time. ECM isn't the end all and be all and in LOMAC it's more of a detriment to use.

Rearm, refuel.

Kuky and myself have been busy with our squadron skins the last few weeks. Some are realistic paint schemes (F15) and some we've added on top of stock skins (Su25T) because there's no good template available and we just don't have the time to make one from scratch. The first 7 are my work, the rest are Kuky's. I was fortunate to find a really nice Su27/33 and A10 template so that I could create new camo. My UKR '27 is inspired by Aquarius Varun's skin, although mines a lot more "abused". We're only lacking an Israeli F15, German Mig and a complete set of Su25A skins. Those are forthcoming.

Real life payload never exceed 4 Mavs. Sometimes 6 are carried on the MER's, but thats for ferrying extra weapons, not for firing. The drag is too great.

I'm here. The party may now commence.

I don't recall which file it is, but I know it's in your Lock On/Config folder. Set your forcefeedback setting to false. That's a known bug in 1.0x.

Last time I checked, 6 K's and 4 D's on MER's was a stock option with Lock On.

The "cracked" versions floating around aren't cracked. In fact, one of the first ones had a virus in it. When FC first came out SF was v3.xx and that was crackable. FC has v4.xx which isn't. That being said, I flew in a Red Flag exercise with about 45 others today and not one of them or one of the 20+ people in my squadron have had SF ever give us any troubles.

It's in the manual! On the U.S. planes there are separate commands to fire cannon and to pickle weapons. There's a key command document in your Lock On/Docs folder.

Last time I checked they were using Frugal's forums. But it's a festival of idiocy over there most of the time............

What version of Lock On are you running?

Yes, you can fire them independantly of each other. The trick to short range (IR) missiles is when you're in range to get fired on start putting out flares, if you can't script an auto-release with your joystick software then use auto chaff/flare. If the flares are already out when the IR missile is fired, most of the time the IR missile will go for the flares. You'd use the same manuevering to avoid short range missiles as you do AMRAAMs, except that you have much less time to trash them.

Rudder steers the aircraft on the ground. If you want to know which keys do what, check your LockOn/Doc folder. There's a keychart there. Flares are for IR missiles, Chaff for radar missiles.