Why do so few people only do VFR flights?

I've started getting into DCS more and more over the past year but, after spending a little time on multiplayer servers it has sort of gnawed at me. Not a single server has IFR conditions and maybe one out of a list of 50 will ever have night missions.

What's up with this guys? Especially A-10C pilots.. and other high fidelity module pilots. The Huey, Mi-8, Mirage and probably others are all capable of IFR flight and some of them are capable of all weather, night / day combat.. why isn't anyone doing it?

Doing a canyon run with NVG's before attacking some ground targets in the A-10 is pretty exciting. There are also mods that enable NVG on the Mirage and MiG-21.

Night flights are some of the most intense fights you can do, DCS has a pretty good representation of real night flying, everything is dark as hell except around cities.

IFR really makes you brush up your game. If you can't navigate and fly in IFR conditions, how can you really be effective in the sky?

Get out there and practice real world airmanship folks..! Not only weapons simulation. Learn to fly a precision approach in crap weather, or refuel at night with nothing but vague directions on where to find the tanker. Super fun stuff.

I personally prefer doing that kind of stuff solo or small group coop.

Setting up public servers like this would drive people away I guess - not everyone wants to be doing this all the time.

I enjoy flying IFR as well. PiedDroit is correct. Most folks don't like flying at night let alone in IFR conditions. You would need to form, or join a squadron with a limited number of members that are all on the same page regarding policies, procedures and in general how missions will be conducted. I say limited because that would be the only way to get everyone on the same page. People come at this hobby with so many different expectations that it's difficult to accommodate them all.

I think haveing one or two dedicated IFR Servers would work very well. There are easily enough"hardcore" simmers to fill these servers.

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I think haveing one or two dedicated IFR Servers would work very well. There are easily enough"hardcore" simmers to fill these servers.

 

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Then set one up and see what happens. :)

I would if I had the time and would know how.

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If there is fog no one will play as they cant see the target. Many have limited time to play and just wants to do a attack sortie with a friend or a group. So mostly about weapons and targets.

I would if I had the time and would know how.

 

If there is fog no one will play as they cant see the target.

Well, there is your answer.

I should imagine that most RL battle planners try to avoid conducting operations when the operating area is socked in by weather.

I think it would be a good idea to hide all units, including player, from the F10 map. It would force people to do some navigation and planning. I don't know if there are any public servers with such configuration.

I like that idea grunf. Considering we're generally all flying planes with 1980's or at best 1990's tech in them, GPS was still not that common and if your MFD or INS went out you just lost your "insta-nav" and had to rely on old fashioned radio navigation to get around.

The other thing is, while mission planners may try to avoid launching flights in bad weather, this would be a huge issue for ground forces on your side, because the enemy ground forces sure won't stop attacking just because of some bad weather. They'll hit harder than ever if there is no air support available.

In the book Viper Pilot I'm reading now the author describes a mission during the 2003 invasion of Iraq where a sandstorm started to engulf the entire Arabian peninsula. All airbases were shut down one by one by the sandstorm. This is what I think happens to most pilots who get into trouble, isn't it? They start out in VFR then get into bad IFR conditions where there is either no published approach available for the desired divert field, or the pilot just doesn't know how to fly IFR.

In the book, the author explained how he set a mark point on the ground above the threshhold of the runway, then set the ILS cues to the mark point to make an impromptu ILS approach which saved himself and a flight of 9 other F-16CJ's that had the same problem of not having any place to land. The visibility was down to 1/4 mile by the time they had all gotten down.

The other thing is if you have mavericks or a TGP you can see through fog anyway and still attack targets. If you have an A-10 that means you can also buddy lase for an M2000 or other aircraft who can't see the targets but are carrying a bomb/missile mix. (Depending on how bad the visibility / fog layer is anyway)

Okay, okay, let's rectify some things:

1.

Okay, this is wrong.

That said - IFR situations are limited to night, fog and storm, using terrain height to make variety, and combinations of those.

2. Before the game engine got updated, some servers enforced nice weather because of the hardware impact of clouds, storms etc. and people got used to flying in VFR conditions at public servers. OFC server owners are not very eager to risk loosing people to try out different scenarios.

3. Balance - It would be ridiculous to have around the clock VFR server, but it would be nice to have some missions that start at day, end at night, or other way around, even sometimes night missions.

4. 104th Server is the first that comes to my mind after No3. They tried in all their honesty to bring diversity with some night missions on their server. What happened, from the point of view of a person visiting multiple TeamSpeak servers in that period, is that the most of the "old players" who get regularly involved in public server flying - was too lazy to fly at night. They found it to be a bugger to them and just wanted plain old fun without much RL time wasted. Personally - I understand all of the reasons for this or that. Different folks, different mingle.

5. Many people fly on non-public servers and create diversity for themselves. This is a good solution for you, and trust me - you can find a lot of joy in it.

Don't expect a lot of improvement in how the public servers work, just my personal opinion, until ED reaches the point where we will have:

A - Complex weather system that allows us to manipulate weather in such amount that you can have multiple meteo-conditions on one map.

B - Dynamic campaign engine

C - Dedicated server

Well the dynamic weather mechanism in the editor is very powerful and from my understanding you can make multiple fronts as I have flown in snow storms one part of map and nice sunny weather in others. Biggest thing that bothers me is most servers have no turbulence so their is no feel of actual flight and air effects going on. That their will make flying much more interesting and realistic. You don't need strong winds for it either. I usually set turbulence at minimum of 22 works great in rotor wing great sense of actual atmosphere like in real life....

Ah, there is my cue word: Weather. In short:

- it looks kinda bad. Still OK but not great, especially clouds.

- immersion-breaking when there is any kind of AI in the mission because AI doesn't care about weather while players do. AI sees, shoots and bombs through clouds as if they weren't there, which isn't fun.

- clouds are not synchronized in Multiplayer. Imagine you are flying your P-51 hiding behind a cloud from some Bf-109 pilot, or trying to evade his fire by flying through a cloud. Then you are hit by his cannons and wonder "WTF happened? CHEATER!!" while actually he didn't see a cloud there, for him it was a kilometer away and he wondered why you fly around as if you thought he couldn't see you. So only a solid overcast is same for all (except AI)

All in all: not fun.

Night is different. I have flown night missions on public servers and they were fun. Harder, but fun.

I'm really happy to see this topic. Sometimes I really get the impression that I'm the only one who thinks like that.

It is indeed true and a real pity, that there are almost no IFR-servers. Over the years I happened to join on a few who do and it was really nice to have something different.

I remember when I joinend the Dogs of War server and they had a mission running with the new dynamic weather. It was great! It was a WW2 mission and the airfield where I started (Beslan, northern side of the caucasus mountains) was in a storm/blizzard. It was really aweful. The view distance was down to just about 100m with heavy crosswind and rain/snow. I barely managed to get airborne in my Bf-109. The objective area was in south, on the other side of the mountains, so I headed south following my compass and started to climb. I still had almost no visibility since everything was in a huge and massive cloud, so I got more and more nervous the more I flew south, because there would be mountains and in this visibility I would only see them seconds before impact. I was really reliefed when I managed to climb above the cloud and was greeted by a beautiful sun and a blue sky. The view below me was stunning. I saw a massive cloud moving through the mountains and only the summits were peaking through. The weather got better the more I flew south and the objective area was in totally clear weather with only small wind.

On my way back I had to fly through the bad weather again and it was really horrifying to descent through it and not hit the ground. The landing was a huge challenge, because of the massive crosswind, but I managed it somehow.

Here is a screenshot of how it looked over the mountains at the edge of the bad weather:

It's really sad, that such conditions are so rare in public MP. I would love to have more IFR conditions, be it bad weather, fog or night. I would like to make more use of my nav aids, but since there is usally no need for them I don't use them. :(

Another thing that grunf mentioned is the F-10 map. I really really hate the fact, that on pretty much every public server the own aircraft and often allies are visible. It takes so much away from the game, because you don't need to use your onboard nav equippment and perfom proper navigation. And there is no way to avoid it, because the kneepad is so bad, that I need to check the map to navigate, especially when I fly with older aircrafts that rely on map & compass.

Just my 2 cents.

I did so me lightning, cloud and night navigation missions with some of the Mi-8 Steam group players. No combat, just long flights with no map markers. It was great experience.

Easy to setup and host.

It is really a completely different experience without nav aids.

I am not too much into campaign missions, but in the Huey campaign there are also some really nice ones in which you can get lost, and you are constantly updating your map.

I just wish I could mark my position on the kneeboard-map or the F-10 map myself instead of using the never-failing marker thing.

Well the dynamic weather mechanism in the editor is very powerful and from my understanding you can make multiple fronts as I have flown in snow storms one part of map and nice sunny weather in others. Biggest thing that bothers me is most servers have no turbulence so their is no feel of actual flight and air effects going on. That their will make flying much more interesting and realistic. You don't need strong winds for it either. I usually set turbulence at minimum of 22 works great in rotor wing great sense of actual atmosphere like in real life....

Yes, you can make multiple systems, true.

As for the people saying stuff about cloud positions: I have flown missions with small number of pilots (up to 4 more beside me), where I was the server and we all saw the same clouds at same positions. I don't think that there is anything wrong with how clouds are rendered, it is NOT a random particle emission, but the latency/lag are maybe what gives you hard time. So, I firmly believe that this is programmed just fine, but will work a lot better when we get dedicated server.

To ED: I wish someday you find time to model different types of clouds into the game, so we can have orgasms while flying up high. :pilotfly:

we all saw the same clouds at same positions

That's pretty nice! Can anyone confirm this, and if that is always the case now?

(perhaps testing required using static and dynamic weather and different configurations for overcast and so on)

I know it wasn't in the past, and I haven't seen it in a changelog so I am curious whether your experience was coincidence. So if it was changed (which would be great news) I'd love to know when that happened.

Here, when he goes into the cloud at 2:54 he says "Not into the cloud..." and this was recorded while we were flying, not a track, obviously.

https://youtu.be/QR8guzEA6UY?t=2m53s

But then, you have the thing where "server" renders clouds and communicates with two different clients... So, that is lag and/or latency what makes problems, if there are problems. Just guessing, someone from ED team should confirm or deny.

P.S. Don't remember if this was static or dynamic. I suppose static is the case in this video, but not sure.

Tested in public MP it isnt popular. Mostly, i think because FC3 is non NVG, the Blackshark hates low light and neither Mirage or Mig-21 take NVG's despite the Mirage's all weather capability and a goodly proportion of mutliplayer is about dogfighting. A-10C also is not a fan of clouds witht he TGP.

I like nothing more than challenging weather so it stays internal for us. To me 1200 noon no cloud Summer is hellishly boring and a complete turn off.

Night flights are some of the most intense fights you can do, DCS has a pretty good representation of real night flying, everything is dark as hell except around cities.

For me everything except "clear blue sky" is extremely unrealistic. Don't want to fly in rain or snow which doesnt affect any textures (plane, canopy, ground/runways) or a moon which isn't illuminating the earth in a realistic way. The landing lights are useless, too, as they aren't even capable to shine through light fog.

So playing with nice weather is for me with the most immersion - looks boring, but real.

I think it would be a good idea to hide all units, including player, from the F10 map. It would force people to do some navigation and planning. I don't know if there are any public servers with such configuration.

You would probably have just as many users as a fogged in server.

' All wheater capablity = must have nvg '

This is wrong, all weather capablity wont require nvg in real life ;)

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Awesome posts guys :) I am glad to see that there are others like me who really enjoy not only the combat aspects but the other aspects, which actually make up 99% of flying anyway.

Tonight I decided to see if it was possible to fly an ILS approach using mark points set into the CDU on the A-10C. Well, it worked! There is no glideslope, so you need to know your minimum safe altitude around the airport, but the ILS bars and the HSI both work to give you localizer-style information.

Here's how you do it if you ever get into crap weather and need to land ASAP but the field has no ILS.

In the A-10C you set your left CDU knob either to flt plan or mission to start with, and the right CDU knob to STEER. Down below the HSI you'll want to set it to the STEERPT mode. I tried it with ILS mode but that slaves it to a radio frequency, so I guess STEERPT mode is the only one that works.

Let's say you either navigate to the field using a VOR/TACAN, ADF or the moving map. You are able to locate the field and overfly it, but visibility is too bad to see it more than a few hundred meters.

Line up your aircraft with the runway you want to land on. You want to keep the hud aligned with the runway carefully, then use the hud cursor to set a mark point some ways down the runway, either at the TD zone or at the very end. Mark points are set by pressing LCtrl+Right arrow key by default.

Then you want to switch to "Mark" mode on the left CDU knob. You can enter a name using the CDU keypad if you want, this can be datalinked to your team mates if you have other people with you so it might help if you name it APPR or something similar. Now select the steerpoint that you just created.

Set your HSI to the correct runway heading (make sure it's the actual rwy heading and not just the abbreviated number, this could cause you to go off the localizer path - set the HSI heading while you're flying down the runway on the initial pass) Then fly the approach like you would normally fly an ILS approach.

Keep it in mind when going around whether you set the markpoint to the TD zone or to the end of the runway so you can accurately judge your descent. If you're bad at math and forgot your slide rule, the HUD should display a time to target at the current airspeed. Use this to manage your descent rate in FPM once you are sure you're clear of any dangerous obstacles / mountains. I use 3000 feet AGL for flat areas, more for dangerous terrain / places where I know there are towers.

(If there is a way to get glideslope info, I'd like to hear it from anyone!)

I flew this approach on a server tonight with my head locked down looking at the instruments and I was able to fly a perfect approach that would have been good enough for 200m visibility or less. It was fantastic.

it's a shame... 104th actually had night and low cloud cover missions. On night missions there where always people complaining. And in low overcast/fog missions SU and MIG pilots complained cause they could not fly carefree in the mountains anymore. But also F-15 pilots that love to hug the ground would complain about this.

I love to fly at night or better weather. Brings another challenge. That's why in my opinion we should just ignore the people that don't like it and keep those missions up. Even when numbers go down a bit. At one point they see other people having fun on it and will join anyway. These kind of things will force them to adapt and develop other useful tactics.