In darkness during night what to do ?

In some missions I start the flight during the night. How am I supposed to do any checklist when I can't see anything ? Even if the plane is up running there are no cabin light and even the instrument seem badly lit.

In some missions I start the flight during the night. How am I supposed to do any checklist when I can't see anything ? Even if the plane is up running there are no cabin light and even the instrument seem badly lit.

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I am not sure why any mission would start you at night. The 109 (like many WWII era aircraft) was never really meant to fly at night and has no real equipment for such a thing.

That being said, many modules have a "flashlight" of sorts (a light that follows your mouse cursor) that you can turn on by hitting "alt+L". I am not sure if that is something that is module specific but it is worth a try.

Either way, I still can't really understand why there would be any mission for the 109 that would start you at night.

I am not sure why any mission would start you at night. The 109 (like many WWII era aircraft) was never really meant to fly at night and has no real equipment for such a thing.

 

That being said, many modules have a "flashlight" of sorts (a light that follows your mouse cursor) that you can turn on by hitting "alt+L". I am not sure if that is something that is module specific but it is worth a try.

 

Either way, I still can't really understand why there would be any mission for the 109 that would start you at night.

As a matter of fact in DCS there are 109 flights starting at night even if the 109 is a day fighter. For example in the default campaign. In one briefing we are told that we need to move the plane but bad weather has caught us. So it was night snow and heavy wind in this difficult take off scenario. Maybe we can think that we need to move a plane right now and there are no time to wait until the morning.

RL pilots would increase the gamma.. :))

While the WW2 era aircrafts were not All Weather, Whole Day aircrafts like modern ones are, they were meant to be operated at night. Fighters just were not meant to fight at night, but bombers were meant to bomb at night and day.

The allies started to use firebombs against German civilians at nights. Hitler didn't allow Luftwaffe to do the same against British civilians for long time because it was inhuman. And Luftwaffe was in huge trouble as theirs as the allies fighters couldn't fight at night as they couldn't see the targets, even when they got ground control telling them the range and heading to bombers.

For any aircraft pilot, they are required to know how to start aircraft in dark, how to taxii, take-off and land at night. That is why airfields had the spotlights, that made landing and take-off possible as you had a visual landmark where you are going. While it was a far more challenging than at sunlight, it was done and required. Because the bombing missions for both sides were designed to happen at night if possible, and that meant that fighters were as well required to take-off at day time and land at the night time. But the most common was the day time operations, and that meant that you took off while it was dark, and you were up in the air when first sunlight started to lit sky, and you fought at the day time victoriously and landed at the daytime.

The bombers two nightmares to fly were middle of the day as you were easily spotted visually and fighters had easy time to come, as well air defense had easy time to correct their firing as it was not just by radar. And then was zero visibility that you couldn't find your target to be bombed. But that means you bombed at night in moon light, you bombed when there was a slight overcast but capability to see between clouds the ground etc.

So you at least tried to shoot down the bombers that bombed at night times.

@jfri, there's also another, more trivial scenario possible. When DCS switched to deferred rendering in its gfx engine, many of the old stock missions happening at dawn/dusk were not updated correctly and ended up being too dark now, even though they're not supposed to.

That might be the case with the 109 challenge campaign, although I haven't flown it so I don't know how it was set up back in the v 1.5.xx era.

109, 190 were used during night. Some were even equipped of little radar. But most of those plane used at night were completely blind and followed what they can to find night bomber. You read some information about the "wilde sau" tactics.

Funny scenario but even read that Ju88 equipped with radar were used as beacon to help those fighter to find the enemy. They emit signal that afn2 instrument can detect and follow.

So even if they were not built to do that at first they were used for that. Some light for night start up would be great :)

I'm guessing the real pilots used flashlights if they didn't have enough moonlight.

Bf 109 campaign begins in pitch black on caucasus map.