Impressive Detailing - Needs Appreciating More.

Just finished a mission (VR), shut down the Cat and punched out to have a look round. I walked round the aircraft and stuck my head in the gear wells. The pipework and mechanisms are highly impressive in their detail, but what got me was when I stuck my head in one of the engine inlet ducts...….

Yup, a good way down the duct I was staring at the fan blades. all present and correct in full detail....and not only that, they were wind milling in the breeze! All that was lacking was the tinkling of the compressor blades.

I was impressed as all hell.

It was a shame I had to punch out on the ramp to see it.

All this detail means it should be appreciated more and is crying out for the ability to conduct walk arounds, climb the ladder to enter the cockpit and settle in, and also to be able to egress the aircraft.

I know this is not an easy thing to do, Iron Mike once detailed how hard it is just putting a pilot body in there, but it certainly needs the tech developing "in quiet moments" in time for VR to become completely mainstream.

Imaging walking out to the ramp with your friends, finding your allotted aircraft tail number, doing a walkround then climbing in..... unreal.

Edit: Need to have a word with the crew chief. The creep marks are missing from the tyres.

Yeah, it's a wish I have too. Immersion level would raise dramatically with such feature, with any module.

+1

Being able to walk around and see everything up close in VR would be a perfect addition to DCS, I agree.

Even without VR, all players should be able to do a walk around before flight on a "Cold and Dark" setup. It would be kind of cool to see people milling about on carrier decks or land based airfields on the MP servers

Yes, good idea! And how about the chance to be a shooter in the carrier in MP? With all the hand signals for the pilots.

I really wish we had a way to walk around it like that without punching out.

From what ED say about future carrier developments, is envisaged to have an aircraft carrier that is possible to walk around, including working elevators. Maybe some of that will give us a context to do some exploring and looking over details like this on some of the aircraft that are parked up.

When I was playing the original Gunship game from microprose, they gave you the ability to do an inspection of the aircraft when you shut down to check on combat damage to the aircraft (In 2d naturally). It would be nice to be able to do that in DCS and rib the crew chief the walkman wasnt working again. :)

It can be done in X-Plane and is such a shame it isn't possible in DCS.

There's another sim in dev doing this with actual checks.

I put the F-14 in the VR hangar, I'd have to tweak the position, but it's so massive.

I often thought it was a waste, sometimes if the cockpit slowly renders when my PC has a bad day, you get to see the nose gear behind the cockpit dash and I get a warm and fuzzy feeling for the 3d modeller and texture artists that had to do all that work.

There's nothing cheap or unfinished about the artwork, it's the finest 3d model of anything in DCS i've seen.

Hope the artists have recovered from all that effort, they need to know their work blew people away.

I had once a VR set in a 5x7 meter space, what I did first time in DCS in there was to "go to walk". It was easy to do as you took HMD away and raised it well above your head and reseted the view there. Then you got to walk around the aircraft like you were there. The craziest feeling was when you crouched next to the cockpit and you could have been there strapping someone in etc...

One of the coolest things in VR was to part the Cat with the nose over the edge of the Stennis...

Just stand up and lean over...yikes! :O