M02, AAR beyond my skills. Am I f****d ?

[pixie]

Well... everything is in the title.

It's the very beginning of the campaign and I'm stuck.

Please spare me the usual "learn AAR, you'll be glad you did".

 

I've tried and believe me, I'm nowhere close to AAR. I made some basket contacts by sheer luck and that was 1 or 2 seconds of pure pride, but I can't figure out how to stay connected. I  have read everything I could on the subject, watched YT tutorials... Naaah , not for me.

The fact is I'm probably too nervous to succeed. Too many unwanted moves. F** it ! 

I'm no real pilot, and that must be for a reason. I have already wasted too much time trying to refuel on training missions.

So what's next ? Do I need to bin this DLC ? Any way I can skip the refueling ? How can I do that ?

Thank you for your attention

 

 

 

 

[Steel Jaw]

I have been flight simming forever, have mastered AAR in Falcon BMS, but still cant nail it in DCS, not with the A10C, F18C nor the f16C.  Dont know why.  Just cant get it.

[pokeraccio]

Hi, some advice from the past in the following lines, and If I remember in R1 in some long missions, you should be able to save and exit and when you take again the campaign you start where you saved behind the tanker with full gas situation and you can continue the sortie. 

 

My personal experience

 

As many of you already point out, practice... practice...

 

At the beginning I started having some noticeable result when start looking at the right visual reference points, not the basket, as well explained and demonstrated on the TUT.

Head track helps. I don't have VR.

I prefer to turn down HUD brightness (during daytime, night switch is perfect) I think is less distracting.

I have a couple of setup I use with the same laptop, so muscle memory can't help when switching between, anyway no big dead zone (3 to 10) and some curves, more on roll axis (the higher on the cheapest, but still honest T16000 set) and easier when a throttle system is available instead the little slider.

 

 

[baltic_dragon]

Hey pixie. You don't need to AAR in M2, you can get close to the tanker and skip it. In mission 3 where it is necessary you can just choose to load mission after you have refuelled. So you should be fine.

[Hippo]

To my surprise, I was able to do the AAR in this mission yesterday much more easily than I expected, I didn't even disconnect once.  I put this down to the following:

 

I am using VR, throughout I was focusing on keeping the markings on the bottom of the tanker in the same place relative to the canopy frame.  I did not check my speed on the HUD, not even once (as my eyes weren't focused on it).

 

For my HOTAS, an X52 Pro, I simply don't think that there's enough resolution on the physical throttle axis to get the fine control necessary when mapping the entire range, so I have set up two curves that I can switch between: the default which I use almost always, and one for landings (and AAR) - I use a curve that maps the physical throttle range to a limited range in the sim (something like 77 - 90%).

 

I'm in no way exceptional at this, and AAR is not something I do regularly.  If I can do it so can anyone.

 

I then went on to screw up the rest of the mission as I struggled to work out what was going on.  Sigh.  Try again later.

Edited May 4, 2021 by Hippo

[pixie]

On 5/3/2021 at 1:10 AM, baltic_dragon said:

Hey pixie. You don't need to AAR in M2, you can get close to the tanker and skip it. In mission 3 where it is necessary you can just choose to load mission after you have refuelled. So you should be fine.

Thank you Baltic_dragon !

I really thought AAR was mandatory, I'm glad it's not. I was desperatly trying to refuel behind the tanker until I was running on fumes. 

What do you mean exactly by "skip it" ?

Do I need to initiate some radio coms with the tanker in order to trigger  following events ? Any key to press ?

Or simply fly in close formation with the tanker for a while and then follow my planned waypoint ?

 

[pete_auau]

On 5/4/2021 at 5:51 PM, Hippo said:

To my surprise, I was able to do the AAR in this mission yesterday much more easily than I expected, I didn't even disconnect once.  I put this down to the following:

 

I am using VR, throughout I was focusing on keeping the markings on the bottom of the tanker in the same place relative to the canopy frame.  I did not check my speed on the HUD, not even once (as my eyes weren't focused on it).

 

For my HOTAS, an X52 Pro, I simply don't think that there's enough resolution on the physical throttle axis to get the fine control necessary when mapping the entire range, so I have set up two curves that I can switch between: the default which I use almost always, and one for landings (and AAR) - I use a curve that maps the physical throttle range to a limited range in the sim (something like 77 - 90%).

 

I'm in no way exceptional at this, and AAR is not something I do regularly.  If I can do it so can anyone.

 

I then went on to screw up the rest of the mission as I struggled to work out what was going on.  Sigh.  Try again later.

 

yep using  vr  makes  alot  of  difference

[baltic_dragon]

I think when you get close enough you should get an option to just use SPACE BAR or F10 menu to tell the tanker that you're done and let your wingman go for it. You should be fine in this mission without taking any extra fuel. 

[ClydeBigBird]

Just played this mission.  It took me probably 5-10 minutes to successfully refuel, then I used the spacebar prompt to tell my wingman to take on fuel.  I heard the radio message from the tanker indicating that he was taking on fuel, but after that my wingman just flew in formation maybe 100-200 feet above the tanker indefinitely, and I couldn't get the rest of the mission to advance.  Tried time accelerating for a while, also tried flying on to the next waypoints, but didn't have any luck.

[baltic_dragon]

I can't put my finger on this one, saw the reports. To me it worked, but it looks like the old DCS may be back with wingman refueling forever if he starts the AAR during the turn. There even is a safeguard built in to tell him to stop after some time, but it seems for some people wingman stays glued to the basket forever. I'll try to look deeper into that. The problem is this is impossible to recreate in a vanilla mission built for testing this issue - there everything works fine. I'll keep looking.