Read the Manual eh?? = useless so far… because I did not look hard enough
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Bottom line is there ain’t no shortcuts to learning this sim…gawd I love it as it’s an excellent community vetting system.
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As a newbie lurker, let me chime in. I really disagree Molni. Less than a year ago, I had never flown a sim in my life. I had a general interest in military aviation, and spotted aircraft in my teens.
I started with just reading through the available manuals, like the dashes etc. Watched a few youtube videos. Just reading through the forum posts here is also very helpful (there are many very knowledgeable, constructive and instructive people around here) And than I just started flying around, tryin some buttons.
After 2 months I joined a VFS (the 31st), and this really makes a world of difference. Nothing like other people in realtime teaching you stuff. Also a great motivator for additional studying, as you don’t want to let your teammates down.
Looooong way before ever getting close to being an expert, but after half a year I was pretty confident around the jet.
Nope, there is no recipe style manual, but for me that is part of the accuracy of the sim. Or did I miss the RL learn-to-fly-a-viper cookbook?
You mentioned and “underlined” the VFS and YT videos. From your post I see just what I said. Stange. Not manual was your first information and traning source. I have so long flight sim experience that I literally jump into old HC flight sim and more or less I can fly with them after 1-2 hours….
…and yet I do not find useful manuals what I got in \docs.
I also trained for some hours a Hungarian guy, how had past flight sim experience with FF. He said the FF’s Compainion was garbage, he labelled as in a “colorful magazin” but not a useful manual. I have to say for beginners SP3 manual is also not so bad. Not as long as AF but it is very, very dense.
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Understood…And point taken… thank you for your response.
You are welcome mate. And remember … in case of big pain, do not hesitate to ask … on my side I will do my best to tell you where to find the info, or, if I have the time and if there is nothing in manuals, I will try to give you a more or less detailed answer.
Non talking about other friendsCheers!
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Bottom line is there ain’t no shortcuts to learning this sim…gawd I love it as it’s an excellent community vetting system.
I agree Mower. You honestly have to put in the time to read the manuals. If you don’t like reading the manual then do a training video search on youtube. With future iterations of this sim, the complexity is going to get more difficult.
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When BMS4 was released I printed many docs and read it through hours. In late 2009 I was master of FF but even today I did not learned to use BMS4. Why? Because the manuals are simply terrible.
Where is this structure in manuals? I cannot see anywhere…
Where is the community? Rather than starting hundreds of (never finished never ending) theaters, … where are ppl for that kind of task? Same apply to the TacRef … !
Except the F4AF conversion manual … do the community waiting for Red Dog to do the job?
Ok too late now … job is done and about to be release (3 - 4 weeks) but we are four years after the first official release. So … the entire community is guilty about the lack of proper learning/training material. Not only BMS.
EDIT: Not against you Molni, I think we are sharing the same point.
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Except the F4AF conversion manual … do the community waiting for Red Dog to do the job?
That is useful but only players who had played with older Falcon variants.
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That is useful but only players who had played with older Falcon variants.
Nope, because it can be used as complement to the “Original” F4AF manual which is available on the Web.
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Nope, because it can be used as complement to the “Original” F4AF manual which is available on the Web.
Correct.
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Well that’s my new word for the day :mrgreen:
Impressive qualifications; Aussie further education?
I lived in the town of Boganville for a period. Its a small place on the mid north coast of New South Wales, a few miles inland from Macksville.
There they have a War museum and their pride and joy is a brass statue of Raven as the finest example of a self made Bogan.
They still tell stories of His exploits as a young truant on the local beaches in and around Nambucca Heads & Coffs Harbour.
And if you looks up the term “bludger” or “beachbum” in and Australian dictionary you will find a reference to Raven6 standing in a Doll queue for his unemployment benifits. -
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Seriously though, if you just watch training videos on youtube you can learn enough to be able to do everything important. I was kicking the crap out of the AI in a few weeks to months, tops, just from youtube vids and sparse reading of the manual . If you can only learn from a text format for some reason, then have fun with the manuals, its all there. But Ive had enough textbooks in college, else I might be in a real viper today, so youtube it is. You can learn enough to be competent from the videos, krause’s to be specific. TMS and DMS are the only freaking buttons you really need anyway ( hotas rules, thanks general dynamics!).
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I lived in the town of Boganville for a period. Its a small place on the mid north coast of New South Wales, a few miles inland from Macksville.
There they have a War museum and their pride and joy is a brass statue of Raven as the finest example of a self made Bogan.
They still tell stories of His exploits as a young truant on the local beaches in and around Nambucca Heads & Coffs Harbour.
And if you looks up the term “bludger” or “beachbum” in and Australian dictionary you will find a reference to Raven6 standing in a Doll queue for his unemployment benifits.A true Aussie Hero & national treasure. http://i943.photobucket.com/albums/ad272/ShadowVonChadwick/thumbs-up.jpg
Hahaha….
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For those of us that have been around since Falcon4 came out, the changes to Falcon are easy to learn. However, as a noob starting now the whole thing is very difficult. Everything has changed, game play, media, documents, single play to multiplay, controllers, and attitudes. I remember not being able to land until update 3, and more then three ships in multiplay not really happening till AF. I remember the Freebirds as a place to go and learn (really miss doc and the others). Where we went to exchange stories and get help was Frugals and Combatsim. Went to a local lan party and was amazed that their were other people that did this. Joined a VFS and spent many hours with people that became more than family. I wish to welcome Murphy back, because his dollars for Falcon3 paved a way for Falcon4. I know that Red Dog has done many things for this community, especially he is one of those that have led us here to today where we still exist without the paid support of other major creators, modders, etc. Let us all be a little tolerant of new users. And if the moderators change the title of your post, there is a reason for it. This is a forum that caters to all Falcon users that has to moderated because not all users have the best interest of the forum all of the time. Not all users understand that a simple question can not be answered in a simple way.
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I wish to welcome Murphy back, because his dollars for Falcon3 paved a way for Falcon4.
Thank you… I bought Falcon 3 and then purchased Falcon 4 as soon as it became available. While I never got around to playing Falcon 4.0 (Career, family, etc etc), I still have the original disk for it sitting in my cd collection.
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I would agree with Pumpyhead’s brief commentary on the expectations of a student. I would also point out that in the air force, both the student and the teacher are getting paid to be there and cannot simply refuse assistance unreasonably without consequence.
I would disagree that there is not the information available in manuals to learn the sim. There is perhaps a shortage of hungarian manuals, but the english docs provided are a good start, if supplemented with ones written by lockheed martin. Documentation exists on how to set your sim up, it exists on how to fly each type of mission, how to release weapons… it simply requires due diligence in researching it.
Murphy, you commented that IRL viper pilots do not just read a manual then go flying. Its not actually that far from the mark. They get 6 weeks of ground instruction, reading the dash one cover to cover then getting lectured at about all the aircraft systems. Then they go flying in a D model. Sortie number 5 they start flying a C model. Its not JUST reading a manual, its reading it over and over and over… then getting lectured about it some more.
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join “Instant Action”, press D to get my eegs funnel going
I’m going to use this as example. Do not say “I press D to get EEGS funnel” because there is no keyboard or mouse in an F-16 cockpit. It sounds picky but it is all the difference in the world between “D for dogfight mode” and “Keyboard D to make my virtual pilot select the Dogfight Override Switch on the throttle level with his thumb so the jet goes into Dogfight mode.” The habit of “Flying Keyboard” must broken to begin the process of “think sixteen” or there is forever a barrier to understanding. You must never be satisfied with “I press this keyboard key and this happens” but always strive to explain what your real fingers and toes would be doing if you are sitting in the airplane in your driveway. I know you just mean it shorthand to quickly describe a situation but I saw an example for a lesson.
A good user has healthy disrespect for the default control bindings. ‘K’ is wheel brakes? Screw you it’s ‘W’ now! If you look through every key file you find you will see that the text label is probably different for every yokel who writes one. It’s not standardized by a long way. It’s simple a keyfile not the keyfile and the best keyfile for Murphy is murphy.key, the one he makes for himself. It’s not a pleasant first impression but just for fun make a copy of BMS.key, name it murphy.key, and open it in Notepad. Find a line you don’t think you’ll ever use and delete it. Rename the text label on another one. Copy a line from keystrokes.key for a callback that isn’t in BMS.key. Laugh in its stupid face, the keyfile that you decide which lines are present and what they are labeled. Oh and make sure to make a backup of your last working keyfile just in case
Because the manuals are simply terrible.
This I always agree with. If you hire a college professor or buy $1,000,000 equipment and the manual isn’t clear and orderly then something is wrong. Murphy is right that it is not right for learning materials to be so disorganized. However I don’t argue what is right and wrong but what is reality. Finding a complaint isn’t getting the job done. We must have confidence that learning BMS is possible despite the challenges. People have done it with less brain cells than Murphy I’m sure. The only guaranteed ways to lose the fight are to give up or be afraid to use all of your resources. It’s a jungle and success comes to the jungle master. Most people oddly defend this disorganization because the skills needed to overcome this challenge are also the type of aggressive problem solving skills that are used in combat. Read everything, aggregate the knowledge, experiment and test hypotheses.
However I have just noticed the first page of BMS Manual:
PURPOSE AND SCOPE
This manual contains data describing the aircraft weapons system updates. It is not intended to replace the Falcon 4.0 manual, the SP3 manual or the BMS 2.0 manual; only to supplement them. This manual is a work-in-progress and will evolve over time. The change symbol, as illustrated by the black line in the margin of this paragraph, indicates changes have been made in the current issue.That’s pretty clear. Maybe it isn’t sufficient but that is obvious homework. It is expected to know 4 whole manuals before you can even start complaining Of course 579+180+169+166 pages is much to read but at least skim the table of contents to get a feel of what each one covers so you can come back when you have questions. I have a great love of the Falcon 4.0 manual for the TE lessons. It is wrong about what buttons you press usually but rarely wrong about how you accomplish a task and never wrong about the qualitative picture and progression of skills. As a path to walk it is a good one. Be humble about your skills. Do lessons that you think you know 90-100% already because you always learn something. Take your comfort/knowledge zone and stretch it at a pace between boring and overwhelming.
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Murphy, you commented that IRL viper pilots do not just read a manual then go flying. Its not actually that far from the mark. They get 6 weeks of ground instruction, reading the dash one cover to cover then getting lectured at about all the aircraft systems. Then they go flying in a D model. Sortie number 5 they start flying a C model. Its not JUST reading a manual, its reading it over and over and over… then getting lectured about it some more.
I completely confirm.
At least it is the same in French Air Force. I would also add that, IF you ask your instructor about a question (aircraft, avionic, regulations, procedures …), be absolutely SURE that the answer is not present on the documentation (that you are supposed to be perfectly known), otherwise, before getting an answer (telling you where to find the info if it is not a question or advice about experience) you will be questioned by you instructor about many other question about thing supportingly known … if you are stuck, you’re “dead” and next briefing and flight will be “verrrrry long” and painful …
Just to give an idea of the ambiance of the daily weather brief, take a look at
, even without understanding French e can feel a bit the adrenaline.Another small
Yeah! We can read Happiness on his face!EDIT … just for the fun, here is few other “funny” moments which are the so delicious “bread and butter” of French pilot students
… fighter pilot’s student … cool life!
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+1 on the USN side…read, read, read, fly some, read some more…test, fly, test while flying…go back and read. Then keep reading.
Most impressive thing I’ve ever heard in a brief was a young Lt reciting the flat spin recovery procedures for an F-14…from memory. Took about ten minutes - five for upright, pause, deep breath, five for inverted. The guy was well-read indeed.
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Neat haha! Those procedures are fortunately quite short for the F-16. You do still need them memorized, although verbatim is not required - so long as the steps are correct and in the correct order, minor variance in the description of each step is permitted. Out of Control Recovery is the last CAPs item I believe.
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:munch: