DCS A-10C Tutorials - From 0 to HERO Ep3- Navigation

hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome back in today's episode we're going to be going over navigation so the first thing that we're going to want to do is cover the heads-up display in full detail let's go ahead and zoom in here a little bit and as you can see some of the heads-up display is kind of cut off down here this is supposedly going to be fixed when the update drops so i'm going to move my seat up just a smidge ah that's much better all right let's zoom in so the very first thing you're gonna see through the middle is the pitch ladder and it's exactly what it looks like it gives you a artificial horizon through here and then you have a pitch ladder 5 degrees 10 degrees etc and so forth and a negative pitch ladder of 5 degrees and so on so forth the one clear distinction between the two is that if you're below the horizon the pitch ladder will be dashed and when you're above the horizon the pitch ladder will be solid on the upper left corner we have our current gs we're currently pulling 0.9 g's let's just say that's one on the left-hand side we have an accelerometer and this actually tells us how many g's we've pulled up to this point this middle one will tell us what we're currently doing and these ones will tell us what our extreme g limits were how much positive and negative g's we've pulled observe there you go as you can see we pulled somewhere around the two and a half g mark i can reset this with this button down below we've already talked about what the speed is in knots and the altitude but we haven't really talked about these numbers underneath this number simply corresponds to what angle the tvv currently sitting at on the pitch ladder so 2 1 zero and we're no longer climbing now this is something you can absolutely ignore essentially what that section is is for mission designers if they want you to fly to a waypoint at a certain time that you need to be there then that will indicate what speed you should be going in order to reach that area on that specified time since we're in a multiplayer server or most missions we don't really care about that sort of thing then we don't really need to worry about it as you can see it says r0 anyway additionally it is interlinked with this line down here in the nav data block ignoring this this will tell you whether or not you're behind or ahead of schedule so again this is something you can absolutely ignore for the time being on the left hand side up here if i had weapons on board it would tell me i have cm and then 1150 rounds for a combat mix of heat rounds high explosive and ap rounds harbor penetrating at 1 150 rounds again we're going to skip this line completely and this tells us what altitude mode we're currently at i'm currently trying to climb up to altitude so i'm in path hold mode and we'll go over the altitude hold modes in just a second at the bottom of the heads-up display we have the compass roads one thing you need to understand is that there is an implied zero at the end so this is two six zero degrees two seven zero degrees so on and so forth and this triangle tells you exactly where we are on this compass rose we should be around the two six mark on the right side of the nav block you can ignore this top line completely the only one thing you're going to be focusing most on are these three things up here this tells you what your currently selected steer point is so our current steer point is steer point one and it's called msn00 for mission zero zero zero the mission designer makes these up so you can actually see these as defaults or if the mission designer sets these up as steer point one is your target it might be tgt it could be your ip your ingress point etc and so forth so the name is up to the mission designer this is how many miles away you are from that we're 46 miles away and we are currently at our altitude and speed and heading gonna reach that in well negative time because we're not flying directly to that waypoint so where is this 0.1 well if we take a look at our total velocity vector you should see that it has a third line sticking out through it now this is always pointing towards our currently selected steer point and if you look in the far left corner of the heads-up display there is a box over there it's kind of difficult to see right now but that box will tell us with two numbers exactly how far you have to turn in order to reach that and how many miles away we are from it 48 miles and at the bottom we also have an arrow indicating that it's a bearing of one two seven degrees to the left so i'm going to keep turning to the left until we're facing that steer point as you can see the numbers are now showing up oh there it is and as soon as the steer point comes into view of the heads-up display the line disappears from the tv and gets replaced from the steer point which points towards the total velocity vector and now that we're flying towards the steer point you'll see that our time to get to that steer point is nine minutes and three seconds ending decreasing and it's decreasing rapidly because we're accelerating still towards that steer point so it's going to take us even shorter amount of time and the bottom line just tells you what the current time is right now which corresponds to your clock down here could not be easier so how do we flip through the different steer points and by the way i'm going to use steer points and waypoints interchangeably the easiest way if you don't have a hotas would be through the ufc or the upfront controller also known as the scratch pad this is just like a quick and dirty way of inputting numbers and accessing certain functions of the a10 where you don't really want to do that here because it's a little difficult to lean to the right so this is just a little easier and it's your up front controller your ufc on the left hand side you see us to your rocker switch if i flip through it you'll see that the steer points will change so steer point two is over here it's called mission one steer point three is somewhere to our left at a bearing of zero nine six it's 38 miles away and it's called mission two before we move on let's really quickly go over the autopilot modes in the a10 we have three autopilot modes to choose from we have path altitude and heading and altitude mode currently i've selected the altitude and heading mode as you can see here with this autopilot mode the aircraft will remain flying straight and it's not going to bank turn it's not going to climb or descend so first i will need to set the switch to whatever desired mode i want it to be in and then i'm going to need to hit the engage or disengage button to actually engage it and disengage it additionally the big red button on the side of the throttle is the same exact button as engage and disengage autopilot it's just there to make it a little bit quicker and easier for you to do so now if i wanted to climb or descend at this exact bearing i would set this to path mode now notice how my autopilot did not change to path mode we're still stuck in altitude and heading so what i need to do is disengage the autopilot pitch to whatever degree i wanted to get to let's say 5 degrees hit the autopilot button and now we're in path hold mode and if i touch my stick she'll rock and then she'll go back to where she was however should i move my stick too much warning autopilot the autopilot will automatically disengage so should you get shot at for instance and you need to disengage autopilot and you're fumbling for the buttons just take that stick shove it to the side and the autopilot will disengage automatically lastly let's go over the altitude hold mode this will allow me to make orbits around a point all i need to do is bank and engage autopilot and that's it that's all there's really to it pretty simple right there's just one other thing the autopilot engagement actually has a limit and that limit is roughly 5 degrees depending on which autopilot you've set up for instance i'm still in the altitude heading mode if i was above the pitch ladder at six degrees and i was pressing the autopilot button i'm clicking it now nothing's happening i need to keep decreasing there we go around the 4 to 3 degree maximum allowable bank for instance in path mode i can set it to whatever angle i'd like for path mode but i cannot exceed a certain bank angle so right now i cannot engage the autopilot i will need to roll out and now i can engage it and the same thing for the main autopilot you're going to be in which is the altitude and heading mode and that's if i want to stick it right there and have it not move i cannot climb above three or four degrees and i cannot roll beyond three or four degrees i need to be as close to that center as possible and then engage autopilot okie dokie now that you've mastered the autopilot let's keep going towards waypoint 2. but now i'm going to introduce hotas commands this is the point where you need to take a pen and paper out because from this moment on your lessons are gonna start getting a lot more difficult you're gonna need to write these down and depending on your health tasks you're going to start binding these things i've already showed you from the first lesson what my controls are like and i have everything bound for the hotes section for the a10c warthog so before we move on i need to explain to you what soy is soi and it is going to be the backbone of you doing all of your hotas controls so soy stands for a sensor of interest in layman's terms the a10 does not know what you want to do when you press a button on the whole task for instance let's say i had a targeting pod on the left hand side and i had a maverick on the right hand side i currently don't have them equipped but both of these things can be slewed using the slew sensor i can move the camera around for the target pod and i can move the seeker head for the maverick so when i touch the sloot sensor on my throttle which is located here how is the a-10 supposed to know what i wanted to do so this is where you need to tell it and say hey i need you to focus on this mfd or this mfd so when i do my button process you only do things for this or this or the heads-up display the heads-up display the left mfd and the right mfd are your three choices for your sensor of interest or soy now in order to manipulate which one of these you want to go into you need to use the coulee hat which is also located on the throttle and on top of that you will also need to know that when you press buttons on the a10c warthog there is difference between tapping a button and pressing and holding the button we call these short and long presses for instance let's say i wanted to make the tad on the left hand side of my left mft my soy currently it's set as not soy and the right screen is also set as not soy so i know by default my heads up display must be selected as soy and one of these strings will be selected at soy at any given time and i know the heads-up display is my soy because you can see a little asterisk on the left-hand side of the heads-up display like i said i want to manipulate stuff on the tad so what i need to do is press hat left long now this needs to be a press to the left with the coulee hat for about one one and a half seconds boom just like that now i know that this is soy because i have a green layer here and the not soy message has disappeared you'll notice that this still says not soy and the asterisk has disappeared from the headset display and i can move the soy over on the right hand side by pushing cooley hat right currently i don't have a target pod or mavic selected so you can't really see that but trust me if i were to press cooley hat right long it would set this soy if i had a sensor there additionally cooley hat left short and head right short has its own little thing and that is as you can see at the bottom of your mfds you have different programs now i can press these programs with my little mouse or i can use my cooley hat to do this for me cooley hat right short will scroll through these programs to the right cooley hat left short will scroll to the left on the left mfd so cooley head left short tap tap tap tap hat right short tap tap tap tap now i want to make the left mfd my soy cooley hat left long boom done the only weird one is the heads-up display the heads-up display requires you to just tap it so it's hat up short so left for left mfd right for right mfd up for heads-up display and if i press it up as you can see the little asterisk has appeared on the headset display and now this is my sensor of interest cooling hat down short is something you don't need to use all it does is it swaps your left mfd for your right mfd cool head down short quality head down short so i can swap these as i'd like let's make our heads up display soy which it currently is because the asterix is there and now i'm going to start manipulating these waypoints or steer points using the dms key data management system key that would be this hotez key right here by pressing it in the up or down position i can scroll through the different steer points this way and it makes it really easy so you don't have to go and reach for your mouse whenever you're flying again if you don't have enough buttons or you're still more comfortable with the mouse just use this to your rocker switch so there you go you've just learned a bunch of new hotas controls congratulations the headset display is a wonderful tool to let you know everything that is happening with your aircraft but unfortunately you are going to need to learn how to lose your steam gauges your heads-up display is acceptable to damage you see most of the electronics are located behind the cockpit of the a-10 so if you ever take shrapnel or missile or bullets to the rear well you're probably going to lose a couple of systems sometimes your heads-up display is gonna go out and if that happens how are you gonna navigate back home well navigating back home your starting position will always be steer point zero so heads-up display is set as soy i'm gonna hit dms down and there you go initial position this is literally where i started from so if i ever need to go back to that same exact position i can always go to steer point zero but again what if i lose my handsome display well this is where this is going to come into play this is called the hsi the horizontal situation indicator now it will not tell you which waypoint you have currently selected however what it does do is it points towards your currently circuit steer point and on the left hand side it tells you how many miles away you are from there don't worry about this this is something for a little bit more advanced use you can set this to help you navigate and we've used this previously for landing and the airfield to make it a little bit easier you also have a headed bug this is mainly just for use so if someone tells you hey turn right through bearing of 330 you can very quickly just do this set it to 330 and you can start making that churn afterwards it's mainly used for general aviation you don't not really gonna use it here but it's just there to help you out in case you are not really good with memorizing things and you want to set them and then just reference them while you're making your flights navigations as i make my turn to the left you'll see that the needle will keep pointing towards that airfield towards my currently selected steer point so if i were to change the steer point to steer point i don't know three let's say one two three notice how the needle will always point towards that steer point but this inner needle doesn't do anything that's just for you you don't need to play around with this at all for navigation you just need to reference where this needle is pointing at at all times and it's 22 miles away let's go over another example and this would be well let's say if i hit f10 on the map that i've taken off from a napa and the progress has taken all of us out to let's say here and the nearest airport to land is makeup well i can click on makeup and get some information about it unfortunately it does not have a tac can attack n is a wonderful little system it basically allows me to home in directly towards the tadkan station at the airfield unfortunately as you can see not every single airfield has it it's not until we start looking at the airfields down to the south east in georgia where we start to see these attack ends actually be available like in tsunaki for instance we have taken 31 x-ray so if i was to try to utilize this i would simply use the attack end with the tack hand set to that i need to now enable it and there we go you're gonna hear that tone the tone is a good thing because it means it's actually picked up the station now this is something that you need to be within los or line of sight if it's behind a mountain if you're way too far away from it you may not pick up the station but now you see that in the outer scale of your hsi you have a needle pointing number two and a number one what gives well when you have a second source of navigation included one is gonna keep pointing you towards your currently selected steer point which in our case is steer point three so if i was to switch the steer points as you can see the number two needle is going to keep shifting around so the needle is going to keep telling you which steer point you currently have selected and steer point one will showcase where the takken station is unfortunately we are picking up the signal but it is too far away ah we just picked it up we got close enough and the red tape has disappeared off of the miles and now we have an indication clearly towards where the tack end station is there is a limit to how far away you can be from the takken station for it to pick it up and it looks like it's well roughly about 250 miles so now the number one needle is going to keep pointing us towards the attack and station so if i wanted to fly towards it i don't need to make a turn until the number one needle faces the 12 o'clock position and this is our little picture of our aircraft flying this way and we would roughly need to fly about there and flying this direction until we get the takken station right in front of us but like i said in the land of georgia the takken stations are scarce it's not really a useful tool for navigation because they only exist in airfields but if that was the only thing you had then you know it is a possible way of navigating around using attack and beacons but we're not going to worry about that right now make sure that once you're done with attack and you go back to the steer point and make that your primary navigational source now what if i wanted to go through to an airfield that i don't have attack hand for there is one way of navigating which would be to use the ruler basically once you click on this you right click and you drag here and as you can see we have a rough bearing of 92 degrees for 93 miles i'm gonna use my heading bug that's about 90 right there so 92 would be somewhere around there and then it helps to set it right here because this core set will give you an actual course so 92 easy peasy let's just fly towards there and if i keep flying towards this area makeup will be somewhere in front of us couldn't be easier but let's say you didn't want to do that you didn't want to cheat there is yet another way for you to access different airfields and that is utilizing your cpu so on the right hand side i'm going to repeat the cdu because remember this is the actual cdu and we can repeat it here and now i want to get into a different page currently on the cdu we have the waypoint page selected i'm going to go to the scratch pad i'm going to hit function 2 for navigation because remember function acts like a shift so when i hit function now i'm accessing these bottom options and now we go to the cdu and there is a divert option here let's hit divert cool we got some stuff over here the way this divert page works is it shows you the nearest airfields on the verna top to the bottom so right now krimsk is our closest target oh that's just changed now it's glenzendik and if we turn towards it it would take us 2 minutes and 30 seconds to get there 2 minutes 36 seconds for crims 2 3 minutes and so on and so on for these but as you can see we are only limited to these amount of pages that we can see so we can't actually scroll down to see any more options that we may have down below so this is really only really useful for the nearest airfields that we have around us but let's say we wanted to go to kremsk what we can do is now that we have crimps here we can select it if i select grims now i have some more information krimsk is an elevation of 66 feet it has two run weights one is bearing zero four zero degrees the other one is bearing two to zero degrees it has no ils it has no tac can and unfortunately we don't have any frequencies for the tower but our currently selected steer point should point us towards kramsk and as you can see the total velocity vector is pointing that way well now that we've actually selected crims from the divert page what it's going to do is it's going to replace our currently selected steer point and it is going to instead force krimsk for us as you can see on the tad or little tactical aida display our current selected zero point is now this 54 which is krimsk and on our heads-up display our total velocity vector should be pointing us directly to the right towards it along with a bearing of 286 to the right and it should be 22 miles away so if i roll right there's krimsk and i can just very easily navigate my way to that airfield and land not a problem and let's say you didn't want to do this you want to go back to your regular steer points i would just rock this to your point switch here and now we're back to having our steer points and you can change the cdu back to whatever you'd like i would like to go into function waypoint anchor point and turn our bullseye on for a heads up display now if i look at my headset display i have bullseye 266 73 you can see on the tab there you have also bullseye located over here but i like to have it up here especially when i'm playing on multiplayer servers because if i need to call for an emergency aircraft to help me out i can very quickly contact the gci and tell him my position with the bullseye and in case you don't know what bullseye is in the description below you're gonna have two videos one of them describes pattern work in an airfield but the other one is going to describe how to work with the gci and what is a bra call along with bullseye but just for a quick gist if i hit f10 we can find out where bullseye is you'll notice that bullseye is actually over makeup it's a series of concentric circles that you can see right here and all i have to do using the ruler function here right click on that drag it over to my position and that's roughly around what we said 275 84 269 85 close enough before we end this lesson let's really quickly go over the tad and all of its functions the tad or the tactical aided display is going to be located only on the left mfd unless of course you hit cooley hat down and you switch the mfds and you can have it on the right mfd let's switch it back i typically leave it on the left side now it's just basically a moving map the first thing you're going to want to do in order to start manipulating the tid is to set it as soy currently it is selected as soy as you can see by the big green box around it and if not then you can just press cooling hat left long until you select this as soy alternatively you can always set something soy by clicking it twice so as you can see if i switch back here it's not soy but if i click it it makes it soy now right now the range scale is 160 nautical miles this refers to this outer ring out here i'm in a center from here to here is 160 nautical miles this is half that which would be 80 miles using the dms up and down hotes key i can scroll this to move up and down and as you can see the range scale will change up here now the outer ring is showing 20 miles and the inner ring will be 10. this will always indicate north we can confirm this using hsi and sure enough that's north these are our steer points as you can see we have a couple of them and if i were to select the heads-up display as soy and use dms up and down i can select the different steer points let's leave it in steer point four let's make the tad soy again and zoom in the other thing you're going to notice is that you also have a cursor that you can move around when the cursor is stowed by default you haven't touched the cursor it is going to be over the top of your aircraft as you can see it is inside our plane right now whenever the cursor is over something that is selectable information is going to show up about it at the bottom typically you don't really care much for what this is but you can see that this is a north and east coordinate grid system and if i were to move it around and slide it out of that all that information disappears i can go up here and tag this and get information about this steer point with its north and east heading etc etc and so forth so let's say i want information about the steer point what i can do is put it over it and press tms up short so tap it by doing so if i move my cursor out nothing changes because i have currently hooked myself onto the steer point now you can see there's a nice yellow line with an arrow pointing to me and this will tell you that i am from it at a bearing of 0 1 0 degrees at 11 miles you can't really get it confused because the arrow always points towards you so it's a reference from whatever you have hooked to yourself if i want to unhook this thing i press tms down i don't need to hover over it i can just do it whatever tms down short it unhooks it and if i ever want to stow this cursor all i have to do is press china hat aft short this is a command that will stow all sensors your mavericks will get stowed your heads up display cursor will get stowed and the cursor on the tid will get stowed so it's a universal press trying to head aft short to stow and reset the cursor the cursor has more than just this function if i move this cursor around with the slew sensor again but i want to see something out here i don't need to change the resolution of the map if i move it up it will do it automatically for me and if i want to zoom in dms up short will do that these axes by the way represent friendly positions the other thing that the cursor can do is right now the tad centered around my aircraft but i can center the tid around the cursor instead and this is where china head forward short comes into play if i tap it once north is now the top of the map and everything is referenced off of the cursor and if i zoom in i can get pretty darn close on details of let's say this city however i'm currently in exp1 mode and i can go one more zoom level if i hit china head forward short again i am now in exp2 mode and i have just a little bit more zoom and this is really handy if you have a lot of stuff on the tid and you really want to select something that's hidden down tight in there if i hit chana head forward again it resets itself back to me but the cursor as you can see is not over me if i zoom out with dms after short the cursor is still stuck back here so china had aft short will reset the cursor back on top of me boom so this is especially useful if let's say i want to go up here and i want to start looking at things in here so i'm going to press trying to head forward short i'm going to press dms up to zoom in and now you can see i can make out that there's bullseye and the waypoint here and there's some friendly positions just north of this airfield over here pretty cool now remember if i use dms up and down i can scroll in and out notice that the map though it changes it changes with the different zoom levels one thing that can happen depending on the sector you're flying in is that the map can go completely black it will look like this this happens if you're in a current zoom level that you don't have map telemetry for so there could be a certain sector where if at a really tight zoom level you just don't have that data so you're just going to have a black screen and if all you have to do is basically zoom out one and you'll have probably topographical data available now let's say that while i'm zooming in and out i want to maintain the map at a current setting let's say i like this city look and when i zoom out i don't want it to go away because i don't like these i want to have this so what you can do is set your map to not off but manual now that it's set to manual and i use dms aft to scroll out you'll notice that now i have that map and it sticks if i zoom in and zoom out but i have missing data as you can see over here that i don't have information for this particular map no matter what the zoom level is so if i wanted to get the map back in these areas i will need to change the map to auto and now i have map data for these areas so you'll have some blank spaces that you're going to need to work with sometimes or you know you don't want the map it's a little cluttered there's a lot of green on green stuff going on you just want off because you don't care you can look outside and see the features and you just want to see your steer points and you want to see your people there you go that's all you need to do the other thing that i can do is get on the same net as this guy so i'm going to hook it by pressing tms up short and now on the right corner you're gonna see 2628. he has his own id set to 26 and he's rocking a group id of two eight so let's say i want to group up with this guy i want to be buddies with them we're friends we're online together the way we can do this is we can set our own group ids and get on it and have our own unique ids net is over here so i want to get in group 2 8 and have some own id that is not 26 hit net my current group is 12. let's go ahead and press 2 8 confirm on the scratch pad that i have pressed 2 8. let's say i've made a mistake i can always clear it don't press enter instead i'm going to press here cool look at that now he's purple so what this number is telling me is what his own unique ideas he's 2 6 and he's at 10 000 feet and it looks like there's another guy that's also rocking the same group id over here at this airfield he's at zero thousand feet and looks like he's got his own unique id as one now what you don't want to do is set the same own id and set group id as somebody else what happens then is that these guys will disappear off the tad not always but sometimes sometimes you may only see a couple of guys that are on the map instead of everybody and sometimes you'll see the tad guys blinking it's a problem and you're gonna need to go into your net and you're going to change your own id or group id now right now we are currently in the net section of the tab so i want to go back to the regular tab i can do so by pressing tab up here or tab down here and now we're back to the regular tab menu awesome the other thing you're going to see is whatever you have hooked actually will show up on your heads-up display so right now we have him hooked if i press tms down i would unhook him let's go ahead and hook him now if i go to my heads-up display i'm gonna have an additional marker take a look at this you have a solid line coming through still indicating where the currently selected steer point is and i have a dashed two sets of parallel lines along with the dashed box indicating what i have currently tagged or selected or hooked so this is actually the guy that i have hooked and this will always show me where he is and if i were to press tms down with the tab selected i have unhooked him and now that has disappeared indeed it has but you'll notice that there's actually a lot more aircraft on the server if i press f10 there's more than just those guys flying around there's a whole bunch of other aircraft so what's going on unfortunately not everybody has the same exact system as we do so since every single aircraft in dcs is running its own system or maybe it doesn't even have a data link system it simply is not compatible and will not show up for the a10c the best you can expect is to see other a10cs a10as and f15es which currently are ai but in the future we'll actually get the playable version now there are more function of the tag that we can go over unfortunately it will do us no service to go over them now so as we progress through our lessons we're gonna learn more about the tad and more about the other systems that are intellect with it for the time being practice these things and see if you can navigate around remember if you ever want to get home just make hud your soy dms down until you have your initial position and you can always fly back 180 degrees behind us 47 miles and that's it for today's lesson on navigation i will see you guys next time where we're gonna be going over how to fire the guns and rockets until then see ya [Music] [Music] you

Channel: ralfidude

Views: 23,894

Rating: 4.978261 out of 5

Keywords: ralfidude, ralfi's, alley, dcs, fc3, digital, combat, simulation, flaming, cliffs, battlefield, bf, flight, sim, f-15c, eagle, f-16, viper, a-10C, a10C, A-10, tutorial, training, HUD, TACAN, TAD, Navigation, DIVERT

Id: sMYTaFJmcKE

Length: 38min 4sec (2284 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020