DCS A-10C Tutorials - From 0 to HERO Ep5- TGP, SPI and Helmet Mounted Display

hello and welcome back in today's episode we are going to be going over mainly the targeting pod and we're going to touch upon the helmet mounted system we're also going to touch upon the sp or sensor point of interest and that is going to be an extremely important lesson to understand so make sure that you pay attention here as of this episode moving forward i will be using the updated a10c2 version now because this is quite a bit of a doozy of a tutorial session i highly encourage that you sit back you have somebody to drink some snacks a pen and a paper ready because we are about to hit a whole bunch of new hot ass buttons and you are gonna need to write a lot of this stuff down however the good news is that after this lesson we're gonna start getting into the munitions and things are going to start getting a lot easier so sit back relax and let's get started all right well for this mission we do have the target pod equipped on the right hand side and that's going to be our main focus as soon as you've equipped your lightning pod and this is called the lightning targeting pod i'm going to call it the tgp you'll note that it is currently not exposing any cameras or sensors it's actually rolled all the way back so one of the things you're going to do especially on startup is down here where you have your master arm gun pack you're going to need to make sure that your target pod switch is going to go in the op position and the laser arm as well in the up position you don't have to have the laser on unless you are using laser-guided weapons or you plan to use the laser at some point with the targeting pods and it's going to take you roughly around three minutes once you flip the switch on until you start to see this screen on the targeting pods section of the mfd you can access the targeting plot from the left or the right mfd it doesn't really matter but as you currently see we're in standby and we have no image with the targeting pod so what we're going to do is i'm going to press the air to ground button and you're gonna see that the target pod is gonna unstow itself there you go the camera rolled out it is now focused out in front of us and locked on the heads-up display you'll automatically see a little diamond and this obviously indicates where the target pods looking and if i were to unfreeze the image really quick you're gonna see that when i move the aircraft around the target pod is not ground stabilized to anything it's stuck to the nose section of the air graph looking straight forward ahead of us well before we get moving i think it's going to be very important that we talk about speed or sensor point of interest not to be confused with soi or sensor of interest remember soi was the sensor of interest that i was going to select when i'm going to start manipulating my controls through my whole task currently the heads-up display is my soi now when we're talking about speed however things get a little bit more uh interesting so to speak however i think i'm gonna let future ralphie take it from here and uh try and teach you what a sp is with paint hey you feature alfie here all right so let's talk about what a speed is and why we need to use it this is probably the number one source of frustration for most new dcs a10 pilots during the startup procedure you had the a10 do an alignment and the purpose of this alignment is that the a10 now knows where it is in 3d space on top of that the a10 also has a topographical map data of the theater it is flying in so assuming that i move the targeting pod to look at something on the ground the target pod will know exactly what point on the ground you are looking at so you can think of it this way this is my sectional chart imagine it's a topographical map instead if this is me in 3d space and i'm facing this way but i am looking to the right and down at such and such angles then if i just draw a straight line from there to here then this must be the point on the ground that i'm referencing right it's something like that but simply looking at that spot will do nothing for you if you want to do anything with whatever it is you're looking at you need to place a speed down right at that location by pressing tms up long with the targeting pod set of soy you will now place a sensor point of interest right on that location on the ground now the a10 will have a reference point to do stuff with it you can now slave your mavericks or your tarting pod to that point if you set a speed down without using a target pod like for instance through your heads-up display or through steer points additionally you've created a point on the ground that you can feed information to your weapons as well you see up to this point we've covered ccip or continuously computed impact point as our means for delivering our bombs this is neat because it's that world war ii style of dive bombing onto your target simply place the paper on what you want to kill and the a10 will estimate the impact point for you for dom bombs this is the most accurate way to deliver those types of weapons however it's not optimal since you will expose yourself to enemy fire by getting closer to it so that's why ccrp exists which stands for continuously computed release point if i for instance saw a car with my targeting pod and i set a speed down on it i now created a point for my a10 to calculate a drop zone as to when the weapon should be released in order to hit it because the system is automated i no longer need to do it manually by dive bombing at it i can simply fly straight and level right over the target and i let the a10 systems do the calculating for me i will hold the weapon release button down and as soon as i fly right over the drop zone the computer will drop the weapon for me and this is fantastic news because now i can sit way up high from the enemy and let the weapon do its thing without having to expose myself to enemy fire this however isn't something that i would typically use for dom bombs because ccrp drops with unguided munitions are highly unreliable and the accuracy is at the mercy of factors like wind and your precision of flying etc and so forth but for guided weapons like the ones we will be going over in the future it's the best delivery option and for some weapons it's the only delivery method there is one caveat though and that would be going back to the point that the targeting pod doesn't see what you see it only sees the point on the ground from the topographical data it has stored so let's say that we are flying relatively low and we look forward and spot our vehicle cool we designate it set a speed down and then fly over to drop a gps guided bomb you will note that the impact point will be behind the vehicle but why why why why why why the reason is the targeting pod doesn't see the vehicle it sees the point on the ground along its line of sight the vehicle is not part of the topographical data that the a-10 has stored and as far as dcs is concerned neither are any of the buildings one way to fix this is to use the laser by firing the targeting pod's laser while sitting down a speed at the same time you will let the system know that the distance of the laser is shorter than the distance that the tgp thinks is true the speed will instead be placed along the line at the point where the laser stopped however the laser has a maximum range of somewhere around six and a half seven nautical miles so if you're trying to designate the vehicle from like 10 plus nautical miles this simply won't work a quick workaround would be to simply designate on the ground at the wheelbase of the vehicle this will give you a pretty darn good speed point so that your weapon will be delivered right on target alternatively just fly at a higher altitude this will allow your line of sight to look through the vehicle on the ground below it but we all know that flying high is not always a choice that we can make due to abandons or sams in the [Music] we're area painted okeydokey hope that helps take it away past ralphie all right now that you understand what a sp is more or less let's uh put that into practice so at any given point you already have a speed set by default the speed will be your currently selected steer point so if we take a look at our headset display the data block you'll see that our current select zero point is steer point zero it's directly behind us as indicated by the box over here saying that it's 15 miles behind us because 15 miles is here and it's 180 degrees behind us at a bearing of two five seven and if i take a look at the tad to visualize this a little easier yeah indeed it's right behind us that's where we started and i'm flying out here we have uh three other uh steer points here so i'm going to go ahead and select 0.1 and you'll see that the yellow box has moved over here we're obviously facing steer 0.1 there it is it's on the ground over there and the other additional thing that you should be able to see is this little white wedding cake symbol this will always represent where your current speed is so as i said by default there will always be a speed so if you've not set it down you just took off you started the aircraft you're in the air your currently selected steer points will always be speeds and should you create a speed later on the ground anywhere with the targeting pod or any other sensor and then you delete that speed it will revert back always to your steer points and also just to note our targeting pod diamond is also shown on the tab and that's what's shown up here okay cool so with the helmet mounted system we will touch upon this in a little bit it's going to be a lot easier to move the targeting pod from point to point to point because we're going to be able to look at things and basically move our charting pod over there and set speeds and mark points and all of that stuff don't worry we'll get to that so first let's get the core system out of the way and then we'll step it up to a easier method with the helmet mounted system okay but before we do any of that let's just take a look at the actual targeting pod and just go over some of the symbology and how it actually works all right so if i zoom in over here uh you'll see that there is just a few bunch of information nothing too crazy uh right off the bat you can ignore what this is you can ignore what that is this is just basically showing you the tilt of your aircraft the role of the aircraft remember the tad has the same exact role so when your heads down you just want to make sure that as you're manipulating stuff in here you're not like rolling the aircraft if you're not an autopilot so it's just a visual reference and you have your north and east coordinates down here which will indicate exactly where the target pod is uh pointing to uh currently it's not set as soy so if i was to press cooley hat right long i'll set it as soy there's the green box around it and now if i was to move the slew sensor around i can move the camera around pretty easy you obviously have your crosshairs and then you have this number up here now don't worry about this number what this number is is a yardstick uh measurements so essentially this crosshair from here to here is 195 meters you will almost never use this which is why i say don't really worry about it but let's say you're anal about trying to figure out how big something is for whatever reason you could essentially zoom the camera in until this line aligns with the length of something and then figure out how long it is maybe how long a bridge is perhaps you want to see how big a gap between vehicles there are so you can set up your bombs and drop them at intervals they drop at let's say 50 foot increments it has its uses but for our general purposes we're simply not going to use this so don't worry about it the number you're really looking for is this number down here and this represents our sign range essentially this is the range from the actual target pod to the point that it's looking at on the ground which is right over here which is nine nautical miles neat the l over here represents that we have the laser and it is armed but it's not firing when it is firing it will start flashing next we have a little compass rose up here and this will always tell us where north is this is north you know west east south and north is this way so if i was looking at something underground over here and i was working with a buddy of mine and we were both looking at the same spot you know it doesn't really make much sense for me to say hey i see something to the left of that spot to the right of that spot because left and right is relative if he's somewhere completely different than me and we're both looking at the same thing his left may not be my left so instead you may need to use the compass rose and this is where i would look at this and be like oh there's something over there i need to tell my buddy right away i will look at his compass rose and say oh this direction is north so i'll be like hey to the north of what we're looking at there's a thingamajiggy over there kill it easy peasy and next up we also have this little dot up here it's actually a square but you know who gives a damn so this actually gives us a representation of where the targeting pod is looking at so i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to actually start slewing this targeting pod so you can see what i'm talking about so with the turning pot selected as my soy i'm going to move my sleuth sensor and you'll notice that now the diamond's moving as i'm moving the targeting pot around and the dot is also moving around as i'm moving the target pot this dot is telling me that it's in the 12 o'clock position in front of us which is exactly what's happening and if i was to move the dot down as the target pod starts to look below us down here the dots gonna start moving closer and closer to the center once it's at the center and it's literally telling me that the targeting pod is looking directly underneath me and then as i move to the six o'clock position it's telling me that the target pod is looking behind me easy peasy and of course if i move the target pod over to the right now you see that the target pod dot is over here so my target point is probably over here somewhere and it's probably looking over there in that general direction so this is just a really good quick reference in order to get our eyes out of the cockpit and look at the spot because let's say my friend says hey i'm going to roll in i need you to get eyes on the area of operation the ao and just let me know if you see any missile launches you know like oh i'm stuck with looking at the target but i don't know where no you have no excuse you look at this you look at it you get your eyes outside there and you quickly find whatever it is your target pod is looking at and it will be a little bit easier because you have the helmet mounted system display if you have the update you may not so that will be much easier for you and if you don't have that helmet mounted display then well life's a little bit more difficult but you should still have no excuse because you now know exactly where the target phone is looking in reference to your aircraft alright and as you can see with the target bot looking like this it's a little easier to make out where north is north is indicated this way now so north west east south as the target pods looking at it so very helpful next up we have the area or point mode that the targeting pod is going to be looking into the easiest way to explain this is this you see the targeting pod is not an ai it doesn't understand the image that it's looking at the only thing it's concerned about is it's saying hey from here let's just draw an imaginary line all the way to the point on the ground where he's looking at take a look at where i am in 3d space take a look at the ground and say hey this is the spot that we're looking at right now and that's pretty much it that's it and i can then feed data to my computer and to my weapons and go from there with the sp's and all that nonsense beyond that the image that you're seeing is just for you the target pod doesn't care it's basically like you having a guy strapped to the side of your wing with a camera you're just telling him point right there and tell me what you see just show it to me don't don't bother just let me see what's going on that's literally it i can change this mode into point mode so if i press tms up short you'll notice that now i'm in point mode generally speaking nothing has changed the only thing that has changed is that now i have a nice solid box around here and if there's anything that crosses within the center of this box it is going to follow those pixels and it is going to essentially track vehicles so i'm currently looking at a city right now and i know there are some vehicles driving about and i should be able to lock on let's say this civilian vehicle and be able to track him now problem is it's not snapping to him it's acting like the camera might as well be in area mode and one of the reasons that this may happen is that the contrast may not be good enough so i'm using dms up and down in order to zoom the targeting pod up and back remember have to have the targeting pod set as soy to do so and now i'm going to introduce you to yet another hotez command which is the boat switch boat switch aft and boat switch forward will change the polarity of the targeting pod for white hot and black hot this is currently black hot as is indicated on the upper right corner and i generally like white hot is there a difference not really and boat switch center will bring me back to the regular tv in case i want to do that so if i move my target pod over here and then zoom in you should snap to it and see how it snaps to it because it's recognizing that there's some pixels and it's moving and it basically just assumes that it's a thing and it's going to continue to track it until of course there is enough obscurity let's say sometimes it's uh light posts other times it's going to be power lines it could be bridges it could be buildings or just other obstructions if something comes and obstructs it too much the turning pot will stop tracking and then you're gonna need to move the turning pad back towards the guy and it's gonna automatically snap to it so point mode really cool mode to work with but it can be finicky depending on what you're trying to do generally speaking i stick with area mode because most of the time what you're going to be attacking is stationary so unless you know for a fact the vehicle is going to start moving essentially i would keep it in area mode because you're going to get those weird moments where let's say there's something over here you're tracking you're lazy lazing lazing lazing in the bombs with the hit and all of a sudden the turning pot starts moving because it snapped to another object that started to recognize or something moved across the target pot and it snapped to it so depending on what you're doing especially if it's a static object i would switch it with tms up short to area mode and then keep it in that mode let's talk more about zoom levels so in order to zoom in and out as i've already taught you it's dms up and down with the target button selected but you can also zoom quite a bit more by using china hat forward short and notice when i do so these brackets will disappear i'm completely zoomed way more in and now i am in the narrow mode of the targeting pod and i can now zoom even further in and back so as you can see uh with the regular mode and zoomed all the way out i'm only three and a half miles away i can see a decent chunk of what's happening around me but when i really want to start getting the starting pod looking at something it's going to be worth having to zoom in and maybe even pressing that china head forward short in order to get there so let's say i wanted to see what's really going on inside this building in the window i can always just press china head forward short as dms up and that's enough of that so very useful very handy and let's say you just move the target pod you're completely lost you just you don't want to work with this area anymore you're moving on to somewhere else how do you uh get the starting pod back well china hat aft short no longer stows the targeting pod that used to be the hotdesk command so if you're coming back to a 10c module just know that that command is no longer working instead you need to hit the standby and back the air to ground and then the targeting pod will now be looking straight up ahead you will also have a moment where let's say i'm looking at the ground somewhere you'll notice that when the target pond is looking and is ground stabilized when i make movements it is going to do the best that it can in order to maintain that picture right but you can't keep spinning forever so if i just continue to spin and spin and spin you'll notice i now get a gimbal warning so we've gone past the gimbal roll that this thing can do or perhaps you were moving your aircraft way faster than the motor can support on a target pod you'll notice that it'll try and snap back but it'll be completely lost it's not going to be pointing anywhere near where you were pointing at just a second ago so in this instance unfortunately you're going to go back hit standby bring it back to air to ground and it's going to spin back to its regular position neutral position and now we're back to business also when you're scanning with the targeting pod uh do note that the speed at which you can move the tarning pot across the ground varies depending on the zoom level you're in so right now i have the target pod looking straight up ahead it's not ground stabilized towards the ground so now let's say that i see a cool factory building and i know that's my objective i can just move the targeting pod to it by moving the nose of the aircraft until the diamond is facing this factory right and then with the turning pot selected as soy i can now press tms up short which will now ground stabilize that targeting pod and it's going to stick to the ground i can look at my targeting pod enter autopilot and i'll slow it directly to what i care about right and if it's not clear and that really shouldn't be the case because this default image is pretty good but depending on the time of day maybe the foreground that you're looking at you can also play around with the contrast and the gain if i switch that but uh generally speaking you just you can leave this alone it's it's perfectly fine so this is another very quick easy dirty way of placing your tarting pot on something that you really want okay cool now let's uh let's go over just one more thing with the target pod before we start moving on to speeds and this will be the control page if i go to the control page for the targeting pod there are three things that i really need to worry about what the target pods laser setting currently is which is one six eight eight and what the targeting pods laser search mode is which is one six eight eight as well the 168 it will be always the default for the for the a10 and additionally the latch there's a latch off the targeting pod can fire a laser so it can basically guide its own bombs it can guide bombs for other people so it can fire a laser with a certain code and that will be 1688 i can always come up here to the scratch pad and change that to let's say one six eight seven double confirm that at the bottom that looks good yes i can come up here do that and boom i'm done and now just go back to return and i'm back in the regular target pod view and when i drop the bomb um it will fire the laser at one six eight seven the only thing at that point you'd have to do is change the bombs laser search for it to search 1687. uh we'll get to that later don't worry that's like gb12 stuff uh so i can fire the laser from the target pod and i can also search for lasers that are being fired for me with the target pod so sometimes jtags and other a10s what they can do is they can fire a laser and spot something on the ground and say hey get your target pot somewhere around this area or at least get your nose looking somewhere in this general direction i'm firing laser code 1688 and let me know when you got it you're like okay cool so you come over here to the control page you go to the lss you set it up you're like oh 1688 cool go back to return and now i have the option for lss laser search and now what you'll see is the target pod is going to start entering a little search pattern in front and around you and it's going to look for the return signal from that person's laser and it's going to lock on as soon as it spots a laser with the code 1688 on the ground and then it's going to snap to it and then you can go from there the reason why i bring this up is because if you have a bunch of a10s working in the same place and they're all firing codes one six eight eight guess what's gonna happen you're gonna start hitting each other's targets inadvertently so this is why you're gonna wanna go into here you're gonna wanna change these codes to something unique don't stray too far from one six eight eight you know go like one six eight seven one six eight five yada yada because there is a limit to how far off you can be with these laser codes for instance all right so let's say that i wanted to deconflict with the other a10s and i'm gonna go with my own unique code uh let's say that i wanted to go and change this code to oh i don't know one five zero zero so i'm gonna go one five zero zero take a look yes that's it i'm going to change that to here and whoop the laser designation code is invalid it's outside of the range of the acceptable laser codes again you're not going to have more than let's say 4 a10s working in the area you really don't need to go way outside of this range of 1688 right you're also going to have flashing error in here the csu input error you are going to have to clear this so clear it so we're good and you now need to clear the message at the bottom now the way to do that a tms left short will clear messages that are shown at the mfds cool all right so let's just leave this alone one six eight eight one six eight that's all we need to care about the next thing is is latch see if i was to fire the laser and i will do so with nose wheel steering button it fires and then it stops i know this because the l will flash and then stop so in for me to continuously fire this laser i need to press and hold this damn laser button now i'm lazy i don't want to do that so i'm going to have a toggle button and that's what this latch is so by switching it to latch on now if i press the nozzle steering you'll see that it flashes and if i press it again it stops easy peasy you're not really gonna need to worry about any of this once you start using things like the gb12s for instance because you can set up weapon profiles where it will automatically start to laze once it's within a certain time period from hitting the ground there are other weapons let's say the laser-guided rockets for instance where you need to lace manually or other instances where let's say you're body lacing for somebody else and you need to manually lace right so it's just good to know that that latch location is there so in the control page really the only thing you're concerned with is these two options and this option here the last option that we can play around with is on the side here so currently the laser is set just to laser so when i fire the laser anything that can use that laser to guide weapons or anything like that uh great that's wonderful i also have another option which is ir this is infrared now this is useful for nighttime operations because when i fire the laser in ir at night time with night vision goggles turned on you can actually see the laser being emitted on the ground so it's a really quick dirty way of showing other a10s or anybody that really has night vision goggles what it is that you're looking at now we honestly have other means of showing things like that where you don't have to like draw a little straight line from you to the enemy because if the enemy has night vision goggles and you're in a multiplayer server guess what they can see you too right so that's something to consider but ir cannot guide weapons so ir is just basically purely visual right however should i want to fire a laser and have an infrared image at the same time i can switch it again and now it's going to do both the amount of times you're going to use this is basically almost zero but you know if you ever needed to know that here you are but we're going to go back to laser and we're just going to fire into laser mode now lastly what we want to talk about for the target pod is masking now notice that if let's say i was looking with the starting pot over to something i don't know way back over here uh there's a little problem in that the targeting pod doesn't really care what it sees like i told you earlier instead what you'll find is that the cameras are just going to look through things like the weapons here and the frame of the a10 so let's say that i'm going to move this charting pod over to the far left so now it's looking directly to the left of me as i can tell by the dot and if i was to bring it up you'll notice that uh oh we're now looking at the frame of my own aircraft and this is a situation where the tarning pod is now currently masked and that's what this little m represents masked now the masking isn't a huge deal when you're just looking at something and you're not getting any weapons because masking will just mean you know as soon as you roll out you're going to be able to to see the target area again however if you're trying to guide things with a laser masking obviously is going to mask the laser as well so that's uh that's that's that's no bueno so let's take a look at this image right here uh everything here is perfectly fine now we're starting to get into the area where we're about to start masking the image and if i start moving it up a little bit we should start seeing the m show up now it's telling us that hey one of our sensors is starting to get masked and at this stage it's not safe to fire the laser or drop weapons because the sensor has been masked even though you cannot really see anything in frame that's blocking your image well you have to take a look it's not just this one thing it's several different sensors looking so even though your camera may be looking at something and nothing's obscuring its vision that doesn't mean that the other sensors may not already be obscured so in this instance we are already masked and we need to start doing something about it for instance i would at this instance roll the aircraft to the right which will give me a the targeting pod a nice clean look at the the area the easiest way to stop masking is to fly high and above something so it looks straight down and below it and then there's no reason for the target pod to be obscured so the higher you are the safer you are from obscuring uh your vision of the tarting pod or make very soft shallow gentle banks so if i just deployed a weapon it is guiding my lasers firing i wouldn't bank any harder than this i would maybe even set my autopilot to altitude mode and just start flying to the left and wait until that bomb reaches the ground that's it alright that was the easy stuff now let's get to the point of the speed so now we want to see how can we start moving the target pod over to the points let's say our steer points or towards our speeds so this is where the china hat commands come in on the throttle now if you'd like to know where all of these commands are reference the manual it's either the a10c manual or the a10c2 manual for the a10c2 it is going to be pages i think 9192 and you're going to have hotas commands for your joystick and hotez commands for your throttle so based on what we're looking at in this chart right now the china had long forward command will slave all of our sensors to our currently selected speed now the only sensor we really have right now that's selected is a targeting pod so if i was to press china head forward long right now i would slave this current sensor over to my speed where's my speed well steer 0.1 and if i wanted to go the other way around i could go china hat after long where i would slave only the targeting pod to our currently selected speed so both commands right now would do the same exact thing because the only sensor we really have right now is the target pod let's say i had my maverick then my maverick with china head forward long would also slave the maverick and our target pod both to our speed but we're just talking about the target pod at this point so let's go ahead and make sure our turning pot is set as soil right now and i'm to press china head forward long and voila my targeting pad has shifted and if i press both switch aft i can see that there are some targets dms forward to zoom around and now i can see some stuff at 6.8 nautical miles away slight range there's some buildings and some truck or something right in the middle of that what is that let's zoom all the way in and uh oh that's an air threat sometimes it helps to go into the regular ctd mode and you can tell that this is a strela this is an sa-13 it's an ir launcher uh it's one thing you're gonna love to learn to hate they placed always everywhere they give you no radar indication because they're infrared launches uh this is something we'll get to later on in the future once we start going into missile stuff but yeah so one of the first things you need to start learning to hate strela sa-13 a little bugger but in any case i have moved my tarting pond over to something and if i ever wanted to slow it back to the speed all i have to do now is press china head forward long and now i have slaved all my sensors back to my speed easy peasy right now i don't just have to move around the target pod to the steer points for example right now i have slaved all sensors to speed and my current speed is set to steer 0.1 if i was to change this to steer 0.2 you'll see that steer 0.2 now switches to my active steer point and it is also my speed and my tarning pod has looked over there to reflect that and if i do that it's a steer point three that's where it goes yada yada right but i can do my own speeds right i don't have to just utilize the steer points because that what the hell would be the point of that right so i'm gonna slew something i don't know way out here in the trees right let's just say that we saw something so what i want to do is be able to set a speed right there now the way i'm going to do that is with tms up long now take a look at the tab you see that our steer point one is still our currently selected steer point the wedding cake is still over that's to your point but as soon as we hit tms up long boop no visual difference on the target pod there's nothing to indicate that you've said sp except for of course on the tad the tad will show you hey there's a diamond and there's the wedding cake over the diamond so we have just currently set a sp right there where the diamond is pointing at which is our target pot now something to note uh we haven't so much set a speed on the ground and now we can take the target pod and just start moving it off the spot that we just set the speed to technically speaking what we're doing is we're setting the speed wherever the targeting pot is looking so if i take a look to my tad right now i'm going to make it soy i'm going to press china head forward short once twice move the cursor around now let's leave it right there just for reference so i'm going to move back to my targeting pod i'm going to start moving my targeting spot and notice what's going to happen to the speed here as i move the targeting pod the speed moves with the target pods so technically speaking when we press tms up along with the targeting pod what we're doing is we're setting the speed on the targeting pod wherever the tarting pot is pointing that's where the sp is as i move in the target pot so is the speed moving with it so let's say you wanted to make a reference point on the ground so let's say you see a bunch of things but you want to start marking these things individually and you want to move your cursor off then you wouldn't use speed for this instance what you could do is you could use something called mark points mark points are a wonderful little tool now the way you set a mark point is tms write short and this sets a mark point at our current target line of sight so let's say right here right now i want to set a mark point let's say there's a tank right there i'm going to press tms right short and look what's gonna happen here mark point eight has been set cool now let's say i zoom out i'm like hey look there's uh there's a tank over here whatever this is is that a river i don't know mark point set boop but uh oh mark point a has disappeared where did it go well right now if you will notice where our steer point switch is in flight plan so it's really only concerned with what our steer points are if we want to see what our mark points are we're going to need to move this over to mark point and if we take a look hey hey mark point a mark point b they're right over there now i'm going to move this back to flight plan really quick just to show you that with the target button selected currently as soy what i want to do is i want to get rid of the speed i want it just to go away because it's interfering right now i'm not using this the speed to do anything what i want to do is bring it back to my steer points so what i'm going to do is press tms aft long and now the speed has gone back to the steer point we're not worried about that right now okay let's go back to mark point and there's our two beautiful mark points except of course because now the steer points are gone and there always has to be a speed somewhere on the ground what's the default supposed to be are currently selected steer points or waypoints in this case the waypoint is our mark point which is mark point a and i can scroll through these mark points by going to mark point b and now mark point b is selected and you can see that reference in the data block okay some of you might have just gone well what i know i know i know this this is this is the moment this is that point in your training where a lot of people just like tilt their chairs back and they're like you know what maybe this isn't for me but i promise you that all you have to do is fiddle around with this a little bit take in everything that i've said and the more examples that i show you the more work you put in on your own you're going to start to see how this works and it's really going to start becoming second nature should you screw up should you start doing things nothing's working remember all of the ways that i've taught you how to reset how to bring things back targeting pod how do i bring it back to to just space straight up ahead because i'm pointing somewhere there's nothing there i i don't know what's going on i need to reset the target but okay okay let's go back to standby back to air to ground right now as you can tell the boxes are not there because we're currently in the narrow view right so let's go ahead and switch the target pod over to soy let's hit china had forward short and let's dms back to zoom out okay cool targeting pad is back on top cool cool cool okay we don't care about these mark points anymore unfortunately we cannot delete mark points so uh that's just something you got to keep track of uh mark points are reserved a through y and not z okay i'm done with mark points though i want to go back to steer points how do i do that okay okay let's go back here let's go to flight plan okay let's uh go to our tab cooley had left long let's zoom out with dms aft cool all right there's our steer points a last place mark point will always be there so that's not going to go away but you'll see that not every single mark point that we've placed is going to be there only the last one you've placed so the last one we placed was smart point b that's why it's still there uh but uh my my map it's uh it you know my a10 is over here what the oh don't worry don't worry currently we are in exp2 mode so our tab is not referenced uh over us it's currently referenced over this little cursor so we press china head forward short once and we're back to regular map right but everything's black why well as you've noted from our previous lesson we're currently looking at 160 nautical miles that's the outer circle uh our map doesn't have that data for that that kind of zoom level so we need to press dms up a little bit up there now we have a map cool so let's uh let's go to the zoom level and we can hit map twice and now we're map manual so now when we zoom in and out of the map nothing changes the map stays exactly where it is and we have information all over this syria map okay and remember our cursor is now way out here if i press china hat aft short the cursor will go back over the a10 you see the cursors there okay cool everything's back to normal so let's go back to trying to put a a targeting pod over this steer point because that's our objective let's say we just took off from a multiplayer server we want to get to steer point one we want to get our targeting pot on it okay okay no problem well let's take a look where the steer point is that's 2.1 and the wedding cake is over awesome so all i have to do is cool the hat right long to set this as my soy trying to head forward long and that will slave my sensors to my currently selected speed and look at that we are back at looking at the targets cool awesome and if i wanted to attack something all i would have to do is slew this over here set this as my speed i'm going to press the tms up long button and now i would just roll the aircraft towards that steer point i'm gonna follow the line from the total velocity vector towards the objective uh and i can also follow the targeting pod because that's literally what it's looking at is the enemy okay there it is that's that's where i have to go cool and we take it from there okay so take a deep breath it's not too difficult it's just a lot of buttons in the beginning as you're starting to learn it'll get better i promise you all right don't give up on me this is this is the hardest hurdle right here okay if we can get fastest everything else is great now one other thing that i want to mention here before we move on to the helmet mounted system is what i see most people do that's incorrect is they take off they're like okay well i don't really know the server i'm just gonna fly towards waypoint one and just hope for the best so they're flying towards waypoint one they're like within oh i don't know three miles of the objective they slave their turning pot over to the objective because they just watched the cool ralphy dude video and they showed them to them so now they know exactly what to do right so they're flying towards it they do that and then they take a look at their targeting pod and they can't find anything in this instance obviously i grouped everything really tightly together but what you know just imagine if you're here and you're trying to find targets and you know you're fully zoomed in like this and you're like well i can't find anything wow there's nothing there well of course you're gonna have a hard time trying to find something when you're zoomed in like this and trying to find targets at uh you know under 10 miles we're three and a half miles right now you know it's it's it's almost like trying to play soccer with binoculars it's a horrible idea so what i would recommend is that you turn your targeting pot on and slave your target pot to whatever waypoint you're going to at about 20 nautical miles hell objects will render up to 30 maybe 40 nautical miles depending on your setting so at 20 nautical miles when you're that far away it is really easy to spot targets you can even see everything that's there and make a plan of attack on how you're going to approach this target so let me just fly way out there i'm going to reset the charting pod and we're just going to pretend like i'm flying in there for the very first time and i have no idea what's there alright so i am currently 21 miles away from steer point one great leg i just took off from the airfield i'm flying towards the objective i have the wedding kick over 0.1 awesome let's press trying to head forward long to slave my target pod to my speed and i'm just pause right here okay now if i zoom in i put my boat switch in the aft position holy hell i can see everything i haven't zoomed in at all and i can already see everything that's there now if i zoom in holy hell i can really see everything now and if i really wanted to identify what everything is trying to head forward short holy hell i can make out these are apcs and if i go over here i'm like oh okay so there's a strella right here between these four buildings okay then i have this column of vehicles over here okay cool cool cool and here's another strela between these four buildings all right awesome i don't see any man pads and man pads are simply just uh guys with shoulder mounted ir launchers the heat seekers so they're really harder to spot than vehicles because they're so tiny but uh okay so right now all i can do is okay well these are the only targets i can see there's nothing else around the area i can see the entire objective i can make a plan of attack i have two mavericks on board guess what i'm gonna do i'm gonna take care of the early air threat first i'm gonna launch two mavericks i'll probably even do it in one pass and i'll teach you how to do that later and take this one out right so that's the two strela's gone and after that i can have fun and take out these guys however i like whether it be bombs whether it be cluster munitions or blah blah blah or even guns right that's it this is for some reason it gets people really worked up when they're in a situation they can't find things it's because they're flying literally over it they're trying to find something when they're zoomed in and it just doesn't work so start getting your targeting pod out there at 20 miles and you will find your targets okay so don't despair unless of course the targets are hitting in a city like this and that makes life so much more difficult but still you should be trying to look for them for 20 miles out so no difference there okay so let's very briefly now talk about the helmet mounted system uh there's just a few things that you gotta know how to use it uh you have a panel that's now on the right hand side of course this is for the a10c2 update so if you don't have that update unfortunately you don't have this part of the training you can stop the video right here and move on to the next lesson so for all the cool cats that do have it you got the panel right here and just make sure it's in the on position and in order to bring up the helmet mounted system you press dms left long and now you got your helmet mounted system cool right for those who do know about broadcasting spee dms left long has replaced that command if you would like to broadcast sp for those who know what i'm talking about the command is now tms left long okay so dms left long no matter what soi you have selected whether you have the heads-up display the left mfd or the right mfd uh the command is now left long dms to turn it on and off so let's set our hmd here as our soy so that we can start manipulating some stuff i'm going to do that by pressing cooley hat up short once which will set the heads up display as my currently selected soy one more time as you can see by the dot over here i will make the hmd my currently selected soy awesome you have your speed you've got your altitude you've got the current uh bearing that you are here one the nose of the aircraft and you have the bearing of where you're looking up here you got your pitch ladder obviously you got your artificial horizon and you've got a line over here that is extending out to your currently selected steer point right so neat very easy very cool so what can we do with this thing well what we could do is let's go ahead and reset our targeting pod right so it's now in standby and i'm going to turn the turning pod on and what i could do is press dms right long and by doing so what i would have done is move the targeting pod to wherever i'm pointing this cursor at so i can now skip this whole diamond on the heads-up display and the way mark points and things limited exactly i can literally just point anywhere on the ground and place my target pod as i see fit now you will notice that it's got some ground stabilization issues but all you have to do at that point is switch to your target pod press tms up short once and it's ground stabilized easy peasy and if i want to move the target pot over here well dms right long and there it goes right uh our waypoints will always show up so our initial position is over here our mark point b that we've set up is going to be over there our currently selected steer point and our speed is broadcasted as well here so we can see that and we should have the other waypoint there it is it's way out there so the waypoints for steer points will always show up uh on this helmet mounted display as well mark points and since right now the servers are kind of worked i can't really show you this but you will have air units that are with our data link system they will also show up on the helmet mounted display and when you move your head forward towards the heads-up display the helmet display will turn off by itself but you'll see that there is this box this grayish box that indicates that a helmet on display is on and if i suppress dms left long that turns it off dms left long turns it back on okay very quick and easy way of uh being able to move the targeting part around and of course i can set a speed down now so if i press tms up long you'll see that the speed has now changed i had the turning point set as my soy when i did that so i can move my sensor around and it will show where the target pod is looking right so as i'm moving the targeting part around with the slew sensor and the helmet mounted display will display that and my speed is now hooked to the target pod so it's moving along with the target pod and if i wanted to make the speed go back to the steer point to remember tms down long now the speed is back over here and you can see that the line will push itself over towards where your currently selected speed is see that's that's what this line will uh represent the only other thing that i will mention is that uh i can also really quickly make my helmet display my curly head up twice and i can set up mark points using the cursor that i see and i can just do that with tms write short hey mark point c hey there's another sam system right here i'm going to mark point that mark point d hey another sam system right here on this corn field cool mark point e and remember if i go back to mark points all of these bar points will now show up so stupid easy to set up really quick references for things that you see especially if let's say i'm high cover i got a buddy and he's doing wild weasel for me where he's going down low and he's enticing the animator shoot whether it's tracers from apc's tanks or trucks or sams like the shore ads and maybe you know the long medium range things you can very quickly just look at the ground mark point that stuff and then you can send that data over to your friend so and at any point i can look it with my cursor towards one of these mark points press tms up long and set them as my speed set this as my speed additionally you also have a little cursor with this helmet amount of display so uh if i have the display set as soy then i can use the slew sensor move that over by itself and i can designate stuff so tms up long and i can set that as my speed and china hat aft long or forward long will slave my target power sensors straight to the speed boom the targeting pod is looking right at it or alternatively i can press tms right short and set a new mark point in that position there's mark point f so a whole bunch of different ways of getting your tarting pod getting your sensors looking at things my recommendation is for you to just go out there practice on your own and i promise you you'll get it okay so we are all going to start utilizing all of this information in the next lesson so we'll start going over things like gpu-12 gb 38 and cbu-97s and we will be deploying these weapons in the new mode which is ccrp continuously computed release points and this is where we're going to start utilizing the speeds in order to drop weapons on these points and that's the entire reason why we learn how to use the targeting pod and how to set speeds on the ground practice this for a little bit and then the next lesson is going to make a whole lot more sense all right so hope this wasn't too painful i'm sorry it was so long i'm going to shut up now and i'll see you guys in the next one bye [Music] [Music] bye

Channel: ralfidude

Views: 24,840

Rating: 4.9783783 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, A10C, A10, a-10, A-10C, Warthog, Targeting Pod, TGP, SPI, sensor point of interest, Helmet mounted display, JHMCS

Id: X0Va2IBU-2I

Length: 56min 6sec (3366 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020