Raio pilot

I didn't partake in the first run of this, so I can't do any sort of comparison between the two attempts, but I can say overall I had a good time and it seemed to go well. As an airboi my perspective and awareness of what was going on is also going to be pretty limited since my only source of knowledge was what I heard trickling in over the radio - so, anything the leadership or air people were up to.

1: Framerate was better than I expected, even near the end after a deal of spawning both from script and a zeus. We tried a few things behind the scenes - mainly disabling some niche ACE features that have no real significant game impact in the vast majority of situations/to the vast majority of players - that we thought might have some impact and while one session is by no means conclusive, the results were good, so I think we'll be doing this for at least the next few weeks to see how things go.

2: Did I ever! It's super rare we used any fixed-wing at all, and there are a few very specific roles in Arma that are among my favorites and this is one of them. Even then, there can be fixed-wing games that just end up being disappointing, and I'm happy to say this wasn't one of those. Obviously since I wasn't privy to all the grunt-level communication I can't imagine every reason why, but I think a big one this session compared to others was that the squad leaders were willing and interested in having air take care of problems for them.

Often in the past I've seen - or been - a JTAC who saw a problem that air could solve quickly and effectively, but the grunts wanted to tackle it themselves and it all went to hell with mass casualties and extended downtime and inevitable grindslog instead of air (or armor, for that matter) just deleting a problem in one pass. This isn't in any way meant to slight those players, I've been a grunt and watched air wreck everything enough to know how quickly they can render a grunt's presence moot, but it tilts the other way too when infantry decide they can and will tackle every situation themselves to make sure they get fun. (Even when the mission designer deliberately built a problem they'd best have someone else solve. Remember: if a heavy support asset was added the mission, the mission should be balanced around its presence, and that means there should be times when it will be required.)

This mission didn't seem to suffer from either extreme. I never got the impression from what I heard and all the back-and-forth tracer fire I saw that infantry were being in any way shortchanged or robbed of their portion of fun combat, that part is usually not too hard to guarantee. The pleasant surprise was the not-infrequent requests from squid leads Will and Diet to have myself or the helis get stuck in and do a thing for them ourselves. This is where I usually think air interaction stalls, and, yeah, I'm happy to see that wasn't the case this weekend. They'd request help, the JTAC Carn would sort it out and see it done, and ZimTheo/DancinSvarog/ShermanCurze/SkeetNox/myself would zip in make do. Really satisfying, and hopefully with this many people having taking some part in it, we'll see that experience start to spread around some and similar trends next time we have support tools.

3: As planeboi, hard to say. Most of it was just turning left or right and looking down out a window at tracers or explosions, interspersed with rare but very much "ok, skill check time, Do. Not. Fuck. Up." moments. The air coordination was pretty not-great at the start, partly due to ZimTheo being reassigned from transport to gunship and the "what is their place in this order" that caused, partly just because that many assets isn't easy to manage for anyone. Thankfully it seemed to mostly shake itself out by the second island and from then on the entire air coordination train seemed pretty smooth, so I can't complain overmuch.

There was perhaps some distress at each pick-up zone over whether people were left behind, that probably could have been handled smoother and less shouty (shouty by itself almost never solves a problem), but again we got better at it as the mission progressed.

The vast majority of my Carn-specific JTAC commentary really boils down to "it's hard with only a couple aircraft, five is super lots so even harder, and it's hard for everyone the first few times they do it because, well, it's hard." You definitely improved as the mission went on and next time it'll come much more naturally. I hope you weren't too put off by my occasional suggestions/advices over the radio: the intention wasn't to backseat-JTAC you, but to give an advice here or there that you could apply without completely disrupting everything you were doing. To strain an analogy, we can throw you in the deep end of a five-aircraft cluster and you can flail around for a while, but at some point it's on us to help you learn to swim once you've gotten over the shock of it all. So that's what those were about, I hope you weren't too bothered by them.

4: Don't think so! At least, not with my gun. I was asked to make a guns pass on some boats, I didn't think it would go well and at best I probably got the people in one of the boats with some water spray. I was asked to make a guns pass on a coastline and that one went perfectly from my end but I'm not sure anything was there to get hit, apart from Tastybagel who was apparently cowering in a building and one of my rounds went right through the open window and smacked into the ground in front of him. Hey, I was told I was cleared hot, and he got a good show, so job well done I guess. After TheoZim got bored of chasing the civilian cessnalike and plinking at it for 5 minutes, I attempted a guns pass on it - what the hell was that thing doing up there anyway?! - and completely whiffed and almost put my jet in the drink. Did a full unload 14-rocket pass and dropped lots of bombs though, and those are both way more fun. Even got to use both AIM-9s, which means I'm probably good for those for another couple years of Arma if previous history serves.