One isn't a tank though, but I'll take a kill on a SAM vehicle any day...
Out of missiles and with too many low and high threats to effectively use any of my mavity weapons, I head back to base and pull up on the ramp long enough to grab some weapons.
In my utter stupidity though I am distracted as I leave the ramp and I run my wing into a refueler! Fortunately, I just catch on fire and rip the wing off.
After a few minutes of repair, I'm amazed that the sim lets me taxi the rest of the way THROUGH the refueler and once I'm free I'm good to go!
Up at the target area I find one more tank, but it takes me 10 minutes of looking while dodging AAA fire. After I launch my first Maverick I lock back on it with my second so that I can watch the explosion on my monitor.
With two tanks burning it is a struggle to find the third tank. I refuse to resort to labels, but I do use the zoom and pan liberally to find the last tank.
He's right there next to the power transmission tower.
Once I get an idea of where a target is, I don't have much problem re-finding it. But finding them is darn difficult!
I get the message that I've cleared the north target area and I head for home.
Now - you all are going to think I'm lying, but this is the God's honest truth and how it actually happened. I made a beeline for homebase, which is only about 2 minutes flying time back to the west. A few miles from the base I see my caution light is on, but I didn't get an audible warning, so I can't figure out if I got hit by AAA or something. I glance down at my caution panel and the L/R Fuel Low warning lights are illuminated and the fuel gauge is reading zero. I had just put the speedbrakes out to slow for the landing, so I quickly retracted them, then added throttle to keep the speed up and I realized the engines weren't responding. I really had run out of fuel! Where is the low fuel warning? Do those lights just come on when you are totally OUT of fuel?
I had just enough energy left to make the runway, but I elected to land on the taxiway instead because I suspect (but am not sure) that if you exit a mission while on the runway you might not get credit for the mission (?). I clear the tail of the C-17 parked in a revetment at the end of the taxiway and plunk it down right on the taxiway.
Now, according to the after action report, I flew for about 45 minutes, so unless I didn't have full tanks at the beginning of the mission I have only one explanation for why I ran out of fuel. I didn't refuel during either of my 2 rearming stops, but I did receive that damage and was streaming fuel when I was hit between target areas. Perhaps I lost that much fuel in the short time I was flying back to base and then, not having refueled, the level was very low? No matter what, I can't believe the fuel ran out literally at the last second. Another 30 seconds of flying around away from the airfield and I wouldn't have had enough speed to make it home. One of the coolest things I've ever done in a sim (I once lost both engines in EECH though and managed to autorotate to an airfield where I got repaired, that was pretty cool too..)
And verification that it was the ZSU that hit me..
Looking forward to the next mission!
BeachAV8R
My 8800GTS 320Mb couldn't cope with the original Lomac however, it had a bug rendering, meaning the FPS were fine, circa 100 FPS or so, but would produce a weird shimmering effect that made it unplayable, and I had to uninstall. Does FC2.0 go anyway to redressing this?
)
