DCS: Top End Australia – an Aussie’s Perspective for Foreigners

(unedited) Transcript:

G’day DCS folks. It’s Eran from fightson.net here. I thought I’d drop in and talk a little bit about this new map that’s been announced.

That’s got everyone all caught decide if it’s excited or aggro, possibly both. There’s some interesting comments on it, mostly from people who hate the idea and think it’s pointless having a map of Australia in the game and in those who want Vietnam only give me Vietnam or something like that.
But anyway, I just thought I might give you some of those trading perspective on it. So, I mean, at this stage, we don’t know that much, but I guess a key thing to understand is that the top in maps going to cover about 1400 by 1800 kilometers by 800 kilometers Australia’s mainland, including the Western and Northern territories.
So I just thought I’d sort of talk you through a little bit of this and just to give you some idea of some of the options.
Now, look, I gotta be honest. When I first heard about it, I was like, f**k. I, I mean, I don’t even know when I space liquor, my hard drive to put another map on it.
I’d have to upgrade my computer for that, but that’s beside the point, but then I thought more about it. I thought, you know, is some really interesting options here.
So let’s go jump over to Google maps first and you can see here, I just moved me out of the road a bit.
This is the top end of Australia. Now I live down here in Perth at the bottom. So that’s what I get in there.
But 1400 by 800 is probably going to, I would suggest it’s probably going to cover sort of this area maybe on something like that.
Oops, sorry. I’m not sure if it’ll go to the right enough to get any of the tip of Queensland. But I think possibly this era now, what’s, what’s good.
What’s bad about that. So a couple of things, number one, there’s two RAAF bases in the Northern territory. One is Darwin, which is the capital city of Northern territory.
And then there’s ref base Tindal, which if you want to jump over to the ref website, it’s located about 320 kilometers Southeast of Darwin in the Northern territory.
And so two fairly prominent basis breakfast Darwin in particular is the home or that’s where they’re operating the exercise pitch, black Adam, which some of you may have heard about.
That’s a big multi-nation exercise going on at the moment as we speak. And I’ve got the raft, I’ve got the Singaporeans, I’ve got the Germans with the little firefight.
I think we’ve got the Americans and I’m not sure who else is probably actually, I’ll just read the list here up to a hundred aircraft are the host up to 2,500 personnel lap to a hundred aircraft from around the globe, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, India, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, blah, blah, blah, lots And lots.
We haven’t let that the palms in and also Germany, Japan and the Republic of Korea will be participating fully for the first time.
So that’s a pretty serious exercise. And so they’ve really, I think they run their members a year or so. And it looks like Tindall is involved as well.
And they do actually have a RAAF base in any believer in Queensland, somewhere over here. I’m not sure exactly where that may be involved as well, but I guess that’s a starting point.
There’s also another RAAF base near Derby, which interestingly enough, I used to live in Derby when I was a small child.
And that is roughly all the a month, which has, you can say there’s not much to it in the middle of nowhere.
It’s what they call a “bare base”. So it’s basically set up so that if need be the air force or the army can just move in and set up and get going straight away.
So there is another one day lay mode, but also the main one is Curtin. So I, my apologies, I got that wrong.
He had Derby is ref based Colonel getting my maces mixed up there. So that is on the north coast of Australia.
It’s about a Southeast of Derby and 170 kilometers Eastern room. So somewhere in that region there. Okay. Oh, can I tell you it’s one of the three bay bases as well, so same sort of scenario.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that there is at the very least, there’s two major bases in the north of the country that have run exercises and could it be very easily used for DCS campaigns and all that kind of stuff?
Really just a case of using your imagination. I suppose now look realistically a large part of this area, desert and, or it’s going to be it’s quite tropical up this part.
So you could you’ll have tropical areas. So like Kakadu National Park, which is massive and I’m like, mom, same climate.
So there’s going to be plenty of waterways and green vegetation, but there’s also plenty of desert there. So we might say, well, there’s nothing there.
And I think I read somewhere, there’s only like 300 people live in Kakadu national park, which is huge, but I think a lot of people make the mistake of assuming the size of Australia, Australia is huge.
It’s a big country land mass wise. It’s I can’t remember if it’s similar to or bigger than the U S if it’s little smaller, it’s not much smaller.
If it’s bigger, it’s pretty extensively. And I think it was probably about 2 million square kilometers or something. So yes, there’s not a lot out there, but there is, it’s really a matter of using your imagination.
And let’s be honest, if we scroll up a little bit, we’ve got plenty of interesting stuff happening up here. You know, lots of islands, you know, eventually we may see these different countries and all these Ireland a******s and all that stuff added into DCS because ed has indicated they want to have the worldwide mapping eventually.
So that’s a part of caseload, you know, getting the least different maps and sort of joining them together, which is cool.
And of course we have China above there. So Australia is probably one of the largest potential targets there. If you want to run that kind of campaign, you can have Chinese carriers attacking Australia and all sorts of stuff.
So don’t think of it as it’s just a bunch of dirt and rocks and nothing else that lots of spiders and snakes and kangaroos and drop bears don’t forget.
The drop bears are the most dangerous creature in Australia and we already have lots of dangerous creatures. But don’t think of it as empty space with nothing to do.
You can certainly use your imagination and have a lot of interesting stuff there. Yeah. If nothing else you can do it, you know, Exercises’ Pitch Black or Diamond Storm, which is I think from memory I was reading it, it was something like that’s where they train all the the instructors and that sort of stuff?
So anyway, lots of opportunities there. We’ve got , we’ve got Hornets, super Hornets and we’ve got more F-35s coming in.
I read somewhere today on, on the web, God forbid that the Australian government is potentially, I don’t know how true this is potentially talking to the Americans about maybe buying some of the B-21 Raider stealth bombers.
Now I think it’s a stupid idea myself, for a variety of reasons. Isn’t going to bore you with it. But you know, some interesting options there.
We’re certainly not stuck in the middle of nowhere, always stuck in the middle of nowhere, but we’re certainly not an, a location that doesn’t lend itself to making some really interesting DCS adventures and campaigns.
So it’s just going to use your imagination, you know, read up a little bit on the history of some of this when the Japanese attacked Australia and world war two was Darwin, they attacked, I think that was the only place they got to, but you know, if you wanted to do a war birds thing, yes, we don’t have zeros and all that sort of stuff, but you know, at some stage that will happen.
You got plenty of opportunities. I’ve rambled on enough. Hopefully this will give you something to think about and maybe, maybe, maybe make you think about, Hey, you know what the map of Australia might be interesting.
And it’s probably not going to come out for another couple of years anyway, sorry, two weeks. We all know that one, right.
So long time away. But it’s a step towards having the Microsoft flight SIM equivalent of the whole world in the DCS universe at some stage.
So I think it’s a good idea now that I’ve had time to think about it. All right. I’m outta here, guys and girls have fun.
See you later.