It’s only been out for a little over a day at this point but I thought, given the excitement, that I’d react to my very first experiences with DCS: C-130J. This new addition to DCS World is the series first four engine transport focused aircraft and its a very interesting proposition. Let’s have a quick look at how it feels on the first go plus some challenges I’m trying to work through.

Full send

I’ve flown the DCS: C-130J only three times to date and most of my first impressions have been formed in that first flight. I went “full send” and just loaded up with a started up and ready to go DCS: C-130J on the Afghanistan map. Nothing like learning on the go. No real flight plan, just going for a flight!

There was method to the madness too. In recent weeks and months I’ve been flying the MSFS A400M and C-160 Transall. I wanted to see how much those large transports would translate into the C-130. Quite a lot is similar and the Transall is the most similar to my initial impressions of the C-130J.

I’m now starting to work my way through the training missions, of which there are several, though there is a lot to learn.

How it feels to taxi and fly

If you’re used to small jets, taxiing the C-130 is going to be quite the experience. The larger wingspan, the large size and bounciness of a large heavy airplane on its gear and suspension is something you have to adjust to – if you’re used to small lightweight jet fighters.

One challenge I immediately ran into is that ASC have not yet put together a feature where the rudder controls also control the tiller. For those not familiar, large aircraft like airliners and transports like this one, have a wheel called the tiller that gives pilots direct control over the nose wheel steering. Most people don’t have a dedicated axis for that so many flight sim add-ons have a toggle feature where the rudder axis is also the tiller axis. This can cause some pilot induced oscillations on takeoff but usually its manageable.

There is a toggle somewhere which I haven’t found in the controls yet so I instead bound controls directly for the tiller which works out fairly well on my HOTAS. I’ll have to find the toggle for smoother operation.

Once your on the runway and throttled up, the C-130 is a bit plodding at first but once you reach V1 things happen quickly and the aircraft lifts off with a fair bit of confidence and a lot of lift. I’ve gotten used to airliners with swept wings and usually the rotation to liftoff is a bit delayed as the lift builds up but with a large straight wing transport that’s not fully loaded it just gets up and goes.

Once in the air I got a feel for the aircraft. It’s very confident in turns and manuevers. It’s slow in doing so but it feels quite good overall and versus the C-160 Transall that I’ve been flying in MSFS, this feels quicker on the roll with less rudder needed to get it going.

Landing is similarly plodding and the C-130 in DCS seems to like to bounce on it gear a fair bit. It doesn’t seem to like hard landings in the way that I might have assumed it would. Gently does it is needed. Reversers are very effective and you need to get on full reverse and then off quickly as the aircraft, when lightly loaded, will stop very quickly. As its designed to do!

Performance and visuals

Regular readers know I’m not much for benchmarking, however, I do like to know if something is going to be performing well or not. So the answer is that the C-130 is quite good generally performing better than the CH-47F generally.

The one exception is when you’re in the external view. In dense city scenes with the engine heatblur on, frame rate absolutely tanks. I don’t think the effect has been well optimized for four engines. Soon as I turned it off, things got a lot better.

The rest of the visuals appear solid. One or two spots in the cockpit where a texture might need to be revisited but generally speaking its really strong, really solid, and the frame rates remain high even as you venture from the cockpit into the cargo area. The details are great to look at in general.

I think its maybe a notch down from the absolute best that we’ve seen in DCS but the bar is just so very high that even being a notch down still puts it in some of the best visuals in the industry.

Systems and digging into them

C-130 is more airliner than fighter jet so if you’re coming from an F-16 or something like that, this is going to be foreign territory. That said, I’ve put in probably hundreds of hours of airliner and military transport ops in MSFS and X-Plane and digging into this aircraft is going to take me some time. The autopilot and flight computer are not quite what I expected and their functionality, on the first flight, didn’t quite make sense to me. I’ll get the hang of it and maybe even learn to love the way its setup but I’m just getting started.

There’s also a question of workflows that is fundamentally different for a military transport than there is for a civil airliner. How these workflows go, how you do your mission planning, and what tools you use to accomplish that, will be part of the learning experience.

There’s so much more here

I’m just scratching the surface here. The C-130J for DCS has systems to learn but it also has the logistics side of things that I haven’t gotten into yet. Cargo operations and aerial drops, countermeasures and defensive systems, and doing the whole loadmaster thing… ASC has delievered a lot on first release. This is early access and there’s more that they plan to deliver, however, its already a deeply complex airplane to learn.

More as I get into it. But my first impressions are very good!