DCS SORTIE STARTER BETA

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Get airborne
▸ From pick to wheels-up in under a minute

Fly it your way.

Pick a ready-made mission — some fully tasked, some open sandboxes — or generate your own theater. Or start at the beginning: a training pipeline that takes you from never having started the jet to leading a package, with the missions attached. Every one opens in the DCS editor to build on.

Any theater, era or jet — not a fixed handful of presets
Curated & vetted — one click, no endless scrolling
Learn it, fly it, fight it — three schools, graded in-mission
three clicks

Fly Now

What do you want to practice — tanking, a merge, killing a defended target? Pick it, pick your jet, pick a map. Airborne in three clicks.

Fly now →
curated

Pick from the Library

Curated, ready-to-fly missions — CAP, SEAD, CAS, carrier and crew ops, historic. Pick one and fly.

Browse the Library →
in order

Train in the Pipeline

Learn it, fly it, fight it: three schools with the rides attached, graded where the sim can see you. F-4E first; a kit for your squadron.

Open the Pipeline →
full control

Build a Mission

Set theater, era, coalition, aircraft, threats, support and comms yourself. The complete builder — total control, still in minutes.

Open the Builder →
Two flavors of mission
FULL MISSION

Waypoints, objectives and tasking set for you — a scripted flight to fly. Our crew-ops missions.

OPEN STARTER

A dressed, living theater with your flight fueled and ready — no waypoints placed. Free-fly, or add tasking in the editor. The Builder's default.

This is a beta. It builds real, flyable missions — but it is a small tool covering a very large game, and you will find rough edges. Everything opens in the DCS Mission Editor, so anything it gets wrong you can fix in a couple of minutes. If something looks off, that is worth telling us about.
Era shapes both paths — filter the Library by it, or set it in the Builder. Every mission opens in the DCS editor for you to keep building.
Training Pipeline
Learn it · Fly it · Fight it

Fly Now

Three picks, one button. Era, base, weather and comms are handled — open it in the Builder afterward if you want to tweak.
1 · What do you want to practice?
2 · In what?
3 · Where?
Spice
Pick a mission, a jet and a map.
Mission Library
Only what I own
Start here
All missions
The Builder: a living, ready-to-fly theater, set up your way. learn more

1Era▾

Hard-filters maps, aircraft, statics and air defenses to the period.

3Mission

What kind of sortie is this? It sets the theater up for you — you can change anything afterwards.

2Map▾

Curated tactical lanes for this map & era. Pick one or more to orient the threat axis and concentrate enemy air defenses & CAP down the lane. None = open theater (free-fly). No player waypoints, ever.

3Coalition & basing▾

Who's flying
Variation (seed) — the same seed always builds the exact same mission (that's how a share link reproduces it precisely). Keep it to fine-tune the same layout; change it or hit to re-roll a different spread of parked aircraft, threats and support.
Your loadout
Your jet is fitted for the mission type you picked — air-to-air gets missiles, strike gets bombs and a targeting pod, SEAD gets anti-radiation missiles, and every fit keeps a pair of air-to-air missiles for self-defense. Everything chosen is checked against what DCS actually allows on that station and against the year, so nothing turns up that the aircraft can't carry or that hadn't been invented yet. Untick to spawn with empty pylons and set it yourself in the Mission Editor.
Your field
Carrier

5Support & extras

On-station assets and briefing aids — turn on what the mission needs.

Air support
Targets & ranges
Briefing aids

3Airfields

Fill your side's ramps with parked aircraft, ground equipment and infrastructure.

Parked statics currently wear DCS stock skins. The curated nation-correct pack ships unverified — its livery names are guesses, and a name DCS doesn't recognise gives you a wrong or blank aircraft rather than the default one, so the engine doesn't write them. Run scripts/dump_liveries.py --merge once against your install to read the real names (including paid ones) and this control takes effect.
Big aircraft need big stands, and the fighter squadrons will take every one of them if nothing holds a few back. Set this to Exercise surge for a Red Flag look at Nellis. Small fields scale down on their own.
Give individual bases their own fill — 0% empties one, and it's the only way to populate a civilian airport. Only military installations are populated — civilian airports (marked in the Home list) stay undressed. Enemy fields dress automatically with their own era-correct theme. Runways and taxi routes always stay clear.

7Map graphics (F10)

The map briefs the mission: each layer draws real mission geometry on the F10 map. Friendly orbits and threat rings render on YOUR side's layer only (multiplayer-safe); bullseye and nav points are shared. Zones inform — they never route you.

4Threats

Pick how hard the mission pushes back. Everything below is the manual override.

Fine tuning
1 Minimal · 2 Light · 3 Moderate · 4 Heavy · 5 Maximum
On top of the SAM defending each enemy airfield, the dial adds an area SAM belt and airborne enemy CAP on the threat axis. Guns only swaps every SAM for AAA clusters — 23/57/100mm, no launch warnings. Everything is era-gated — a WWII field never fields an SA-10. Needs Air defenses (building blocks) on.

6Carrier deck configuration

9Review

One glance, then build. Any rail item jumps you back to tweak.