A guided tour of Specter

Where a new install begins. It adapts to the simulator you fly — DCS or Microsoft Flight Simulator — and offers each one its own bundled recordings, so you can see every screen working before you load a file of your own.

The front page of the debrief. A summary of the mission, your session grade, and a flow diagram that points at the tabs worth visiting for this particular flight — so you are not guessing which of twenty screens has something to say.

Every kill reconstructed as a clip you can orbit, scrub and pause — shooter, target, weapon, and the geometry between them, over real terrain.

The whole mission at once, over a curved earth. Start here to see the shape of the engagement before you pick it apart.

The flat tactical picture, with satellite imagery, coalition-coloured tracks, a scale bar and a north arrow — for when the 3D view is more than you need.

The picture as a scope would have drawn it: contacts in range and azimuth from your own nose, rather than laid out on a map.

Every detected event in one list — launches, kills, merges, defensive breaks — each one a jump straight to that moment.

Every missile you fired, graded: was it inside a sensible engagement zone, at what aspect, with what energy — and what the target did about it.

Detect, track, engage, kill — reconstructed as a timeline per aircraft, so you can see how long each stage took and where one broke down.

Lead, pure or lag — which one you flew, when you switched, and what it cost you in turn room.

Did you react to the launch, how long did it take, and did what you did actually work — notch, flare, drag, or none of the above.

Change one decision — the shot range, the break turn, the altitude — and see how the engagement would have gone instead.

How you spent speed and altitude through the fight, against everyone else in it. The aircraft with energy at the merge usually decides how the merge ends.

The same story as a surface: speed, altitude and time as one shape you can rotate, so a long slow bleed reads differently from a single hard break.

Spacing, line abreast, and how well the flight held together through the engagement.

Your carrier approach graded the way a Landing Signal Officer would grade it — glideslope, lineup, angle of attack, and the wire you caught.

Where the air defences were, how far they reached, and exactly which parts of your route were inside them.

Every contact expressed as a bullseye call, so you can check the picture you passed on the radio against the picture that actually existed.

When the mission was busy and when it was quiet — the fastest way to find the five minutes worth watching in a two-hour recording.

Every participant ranked: kills, deaths, shots taken, missiles defeated, and distance flown.

The written debrief: every pilot, weapons employment, the full timeline — exportable as a self-contained HTML file you can send to your squadron or print to PDF.

Build any engagement from scratch — aircraft, SAM sites, ships, MANPADS — and watch every sensor picture at once.

Watch a DCS mission as you fly it, and record it to an ACMI you can debrief the moment you land. Needs a small export script installed into DCS — the guide covers it.

Campaign and multiplayer recordings often carry only a few position updates per second, which makes playback stutter. The upsampler fits splines through the track and writes a new ACMI at the rate you choose.

Capture a Flight Simulator sector straight into Specter. Nothing is installed on the simulator side — no SDK, no add-on — because Specter speaks SimConnect itself.

The whole sector on one screen: altitude and speed profile, fuel burn, engine N1/N2 and EGT, and a phase breakdown from taxi to rollout with the time spent in each.

Airline-style findings against the flight: the stabilised-approach gates at 1,000 ft and 500 ft, sink rate and speed on final, touchdown load, and the 250 kt limit below 10,000 ft.