Pseudoruse

I have a problem where I am running Ares in a SP scenario. On first loading all of the Ares options are available and functional, however when I save and exit and then load the save later, none of the Ares options are even listed in Zeus. Only the default Zeus commands are available. Has anyone experienced this issue before?

Perhaps I'm missing something obvious... but is the GAU-8 HUD pip, and by extension the gun, totally worthless? The rounds never fall where I center the PIP. I can't even use any other reference to aim since the rounds have no predictable consistency. Every other aircraft is easy. What am I doing wrong here fellas?