near_blind

Jester does that for you automatically

The RIO position has the ability to use both chaff and flares or any combination of the two. The pilot has the ability to use chaff OR flares depending on the position of that switch in the RIO pit. In my experience, if Jester detects a missile, and there is an RWR warning, he chaffs. If Jester detects a missile, and there is no RWR warning, he flares. Simple as.

Jester automatically uses TWS. By default he will start in RWS. Once the radar detects a target, he will switch to TWS Auto. Your cue will be the scan volume on the TID repeater will switch from 80 degrees wide to 40 degrees wide. TWS Auto will automatically adjust its scan volume/elevation to try and keep the greatest number of most important contacts within it's scan volume. The options to select specific targets in the BVR menu are for telling jester to STT lock specific contacts. Shoot order (or target sorting, if you will) in TWS is done every 2 seconds by the radar itself. Jester doesn't have a way to change the shoot order.

did you happen to use active pause?

That E Bracket? You'd put the flight path marker in the crotch of the ship, but otherwise...

Bingo. In our version of the Tomcat the LANTIRN can't interact with the jet. If you really want to loft, you would need to visually designate the target using the HUD, get jester to point the pod at the target, fly the CMPT TGT cues, and then have jester lase at the appropriate time. Essentially you're doing the attack twice at the same time. Not impossible, but a bit impractical with jester

The first operational deployment with the C, at least within PACFLT was with CVW-2 in 1987. That picture was probably taken as part of that. As for why the AIM-54A in those missions. When the module was introduced there were far fewer differences in how the AIM-54A and C seekers worked, the C basically being an A with better CCM, and the Mk60 motor was far more optimistically tuned. I believe the opinion at the time was the booster performance from the 60 motor outweighed any CCM advantages the C seeker offered, and was the missile of choice for the mission making team. Since then the Mk60 motor has been reigned in quite a bit, and significant differences between the A and C seekers have been added. The missions should probably use the C, but haven't been updated to dos o.

Is the diamond flashing?

Depends on the situation. Against a target that's running for its life on the deck? You probably want to wait until you're within five miles. Supersonic at medium altitude? You can shoot at 20 and the missile will have a reasonable chance of getting them if they don't react violently. Supersonic at 50 thousand feet I nailed an AI Flanker from 37 miles with an -7MH.

A friend on a different continent and I started running into this last year, and as far as we could determine it was caused by a combination of ED's wake turbulence and network lag. It only occurred when we were flying near, but not necessarily close to one another. Best we could guess is some sort of packet loss occurs, either the server or the client does some sort of extreme extrapolation of where the other aircraft should be, and that creates an extremely violent vortex in a place it shouldn't be. Pardon the language in both these clips, they weren't really made with public consumption in mind, but you can see in both cases the violent tumbles occur. https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxCYI-LbBCj7twkyOQ78-_f9afCz3EVeAv?si=zBFeggavVVViKEDB In the second one me aggressively approaching my buddy and decelerating causes _him_ to tumble as if I blew past him. https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxQ_jGwRX03Y0GobytxJLeXxTiv26TfQs8?si=Psvyv7jFUn_TE4f3 After six months of this I turned off the wake turbulence option on the server we use and we haven't seen this behavior since. It might be worth a try.

Do you have ED's wake turbulence on?

https://theaviationist.com/2013/11/06/f-14-damaged/amp/

The computer almost certainly has no idea whether or not a wing is missing. In the case of this happening the crew would almost certainly put the wings into emergency sweep and plant them forward.

I'll have to go back and check the marketing for where it promised the jet would have advantages over other Gen 4 jets with AIM-120s. Ideally one would fly it because they are interested in what an F-14 is like. If that's not the case and you want to chase the meta, may I be so bold as to suggest the lawn dart?

VF-74 operating in the Gulf of Sydra in 1986 VF-14 in 1990 VF-154 in 1987 VF-32 in 1990 VF-41 and 84 off Iran in 1980 (bonus Eagle Claw invasion stripes) As Sylfa said, until the introduction of the AIM-54C and the appearance of large numbers of Soviet/Pact medium range missiles in the mid/late 80s there's a dichotomy where AIM-54s are for bombers/missiles, and Sparrows are for fighters and everything else. You tend to find the 0x4x4, 0x4x2 or 0x5x3 loadouts on jets that are around hotspots where it's expected they might have to engage other fighters. Of the six pictures above, two were taken in the Gulf of Sydra during the Naval Action of '86 and El Dorado Canyon. One was taken during the preparations for Operation Eagle Claw. One was during a separate period of tensions with Iran during which two US F-14s fired Sparrows at an Iranian F-4 in response to it shooting a Sparrow at a US P-3, and the remaining two were likely during Desert Shield.

Seeker performance for sarh missiles across the board is... Disappointing. Unfortunatly that ball is in EDs court

It's hard to conclusively say without seeing the situation, but jester is fallible. He has a finite field of view, so he can't see everything at once, and moves around depending on what he's focusing on at the moment. For instance, If he's looking at the instrument console because he's reading off your airspeed or you asked him to flip a radar switch, he's probably not watching your opponent at that moment. If he's doing something inside the cockpit, if there are multiple bandits, if the bandit was occluded by the fuselage when they shot, all of these are possible scenarios for why he didn't respond to a shot. If jester doesn't call out the missile, it's likely he didn't see it. I wouldn't be surprised if there's also some slight randomization of the speed at which jester responds to things he does see. If I see a missile, or I hear jester call out a missile, or if I feel like I haven't dropped flares in a while, I'll generally drop some flares just to be safe. Flares are cheap, jets are expensive. Also keep in mind BFM is an inherently risky proposition. In the age of all aspect missiles the more aircraft you add to a merge, the closer the exchange ratio trends towards 1.

What altitude bands do the Kh-20, Kh-22 and KSR-5 travel in again?

This can be attributed to a couple of things. You have to be in STT or TWS to get HAFU (Hostile, Ambiguous, Friendly, Unknown) symbology. If you're in TWS for stuff outside of visual range Jester is hitting the IFF interrogate button, reading returns off the DDD, and them correlating them with what he sees on the TID and manually selecting tracks and entering their HAFU. This is a process that takes a bit of time and if I had to guess he can get interrupted by other, higher priority tasks. The more stuff on the TID, the longer this will take. When you go STT, depending on the range he's either only got a single IFF return to sort/assign, or if you're within ~40 miles or so, he's probably switching to the TCS and visually IDing the contact (your cue he's doing this is your TID going blank for a second or two). A word of caution is Jester is known to get confused if you're flying a mission where there's heavy overlap in aircraft available to each coalition (think you stumble upon a fight where F-16s, F-15s and F-14s are fighting... F-16s, F-15s and F-14s). What situation are you in where that's happening. I'd need to go experiment to speak conclusively, but my general experience with jester is Jester Sees Missile + RWR Warning = Chaff Jester Sees Missile - RWR Warning = Flares He can make mistakes. Sometimes he doesn't see the missile. Sometimes there is some annoying behavior with the RWR in some certain edge cases that can mean jester sees a missile, but because the RWR isn't producing a launch warning he drops flares even if it's a radar guided missile. He's also more likely to make mistakes if it's a chaotic environment with RWR bleed over and lots of missiles going back and forth, but that's not unreasonable.

Not my horse, not my race. Merely explaining its not a HB side decision.

It's been a long while since I've triffled with it, but I seem to remember hiding the jester wheel was a deliberate decision by the AIRIO folks. I don't remember there being a reason why it has to be removed other than they didn't like it.

No. You can set the ALE-39 such that you release chaff with the DLC button instead of flares, but Jester will still threat react as he deems appropriate. Alternatively you could remove jesters ability to dispense any counter measures, or you could make it so chaff dispensing is handled by the RWR, which is most likely going to be even more conservative than jester. Need more information. Does your radar actually see the contact? Is it actually being provided over data link (bottom half symbology) rather than by the radar? Is the contact within the zero doppler filter or the main lobe clutter filter? Is the contact even within the scan zone? Jester telling you he can't lock something usually means _the radar_ can't lock something. He's not smart enough to act as anything but a pass through. If the relative velocity of the contact is +/- 133 knots of ground speed and less than three degrees above the horizon, it's in the MLC filter and can't be seen. If the contact has less than +/- 100 knots of closure, then it's in the Zero Doppler Filter, and can't be seen. At 15 miles the actual area being scanned by your radar is deceptively narrow, especially in the vertical axis, and you should probably be thinking about transition to a close combat scanning mode such as PAL, or turning around to build space for another try.

Radar interference due to multiple aircraft being on the same channel is implemented.

You're on radar channel A1. What are the odds that your buddies in Enfield 12, 14, or Ford 64 were also using radar channel A1?

You're not missing anything, and it's not your fault. The LSO calls were built by ED with the hornet in mind. The turkey is on speed at a higher AoA than the bug, so the LSO constantly calls you slow. vJello needs to stop sipping torpedo juice and work on his visual identification