WarthogOsl

Are you looking at your own plane, or another F-14 in multiplayer?

A relevant video just posted today

If you mean the red lines, I asked Bio Baranek about those (he was in VF-2, though not in the original deployments). He didn't know for sure either, but thought it might have something to do with the air bleed vents being able to close, so the lines were a warning to maintainers working in the area. As far as I could find, the vents could close on some pre-production planes, but I don't think that feature ever made it to the production ones.

Yep, that's the one!

Just to clarify, these pics were not from the F-14's first deployment (apologies if you meant from the beginning of this particular deployment). They are of VF-1 and VF-2 from the late 80's. I don't know about this particular one, but some of those F-14A's could have been almost 15 years old by this point. This one certainly looks clean, though. There's another pic in the book that shows one of the warning lights lit up on the right side of the VDI....in broad daylight!

LOL, oops!...its the first time I saw this thread pop up so I just assumed... A very useful bind at any rate...especially since the TID range option often disappears from the Jester wheel after you launch a missile.

These binds already exist for Jester, unless I'm misunderstanding something. I have a hat on my throttle assigned to all the different TID range options.

Hope you have good reception

Read the article. It's from a first hand source.

Just to be clear, I am not at all advocating that we get any sort of IRST with the HB F-14...I just find it an interesting subject. At any rate, here's some info about IRST's of that era, in this case, on the F-106 (source https://www.f-106deltadart.com/weapons.html): --Mark Foxwell, Col USAF (Ret), USAF Interceptor Weapons School Instructor and Commander

Which is odd, because just about the only comment I can find about the IR seeker is this one from James Perry Stevenson's book: "The infrared mode provides detection in the airspace that can be used in conjunction with the radar. It is most effective against high altitude after burning targets. The IR sensor can be slaved to the radar, or it can search independently. F-14's have picked up SR-71's at high altitudes over long distances." Like you said, that sounds perfect to use against a Foxbat. So perhaps reliability or something was a known issue by the time the Iranians took delivery of it?

And this is the crux of my question...do we know it was, in fact, better then those older systems? All I want is some details about why it seemed so bad. Unfortunately, most of the Tomcat guys in interviews came well after the original IR seeker was removed, and can only say "I heard it was garbage. I'm not doubting that it was garbage...I'd just like some kind of detail beyond "it was garbage." Are there any sources? For all I know, the thing might not have worked AT ALL.

Yes, the original one is what I was referring to. Again, wondering how or why it was so bad when apparently the type used in earlier aircraft like the F-101 and F-106 seemed to work fine according to pilot accounts.

I mean, I've heard interviews with guys who flew the F-101 and F-106, and they didn't seem to have any complaints about it. It sounds like the one in the f-14 almost didn't work at all.

In Ward Carrol's video about the second Gulf of Sidra incident, he says that the first Sparrow missile gets trashed after the second one is fired, due to the channel issue. I don't really understand why they would design it it like this, though, since you can't track more than one target at a time for a Sparrow anyway. I wonder if he was confusing it with a Phoenix PD-STT launch? It makes sense that there'd me multiple channels for the Phoenix given that you have to be able to communicate with 6 different missiles heading to 6 different targets.

I haven't had the wings get stuck, but I have seen the EMERG indicator come up when the wings automatically sweep back to 68 degrees.

It narrows down at lower power to match the ambient air pressure. Most jet fighter nozzles do this, but they are covered with external "turkey feathers" that mask this appearance. One exception is the F-15C which doesn't have these covering flaps. Here's one with the nozzle closed down.

They were removed because they often would break off during refueling, especially when using the USAF's "iron maiden" refueling adapter (a short hose/drogue attached to the end of the refueling boom of a big tanker).

Mind if I ask which thread? I looked in all the update/patch threads and couldn't find it (except for the same issue that happened in the previous patch).

Was the VF-14 AB103 skin texture issue fixed? I applied a fix locally last month, so I can't tell if it's been updated for everyone else.

Is it linked specific liveries?

Is the "VF-14 Tophatters by Ben_Der" a fix for the fuselage textures being missing on the AB103 livery? I really like these bicentennial liveries!

Out of curiosity I tried a gun fight vs an AI F-14. It only took me 15 hits from a 70 round burst to take out the other F-14. I've had a lot more issues taking out MiG-21's. It seems like you can just pepper those thing with shells and maybe they will only start smoking a bit.

Okay, so I listened to this, but I got the impression that he was using "crank" in much looser sense of just "crank a turn" rather than "crank to gimbal limits." It seemed to me that he was just contrasting it with an active-off-the-rail shot (which they were just previously discussing), which was essentially fire-and-forget. I took "bad data" to mean what would happen if you launched a TWS shot and then went cold. Anyway, that was my interpretation.

It's odd because there were certainly other jets in the US inventory that had IRST which apparently worked (the F-101 and F-106 for example). At any rate, my book is from '75, so I believe most of the photos are from '74. And then to confuse things further, another F-14 book, by Arthur Reed, shows the previously un-IRST'ed Wolfpack 101 with an IRST.