Dragon1-1

We need that oldtimey wooden ladder. It'd be correct for the state of our SPO-15.

Our maps are late war, the area looked quite different during Battle of Britain. I'd rather have them focus on the Pacific.

Probably, as this was quite an advanced radar, not to mention fairly large for a fighter. Tomcat's big nose allowed a hefty antenna and power to match. However, both jammers and radars are classified precisely so that such questions would be difficult to answer precisely.

Generally, stated ranges are based on flyout range, not on what's practical. Heaters will usually be limited by their seeker. While ET might have a better range against a rear aspect target in full AB (in fact, it's really well suited to this scenario, which is otherwise difficult), its main advantage in other situations is mostly that it's got a lot of energy to spare.

The AWG-71 supposedly blows it out of the water, including a special mode that can combine two Tomcats' radars into one massive radar dish, but it's still classified.

Yeah, I wrote the wrong word. You need to wait for him to be there to get taxi permission. You can do startup before he gets there if you're too impatient too wait, but he won't clear you to taxi unless he's at the plane.

When cold starting, you salute twice. First you report ready for engine startup, get a thumbs up, then you report ready to taxi once that's done. Also, you need to make sure the brownshirt is there to get taxi permission. Sometimes, he'll be over at some other aircraft and you need to wait for him to walk over. He'll only react to the salute once he's at your plane.

He's mentioned somewhere on his Discord that he'd like to do that, but it'll be a significant rebuild. It's an old campaign, after all.

I had my Winwing gear take such drops without problems (due to a design flaw in DIY desk mounts). If they ever make Tomcat handles, that would likely work. I imagine that will hold for any company that makes the mechanism out of metal. Throttletek stuff looks like some of the experiments I've made with DIY 3D printed hardware.

This is mostly a result of large multiplatform engines that allow games to be developed without worrying about the particulars of running on Linux or Mac. Devs that don't use one of these would still have to code specifically for each platform. Linux is not going to take over the gaming market anytime soon, and given all the associated utilities, I especially wouldn't expect DCS to run on it outside Proton.

B(U) us basically the D with the AWG-9 and no IRST. It seems that the idea was to make them as good as the D at air to ground, but without rebuilding them into fully fledged Ds (like what was done with some As).

FC3 is not happening, though we might see it phased out in MP eventually. M2K is probably not happening because RAZBAM (it'll probably break one day and stop being an issue). F-16 and F-5 that we have use the ALR-56, so it should be easy to port over from the F-15. Hornet's ALR-67 is another matter, but that's just one RWR. JF-17 and F-14 are 3rd party products, I'd expect HB to get with the program rather quick (the current F-14s have the ALR-67, though an older version than the Hornet), you might have to wait a long time for the Jeff, but as it's a very modern aircraft, its RWR suite will probably be better than others even when updated.

Maybe it will. Since ED has gone to such lengths to give the MiG a correct RWR, maybe they'll look into better modeling for Western ones, too. Maybe for the F-15C, at least at first.

Also keep in mind that Jester can't see a damn thing in the forward quarter, and his ability to check six isn't that great. He can see real good at three and at nine o'clock, but not a lot beside. So if you try to manually point him at a target in your forward hemisphere, he'll never be able to see what you're pointing at.

F-5 is extremely poorly matched, it doesn't even fit the external model particularly well. They updated the textures, but the underlying cockpit model is still quite old. The F-16 has some minor errors, but it seems fairly accurate, including how claustrophobic it feels in VR.

Not necessarily, this is a well known problem with electric trim systems IRL. ED might tune it a little, but ultimately, such aircraft need constant trim adjustments anyway. Note that in a real aircraft (or if you have a realistic long stick), you can simply apply a little stick pressure, you don't have to trim it out to fly perfectly hands off.

For your headset at least, really the whole point of this slider is that if your headset driver gets it wrong, you can fix it by adjusting it in the sim. Haven't had that problem myself, but I've seen posts from people who needed to tweak it in other sims.

No, it's World Scale. In commonly used VR terminology (including every other program that has this setting exposed), it's called that. IPD refers only to the actual distance between user's eyes and the corresponding physical setting on the headset.

It actually rescales everything else. Actual people with different IPD don't perceive the whole world as significantly bigger or smaller. Due to how VR rendering works, the base setting for world scale is tied to IPD reported by the headset, but this does not necessarily result in correct perception. In racing sims, it's immediately visible as the difference between the size of your real and virtual steering wheel, for example. The "IPD" setting in the sim is actually an adjustment factor to correct this.

Well, IPD is supposed to work best when it's your actual IPD, which is personal information, albeit of a rather inconsequential sort. That said, the IPD value in DCS is actually world scale, which is not quite the same as the actual IPD setting that physically adjusts the lens on your headset to match your eyes. World scale can be thought of as the size of your virtual head (and hence your "virtual" IPD), but it's not exactly that.

AAR is formation flying. Once you understand that, it's much easier to do. Curves are unnecessary, or even harmful. Find yourself a visual reference that isn't the basket (aiming with the gun cross usually works OK) and use it to judge where you are in the envelope. Also, start with the KC-130. If you try to do it with the S-3D, you're in for a frustrating time, that's the hardest tanker to refuel from. Once you can do it with the Herc, move on to the S-3D.

It's not hard to find WWII era Soviet hardware that's still in use, mostly things like flak guns and the like. Ukraine recently had some successes with their SA-5 batteries. The versions we have in DCS are usually more appropriate for the modern era than for Cold War, but in many cases the differences are subtle. That said, our SA-2 is actually the late Soviet variant (which Syria later go) that outperforms the classic Vietnam era one by quite a bit. It'd be nice to have more older variants.

That was the theory. In practice, it appears the effect was not noticeable in the cockpit. Remember, aerodynamic simulations like we're used to were simply not a thing when the Tomcat was designed, and they ran their calculations on mainframes less powerful than a today's smartwatch. The engineers clearly thought that they needed those vanes, but it turns out supersonic turns work just fine without them, and there's not much difference either way. In that era, there was no way of testing such concepts other than building the thing and flying it.

I think the whole point of welding them down was that nobody ever noticed them doing anything to the flight characteristics in first place. They added mechanical complexity while doing absolutely nothing tangible.

The navigation system wouldn't have been much of an obstacle in that case, one MiG-29 did manage to do exactly that. Navigating by compass, map and landmarks remains a basic skill for any pilot, long before he gets to mess with an INS. It was designed not to give the pilot too many options to avoid confusing him with too many buttons (and also because it was simpler and cheaper to make). Also, it being a copypaste of systems in other Soviet aircraft was deliberate, because it made them easier to produce and train pilots for. All Soviet aircraft had common instruments and equipment, to a much greater extent than Western ones. The Soviets learned during WWII that being able to produce a lot of aircraft fast is paramount in wartime, and being able to redirect instruments from one type to the other helps a lot with that.