Dragon1-1

I think that's a stretch. I don't remember it ever looking like "about to release". Very advanced, yes, but hardly in the final phase. We haven't seen the radar, or really anything showing that it was ever actually flyable.

ED did get them right. RL pilots and boomers both said them being too dim to see was a common complaint IRL. "Sorry sir, the lights are full bright" was a common response to said complaints.

If it's a payware campaign doing this, then the author should have made Jester find the target automatically. There are currently no payware campaigns where you need to cue Jester onto a mission target.

Well, COO would usually be a decision maker, so that they know is pretty certain. Whether they care, that's another can of worms, and that's what I'm hoping about. If nothing else, the backlash showed that there's plenty of people down here who do care.

Too bad I came here looking for a solution, then.

Well, you can barrel roll some helos, but it's unlikely to be of much help.

As nice as it looks, don't you want to wait until they make the Navy Phantom?

Well, since 9L relayed a statement from the COO, the decision makers are presumably aware, too. Let's hope they can see reason.

Well, that's what this post is about. There should be a much greater variety of trees in DCS. Helo drivers would particularly appreciate this, I imagine.

Well, not worth working with any RAZBAM modules while that mess is going on. I hope they do resolve it eventually. In the meantime, I'll have some fun with your Hornet campaigns. Ready to dust off my collective, too, once you get to making the Apache one (I'm still waiting for the Kiowa to go on sale, but we'll get there... ).

For this, a good general purpose piece of advice is "take the fight where the bandit can't follow". In the Tomcat, it usually means into the vertical. There are some opponents, like the Viper, where it can means slow (but slow is always risky, and the only way to get there is through his corner speed), and for a MiG-15 it can mean so fast that his ailerons lock up. Once you get there, you just have to figure out where the bandit decided to be instead of staying with you (all his options are bad at this point), then go down there and kill him, now armed with plenty of spare energy and probably decent angles, as well. If you mess up, go back up and try again. Just make sure not to break the wings (often a risk, particularly when you're coming into the merge supersonic from a Sparrow fight) or run out of gas.

I suppose if you keep it simple it might work. Quite frankly, I'm surprised it didn't butcher it completely. It's definitely interesting, I wonder if it can make one using realistic procedures (time on target, push times and so on). It probably has a limit, but it could save a lot of tedious work in ME. I still wouldn't use it for writing stories, though. Unless, of course, you want the most droll, cookie cutter story ridden with purple prose, hackneyed tropes, bad "research" and overall poor writing that you ever saw outside sitcoms and mass-produced crime novels.

That's because you're focused trying to convince me the current approach is better, and seem to have already resolved not to fix the problems with the PDF version. If you're not willing to consider whether your design philosophy has downsides that negatively impact customer experience, there's indeed no point in this discussion. At this point, I might be better off asking Chuckowl whether he's willing to entertain making a more in-depth guide for this module than for the others. And I'm glad you're never going to be involved in making anything worth paying for.

This video is from 2020. Anything could have happened in the intervening four years. We've been through a lot of patches and drag corrections, not to mention the F-5E remaster. It might've been true then, that doesn't mean it's now. It might, or it might not.

Viper has a different datalink system, and can't receive 9-lines in text form. It's a feature of SADL, which our Viper doesn't have (IRL there exists a different block that does).

Yeah, just wanted to check. Even AI wouldn't have been that far off base. Given that accurate attack runs require you to fly coordinated (you can use a touch of rudder to aim, but not a lot), it'd be quite a strange tactic indeed. Circling the target flying sideways is a valid gunship tactic, works similar to a pylon turn that fixed wing gunships use. However, accurately firing in a sideslip (or out of the side of any moving aircraft) pretty much requires a lead computing gunsight. Early gunships simply used miniguns and walked their fire towards the target, the AC-130 didn't get its massive howitzer until the tech to aim it properly was around.

Let me see, it has all the switchology, it has LANTIRN, it has the checklists, it explains everything in a concise, easy to read way. In what way is that bad? That it doesn't have all the random modding information or pointers for skinners (what you call "content-rich")? In my eyes, that's a plus. It's very professionally done, too, with all the navigation features I'd have expected from it. The only unneeded thing is the history lesson at the beginning, but that's just a DCS tradition at this point. The point is, you seem to think the website sync, and things you add to the website, including the ability to update off-cycle, are of more value than they actually are. Most of the extra content you added is actually pretty useless for me, as are the "interactive features". What you have actually done seems to have opened the door to endless feature creep of what should have been a simple document to be referenced by the pilot and RIO, during flight ops or in preparation for them. I'm not asking for an "All Things Phantom Wiki". I'm asking for a flight manual. You seem to be confusing the two. Keep your website, by all means, I won't be using it, but modders might. I'm only asking, do spend some time on manually building a flight manual, too. Same thing as for the Tomcat, 100% usable, zero bloat, and it's got a nice table of contents on the side. It doesn't need to super-maintainable, just keep the sources around in case you actually add something that's worth looking up mid-flight. The whole point of this discussion is to convince you to make an effort to provide a concise PDF document that is an in-flight reference and nothing else. The Tomcat PDF manual is exactly that. Instead of pretending it doesn't exist, take a good, hard look at what it is actually used for, and you'll see it's perfect for that single purpose. There's a reason Tomcat NATOPS doesn't include information on how to change tyres on the landing gear.

It's not a matter of wording, but of factual correctness. Airspeed is not energy, that's the whole point of the E-M theory.

Err... that's very, very wrong. You're probably thinking about airspeed. Going up is the best way to save energy while still being able to make a tight turn. In fact, going in fast and pulling up lets you bank that extra energy and maintain your best turning speed, while being able to pull a bit higher G than 6.5, since when you're coming down, you're gaining airspeed, so anything above about 310kts can be turned into Gs at your leisure. Very few things can defend against an F-14 that can use the vertical right.

Wait, are you trying to say the Tomcat doesn't have a PDF manual? Because I'm pretty sure there's a rather nice one in the Tomcat's docs folder. In fact, what I'm asking for is for the Phantom manual be brought up to the standard of usability of the Tomcat one. All it has right now is a bad website and a PDF that's also bad, in other ways. I meant something like pulling the markdown into MS Word and manually adjusting the tables. The second step is kind of important, too. No, you likely won't be able to just hit "compile" in Github and get a perfect result. I really don't like the idea of foisting this job on the community, either. Sure, I could copypaste text and pics from your website into Word, apply some formatting to get it to look better than the current PDF, and then send you the results. But why should I have to do it? Right now, I feel like I might as well use the original -1 and -34, and hope that, since you're much better at making planes than at document and website design, nothing significant will be amiss. Just wish you stuck to what worked in Tomcat and Viggen, rather than give us this dolled up mess nobody actually asked for. I ran out of SP content for the Phantom (content that works, anyway), but if there's no progress by the time it accumulates enough new stuff for me to get back to it, I might spend an afternoon or two copypasting things. I still think it's a step down, considering I didn't have to do it for other modules.

Just to specify, I didn't mean not using PDF as a final product, I meant not compiling directly to PDF, so manual adjustments (or scripted ones) can be done before creating the (effectively uneditable) PDF. The intermediate format can be whatever this website export crock can handle with the fewest issues. Now that I think of it, I'd like to disable the external site loading altogether. It seems like there's no place where it's explained what tech this in-sim browser is based on (Chromium, probably? Would explain the performance issues...), what has been done to make it secure, or what privacy controls are there. If it can load YouTube videos, it can load a whole lot of things, some of which I might not want loaded. Another reason to ask for a proper offline PDF manual.

Do you have any references for that? A quick search for "vulture turn" didn't reveal anything of note.

How about doing that and putting it on the store? I'm pretty sure it'd sell quite well.

HARM can keep heading to the general area where it last saw the target radar. I think this feature is modeled as way too accurate, though.

The missions work fine. The Hornet was pretty much correct from the start, so the fundamentals didn't change. Things had been added, not all have training missions, but some do, and they're actually pretty new.