Dragon1-1

Yeah, it's not uncommon for prebuilts to bilk you for brand name CPU and GPU, while skimping on the mobo, RAM, and storage. If they only mention storage and RAM capacity, it's a good bet they'll be on the slower end.

Yeah, that would've been a very worn out airframe. I've heard stories of no less than two incidents in which a part broke which was stated to "never break" in the docs, presumably because it was overdesigned with respect to the rest of the aircraft. Sending up spares when one aircraft scheduled to fly had an issue was a common occurrence, notably unlike Hornet squadrons. The F-14 we have modeled is in a somewhat better shape, about a decade younger, and with a few hundred fewer carrier traps and training dogfights behind it. That means you can get away with some abuse without the wings falling off. Pre-FBW jets are entirely dependent on the pilot respecting their limits, HB modeled this, as well as the safety margins. For what it's worth, in words of one Tomcat instructor, the F-14B is "as close to a rocketship as the Navy has" when in clean configuration and at about half fuel. So the comparison to the X-15 isn't entirely unwarranted. You could plug in the blower, pick up some speed, then zoom off about halfway to space in a vertical climb. Even towards the end of its service life, despite the G and mach restrictions, it could put up a fight in the vertical.

Did you actually try sweeping the wings back forward after pulling 12G? Because if you did, you might find that indeed, the wing box pinions didn't like your stunt at all, and your wings are now stuck in the "optimum position". If you pull that 12G in DCS, chances are you will find yourself missing something, like your INS, wing sweep or a gauge somewhere. Or not, it's pretty random what breaks and when. I don't know if we have stab flutter, but you overload the plane at your own peril. Yes, in DCS the F-14 can survive a 12-14G overload condition and keep flying, but fortunately it can't simulate the "conversation" with the crew chief that would ensue after you came back (not without increasing the age rating of the sim, anyway ). Also, when did your son fly the Tomcat? That's important, too. In later years in particular, F-14s were severely derated for both maximum Gs and speed. They could, if you pushed it, still achieve it physically, but unless you did it to save your or someone else's life, actually doing so would get you chewed out by the CAG and the airframe would likely be written off. HB is working on modeling airframe wear, but right now, AFAIK we have them in a state they'd between the 80s and 90s. Not brand sparkling new, but not the perpetually broken down hangar queens they were in the mid-2000s. As for controls, yeah, DCS is best experienced in VR (get a good headset and this fixes the peripheral vision problem), and with as many button boxes and physical switches as you can afford. Modules are designed with this in mind, every dev basically assumes you'll bind everything important to a HOTAS/button box, then use the mouse for the rest. Using a low button count stick and a keyboard does complicate things, the default bindings are a bit of a wild west. You can do controls standardization yourself, but it's a pain to change every module to your liking. Worth noting, the MiG-21 and Cessna 172 don't have the same brake controls - the MiG has a pneumatic wheel brake, which is controlled with a stick lever and rudder pedals (it also has a nose gear brake, which you can turn on and off by a switch). The gear lever in a MiG also has three positions, not two, and if you leave it up, you'll use up the compressed air and end up having no brakes when landing. So in many cases, the controls are quite different, and an experienced Western pilot jumping into a vintage Russian jet is in for quite a few surprises.

I'm pretty sure recent changes from the Apache will be backported to some extent. Petrovich and George are pretty much the same subsystem.

Yup, this is the new reality for everything Chinese in the US. Tariffs are ultimately paid by the consumer, this is what you're seeing.

Everything so far had been SFM, GFM has not been released yet. Fuel issues is mostly because AI sucks at managing their fuel. They use AB willy-nilly, fly at full power as opposed to efficient cruise, and don't respect any sort of bingo, so they continue wasting gas until they fall out of the sky.

I think ED actually has some debugging tools to analyze tracks, in addition to what the sim normally provides. They might be able to pull better data than we do with them.

The WP radar wasn't actually downgraded all that much, AFAIK. The main difference was lacking one single radar mode with better ECCM, and there are reports from Serbian pilots in Yugoslavia using that mode in combat, so even that's not certain (apparently, this mode worked similar to VS mode in Western radars and wasn't very popular with pilots). The 9.12B, sold to 3rd world countries, was the one with a significant downgrade. In any case, R-27ER and ET use exactly the same seeker as regular R and T. Same mounting interface, too. The only important thing that's different is the big honkin' rocket booster at the back. The R-27 family is essentially modular, this is why so many variants exist.

Relying on any single system opens you to that system being targeted. If StarShield becomes an essential component of the US military technology, the first thing potential adversaries will do is develop ASAT weapons capable of taking the system out. You can't prevent satellite overflights of any given territory, including enemy ASAT sites so there's no good way, other than putting active defenses on the sats themselves (driving up mass and cost) to make sure they won't get shot down. For constellations, killing one sat will create a debris cloud that could damage the others, making this a massive risk. In fact, this is one reason why Reagan's Star Wars program didn't go anywhere. INS should be enough to get home, at least with enough accuracy to get a visual on the airfield, or an ILS fix. However, there needs to be a way of setting up the ILS and enabling it without using the LAD, not to mention stuff like switching waypoints and taking INS fixes.

That it isn't new doesn't mean it can't fail. In most aircraft, an MFD failing isn't a huge deal, so it doesn't go in the news, they just fix it before the next flight. The LAD hasn't been around for very long, there are probably some contingencies for a total failure, but I'm not sure how well they'll work in practice. Of course, it also helps that fighters are flown much less than airliners, when we consider the total flight hours. I'm a bit worried that the engineers, while they know what they're doing, might have different priorities than we'd hope. "It's cheaper that way" mentality had caused a few aviation accidents over the years. The LAD is nice because it's cost-effective, you've got one screen, no buttons and minimum maintenance requirements. Of course, the F-35 has an ejection seat, which probably affected the calculation as well.

It can't if it's being jammed. This is another crucial failure point of many modern systems. This is also the issue with using the datalink: what if the enemy manages to jam it? GPS jamming is fairly straightforward, it's easy to degrade it to the point it can't be used for landing or PGM delivery. With datalinks, it depends, but reliability of a high bandwidth system in a hostile EW environment will be suspect. All the other suggestions rely on another system that would have to be added (and cost money). I would propose a minimum fuss, minimum problems solution: display the data in simplified form on the HMD. You don't need a full color high resolution map, just enough to get the jet home. Fuel and remaining time could be displayed by pressing a button, that alone would improve the situation somewhat. That alone would allow proper fuel planning. In general, in case of an electronics failure, you want to give control to the pilot, not to more electronics. An airliner is in a better situation because it doesn't rely on a single screen. Having two crewmembers, it usually would have at least two displays. This gives it a basic measure of redundancy a fighter LAD lacks.

Yeah, it never works, except in ODS and OAF, when it did. When you're targeting an airfield, a military base, or any sufficiently large gathering of conventional forces, a B-52 strike tends to be rather effective. You seem to be confusing destroying the enemy's ability to fight with breaking the enemy's will to fight. The latter is kind of hard to destroy with bombs, but when facing a regular army, the former is very much doable, and made much easier by being able to deliver a lot of big explosives. US loses like Vietnam and Afghanistan were against guerilla movements, which require a more comprehensive approach to fight.

My mistake, it was found on 737s. The directive recommended checking all Boeings, though, including 787s. However, since it was optional, Air India has explicitly been said to have not complied with it. Meaning that, assuming the pilots didn't treat the lack of toggle locks as normal from the start, complains about it wouldn't necessarily have gone anywhere. And yes, such a minor thing not getting fixed for 7 years is perfectly plausible. Either way, since that part was pulled from the wreckage, they will undoubtedly check this. This is being investigated right now, but we need to remember that even without the locking toggle, those switches are pretty hefty. It'd be hard for them to get flipped down all by themselves. Nobody wants to bring up accusations of pilot suicide, but switches don't simply flip themselves. Even with a worn out switch missing a locking toggle, it'd take a very powerful jolt to actually flip.

B-52 has a simple role which hasn't changed in 100 years: low threat delivery of a massive load of bombs. There's no magic here, you need a great big plane, a great big bomb bay, and... that's basically it. You don't deploy the B-52 where you expect it to be shot at by anything, instead you surround it with enough fighters and SEAD that even though the enemy knows you're coming, they can't do a damn thing about it. It is, by far, the most efficient way of pounding the enemy into submission once air defenses and fighter bases had been taken down, possibly by B-21s. Another role it fulfills is a long range cruise missile boat, shared with similarly old Tu-95. It's rarer to see it do this, but it can. All you need is a big plane with big racks capable of hauling a lot of mass. Once again, B-52 delivers, and you don't need to fix what isn't broken.

Trailing plane will fall out of the sky in this case. This is because in this scenario, you're reacting to what the leader does. If you both firewall the throttles in sync, you will stay together, but what is going to happen is that you'll see the leader going full thrust, and only then apply power of your own. This will produce a lag, normally when flying formation you could correct it by adding more power and then pulling it back, but as you're both at full power, you can't. So you will fall behind/below, and if you try to maintain your position in the formation, you will start trading airspeed for altitude, putting you behind the curve and stalling the jet. If you don't, you will eventually settle into the same climb profile as the leader, but the gap that will have opened up between you noticing the acceleration and engine reaching full power (a surprisingly large delay with a slow spooling jet) will remain considerable. You would also have to only start climbing when your engine spool up, not when the leader does, as otherwise you'll climb too early and likewise end up behind the curve. Max rate climb is a very unforgiving maneuver.

If you read the report, this wasn't necessarily the case. Several Dreamliners were found to be flying with the toggle locking feature disabled. Boeing issued an advisory directive to fix it, but Air India didn't implement it, since compliance with it isn't mandatory. Also, as those switches are toggled before every flight, and exist in every Boeing airliner, any pilot who flew one for any length of time had, indeed, practiced. I flip the toggle locking switch on my Winwing PTO with barely more effort than a regular toggle, it's smaller and lighter than those, but someone with strong hands could probably have pulled them both out at once. It would be awkward, but if you're flipping them several times a day, you might get into habit of doing it like this.

A real aviation switch of this size would be pretty stiff, to the point where it'd be odd if they were both actuated at exactly the same time, unless toggle lock was disabled. Of course, the condition of the aircraft would also play part, but I highly doubt they could be jostled or bumped by accident. I doubt any Dreamliner had been flying long enough to actually wear those switches out.

If you can make it, you'd do it by luck, and probably not in IMC, because without the LAD, actually selecting the point you want to fly to and enabling ILS is probably difficult, if possible at all. I'd hope that there are HOTAS options to, at least, get the aircraft home if the LAD suddenly decides to go blank. Losing tactical systems isn't too bad, because you're not really fit to fight if you lose even one MFD in a more traditional cockpit, it's not quite as bad, but you generally want to get home ASAP anyway. The biggest problem with LAD, IMO, is loss of engine instruments (particularly fuel flow) and the fuel indicators, robbing you of all means of endurance calculation. Other than that, the HMD can display enough information to keep the aircraft flying mostly straight and in the right direction, if you can select the home plate by HOTAS.

Doing that perfectly, 100% of the time, is very much superhuman. We're not just talking a well trained pilot, we're talking one who can magically teleport the stick from one side to the other. We're talking one who can guess his airspeed perfectly at all times while keeping his eyes glued to the bandit (and simultaneously looking behind, the AI is that good). We're talking one who can continuously hold perfect trim, disregarding the imprecisions in the trim switch, or even the need to actuate it. In fact, I'm pretty sure nobody actually trims mid-fight. DCS AI does, it's always in perfect trim like an FBW jet. I agree that most players don't even meet the criteria of simply flying well, and the MiG-15 is a real beast when flown well. However, no real pilot is going to hold corner speed to the knot while not looking at the airspeed dial. We simmers are seriously disadvantaged in the G load department, but a pilot's butt isn't a super-precise G indicator. You can be good at guessing, but you don't have a HMD, so in a dogfight, the MiG-15 needs to be flown by feel to some degree. Otherwise, you'd spend so much time staring at the gauges that you lose tally.

They didn't have guards, but they were protected against being bumped accidently by protrusions on the sides, and they're also supposed to be toggle-locking type, though supposedly this wasn't always the case. Either way, they require a pretty deliberate action to flip. Right now this is probably the only explanation that doesn't assume a truly improbable level of stupidity. There's no reason for the pilot to have his hands anywhere near that area at that phase of flight unless he's actually trying to crash the plane. Sadly, murder-suicides by a pilot are not completely unknown. It'll be interesting to see what else the investigation turns up.

You're not getting it - flying aerodynamic tables exactly in an analog bird like MiG-15 is superhuman. It's like you're dogfighting a wind tunnel model, not an aircraft flown by a real human with real controls. Aerodynamics are only one part of the aircraft's performance, another critical factor is the human-machine interface. Yes, it's theoretically possible to fly the MiG-15 that way, but in practice, you'd need to build a piloting robot, or retrofit an FBW system (same thing, really, if you think about it). A human pilot needs to physically move the control column to maneuver, actuate the trim switch to adjust the trim, physically look at the gauges to determine airspeed, keep tally, and so on. In a MiG-15, all those tasks are somewhat complicated by poor cockpit ergonomics (a somewhat notorious issue with all Soviet fighters), in addition to the normal delays and imperfections from making those actions. AI models none of this, which makes it superhuman. We're effectively fighting a MiG-15 equipped with modern FBW controls, a force sensing stick and a modern HMD. In fact, it seems to be exactly the same case as with climbing with warbirds. Until they got WEP restricted, most people couldn't do it, but Reflected found a way by the means of unrealistically tight trimming and very hard, but doable precision flying. Yes, it follows the tables, but it does not follow either real WWII practice or normal ways to fly a warbird. This is also why complaints about fighters which are supposed to have FBW are much less frequent.

Odd. Last time I flew the F-5 it worked. Do try the hold binding instead, it seems the remaster added it. Maybe something changed there.

Did you bind both idle and off actions to the appropriate buttons? The F-5 doesn't have a dedicated "hold" binding for idle cutoff. You need to assign both idle and off bindings.

In any case, this is not something you should touch while in the air. As one expert put it, there's nothing here that is likely. No matter which Boeing the pilot in question was trained on, there's zero reason to even have your hand anywhere near this area once the plane is off the ground.

It would seem like the engine switches were inadventarily operated by one of the aircrew. Now to figure out why would anyone mess with those mid-flight.