Dragon1-1

Well, hopefully someone less costly than RS, anyway. Plus, I don't like the idea of a linear throttle, the real thing moves in an arc, and that's quite important for ergonomics (your hand can sense grip angle more precisely than position). The original WW Taurus had a realistic mechanism, at the cost of being a huge chunk of hardware.

Well, they've got a pretty nice range of sticks and throttles for fighters already, plus PTO2, the MFDs, and two UFCs. I think that's a good lineup going forward. Right now I don't feel like I need anything more except maybe FFB, but that is extremely bulky and expensive. In fact, if I were to go that route, I'd probably need a dedicated sim station instead of mounting things to the desk, especially since I'd probably want the stick base to be in the center. I'd probably get a UFC then, too, and the MFDs. I hope someone does the F-35 throttle once that's out. It's got a cool shape that looks pretty ergonomic.

Reflected scripted a crew chief for the F-16, seen in the Arctic Thunder campaign. It'd be great if ED rolled out something like this across the board.

You can, but only for radar missiles, flares are your job (the DLC button will release them). Also, you need to defend against the missile yourself, chaff alone won't get the job done. Notching can work, but it's better to defend the missile kinematically, particularly SARH. Look up the F-pole maneuver, done properly, it'll allow you to defeat a SARH missile while still maintaining your lock. That also goes for heaters, BTW. You have to cut burners, turn your engines away from the missile and help the flares do their work.

I think both this and the magic teleport should get commands. "Abort ground crew" and "reset aircraft position" or something. Currently there's no good way of dealing with broken flaps on the F-14.

It's logical. When they update the core, the campaigns often need to be updated to adjust for new features and bugs the code introduces. It seems ED caught on that, so now we get a core patch, and a campaign patch to fix issues the core patch introduced. DCS mission scripting is notoriously brittle, and complex campaigns break at a drop of the hat. Such an approach is practically necessary.

He's a bit more capable than that, actually. Once he acquires contacts in TWS, he will try to keep as many of them as possible within scan zone. You do have to tell him where you want to search in first place, and his way of prioritizing targets isn't always best, but once they're in view, he should operate the radar in a way that makes at least some sense.

It is very much relevant. ED has a team in Russia (which is the one that makes the Russian stuff) and is rather interested in selling their products in Russia. Mi-24P has been released, so the cat's out of the bag on that one as far as Western markets are concerned, but they're not going to develop, say, a Su-25 without some sort of guarantee that some goon won't nix it halfway through just because he wanted a bribe and didn't get one. No, but if the helos are permanently removed, this would reduce the incentive for ED to continue updating them. I don't think they'll be forced to yank them from non-Russian market (if only because Switzerland has little incentive, at that point, to cooperate with Russian legal demands), but you never know. If that happens, you can expect updates not to be too forthcoming.

Regular 4th++ gen ones are getting RAM coating as an upgrade. It doesn't help much, but it's better than nothing, and on a small fighter it does make a difference. Obviously coating a B-52 with it won't help. Fun fact: Mythbusters managed to get ahold of some radar-absorbing paint and coat a car with it. It didn't help them evade a police radar gun, but the point is, at least some materials of that sort are available on civilian market. This is not some exotic tech, I suspect the advances in the F-35 version of the material are more about not making it weigh the plane down than a major improvement in radar wave absorption, due to physics involved (though it's probably more capable in that area than the stuff Mythbusters used).

It's an educated guess, though. Those things tend to happen in Russia. I've been always saying that, but some people just can't accept that working with both Russian government and their companies is hard. Everyone who tried says just that. Oh, and we're not likely to ever hear the reasons from ED. It'll just be "resolved" and either the modules will come back to the Russian store, or not. Transparency is not a thing in Russia.

I guess all those "why don't ED make more red air?" complaints can now be redirected to this thread. I suspect that whatever happened, it's exactly why ED preferred leaving Russian aircraft to 3rd parties in the past. That it happened to an already released module doesn't bode well for doing any further business with Russia.

This means no talking on the radio.

We do know that RAM, as a rule, doesn't absorb very much. F-35 gets its stealthyness from geometry, with RAM providing a bonus. While we may not know exact specs, it should be possible to estimate from physics and public research papers on how RAM works.

He might have made it miss by outflying it. If a SAM launches at you, it means it has a solid lock. A jammer alone won't make it miss, it might make it fire at you later than it normally would and force it to use a less efficient proportional guidance method, which may make the SAM easier to dodge, but that's all.

In fact, you can safely cut the AI out of the picture, and just go straight to human written sources. AI is neither a search engine or a source of information. It's a text manipulation, text generation and pattern matching tool. These are valid uses for AI. If you want to rewrite your book blurb in corpospeak, or write the next episode of Seinfield, it'll do an OK job. If you start asking questions about reality, you'll find it pretty eager to spout BS.

If you have a 3D model, you can use open source RCS calculation software to determine that. As it happens, we know the physical shape of the F-35, so it should be quite possible to get a good estimate. There are some non-obvious factors (RAM effectiveness, radome), but that can be estimated, too.

You seem to be operating under a misconception that "neutral"="parallel to the ground". This is not the case in the Hornet. There's zero reason to force the tail to be perfectly horizontal, and this is very much not a neutral position.

It's a bit undermodeled, to say the least. Turbulence, in particular, is only about aircraft wakes, not all the interesting things that happen around clouds, for instance. Wind only blows you sideways, as opposed to flowing up and down when it hits mountain ridges, and being funneled down the valleys. This can create dangerous conditions for aircraft, for instance an downwind slope will create a downwash as the air rolls down it, which can slam you into the ground if you're not careful. It can also create vortices similar to a carrier's burble, but worse. Those can be strong enough to slam an airliner into the ground (and indeed, at least one met its fate that way). Of course, to a tactical aircraft cruising along at 20kft, those would matter relatively little. However, if said tactical aircraft tries a low level ingress, or has to drop bombs at a target in mountains, things start looking different. Helicopters would be massively affected by air currents like this, making weather a major consideration. That said, at least in its current implementation, wake turbulence is a huge performance hog, especially with many aircraft present. This is why it's often turned off in MP. This would have to be improved if the system was to be expanded. It's a good base on which other kinds of turbulence and air movements could be built, but it has to be done in a way that doesn't completely bog the sim down.

No, and idling the engines doesn't remove them.

The proper technique is to roll inverted and pull after such a climb, for precisely this reason. Most jets don't like negative Gs very much, and neither do the pilots.

SR-71 couldn't really loiter, either. Its advantage was that it could make a pass when it was needed and without advance warning, unlike satellites, which move in fixed, easy to track orbits. That said, the real reason for its existence was actually something else: film development. Spy cameras of the time, including satellite ones, used photographic film. When the film ran out, they ejected a capsule, which had to be recovered, and only then could the film be developed. With SR-71, film could be retrieved as soon as the aircraft had landed, much faster than from a satellite. With digital cameras being introduced on the KH-11, this advantage was rendered moot. Also, it's worth noting that both SR-71 and U-2 can still be very good at avoiding SAMs, simply because they fly so high. While they could be hit if they actually overfly a site (which tends to be a problem when trying to photograph something with a colocated SAM site), the WEZ at their altitude would be tiny, especially combined with SR-71's speed. It's no longer a sure thing, and you probably couldn't snap a photo of something next to a SA-10 site, but there are only so many SA-10s Russia can deploy, and not every important installation can have one smack in the middle of it.

They wouldn't send a jet without them, precisely because they wouldn't want them to get first hand experience on tracking a stealth jet, plus the point of there being an interceptor in peacetime is for it to be seen.

Except "as real as it gets" is actually an appropriate description. The FC3 F-15 is said to be the best F-15 simulation out there, and that's true. Because the last non-ED F-15 sim on the market is Jane's F-15 from 1998. Not a high bar to clear. So it really doesn't get any better. Of course, HB are aiming higher than that, and I agree, too. I don't want made up systems, I want the real stuff, modeled according to real physics and engineering.

I have a soft spot for it since ArmA2. Plus, anything USMC gets my vote, for this and other reasons. So I'm looking forward to that one.

I'm guessing the Cobra, specifically the AH-1W SuperCobra. While it does have some displays, George will be absolutely vital for it to be of any use in combat, because unlike in the Apache, the pilot only has steam gauges, a HUD and an A-10 like FMS. Only the CPG has displays to work with.