Dragon1-1

I do hope the preorder will either show up on Steam in September, or the 30% discount will be available, say, for the first two weeks of EA phase. Otherwise, it would not be fair to Steam users.

In that particular case, it's fire protection. LAU-68 is used by the USN, while the LAU-131 is used by other services. The latter also has connectors both at the front and rear, which is useful on some airframes, but not on ones that USN uses. The big difference, though, is the insulation that LAU-68 has. This greatly increases the time it'd take for the rockets inside to cook off if they ended up in a fire. On a crowded aircraft carrier, this can mean the difference between an extinguished fire and a massive explosion, since on a carrier there's a lot of ammo in close proximity, surrounded by thin metal walls, and nowhere to run. USAF ordies have the luxury of being able to hop into a hummer and floor it until they're on the other side of the airfield if the ammo dump starts smoking. USN doesn't, so they put more emphasis (and money) on making sure their ordnance takes a good while to blow up from heat, giving them a fair chance of putting it out. In general, the reason can usually be found in seemingly minor differences between the launchers. There's usually something that might seem inconsequential, but is actually an important factor for a given service to choose one over the other. It's not only capacity, but data connections (the reason why you don't see JDAMs on TERs very often, they need a dual "smart rack"), fire protection, location of connectors, stuff like that.

If the LUA file is correct, and if the AI MiG-15 flies exactly as LUA file says it should, then the only logical conclusion given the above is that human-flown PFM MiG-15 underperforms. Perhaps a test to check if it does is in order, but I'd be surprised if that was the case. Since it's been shown the LUA is pretty much spot on compared to the charts, either AI flies better than the LUA implies it should, or the player doesn't fly well enough. Also keep in mind that we might also be looking at something like with Reflected's warbird formations. There, it was possible to climb with the AI, just really hard. You had to be perfectly on speed, have trims set in a perfect way, and never, ever fall behind even a bit. Then, you'd stay in formation, despite AI performing a max performance climb. So we also need to exclude the scenario in which the AI simply hits the (arguably unrealistic in practice) theoretical maximum and the human doesn't.

Note that a simulation also needs to include some way to model abnormal conditions for which data does not exist. You can put a simulated plane into a flight regime in which testing it for real would be too dangerous, for instance. In DCS, this is further compounded by having to figure out how a plane would fly with various kinds of battle damage. That's one reason why DCS doesn't use lookup tables only. While this could be passable for something like CMO, where you don't actually fly the aircraft, One thing GFM does is simulating some of those abnormal conditions. AI will be able to stall out and depart the aircraft. Hopefully, ED will take opportunity to look at decisionmaking process of the AI, and at the way it flies simple administrative tasks, as well.

Yak-3 is iconic, but I'd rather have the Yak-9, if only because it served in Korea as well as in WWII.

That's a good point. We can plot out LUAs all we like, but it's of no use if AI performance doesn't actually follow the LUAs. If the current AI FM is incapable of translating those curves into realistic performance, directly inputting real data is of no use. Hopefully GFM will be able to do a better job at that. Of course, we also have to keep in mind that with vintage aircraft, it should be modeling a human pilot's inability to perfectly follow the curves. This human factor is difficult to simulate, but there are ways to fake it.

And that's the problem - they are perfect. AI is consistently achieves and maintains the aircraft's performance limits in ways a human could never manage. This was noted, for instance, by Reflected in his climbing with AI warbirds video. If you're in perfect trim, have your engine settings just right, and don't make any mistakes, you can keep up with the AI. I'm pretty sure no WWII pilot could actually set up his aircraft this well (at least that got improved, but only by capping the AI engine power). A dogfight is ultimately decided by who makes the fewest mistakes, and the way AI flies, small errors inherent to every human's piloting simply aren't there. The fundamental problem with that model is, it doesn't tell the whole story. As mentioned above, it's dry maths, not accounting for how the plane is actually flown. This, BTW, is why modern jets suffer from this issue much less than vintage ones (sure enough, the AI FM has been designed for modern jets). Nobody flies the MiG-15 on the numbers all the time, but in the F-16, the computer is doing much of the flying for you. If you want to get the best turn rate, just haul back on the stick and presto. This will get you in trouble in vintage planes, but AI can ride the exact point between too hard and too little pull.

Should there even be a loss of control? The F-86F has an all flying tail, which means the elevator should remain effective at supersonic speeds. Just how effective is another matter (and there's also a matter of the maximum G load), but it shouldn't lock up like a conventional tail.

Remember that both the F-35 and other fighters (this mechanic should be applied across the board) can also have external stores. Flight control position won't really matter, but external stores would, both pylons, racks and actual weapons all have their own RCS.

I think it should be quite possible to calculate RCS dynamically on configuration change. Algorithms are out there, and they don't have to be real time, nobody cares if the RCS updates a few miliseconds after the plane drops its payload.

What we didn't hear for 7 years is stuff like "most of the team is busy with Vulkan right now", it's been a lot more in the background before multicore came out. Again, it's holding up several planned features, and they've been pretty explicit about having kicked it into high gear. If it was going to take several more years, we'd be looking at a large chunk of the team working, full time, on something that doesn't produce a visible result in several years. I find it a rather unlikely outcome. It's coming, and you better hope it doesn't break too much stuff. Because it will break some.

Between my Orion 2 and the PTO, I'm able to bind every non-HOTAS control I need to regularly use in flight, so there's that. On most jets there are only so many switches that you need.

It's not a given, but it's not just the 3D work that needs to be displayed. I'm primarily worried about things like MFDs and TGP picture. It has to be rendered onto a texture in a particular way, which is controlled by the module devs, not by ED. If the way things are rendered in cockpit changes, it may require adjustments to the module itself. All RAZBAM modules have a display somewhere in the cockpit, losing the radar screen would be inconvenient in the MiG-19 and crippling for all others. It's coming soon, as in, ED has a significant portion of its team working on Vulkan, and it seems they need to push it out of the door because a lot of their future plans depend on it. This is not something that's going to linger for years waiting its turn, it's a core system change that's been their priority for a while now.

I'm not worried about 2.*, but I am worried about 3.0, which is probably coming out as soon as they finish the initial Vulkan implementation. We can expect the old system being ripped out.

If they didn't undermodel the failure rate of the Mk14, it would have been a very frustrating sim. Most of the time, the magnetic exploder was disabled IRL, they used the contact pistol (which had problems of its own).

I would avoid the bubble canopy, with a CAS aircraft you want a WWII-style armored windshield. More thrust, bigger wings and more stations are always welcome. Also, all stations should be "smart", unlike on the A-10, which only has some of them wired for PGMs. However, you're not addressing the reason for A-10's retirement: SAMs, particularly MANPADS. Active IRCM is a must if we're making something that's going to fly slow. I'd pack a built-in SPJ, too, in order to avoid having to reserve a hardpoint for a jamming pod. Another thing that would free up a hardpoint is a built-in IR camera and a laser designator, to avoid having to carry a TGP. In addition, this could make the aircraft a capable drone hunter, if it had IRST functionality with enough resolution.

Yeah, and they didn't work very well, the US version in particular. They either blew up too early, or not at all, and they weren't very popular, despite spectacular results when they did work. It really took until Cold War before they really came into their own. The vast majority of torpedo attacks in WWII used contact fuzing.

In fact, modern torpedoes work by going under the ship and exploding beneath the keel, breaking it. Shallow draft won't protect you, nor would WWII style torpedo bulges. That's more or less what killed the battleship, not aircraft as it's commonly assumed. Modern torpedoes are one hit kill against pretty much anything other than very large submarines, since for subs a direct hit is preferred, as getting a torp below one can be tricky.

The 3km range is the kinematic range of the rockets, not necessarily that of the ranging system. Also, effective range is much less than that unless you're shooting at a large area target. In general, rockets are not fired at ranges you see in ad brochures. You need to get close in order to hit anything with them. 500m or so is a good range if you want remotely accurate fire. Anything further, and you'll just scatter the rockets over a wide area.

Shadows could be better, hopefully after Vulkan they'll be looked at, as well as HDR support. There are improvements to be made regarding the lighting, for sure, but model and landscape fidelity is up there in modern maps, though. Maybe in an OLED headset (I have a ReverbG2) the differences would be more visible, but I found the vistas pretty stunning in Syria or Marianas, even Nevada from high up. The biggest problem, IMO (and what drags down Nevada and especially Caucasus down low), are numerous outdated assets, unfortunately the replacement process for those is slow.

For anything complex, ChatGPT is of limited utility unless you're really good at using it. It's too likely to spew crap and make things up. Simple things work, complex ones... not so much.

Make it an O-1E and nobody will oppose. It's basically a Cessna 170 (172's taildragger predecessor) modified for the FAC role. It could carry a handful of rockets for marking targets (or light attack, if you loaded HE), but the most notable use was flying around spotting targets. Good for a free module, and will be all over the place as AI (or player!) FAC in Vietnam era missions. It'd also have an added bonus of allowing people to learn taildraggers in something that doesn't immediately try to kill you with prop torque on takeoff and landing, as the TF-51 is wont to do. Maybe you could have a usable M-16 using the same tech Kiowa does, too. FACs carried rifles and occasionally fired them out of the window. There were some crazy stories about them out of Vietnam. BTW, I don't know what settings and maps you're playing on, but "beautiful graphics" is definitely a thing in DCS. We have realistic navaids, too, though as most maps are strictly modern, there's a paucity of VOR and NDB stations, their numbers are dwindling these days.

Tomcat is never going to stop being the coolest plane to ever fly from a carrier. That said, the stick was always going to be of limited appeal. It's got a bunch of unique features not seen on other sticks, like the weapon selector and the DLC wheel.

Holding a forward slip will eventually induce a heading change, but it's very slow, and also rather counterintuitive, because the flight path moves far less than the nose does, and the nose will snap back into trim, seemingly undoing the heading change (if you look closely, you'll notice you've turned a few degrees). In LOMAC, this was probably exaggerated. Either way, except for high AoA and stunts like rudder reversal, the pedals are not used to turn. You roll and pull a little, and it'll turn perfectly well.

Campaign creators aren't going to work with a module that's out of support, especially since it went off sale. So I'm afraid they're off the table for now. Otherwise, BD would have probably already looked into it.