Dragon1-1

Hey, as long as you make your time on station, you get paid the same no matter if you actually commit to anything while up there.

The US AWACS services were generally up to snuff. Other nations could be more... variable. Like with that story with the Brits, or how one South Korean AWACS guy seemed like he didn't know what "Judy" meant (their pilots apparently require talk-on right up until the merge), to great annoyance of the USAF F-15 driver who had to listen to his prattle, despite long having the bandit acquired on his own radar.

That's how it's supposed to work like. That not every controller lived up to that exacting standard IRL was sometimes a problem, but when following proper procedures it should indeed let the pilot create a mental map of the battlefield. Also worth noting, in Soviet aviation, GCI had more of a command role than in USAF, where AWACS is more of an advisory that the pilot can use or not. NATO pilots in general have a lot more freedom than Soviet ones did.

You don't have to post this in every thread, it won't be any more correct. HB just announced the AI A-6 for the next patch.

Well, presumably not a campaign hotfix that may or may not come out later, but I'd expect it in the next month's big patch.

There will be no forum section for an AI asset. Only when they start developing the FF version, which is still a long time away.

It's coming in the next patch.

Maybe because the only real AdA module was made by them, and hence French aircraft fans would congregate there. I suspect quite a few Mirage 2000 drivers would appreciate the Rafale.

Not true, it's a normal way to land all warbirds at an airfield, including interwar ones that long predate corsair. Fat nosed fighters existed long before the Corsair. IIRC, the US copied the overall pattern from the Brits. I'm not sure it was around during WWI, but in WWII, fighters on land and at sea used the overhead break. What Corsair did was basically a very short final where you rolled out seconds before hitting the deck. That was what they did differently to other aircraft. Others landed more like on an airfield.

Well, a year ago the brouhaha with RB was already well underway. The Rafale is being made by another studio: https://msfsaddons.com/2025/04/12/azurpoly-announces-dassault-rafale-for-microsoft-flight-simulator/ It appears the schedule slipped a bit since this was posted, but we're used to that, and so is the MSFS community, I suspect. I would expect AzurPoly to be the ones to bring this jet to DCS.

Zero is, fundamentally, a naval aircraft, and as such, I'd expect we'll be flying from a WWII Japanese carrier most of the time. I'd expect them to use an approach pattern similar to what every other nation did, but I wonder what they did differently from the US and British carriers. Any info about how to realistically take off and land on a Japanese carrier would be appreciated.

Wow, given the drama the last time anyone tried touching Rafale (long ago), it seems that there's been some real positive change at Dassault. I wouldn't expect any official news until the initial version of the Rafale is out, but after that... who knows? It'd be nice to have that jet in DCS. I'd love to see some non-US naval aviation.

I also think the AI "bingo" response is broken, and has been for a long time. Bingo is the state at which you RTB, not ten seconds from flameout. It'd be far better if we could set bingo level for the AI. Once it hits that level, it should ignore everything (disengaging from the fight if it has to), restrict afterburner, go to max range flight parameters, and head to the nearest compatible friendly airfield, or to the nearest tanker. Yes, that'd get it killed in a fight, but so would running out of gas (a real pilot could probably keep fighting and then just try to punch out over friendly territory, but AI needs a simple procedure).

I'd rather have a MiG-19S, seeing as it's probably not coming from RAZBAM. Many systems are similar between the -17 and the -19.

Early in the war, not only did the Japanese have seriously good pilots, but the Zero handily outperformed the US fighters in a dogfight. The almighty US Navy Aviation turned out to be quite beatable after all. What the Japanese failed at was planning for the long haul. They failed to significantly improve the Zero and to ensure a supply of trained pilots. Of course, the US was always going to simply outlast Japan, simply as a matter of size, but their lack of innovation (mostly thanks to believing they were inherently so superior they didn't need to) made it much worse.

I don't know why he keeps posting that "data", it's info from some other game that's rather obviously inaccurate in several places. It's not historical data and it doesn't actually bring anything useful into discussion. I hope we get both B and C. The differences between variants weren't quite as big on the Zero as they were on other aircraft.

In reality, the RIO would be in charge of the whole intercept, including launching missiles. The pilot would only take over when closing to WVR. Since that's too much to ask from Jester, more callouts is something that's worth considering. Would've been nice if he could run a few "canned" intercepts at pilot's request. A stern conversion, for example, is a fairly well attested technique that's discussed on open source materials. Since it can be ran by checklist, Jester should be able to do it.

There's a lot of threads about fixing problems and working around bugs, because DCS is an old piece of software with heaps of technical debt piled on over the years. ED is chipping away at it, trying to make it more maintainable, but it's a slow process. Add to it the fact that the simulation is complex and inherently resource intensive, and you've got something that takes some effort to make work correctly. IMO, the single worst offender is the mission scripting system, which is so ridiculously brittle that complex campaigns such as Raven One often break on every other update. That's one system that could use one good refactoring pass behind the scenes (preferably leaving the language the same, just making it work consistently).

The problem I noticed talking to WW is that they're Chinese, and the person I was talking to was obviously using an automated translator. Leaving aside cultural differences, this makes the conversation awkward. I'd imagine a truly proficient English speaker might be hard to come by in China, and WW being a small company, they probably don't have any.

You forgot the hard part: finding a dev who'd pick up the Buccaneer. I imagine the Jag would sell, and I sincerely hope someone will pick the Harrier (any of them) up eventually, but other aircraft have a very low chance of happening now that RAZBAM is probably done with DCS (which is a pity, because they were also doing the Lightning). AFAIK, Harrier in particular was a problem because of its very much classified radar (and sure enough, the one we have is a radarless USMC variant). It's the reason RAZBAM gave for making a US Harrier variant. Specifically, they were unable to acquire docs for the Blue Vixen and Blue Fox radars. A British variant would require at least one of this, and even Blue Fox was apparently asking too much. I think the Marconi RWR might've been a problem, too. Sure, it's not every aircraft that's affected, but the Brits are very stingy with their military documentation. I imagine Buccaneer's Blue Parrot would be considered less sensitive than either of those.

I'm not quite sure where that value comes from, but either way, trying to peg a single maximum speed for a missile that lofts is not very useful. It might well be the maximum design mach, as in, the maximum that the airframe had been designed to withstand. This will invariably be a more impressive number than any speed that's observed in operational practice (though unless the missile is massively overengineered, it still tells you something).

It's worth noting that Syrians had proven not to be very competent equipment operators. I don't know if it's that Russians failed to train them, or that nobody with a brain would willingly serve in Assad's army, but it seems that in Syria, any system more complex than an AK has a very low combat efficiency. Russians aren't terribly competent, either, but at least they actually know how to operate their equipment beyond "mash the launch button and hope you'll score a hit". Such SAM systems are not a hands-off, fully automated affair, a lot still depends on the crew.

There is a real problem here, in that the dual target track mode in MiG-29S provides an STT lock warning for both targets, despite being more akin to TWS. The R-77 can definitely be guided in STT, but it uses the same datalink as in other modes. It's not a true SARH mode like what the AIM-54 does when fired in STT. A random presentation on missiles, especially if not translated by someone who knows exactly what they're doing, is not a good source, especially if the real FM states otherwise.

It could be that way in the real MiG-29. Electric trim is often imprecise IRL. It's also possible that it changes when wheels up, or depending on airspeed.

Been suggested time and again. It's unlikely to happen. An O-1E would be nice (basically a Cessna 150 with a different cabin), but even that is probably going to be AI-only, if it's ever added.