Dragon1-1

Ah, yeah, this old chestnut. This is what people say when they run out of arguments as to why this shouldn't be looked at. "It's just a game, it's not worth fixing the flaws." It's also a load of bollocks. The fact that this needs to be explained is what's really disturbing. We are, in fact, talking about a purely visual sensation. If you can't see out, you can't even determine if you're moving or not, especially if the ride is smooth (this is why motion simulators work). And it is, in fact, very much possible to make a video game look exactly like a real image. DCS is still only in "close enough" category, but the discussion is about whether it's already good and can be made closer. That's true, games can make even a fairly leisurely drive at highway speeds feel like you're riding a rocket. Although, I suspect that it would help if DCS had functional motion blur. IRL it's not nearly as exaggerated, but it's there. A better blur algorithm compatible with VR and integrated with modern visuals could possibly make a difference when flying through a canyon at supersonic speeds. Which isn't to say flying low level in VR isn't pretty hair-raising already.

Well, the doors falling off midflight certainly make for an interesting trip...

It should be definitely possible to see the full list, but filtering out modules you don't currently have is definitely desirable. Even if you do have some modules uninstalled right now, to reenable them would require you to quit DCS and wait for it to install, something you may not want to do at the moment. Or maybe he meant that even though he technically can join a server, it's of no use for him because all he can do is spectate, as there are no aircraft for him to fly. Most people join servers to fly on them, you know?

It means that sometimes, you run across a server that runs only modules that you don't have. Say, a Cold War server when all you have is modern aircraft. I don't think there's an easy way to filter that out.

You could have linked the article, you know? Or quoted from it, with your own commentary. Copypasting the whole thing is the worst way to go about it, especially without rejecting the formatting. Do try, at least, editing the post to be actually readable, please, and get rid of the irrelevant pictures (they're a waste of space even in the article).

HB is already working with ED on a better RWR implementation. There's no reason for RAZBAM not to work with them on the IFF, particularly if they can simulate how the Soviet systems work. The old modules, however, that's another story. Old modules are old, and that means implementing things in the modern way is not going to be easy. Mag3, at least, expressed interest in a completely new MiG-21 module (of course, they don't work very fast), but the F-5 doesn't seem to be anywhere near priority, as much as it deserves to be brought to modern standards.

I'm pretty sure that when they said the performance is "under" the F-14 benchmark, they meant it's worse than the Tomcat. They're likely referring to FPS you get in the cockpit, not any particular system.

Is it stable in roll now? Specifically, in landing configuration.

I remember this happening before, basically the FCS would go stupid if you took off with anything other than half flaps. I highly doubt the real plane does that.

On the aircraft that we have, it's far from it. Basically, IFF has three modes, one of which is basically a civilian transponder, two are well documented and one is an encrypted version of the civilian transponder. Friggin' Wikipedia has a good overview of how all the IFF modes work, complete with how the pulses are encoded. Even the range of frequencies is known. In general, an IFF system is basically a digital radio transceiver that listens for a specific interrogation pulse and then replies in a way that's determined, in a fairly transparent way, by the position of switches in cockpit and (for mode 2, which replies with the tail number) in the avionics bay. Mode 4, the encrypted one, works the same, but now the code for both interrogation and reply is secret. Two codes are carried: A and B, changing according to the SOP (for instance, every 12 or 24 hours). A is the current one, B is the next one in rotation, if you're flying past the scheduled code change, you flip the switch when that happens. There's also a small, random delay to a mode 4 response that ties into the code, this is to make locating the aircraft via its IFF response harder. As far as failure modes go, they're basically the same as any other radio, plus accidental zeroization of the secret codes. Properly implementing the Western IFF system would not be particularly difficult, compared to other systems of the same complexity. For Soviet ones there are some resources out there, and everything but SPZO-2M and Parol was compromised by Vietnam, so the docs for those might be declassified along with Combat Tree (which we may be getting on the Phantom). In any case, the Soviet systems gave the pilot relatively little control over them. MiG-29A supposedly even had automatic interrogation, and would inhibit firing or even locking onto an aircraft it recognized as friendly (with an override button on the stick, thankfully).

Neither SA-10 nor Patriot should set off launch warnings on RWR, but in both cases the search mode of the FCR is not very good, and in any case, the FCR is not turned on until the battery is ready to engage (otherwise you risk eating a HARM). What I've heard is, if you see a "10" on RWR, assume you've been launched at. That is your launch warning, and while the RWR won't raise hell about it, you'll live longer if you start defending right when the FCR goes on. So it's the AI behavior that is unrealistic, but the player getting RWR launch warning when the battery actually launches is wrong, too. Those SAMs seem to have been extrapolated from older systems such as SA-2, but a modern SAM like the SA-10 or Patriot can be a lot more sneaky. Another thing is, AI probably shouldn't react to the missile at all, since if it gets you, it'll be coming too fast for you to get tally on it. I suspect it's a leftover from the A-10, which assumed an MWS (which could pick up the missile a moment before impact).

In that case, I trust HB will find a way to implement the system sooner or later. However, I'd imagine it would need a core implementation of ground-directed bombing from ED. Which I hope will happen because it will be right at home in WWII and Korea, too, provided the system is flexible enough to simulate all the way the concept was developed over the years. It might be boring, but hey, at least you're not dropping JDAMs. As per Dos Gringos, all you need for that is a monkey, so to speak.

I'm not quite sure about that. There's a noticeable difference between brand new brake pads and ones that are worn out (mostly felt right after they're replaced). Yes, they still work, but they're less snappy. Even better, it might happen that they're worn asymmetrically for some reason, and the plane will pull to the side when standing on the brakes. Also, we need a button for punching a malfunctioning altimeter in hopes of unsticking the needle, complete with a pilot model animation. This will especially come in handy later on, in the A-6 module for the BN.

Your CPU is not especially powerful, and the GPU is downright wimpy by VR standards. The 2070 is inferior in performance to the 1080ti, and has inadequate VRAM. 16GB RAM is also borderline for VR. I've used these settings, but performance was meh at the best of times. Try lowering the textures and CPU-heavy settings to see if it helps. Do not expect to have everything maxed out on that Dell.

Missions designed in modern times actually allow this. Older modules typically don't. Hornet has both old and new types of training missions and the difference is stark. I hope older missions get overhauled someday.

Was Combat Skyspot even present on the F-4 that you're making? I know it was used with the D model Phantoms in Vietnam a lot near the war's midpoint, but not so much afterward.

OK, so my procedures might be a bit dated, blame me being primarily interested in ODS-era combat aviation. I'm not living in a fantasy, but I might be used to flying around in a reality of about three decades back. However, this doesn't actually address my point. Fast FAC was a thing in Vietnam, where F-4s spotted targets for other F-4s. Sometimes, they went "shopping" on their own, as did A-10s in ODS (notably, this is a USAF-only brevity code, other countries never did this). They can do this kind of thing, and had, for a long time. They just don't, because, guess what, drones are better at it. This I never disputed. What I do dispute is that having a drone do it is some kind of massive revolutionary leap, as opposed to an evolutionary progression from manned FACs. Likewise, SLAM-ER isn't suited for loitering, but it is suited for striking a target the location of which isn't known to the meter. However, as you pointed out yourself with the ODS example, sometimes accommodations are made with regards to necessity. There's no such thing as "never" in a competent military, although there are things that are pretty darn unlikely. You do appear to have missed my point, though: there is an overlap between capabilities of drones and missiles, and what they bring to the battlefield is not some new, miracle capability, but a change in economics, a change that could be reversed by technological development forcing more expensive equipment onto the drones. Which is exactly why I used their current budgets. I assume both of them are spending as much on the military as they comfortably can, with Hamas spending pretty much everything not eaten up by admin costs, and Israel spending as much as they can without going into war economy and inviting hardship. While assuming that the current Israeli government is particularly competent at anything including budgeting might be a stretch, it's reasonable to assume that those levels are representative of what each group can put towards the daily, low intensity rocket war. In addition to that, countries routinely spend money that they don't have (balanced budgets went out of fashion long ago, in case you didn't notice). Loans and treasury bonds, in short, increasing the national debt is very much something that a generally solvent nation like Israel is capable of doing. It has costs, but those costs tend to be long term. Also, you missed the fact that Israel can normally generate more money by going to the US with a begging bowl in hand. The current state of it being bogged down in Congress is extraordinary. Before judging others' understanding of economy, do refresh your own knowledge of how they actually work at this level. I consider the first example you showed to be refuted. Now, before you provide another, try to understand what I'm saying, because "essence of what I preach" is not what you misunderstood it to be. It does not imply that smaller countries are more efficient at war than large ones, quite opposite - it shows that a larger, richer side has the advantage. It uses the sheer size of its budget to be able to afford expensive, but ultimately more effective weapons than the smaller country. Finally, my example says nothing about the prospects of turning the tide. It's a fixed scenario with one side attacking and the other defending. Now flip the scenario, Israel attacks, Hamas defends. You'll see what anyone can see, Hamas has no defense comparable to Iron Dome, nor would it be capable of supporting such a system even if they did. If it wasn't for their tunnel network, they'd all be long dead. To win in this scenario, Hamas can't just shoot rockets - they have to take the fight to Israel, and they have to do it in an asymmetric way, because with such a budget disparity they can't exactly win in line combat. This is what they did, the purpose of their entire operation was to destroy Israel's carte blanche and cut off their flow of foreign money. This is working, too. You mentioned earlier the West attacking Russia's logistics by imposing sanctions. Well, Hamas is trying to do the exact same thing. They know Israel is terminally dependent on foreign donations, and they're trying to reduce its international support so that their source is cut off. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/15/rate-of-russian-military-production-worries-european-war-planners They are very much given an ultimatum, see the final paragraphs of the article. The article doesn't say whether it's paid overtime or not, but even if it is, it's still basically forced labor, because, as the union leader said, there's no option to refuse those extra shifts. There, you'll find a detailed description as to why Russia is doing better than how you'd think it should be. The more decoupled a country is from the rest of the world, the less you can trust the raw dollar values. Demonstrably wrong. "Relevant resources" often being tooling and machinery, which in some cases might be unique, and has to be remanufactured to order. Heaven help you if your tooling factory has also been hit. Under peacetime conditions, I've seen people talk about two or three years to build a new factory, and I've seen construction of a large chemistry institute take about that long. To rebuild a destroyed facility of that sort, you first have to clear the site of debris (some of which may be explosive) and then build the factory anew. This is not going to improve matters. If some of it survived, it can be better, and you can probably cut some red tape from the process because you're at war, but in the end, it will always take time, during which you're without a chunk of your production. War in Ukraine has so far lasted less than it can take to build a factory from ground up, although if you hurried up with construction and started right as Putin marched in, you could be bringing the first factories online around now. You seem to have fallen into a sort of "equilibrium thinking" - it pretty much does come down to money if you've got infinite time. Sure enough, the longer a war goes on, the more things hinge on money, but at the same time, many wars do not last that long anymore (those that do tend to be insurgencies, see below). I never said that money doesn't matter. I've said that money is not omnipotent. You can lose a war by running out of money before the other side, and running them out of money is a viable strategy in some cases. However, there are other strategies that also work. Also, it's incorrect to dismiss Afghanistan as "failure of other things", when it's exactly what proves my point. Afghanistan wasn't won by Taliban out-beancounting the US. It was won by them simply outlasting the US' will to continue the war. You seem to imply that logistics only are what's required to win a war. Except the US had a better logistics than Taliban, and they still lost. They had better logistics than Vietnam, and still lost. This is not rare. Superpowers in general routinely lose to Afghanistan, and they also lose more and more often in guerilla wars. By your logic, Afghanistan should be an anomaly, but it isn't, because sometimes, wars are decided by other things than money. Drones did not save the US in Afghanistan, and AI would not have done so, either. I do take time to read and understand your walls of text (even if I don't quote in full, for compactness' sake), the least you can do is read and understand mine, because you misrepresented several of my points. You frequently spend several paragraph arguing against a point I did not make.

It's a problem on every aircraft that didn't start life as a Navy jet. That said, I haven't had trouble with PIO on landing, even early in my flying days. If you're slamming the bird down so hard that things start to break, you're probably doing it wrong, so to speak. PIO is really a pilot problem, not anything that has to do with the jet, unless it's an experimental prototype with controls tuning WIP. That doesn't apply to our Phantom, though. In fact, I'm pretty sure the landing gear will break before anything else does.

Not necessarily, missiles have small control surfaces, which means they need the speed to have enough air moving over them to be able to be able to pull Gs at all. Modern missiles are rated for very high G loads, but they also come with very small control surfaces to reduce drag, so they will be limited by their control surface authority more often than by G. Hence, they'll turn better the faster they go. That said, Meteor should not have major problems with that unless you try to use it in a dogfight (that's what Sidewinders are for).

Almost all that can be applied to the SLAM-ER, except the ability to RTB. It's not a weapon for purely preplanned targets, though you need to designate the target area. It does not put the pilot in harms' way (the whole point of ER part, and why Ukraine can't do much about Russian cruise missile bombers). Also, the older SLAM is very much not a rocket. It looks like one, but it has a jet engine. It uses a rocket booster for launch. SLAM-ER doesn't even do that, being air launched. Tomahawk, admittedly a much larger missile, can even loiter and search for targets on its own, acting almost like a typical drone. Also, aircraft very much can operate solo, this mission profile is called Battlefield Air Interdiction (BAI) and it is well known to the USAF. A TGP and an advanced radar go a long way. Again, you're stating that you can get a 1000$ drone, but not addressing the fact that such a drone is basically a toy modified for combat use. That works, fair enough, but is it going to stay that way? I don't think so. They are used in Ukraine right now, because they work. This doesn't mean that there will be no technologies similar to THOR in the near future, able to rapidly burn through multiple drones. This price point will likely not hold for a tactically useful drone in future conflicts. Missile and drone technology will likely continue to converge, as we're seeing in the Shahed line, and so will costs. This is not how what you know as "AI" works at all. Modular is one thing they are not. You also seem to be conflating "game AI" with the recent developments in LLMs, (which are mostly irrelevant to drones except for image recognition). Those two are completely different terms. In short, a "game AI" is actually a purely deterministic, algorithmic decision making system, which, given conditions, will take an appropriate action. You can use machine learning to do this, but this loses you the modularity. Any ML algorithm is a black box, you train the AI, but you don't really get to look inside its "brain", because it grows organically, and there are no clear "modules" you can separate. It's still deterministic, except it also becomes unpredictable, a very undesirable component in a weapon. Outside marketing buzzwords, Loyal Wingman will use algorithms that a human can understand, although it might be called AI because that's what games use to control NPCs. Nothing wrong with that, either, a good algorithm will take you a long way, and human pilots also follow them to a large extent. They could use limited ML routines for when the (human) leader commands them to engage. As an aside, Moore's Law has failed us quite a while ago: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/moores-laws-dead-nvidia-ceo-jensen-says-in-justifying-gaming-card-price-hike-11663798618 Gordon Moore himself predicted, in 2006, that (paraphrased) "we have about 10-20 years before we hit physical limits". He was right. You can no longer double the number of transistors (not performance, that stopped being linear even earlier) on a chip as easily as you used to. You make them too small, you get quantum tunneling effects between logic gates. The "2nm" architecture currently in development doesn't actually mean transistors will shrink by 50%, there'll be only a small reduction in gate pitch, from 48 to 45nm. Moore's law is over. Keep that in mind both when talking AI and planning your next PC. You do not need to lecture me about the importance of logistics. You do, however, fail to actually consider the whole picture. However, consider this: Israel's military has a budget of 23.4 billion USD. That means that 20 interceptors, which cost 50k each, make up about 0.00004% of it. It has been estimated that Hamas had an annual military budget of about 350 million. Let's assume an S-3 rocket costs 3k, so 20 of them would cost Hamas 0.00017% of their budget. So you can see that in a 1:1 exchange, Israel easily comes out on top, despite their missile costing more. A more realistic 3:1 exchange (it takes about 3 Iron Dome interceptors to kill one rocket) makes it almost even, but still, you can't make Israel poor that way, because while Hamas is mostly its military, Israel could vote to increase its budget. Given that any rocket that gets through can make way more than 50k in capital loses (all it needs to do is take out one high end workstation, or block a major road for a day), Iron Dome is, therefore, perfectly economical, given the context it's used in. Israel needs a way to deal with masses of several thousand rockets at a time, without covering half their territory in Iron Dome launchers. Also, it's obviously better to do the interceptions cheaper, because they're not going to go away. They also need to consider other kinds of threats, because your enemy isn't going to want to keep up a fight they're certain to lose. As it stands, the limitations of the system had been laid bare. Therefore, finding a system to overcome those limitations is presumably high on Israel's list. Wars are not beancounting contests, simply because you can't shoot the money. To do so, this money has to be turned into bullets, artillery shells and fuel, which need to be delivered to the front. This takes time, and time can also be quite valuable. Attacking any part of this chain has strategic value far beyond the numbers game - it's not just about what physically got blown up, but about the capability you lose, and the time that it takes to fix or get around the damage. Hence, an "uneconomical" defense can still be worthwhile, if it prevents you from taking a hit to something you can't replace. See Russia, which can handily outproduce EU while being pummeled by sanctions, while EU is sitting on gobs of money, but they can't actually buy any artillery shells because they don't exist, and neither do factories to make that many. Sure, you can pay money to expand manufacturing capability, but that's the long game (notably, EU pledged to make one million shells, and failed to do so, despite clearly having the dough). Ukraine won't need shells next year if it gets overrun right now. Also consider that cutting the supply lines by sanctions had not, so far, worked on Russia, simply because they're able to get by without our money. They have reserves, they have material stockpiles, the have unpaid convict labor. In fact, Putin had decreed, by fiat, that workers can be made to do extra, unpaid hours, that they can't refuse, or be fired. In other words, forced labor. Sure, I think we can see what this will do to quality and worker motivation, but first, see what it does to your nice and clean dollar figures. If pressed, a nation at war can run on empty, though it will have long term consequences. The only sure way to disrupt enemy supply lines is to blow them up, even slave labor can't do much if your fuel refinery is a burning pile of scrap and the ammo factory has just been spread over half the country. As Napoleon said, an army marches on its stomach. Good luck feeding them dollar bills, but if they run across an enemy food storehouse, they'll gladly help themselves. The point is, you can't reduce military problems to bare dollar values, you have to consider how and when those dollars are used. FYI, this discussion seems to be growing exponentially, so assume any points left unaddressed were due to lack of time on my part.

The rest of your points merit a longer response (and some slogging through Google Translate-mangled Hebrew), so I'll address just this one at the moment, with a simple question: how is that any different from a missile? If you have a "drone" with long range, a jet engine, an autonomous seeker and an autopilot, then you have, basically, a SLAM-ER. It will perform like one, cost like one, and probably even look a lot like one. All you can do is vary the size of the warhead, SLAM-ER is a pretty big missile, so if you shrink that, you'll shrink everything (warheads on FPV drones in Ukraine are small by missile standards). However, that will not reduce costs as much as you'd like, although there certainly is merit to an idea of huge swarms of small missiles. One of the major differences between drones and missiles is the control link. A DUKE-style jammer basically mitigates the drones' major cost advantage, which is remote control. It's overcome easily enough, by a more sophisticated MITL system, but sophisticated=expensive. This is also why onboard AI will never be used by cheap drones. In order to run anything that could be called "AI", you need a decent CPU. Which, as you know if you were looking for a computer upgrade recently, costs a pretty penny. If you want autonomous, you need to put a reasonably powerful chip on every drone, and that will run up costs, up to the point where you could ask, why not a missile swarm instead. The form of drone warfare that's most likely to revolutionize anything comes from the realization that you don't have to do that. Instead, all fancy equipment, even AI, can be located at a control station that doesn't get expanded with every shot. This, of course, has limitations of its own, notably vulnerability to jamming. Also, this single quote makes me question whether that article from which it comes from is worth anything: This is patently untrue. We are talking defensive weaponry, therefore, we have to weigh the price of defensive weaponry against the value of the attacker's intended target, not against the weapon used to attack it. If your burst of 30mm rounds costs less than the apartment building that would otherwise be hit, you're still coming out ahead, even if the drone that would have hit it is cheaper. Wars are not spending contests, although they sometimes look like they are. Spending more on defense than your attacker spends on offense is certainly suboptimal, but this is not "working against yourself" and is in fact quite tenable if you're not planning on winning the war on pure attrition (or you do, and have a vast reserve of resources you can only use for defence). Honestly, this whole quote reeks of the usual "AI glasses" and SF-like predictions about how it will revolutionize things. It is not a realistic assessment. AI is certainly going to be useful for target recognition, but that's about it. In fact, given the record in recent conflicts of human ability to tell between enemy command posts and schools or hospitals, I can see it improving on that. Well, either that, or we'll have war criminals hiding behind thoughtless machines. In fact, that is a good argument to preemptively ban autonomous weapons and unambiguously designate who are we going to drag into the Hague in case the ban gets violated. Just to make it clear that using a robot to commit war crimes doesn't absolve whoever ordered them. For missile guidance, you don't need AI. Poseidon and HGVs both have one thing in common: they're fast. Faster than most similar weapons, which accounts for the difficulty intercepting them. They do not use AI for anything. AI isn't magic (no matter how much techbros try to sell it as such), nor is it particularly superior to a well designed algorithm, or when it comes to evasion, to a simple random walk. Stick a microphone in the pitot tube and you'll have a perfectly serviceable hardware RNG to use for completely unpredictable evasion. There's no need for AI for strategic weapons, just going very fast towards the target coordinates, possibly with some random dodging before getting there. The article seems to be desperately trying to shoehorn AI into military uses that it is not suitable to. Conflating missiles and drones is just icing on the cake (and no, missiles aren't "clever", they use a straightforward, but highly optimized algorithm).

They can burst from overspeeding them while in contact with the ground.

I imagine in cold weather starts it could well be important. In such cases, the heater could be turned on well before the alignment to avoid INU trying to start up when cold. Does it actually work that way in the sim?

Yeah, we need FFB, but that's only recently began to even be feasible, due to patent troubles. I hope this gets more common now, IRL you get feedback through both stick and pedals, especially in a warbird. That said, the F-16 is a force sensing stick without anything like force feedback, and so is the Hornet. I imagine a lifelong F-16 driver would have similar trouble fighting in the real F-14, given that this was the case for this lifelong F-16 simmer. It takes a lot of practice to get rid of bad habits the Viper teaches you, it does so much for you that the way you operate the stick is very different from even the Hornet, nevermind an analog jet like the Tomcat. I'm better now, but the transition was hard. Also worth noting, Mover and Gonky fly enough DCS that the "real jet vs. simmer" argument doesn't really apply to them. They're familiar enough with flying without the cues that you don't get sitting in a chair. What we saw in the video can be entirely attributed to Mover not being accustomed to flying something that doesn't hold your hand.

That's why Russians routinely put theirs on masts, and some Western ones come with one already attached. This is not a new problem and it has known solution. They are popular in other conflicts, too, they just don't get the same kind of coverage. Another reason is that Ukraine is the big state vs. state conflict, with both sides having considerable funding and resources. Every other currently ongoing conflict is an insurgency, where one side has to scrape by with whatever resources they can get, and the other has enough conventional forces not to need to innovate (or they don't think they need to), on top of the fact that even the state in question is typically smaller and has less money than Ukraine. Hence, the drones used there are less advanced and the press is less interested in them. Insurgents use them all the time in Myanmar, for instance, and Hamas nailed a few Israeli tanks. It did, they just won't officially admit they ignored it. For all their reputation, Israelis were about as bad as the Russians early on. This was a human failure, not that of equipment. That's because they've been designed in the pre-drone era. Now that the drones are a threat, countermeasures will be developed. The US already has the DUKE IED jammer, which could probably be improved, and they've demonstrated THOR, which is an energy weapon that can take out entire swarms. Russia is fielding a variety of anti-drone systems, some of which have already been countered by Ukraine. It's only a matter of time before drones, except the most sophisticated ones, are rendered practically useless against a peer enemy. Of course, protecting against drones has a cost of its own, but they're not the wonder weapon some people think they'll be. AI can help with target recognition and identification, but for guidance, you don't need it. In fact, a drone is remarkably close to a MITL missile system like SLAM-ER, except slower, smaller and fully dependent on its datalink, but cheaper. You can use any old guidance algorithm, such as a contrast seeker, running on the control unit. However, while this could occasionally allow you to hit a slow moving helo, it still won't turn the drone into an AA missile.