Wildwind

Even when I did have the gamma set at 2.2, I couldn't see the indexer light. Right now my gamma is set at 1.8, because at 2.2 I can't see the HUD in level flight some aircraft because the sky is too bright at horizon level. The only time I've ever been able to see the red or green arrows on the indexer, regardless of my gamma setting, is when the shadows of the cockpit rail fall over the indexer, in which case I can see it (but it still doesn't stand out, and isn't remotely as bright as the ones in the Hornet, Viper, or A-10)..

No, that was me. I haven't started with the A yet, as I don't feel I've quite mastered the B. My biggest challenge right now is flying the pattern correctly. In the training missions with the gates, i can do it just fine, but without that visual reference I get out of shape (usually in terms of gaining or losing altitude without realizing it) quickly. I really need to spend a lot of time working on low-speed fine control (and on my overall awareness) in general, not just in the landing context (though, landing is about the only time I ever get that slow). Flying fast is easy, but flying slow is hard. I've been trying to work out a good way to practice those skills besides just flying the pattern over and over again. I think where I am really suffering is in the basic skills that all real pilots learn from their instructors before they ever fly solo - things like making level turns. But I'm not sure how to go about learning those skills in a sim.

I wasn't attempting to give a definitive answer, just suggesting that my limited experience with this suggests it isn't a good idea.

Completed this campaign tonight, and this was the most fun I have had in DCS, hands-down. The whole campaign is great, with a great variety of missions. I was surprised to find that I enjoyed the strike missions every bit as much as the air-to-air missions. The low-level strike mission in particular was a blast. The Tomcat does a pretty good imitation of a Viggen, it turns out (though my wingman seemed to crash every time I ran this one. I guess I was flying a little too low for the AI to keep up, or maybe cutting the corners to sharply). The final mission in particular is especially epic. Now it's time to go back and do it again, hopefully this time with no deaths or ejections (have I mentioned I am not especially good at carrier landings yet?)

Looks like I have been dropping them a bit too fast (I dropped a set in a mission tonight at 500 knots indicated at 35,000 feet, which would be both over the KIAS and Mach number limits, I think). I kinda suspected that was dangerous. Looks like I will have to start dropping them sooner. Oh, well, that gives me an excuse to use afterburners when climbing to altitude. If I'm gonna drop the fuel anyway, might as well use it. My experience with this (from forgetting to drop them a couple of times) is that hard maneuvering with the tanks on tends to lead rapidly to sudden departure from controlled flight.

...now I need to look again, because I swear I searched for Fire in the settings several times and that was not there. ...and I just checked again, and it's still not there. I guess somehow I don't have the latest update? Odd. I am on Open Beta. I blame Steam for this.

I just love its ornery, stubborn, analog, flight characteristics. It feels so very alive when you fly it. My first car was a 1965 Mustang; rebuilt the motor myself. Since the missing data plate on my Mustang meant no collector would ever buy it, I was free to modify it, and so I did. Shelby headers, Edelbrock manifold, Holley carb, roller rockers, plate-bored .030 over... that car was hot, and she would smoke a lot of newer cars off the line, but she was a real handful to drive (I attribute the fact that I'm a pretty good driver now to that Mustang; she taught me to respect cars and forced me to learn skills I might have otherwise missed out on). All that V8 weight in the front, dragster gears in the back, three-speed transmission, total lack of modern conveniences... but she was light and had a ton of power and (after I rebuilt it and lowered the front an inch Shelby-style) she would handle... as long as you knew how to handle her. If you didn't, she would get out of shape really fast. Flying the Tomcat is like driving that old Mustang, but turned up to 11. All the performance you could ever want is there, but to draw it out you've got to treat her right. Get reckless or careless and, just like that Mustang, she'll throw the tail out and you'll be spinning off to nowhere in a heartbeat. She's wild, unruly, temperamental, and I love that about her. I will definitely grant that not having to fiddle with the radar and being able to focus on flying it is a bonus, for sure.

See, I think that's exactly the reason I feel the way I do about it - I wanted to be a RL fighter pilot. Desperately. In fact, I almost went to the Air Force Academy, had my recommendation and everything... and let someone talk me out of it (well, really, someone told me I was too tall and wouldn't be able to fly fighters, and I believed them, and then later found out that was more true for some fighters and less true for others). A decision I've long regretted (I mean, would I have made it? Who knows... few do. But I deeply regret not trying). So... when I fly in DCS, I'm basically living the life I wanted to have and didn't. So I try to make it as real as I possibly can. (It occurs to me that someone is probably asking the question, "If he wanted to be Air Force, why is he flying the Tomcat primarily?" And the answer to that question is that I bought the Tomcat because the plane I really wanted (a full-fidelity F-15) doesn't exist in DCS. And then after flying it, I just fell in love with it, and I've spent as much time flying the Tomcat as all the other planes I have combined since.

Yeah, it's really kind of a range of playstyles, rather than a binary thing. I mean, I know there are people out there who are way more hardcore about realism than I am, who want every little detail to be perfect, and they go and form squadrons with other like-minded people and pretty much re-create reality as best they can.. And then there's someone like me... I'm still pretty serious about realism, and want the real experience as much as possible, but I knows I don't have the time (or the patience) to go quite that far. And then there's someone else who wants things to be mostly realistic but maybe wants to idealize things a little bit. This may be you, I'm not sure? I kinda get the impression that you want to be able to fly the plane to its very limits every single time, which is kind of an idealized version of reality (and I don't mean this as any kind of criticism, at all. We all do this to an extent, and it's really a question of which things we choose to idealize. I sometimes like to load up a plane at Nellis and then go blasting down the Vegas strip at 500+ knots 50 feet off the ground, which... well, realistically, you could do that... once ) One of the advantages of sim is you can have that sort of thing when you want it. And then there's someone out there who wants to fly realistic missions but is totally in it for the multiplayer, and they aren't so hardcore as to go in for a closed squadron, but they are willing to accept a bit more casual environment to have that social aspect. And then there's someone else out there who just wants to fight and win and wants the airquake mechanics (but still wants a realistic flight model, which is why he's not playing War Thunder or something else). And there's room for all those folks. Or, at least, there is as long as you don't try to put them all on the same server, because then there will be friction.

I don't begrudge you your playstyle. I'm perfectly content playing single-player and running campaigns. But, invariably someone comes along asking questions like, "Why don't more people play multiplayer?" (someone just posted a thread to that very effect on Reddit just two days ago, in fact), and ultimately, this is the answer: my preferred playstyle doesn't mix well with the playstyles of most players on public multiplayer servers.. To me this is much more "simulation" than "game". It's only to be expected that someone who views it differently would have different priorities.

Believe this is only on the -A. I've spent a lot of time practicing carrier deck landings in the -B lately (still need a lot more practice, too), and have only heard "Tomcat ball"

Yeah, pretty much. I'm aware of the serious multiplayer groups/squadrons existing, and I would love to be a part of something like that, but it's a bigger time commitment than I can make right now, unfortunately. I have great respect for those groups, though. Since I can't commit the time to be part of a serious squadron like that, and I don't want to deal with those on public servers who aren't interested in accurate simulation, I'm pretty much stuck with single-player for now.

Well, we know historically that the TF-30's don't behave well at low throttle settings. Could be that this is just a manifestation of that behavior? By that I mean, is the "surge" that you're seeing at a certain throttle setting a reflection of the fact that the engine just doesn't perform very well below that setting?

The behavior of the flaps is correctly modeled. The fact that the F-14's flaps could and often would jam if deployed at speeds or G-loads beyond what was specified in the NATOPS is well-documented. I have to laugh at the person who says this isn't a problem based on their experience in other airplanes. This was an issue specific to the F-14. Of course you wouldn't see it in other airframes. The technical reason that they were prone to this failure is also well-documented. See the quote above from Victory's post on the subject. As for "practicing the way you fight", I suggest you practice in a way so as not to cripple your aircraft so that you can then fight in a way that won't cripple your aircraft. If the only way you know how to win is by using your flaps in ways that are likely to break them, in real life, you're going to have a problem if you get into a war because pretty soon your squadron is going to run out of planes because they are all down getting their flaps repaired. As for "I'll just get another plane, it's just a game", players like you are one of the reasons I don't play multiplayer in DCS.

Doing it on the fly is not really viable for bandwidth reasons. Desync is a problem already; trying to transfer graphical data to every client when an aircraft with a custom skin enters would not help matters. Either you transfer it to every client on the server the moment the player joins - which will inevitably lag the server while it is happening - or you try to load it to a client when they come into a certain range of that aircraft - which will make desync issues at the merge worse than they already are. I don't play multiplayer in DCS, but I've played enough other multiplayer games and know enough about how netcode works (I am a software engineer and work on distributed applications every day) that the problems with doing something like this are pretty apparent. There just really isn't any way to do it effectively. If every player had a great connection to the server all the time, something like this could possibly be done, but in the current state of the Internet that is not something you can rely on. Besides this, nothing would stop a user from creating obscene/offensive liveries and inflicting them on everyone else even if it was otherwise feasible. Having played some racing games which do make custom liveries available in multiplayer (Forza Horizon, for one example), I have seen a fair amount of this. In order to prevent that, someone would have to vet every custom livery before it could be used on a multiplayer server - and I don't think ED is going to be hiring the staff to do that. Another thing to consider is that DCS is a RAM hog as it is on many maps. Making all the other players store your custom livery in memory won't help matters. Sure, you may have enough RAM that it's not a problem - but not everyone does. The current scheme works fine. If someone actually cares about seeing someone else's custom livery in MP, they can download it. If they don't care, then they don't care, and at that point what does it matter?

The turn rate is messed up at the moment. A few degrees/sec short of where it should be. That said, exactly as you suggested, Heatblur has already fixed this internally (they had it fixed the day after it was reported) and we are just waiting on the next ED patch for the fix to go in.

Based on using the VKB replica of the grip, I've found the stop is actually very convenient. Aside from serving as something of a safety (i.e. you don't go out of OFF unless you want to, and you don't go back into OFF (which is also ORD in ground-attack mode) unless you want to, it also means that when switching from either missile type to GUN, you can just thumb it down 'til it stops and not worry about feeling the individual clicks to know what position it's in. Since you obviously don't want to be looking at the stick while you are flying, it removes some ambiguity.

Yeah, I pretty much only play single-player, so the oddity of the AI (which has Skyrim archery-target psychic SA, and often UFO flight model, but isn't all that smart) probably plays a large role in my experience.

I see. Well, in that case, obviously you are correct.

This is not actually correct for AIM-54. It does not automatically go active. It is commanded by the F-14 WCS to go active. Of course, that happens automatically, so I will grant that this is nitpicking. I can only speak from my personal experiences, obviously, but I've had less than a 25% hit rate with Phoenix inside of 20 nm, whereas it's more like 65-70% between 20 and 25 nm. And the AI doesn't seem to do much better at that range than I do. My TacView recordings suggest that this may be because Phoenix lofts too much at short range. Edit: Ugh. WTF? Stupid forum software wouldn't let me delete an completely irrelevant screenshot (taken in the mission I just flew, so it was on the Clipboard) I accidentally pasted in.

Fire extinguisher, please? It's completely impossible to get to those buttons in the clickable cockpit (I just spent quite a while trying while my right engine burned), and there's no binding option for them. So if you get an engine fire, you're screwed.

The behavior as you describe it with Jester is the correct behavior for AIM-54, other than the TTI jumping to 16 seconds (which is, as already noted by HB, a workaround for the incorrectly-computed TTI prior to that point), until they can implement a real solution for it. In TWS, the missile should be SARH until it goes active. In STT, the missile will never go active, it is SARH all the way to the target. This is how the Phoenix behaved in real life. As a note to those who are saying Phoenix is not effective right now... in single player last night, I found that Phoenix launched from TWS was plenty effective. I fired... 4 vs. Tu-22M at 45-40 nm, nose aspect, splash four 2 vs. MiG-23 at 25-20 nm, nose aspect, splash two 2 vs. MiG-21 at 25-20 nm, nose aspect, splash two 2 vs. MiG-25 at 25-20 nm, nose aspect, splash one So, 9 hits out of 10 missiles. This is consistent with my previous experiences with Phoenix - when shooting at AI fighters, 20-25 nm is the sweet spot. Farther or closer is likely to miss, but it's very lethal in that range bracket. I believe these were all 54A Mk47 as that's what the Cage the Bear campaign tends to load by default, but I didn't check this on every mission to be sure. My AI wingman scored one hit out of three Fox Three calls during those missions, but he was firing at ranges I consider too close for Phoenix (~15 nm). This is where one ought to be using Sparrow... ...except that Sparrow is broken in that it does not track in PD-STT, as others have noted. Using it in PAL last night, I scored two kills in two shots, so it's still useful at WVR, but this definitely limits its overall usefulness. Sidewinder is Sidewinder, and I scored two kills with it (1 MiG-21, 1 MiG-25) on four shots.

The Sparrow problem alone is probably worthy of an AFU grade, IMO, without even getting into the Phoenix and its behavior since the last patch.

Thanks, I'll check that out.

I know how AoA works. I majored in aerospace engineering for a couple of semesters in college before I realized there were no jobs in that field at the time and so switched to Computer Science. My descent angle was obviously not 7.9 degrees or I would have had a lot bigger problems than my LSO grade! My descent rate (again, per Tacview) there was a little high (-870, when one would like it to be -750 or less) but my descent angle was nowhere close to -7.9 degrees. Also, in TacView I was visibly angled up from the deck at touchdown. I tried watching the track to confirm that, but as seems to be the case more often than not, the track did not play back correctly.