Fromthedeep

The 24 is such a complex beast that it's basically impossible to reverse engineer the implementation without being intimately familiar with the weapon IRL. There really should be much better documentation as to what exactly is simulated from the different profles in mode 1, otherwise it's going to require hundreds upon hundreds of drops to get some kind of testing data and try to figure out what works and what doesn't. So, in my opinion there should be a clear and comprehensive writeup about the expected implementation and from there we can determine how well it matches up.

I can't, I'm not a US citizen. And while I'd be more than happy to shell out the money to gather all the pubs, the lawyer fees would be even more expensive and I'm not too keen on figuring out what the federal prison system is like. From the inside.

And yet there was a -34 being sold on Ebay a while ago. Now that doesn't mean it would be possible to legally acquire it for a commercial product, but I'd be willing to be good money that if you search hard enough, as a US person, you would be able to get in touch with someone who has the pubs.

Yeah, I certainly wouldn't fly 90s era AJS-37 on a historically accurate Cold War server but most public DCS servers care about gameplay instead of historical accuracy. So I don't doubt that the upcoming Vietnam server will be perfectly fine with Mig-21Bis/Mig-19P vs post DSGC slatted F-4E and F-5E. Out of those, the only one that actually fits is the F-4E. With that being said, that's a very specific case, because the AJ-37 and the AJS-37 mainly differs in things that you can control. It doesn't have a different radar, engine, flight characteristics, bombing modes, etc. Aside from weapon restriction, you shouldn't use the TERNAV and the DTC and you shouldn't use the ELINT capabilities and now you have some minor cockpit differences. Out of the previous list, the A-7E is kinda in this regard, but the A-6E (depending on the variant, we may end up with a SWIP) can be somewhat different or drastically different. It also doesn't help that the Migs aren't Vietnam era variant either. For a proper Vietnam era USAF vs VPAF lineup, we'd need at the very least a Mig-21PFM, a Mig-17F, a Mig-19S and F-105, A-1 for the US. The USN is a lot more complicated case, but you can still kinda cobble something together with the F-4J and the A-4, and if you aren't too strict about historical accuracy, the A-7E. As far as HB, Cobra already talked about how providing multiple variants isn't a choice that can be sustainable long term, because it takes a ton of resources to provide them. I wouldn't be surprised if the F-4 was the last product where they provide multiple variants.

Well, the A-7E we're getting also has some other differences like the HARM control panel. An A-6E TRAM also has a different radar than the early A-6Es and we don't know if we get a TRAM in the first place. We could end up with a SWIP, which has other differences like the missile control panel, different bombing modes and such.

Those are going to be 70s or 80s modules, the A-6 and the A-7 are not going to be a Vietnam era appropriate variants.

Even as a completely different module, I don't see anyone taking on the project unfortunately. Interestingly enough, it does have an almost "MFD", it has a digital SMS panel and it's mechanized similarly to an MFD but it looks like those old calculators with huge orange letters. It's gloriously retrofuturistic.

I also agree with the other guy, and I'd rather see a Block 10. A Block 1 with black radome is not very representative, and the Block 10 would fit in well with the upcoming Kfir and F-4E for Israeli campaigns. The biggest issue I have with the current Cold War lineup is that I feel it's very unlikely that anyone will pick up the F-16A or early F-15A/C and due to this, land based bluefor will have a pretty serious disadvantage against the upcoming Mig-23/Mig-29 combo. In game, blue will be at a severe disadvantage in terms of weaponry, radar performance and BFM capabilities and that's simply not historically accurate. The early F-14A can help with this, but that requires adding in a USN carrier group to a Fulda Gap environment and F-14s providing OCA over Germany just doesn't sound that good to me. They would have their own place in a GIUK or upcoming Kola environment doing their own stuff with the rest of the Air Wing.

No, that's not an ad hominem. Ad hominem is when you're trying to argue your point and win the debate by demonstrating some kind of real or perceived fault in your opponent's character. So when you and other people are trying to discredit the OP and imply that the point they are raising must come from a lack of knowledge, you're arguing from a fallacious point. Realizing this and calling out destructive behaviour that destroys the debate is not ad hominem, it cannot be by definition, because that's not part of debate, it's a something that's noted about the nature of the debate itself. Think about it like this: if there's a debate being held in an open area and when a huge rainstorm makes it impossible to pretty much do anything, if a participant says that 'guys, we cannot continue in these conditions', it doesn't mean they concede their position, or that what they say is an argument within the context of the debate. It's a meta statement about the conditions of the debate itself. The reasonable approach here would be to describe in general terms what adverse yaw is, what causes in normal conditions, what sort of design decisions are present on the F1 and then quantifying how much adverse yaw should be caused based on the characteristics of the aircraft, how much is being shown in game and comparing the two. Obviously this requires very robust knowledge, so this thread never really got over the first step; describing what adverse yaw is and what causes it. That's not the question, the question is how much should the F1 display. The other possible way to tackle this problem is to have an SME, who has flown the aircraft comment on the behaviour. edit: typos, grammatical mistakes

This is very interesting, thank you for your input and taking your time to ask your friend about it. I wonder if Aerges can verify this with their own Spanish pilots who help with the development of the module.

Why? I've already explained to you what ranging does. If you know the elevation in advance, you can calculate height above target, and now the limfac is the instrumentation/equipment of the aircraft. If the INS/ADC/instruments are so poor quality and inaccurate that the solution will be useless, what would a ranging radar or range finder help with that? The way a computed bomb delivery works is that the computer inside the aircraft solves the bombing triangle, calculates aircraft velocity vector, and taking into account weapon ballistic data, environmental and aircraft parameters, it displays the solution/steering commands to the pilot. The bomb travels in a ballistic arc, with three parameters that we need to be aware of. It will have a downrange travel, which is the horizontal distance it covers from the release point ot the impact point, it will have a self explanatory time of fall, and the values of these will result in a trajectory drop, which is the angular value of the ballistic arc that the bomb will follow during its flight path. The behaviour of the bomb will depend on its inherent ballistic parameters (weight, shape, etc.) that are described in ballistic tables, the parameters of the aircraft at the point of weapon release (altitude, AoA, airspeed, attitude, yaw and G at release) and the environmental factors (temperature, air density, wind). For a given environment, if you know the ballistic characteristics of the bomb, you can determine a set of aircraft parameters where the trajectory drop will have the same exact value in mils. If you do some math, you can set your pipper at the necessary depression or sight angle so that if the aircraft parameters are correct, the sight will depict the point where the trajectory drop of the bomb intersects with the target. If the parameters are incorrect (you're too high, fast, etc.) the sight will depict a false solution, and the bomb will land to a different point depending on the deviation. This is what happens during manual bombing, you follow the proper set of parameters and if you release at the proper altitude, dive angle, speed with the appropriate depression set, once the pipper intersects the target the trajectory drop of the bomb will also be at the target. Of course, this is a simplification because environmental factors and ballistic imperfections but if we assume that you do it correctly, you'll hit the target. But what if you release during the dive that one of the parameters are incorrect? For example, if you're too fast, the sight picture will be short and the bomb will land long, because at lower AoA at releas and lower TOF, the trajectory drop is also shallower so the bomb will land long of the target (you would need your pipper to be less depressed to be accurate). Let's say you're an experienced bomber, and you know this and you adjust based on feel, experience and you release it earlier than when the reticle and the target intersects. This will of course no going to be perfect, because you won't exactly know how much you should adjust exactly. But in theory, it can be quantified, depending on your current release airspeed a computer could calculate the new trajectory drop, the pipper could adjust itself based on computed input and you could still drop exactly at pipper-target intersection and still be accurate. This is what CCIP does. So, what do we need to make such a computer? You need a ballistic computer that can take the characteristics of the bomb into account. These characteristics have been determined and are described in the bombing tables, and the memory available is obviously more than enough in the 80s to upload something like that to a computer. (Case in point the many aircraft with CCIP/RP in the 80s) Now, you need aircraft parameters as well. Airspeed, velocity vector, angle of attack, attitude are all values that even the CE knows. If you have an air data computer and an INS, you can determine all of these parameters, and now you need to solve the bombing triangle and present the solution to the pilot. The bombing triangle is a right triangle consisting of ground range, slant range and height above target and depending on what parts of the triangle you have available, the computer can use trig to determine the missing part and calculate the impact point of the bomb. If all the four requirements are fulfilled, you have a computed solution that is significantly superior to the manual sight and now you don't have to eyeball slight corrections. What active ranging sources do is determine the slant range and using that and sensor look angle, they can calculate all the missing parts of the triangle. But you can directly input height above target and if you have an INS that knows present position and target position, you'll have a ground range as well, and now you can calculate the rest of the triangle and get a solution. The height above target source can be the difference between current altitude MSL and target elevation MSL or if you assume that the target isn't at a significantly higher location than the rest of the area compared to sea level, you can use AGL as well for the calculation (not going to be a good idea if you want to bomb a radar on top of a hill). Using the radar altimeter will give you a constant readout of your altitude AGL and that can be used by the computer to target. Since the EE will have an INS, in theory nothing is stopping it to have just as good effects against preplanned targets and targets at a flat terrain as an aircraft woul with a laser or radar ranging capability. What could be an issue is inaccurate ballistic data, inaccurate instruments and INS that give erroneous values to the computer and then garbage in-garbage out. But that wouldn't be mitigated even if you have an active ranging source because the computer needs an accurate velocity vector regardless of how you solve the triangle. The other advantages of this method over manual bombing is that an INS can also be used to directly measure wind as well and compensate for that. Keep in mind that the logic of this applies to all computed bombing modes, not just CCIP.

Not at all. The point you were making was that without AGR there's no point in having CCIP, because the CEP would be too high, therefore, the EE likely didn't have CCIP either. Obviously aside from the logical fallacy (just because it may not work well, it doesn't necessarily mean the aircraft didn't have that capability), the discussion here is to demonstrate that other platforms can be effective at CCIP without using active ranging sources. The point I was making with the DTED of the A-10 is that if you have access to the elevation of the target point, you can have pretty good success even without using active ranging. An aircraft in the 80s couldn't have a database as extensive as an A-10 would in 2022 but spy satellites were a thing even back then, and scientists had good enough tools for topography to make elevation maps of the Earth's surface. Would the Spanish Air Force have the necessary infrastructure to do this? I don't know. NATO as a whole most certainly did, and the inaccuracy only becomes an issue if there's severe elevation differences ie. the target's on a hill. If you're trying to bomb a warehouse, or airfield or Red Army truck park on flat terrain with a stick of dumb bombs, the elevation data would most likely be more than good enough, so that it won't be the limfac. The advantage of modern databases is the fact that you can use it in dynamic situations for targets of opportunity. Having the intel guys come up with the elevation at a specific target point is good enough for an 80s engagement and that's definitely in the realm of capabilities of NATO at that time. If you know what you need to strike in advance, you don't need to have the memory to have the database for an entire country, you just need an INS waypoint with the elevation of where the target is, and if it's not on top of a hill, you likely won't be having any issues. Not sure I follow you. If you have a way of caculating the bombing triangle (and having the target elevation in advance is one of way doing that), what you need is ballistic data for the bombs (that you'd have), a way of knowing aircraft acceleration, attitude, airspeed, AOA and wind. You do need an air data computer and INS for that (or something along those lines, whatever you wanna call them) and there are very well documented instances of contemporary fighters (like the F-16A) having good enough INS in that timeframe to be effective at using CCIP against preplanned targets. (Operation Opera). Remember, that if you know the target's elevation or if it's on flat terrain, having a ranging radar does not give you any advantages. The limfac here is the accuracy of ownship data needed for the calculations. Now whether or not the Mirage F1EE specifically had good enough INS/instrumentation to be effective in that role is a completely different question, but at that point, we're not talking about generic theory of CCIP bombing, but a specific piece of equipment. And judging the effectiveness of a specific INS is impossible without direct empirical evidence. It is theoretically possible in the timeframe to be very effective with similar type of equipment. Whether or not the EE had this capability and if it did how effective it was in practice is something neither of us knows. (Although it is not me who made definitive statements regardless of this problem.) Even in DCS, the Viggen is using its QFE altimeter for air to ground ranging for some of its computed bombing modes, there are modes where the radar is not used at all for ranging. And it's an effective bomber, and an AJ-37 is in fact an older platform than an upgraded 80s era Mirage F1. That's a different question all together, and we can discuss that once we've learned if the EE is going to have CCIP or not. I'm not saying it had. You guys said that it didn't, and the common reasoning for that is either that a.) it didn't have active ranging or b.) it was not used for air to ground by the Spanish Air Force. I was explaining why an active ranging source is not needed for CCIP/computed bombing so the logic that you're trying to argue from (the EE has no AGR, therefore it won't have CCIP) is simply erroneous. Just because it didn't have AGR, you cannot conclude that it won't have CCIP either. It could use a QFE altimeter, INS waypoint data or a radar altimeter for ranging. B.) is an even weaker reason, just because an aircraft was not used for a certain mission set doctrinally, it doesn't mean it couldn't perform that mission set if the doctrine changed. The F-15A/C in USAF service didn't operationally do air to ground and yet it still had an assortment of bombing modes and even guided weapon integration for that role.

There's nothing theoretical about it, the A-10's heavily rely on their digital terrain elevation database for CCIP/strafing and I've never heard of any A-10 pilot saying it has issues with accuracy compared to let's say an F-16. They also have a way of directly inputting target elevation through the UFC rocker if it's given by the JTAC and it's more than good enough, especially for forward firing weapons. The big limfac without an active ranging source, is that there are certain caveats to mission planning. If you're using the QFE or radar altimeter for the bombing triangle, it's not going to work if the target is on an elevated position like on top of a hill. If you're trying to hit preplanned targets or enemy infrastructure, the limiting factor will be what the intel guys and targeteers will give you. If you have a good enough satellite map or whatever source that can give you coordinates to the enemy location and an accurate elevation for the target point, the limiting factor will be wind and pilot skill and the interent inaccuracy of dumb bombing, assuming your INS/air data computer all work properly. Ranging sources are not magic either, a laser rangefinder doesn't work well at shallow grazing angles or if there's high humidity, clouds, dust, hail or any kind of debris in the target area and radar ranging depends on geometry, if the terrain is very hilly or variable depending on the width of your radar cone, it can get erroneous values. If you know your target coordinates in advance and you can get mensurated coordinates and very accurate target elevation, feeding in the elevation of the target point to the computer is the most accurate, reliable and surefire way of dumb bombing. But now intel is the limfac, and of course, it's not going to work all that well against movers but using CCIP against movers is also not that great of an idea in the first place.

What exactly? Someone had the real life EE manual and combed through it and found no evidence or a real life EE pilot/avionics tech joined in, or perhaps Aerges made a comment or what? Do you perhaps remember what the evidence was, even if you don't know where you've seen it? If the only source is Discord channel that may include someone saying something, at this point it's fair to say that no one actually knows what to expect, or at the very least, there's no reputable source that confirm this one way or another. Keep in mind that CCIP does not require air to ground ranging by a radar or laser rangefinder. Active ranging sources are the best way to calculate the bombing triangle but this is not a requirement, so if people assume that it doesn't have CCIP or computed bombing because the radar is the same as the CE, it can easily be the case of an educated guess that may end up being wrong getting repeated over and over again. It also isn't about what I choose to believe, as I don't believe anything. It just that there are people who make statements in no uncertain terms, and I'm wondering if there's anything that can be used to verify these claims.

No offense, but I've seen this being repeated over and over again, is there any actual data or documentation to prove this to be the case? Or perhaps SME statements?

I wonder why they needed an INS in the first place for an air defense interceptor, that I assume was almost exclusively intended to protect Spanish territory with ample GCI coverage and more than enough beacons to navigate around.

Well, the C7 looks fairly sophisticated, with an MFD, a HUD, INS and so on. I've collected some pictures here: https://imgur.com/a/7mkw6c7 As we can see, some sources indicate that the C2 does in fact have a HUD (and it very much reminds me of the A-7s HUD), and even on the oldest looking pictures, there's some kind of UFC screen on both the, the ATAC agressor variant seemingly lacks the INS, but it does different screens (if I were to guess, the new screen above the UFC is a radio control panel, and the screen on the right is maybe some kind of GPS unit). There's a weapon selector dial for the C2 with multiple different settings and according to the CMO database, it does have a ranging radar. If assume that the HUD pictures are reliable, I think we can expect some level of computed bombing even for the C2. Please be advised that these are images I've found randomly on the internet, so I cannot verify with a reputable source that they indeed depict the variant that they state to be depicting, take them with a grain of salt.

Does anyone know what kind of avionics we can expect from a C2? HUD, INS, computed or manual bombing, self lasing?

In my experience, people, especially the ones who derive enjoyment out of imaginary street cred the delude themselves with by "mastering" old, non FBW fighters that are rumored to be difficult to handle care very little about how the actual aircraft functions in real life. There's this trend in flight simming (which is likely the result of the simplistic modelling of very old sims) that difficult is more realistic. So if the aircraft is bobbing and weaving all over the sky it's surely going to be more realistic than a well mannered aircraft because the real aircraft must be difficult to fly, even if this doesn't reflect real behaviour.

The EQ-5's pod, based on the footage looks fairly modern to me. I don't think it's reasonable to expect this to come out in this decade. Since DCS literally doesn't model the vast majorty of factors that give depth to LGB deliveries, the difference is pretty much negligible. The only way to have captivating, old-school cool air to ground gameplay is with manual bombing. I'm not sure how that makes any kind of sense. The M2000 is a modernized, 90s era fighter bomber with advanced fly by wire, highly capable Fox 1s, a great PD radar and a plethora of computed dumb bomb delivery options. Apples to orangutans.

I highly doubt there's enough data to actually properly implement these variants. While it's obviously subjective, I'd much prefer them to focus on other prevalent, old school platforms that the Spanish Air Force utilized in the 70s and the 80s, like the F-104 and the Mirage III, instead of yet another smart bomb truck. I'm willing to be that most people like the F1 due to its highly challenging and skill reliant playstyle. Using LGBs and guided anti ship missiles completely defeat that purpose, and at that point, it would be one of the many smart weapon capable multirole fighters that we have in DCS.

Did Aerges indicate that they would be interested in non Spanish variants once these are complete?

The issue is that it's not objective quality that determines price but perceived quality. Most people (I'd say vast majority of DCS players) simply do not know what level of fidelity DCS modules aim for, especially when compared to other, civil aviation focused products. Every developer wants to generate as much profit as possible and the pricing is chosen to reflect this. So if there are enough people who think DCS modules are worth 150 or even 200 bucks and this reaches a critical mass, there's no incentive for developers to not increase their prices to this level. The other rule (albeit an anecdotal one) is that most niche games and free to play titles make the vast majority of revenue from enthusiasts (or whales) that buy most products anyway. Realistically speaking 150 would be extreme, but an increase to 100 EA and 120 full price for the upcoming highly coveted modules like the F-15E, F-4 and EF2000 is not an asinine theory in my opinion. And if people complain, trolls like Zhukov will come out of the woodwork to give you the daily dose of elitism and classism.

Where did you read that?

And many of those are a husk of what they should be with a tiny fraction of their real life capability and system logic. But just because certain regulations apply to US aircraft you can't assume the same will be true for Swedish ones. People have talked about in the past that the datalink in the JA-37 serves the basis for the indigenous datalink of the Gripen as well.