Steelpanther

thx for tip on the controller. But yea I know what cranking is and I watched some growling f-pole manouver video. Cranking is typically 45deg or more turn away from bandit, keeping him locked at the gimbal limit. In hypothetical 1v1 scenario it reduces closure rate as long as enemy keeps same heading and makes possible missile shot fly longer path. Keeping the lock also helps your own SA. Keeping the lock in case you managed to shoot also provides the midcourse updates to AMRAAM. In case of eagle max possible crank angle should be about 55deg off the nose (within 60deg) I've been practicing it against flanker in the quick mission. I don't know how else to practice against F-16 and the like. Maybe in the mission editor it can be done. I'm not very good with the mission editor I just put planes out there and hope for the best. Notching I'm not totally sure about but I heard its something to do with the radar and doppler effect, or maybe it was also about putting the AMRAAM at your 3-9 line, as a purely defensive move. I've heard online that the notching would somehow lose radar lock with doppler effect but I didn't fully understand it. If a bandit was notching (beaming) so that the heading crossing angle would be 90deg towards yourself using the radar. It would be true that the enemy would not contribute to the closure rate very much. I would still be moving forwards at lets say 450kts. So I suspect there would still be some closure rate between me and target which may or may not be detectable. It seems as though the true closure rate between sensor platform and target seem to be the key factor in the radar detection, more so than any specific angular geometric arrangement between the sensor and the target. If I was chasing an F-16 in a tailchase flying at closure rate of zero and looking down from above at the F-16. I think I would not be able to see the F-16 probably... (unless the radar could show the difference in pulse return time). I suspect there is some minimum value for closure rate that is the key. I think I read from somewhere that F-15 radar sometimes might see fast moving cars on the ground (probably speedsters!). At the risk of embarrassing myself I will give those above as my thought experiment about notching. I'm not truly sure whats the best way to do it ingame. But I would still say that with eagle's radar headon hot aspect radar detection at 45mile against viper is not exactly speaking inspiring confidence in the eagle's radar equipment. I think with that kind of detection range, you must probably crank immediately and depending on altitude already start defending against long shot AMRAAM. Maybe it would be easier with human GCI operator so that one could maybe ask about specifc bogies what their status was. The bot AWACS just gives some irrelevant bogey dope sometimes. Or then I just have to guesstimate better in my mind where an enemy could be going towards. That being said the F-16 datalink seems to be more accurate with AWACS info. Because radio call from an eagle to AWACS only gives the rough enemy target aspect not the actual heading. It could very well be that I'm just bad at the game haha!!

thanks for answers. although its a bit disappointing to hear that the F-15 radar is a bit gimped in the game. I was able to occasionally detect bot Vipers in single player at about 55 miles hot co-altitude/lookup (the best range) strictly in the TWS mode. And the worst range was with RWS mode at about 45 miles hot aspect co-altitude. PRF doesnt seem to make a big difference with detection range at least in this scenario trying to detect Viper. At 45miles the bandit has definitely fired already two AMRAAMs which might still be roughly within launch parameters buit at the upper end of it. It appears that inside TWS mode moving the search cone seems to provide best detection where as the RWS mode doesnt detect bandit until too late. But I roughly knew where the bandits would be because it was a single player mission which I made, and this made it a bit easier to try the TWS for searching. Thanks for information about the droptanks drag on F-15. I always took all three drop tanks without giving it much more thought. With the three droptanks and AMRAAM load my initial ascent profile is typically afterburner takeoff, followed by about 15-20 deg steep climb in burner. I reckon the best thing would be to use centerline tank first for the takeoff and initial climb to 30k feet. Apparently Viper has that capacity to individually select and jettison droptanks.

Hi! I started flying DCS planes with the FC3 module to test out things first. I mostly played WW2 warbirds planes like in the old IL2 sturmovik games. I'm really liking the F-15 so far because the manuals, cockpit gauges, and HUD symbology is very easy to understand. I was trying also multiplayer and the enemy side F-16 vipers are really tough opponents when they get up to the altitude >= 40k feet. Apparently the F-16 can afterburn and stay very controllable with droptanks at that altitude. Typically they would be around 1.6 mach patrolling there. I'm not totally sure on the latter point (if they had still droptanks or not, while afterburning) because I don't have F-16 module, but judging from tacview they do stay very fast supersonic, at very high altitudes. 1.) radar effectiveness. I feel like I really struggle to find enemy F-16s at anywhere decent ranges on the range-while-search even when searching the correct altitudes (indicated by friendly AWACS). Is there something wrong with the radar in game or is it just operator error? F-16 does seem to get immediate datalink LINK16 updates from the enemy AWACS which probably does improve F-16 situational awareness a lot. 2.) Can the eagle take advantage of its higher service ceiling by flying at 60k feet, as opposed to the viper. From what I've read the eagle and viper should have about similar thrust-to-weight ratios, but eagle has higher service ceiling. From the F-15 perspective though the high altitude seems to be very sluggish and slow unless I'm afterburner without droptanks. I suppose the good tactic would be to use the droptanks for quick climb to high altitude, then fly towards combat area with droptanks and at some point jettison them and stay supersonic at altitude. (?) 3.) I used to have a problem where I was really slow on the F-15 at afterburner, but I think I managed to narrow it down to DCS World throtle not registering the input all the way up to the max level. This was a bit hard to narrow the problem down because I was still in afterburner in external camera view. I tried to fix the problem by putting a "deadzone" at the upper end of the throttle travel with "saturation X". Can anyone confirm if in the axis curve tuning settings, the black square, does that mean the actual in-game registered throttle level, and the red square seems to indicate the controller input directly? So it appears that saturation X will allow the in-game throttle setting to go all the way up, to compensate for the upper end throttle "deadzone"? 4.) can someone provide some reference values for nozzle position gauge, RPM gauge and fuel burn gauge, mach number and altitude, for the max thrust setting for F-15 to verify that the above problem was fixed with the saturation X? (I just have this one throttle and I ordered a new hotas but its still in backlog, probably because of covid delays or something). I discovered the problem by mapping the thrust into my joystick's axis, which is definitely unusable in practice, but it allowed me to discover the problem.