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SgtPappy

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Everything posted by SgtPappy

  1. If anyone's curious, this is what it would look like. Note the brick on top of the radar repeater display with the little sight camera.
  2. I'm willing to bet you can get it printed and bound for a relatively cheap price at a shop somewhere. That's what I definitely did not do with the books I found online when I was in college
  3. I'm in the same position right now. That's why I hope i'll really like the FFB2 on my desktop. I only hope the future will include home ownership for that man cave
  4. Sounds convincing! It will be a consideration for the future, for sure. I looked this up as well and hope to make this a future project in a man cave or something. The FFSB stick in combination with the F-4 might just launch the next stage to this addiction. Dammit now why did you have to put that out into the universe, now I'm seriously considering it... Come to think of it, my membership to the gliding club was far more expensive than a Rhino FFB kit.
  5. May I ask why you have many? Do they break often? Yea the deadzone thing might be tough, but I still have my VKB with which to switch back and forth. Maybe one day there will be a good FFB stick or a kit that won't break the bank.
  6. I'm assuming the F-4 will have FFB as well. After reading how people experienced the F-14 in a whole new light, I just bought a Sidewinder FFB2 which arrives next week. I'm pumped.
  7. Lol thanks, I guess some things are more interesting when they're a mystery.
  8. Maybe my google-fu is weak today, so I couldn't find the answer. Why would only 3 barrels be sighted as opposed to all 6?
  9. I'm just as guilty except unlike you, I pushed my luck. Apologies to both you and everyone else who was abiding by the rules.
  10. Both of these posts perfectly frame how I feel as well. In terms of things I could buy, I could not have been more excited for anything else ever and when BST canceled it it really was a massive disappointment. But to have the game and technology progress to this point and then have HB pick it up is incredible and will undoubtedly bring one of the most detailed modules ever made. I feel lucky to be around with DCS in such an advanced state compared to back then.
  11. Then you had this absolute mf'er https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the-story-of-chico-the-gunfighter-the-very-unique-gun-podded-stormy-fast-fac-f-4e-phantom-ii-used-during-the-vietnam-war/
  12. Is there a reason why pseudo-Doppler was used if Master Arm was off vs simulated Doppler when Master Arm was on? I'm curious to know if there were disadvantages of one Doppler calculation over the other.
  13. Now that that's over... does anyone know if the Shrike is only useable against the SA-2 and SA-3? I seem to remember that the SA-6 was impervious to it in 1973 in Egypt and Syria, but I also know there several variants of seeker heads that we may or may not be able to equip. I wonder if they can be used against higher digit SAM systems.
  14. By all means! Keep sharing! For anyone who's on instagram (hopefully you don't mind, Dr. Petersen) here's the link: https://www.instagram.com/spetersen13/?hl=en My fianceé and I are big fans of your photos of cats and planes (respectively)!
  15. The manual is supposed to teach you how to operate the aircraft though, so detailed descriptions on how it all works internally might be out of scope if done for every component. That said, some things can be explained as long as it is relevant to understanding how to employ a certain system. Additionally, a lot of the manual is taken from the real manuals so the content was more of a McD/USAF decision. Now for a very high level answer to your questions: the pulsed radar transmission is used to determine range, by timing the receipt of the reflected signals. The CW signal reflection is used to determine the Doppler shift return of the target and the AIM-7 homes in on a reflection matching the expected bandwitdth of Doppler shifted returns. Range information isn't extracted from this signal so theoretically if another target flew into the beam within the expected Doppler gate but with a bigger RCS, the AIM-7 might go for that target instead. The rear antenna is used to compare the reflected signal to the APQ-120 transmission directly behind the missile so that it can calculate the speed gate by comparing the two (since that is also red shifted as the missile moves away from the F-4). The rear seat antenna polarization switch determines the polarization direction of the transmitted radar EM waves. I believe the reason for this switch is explained on the manual, if not the 1F-4E-34-1-1 which you can find online for free. Reflections are polarized more or less in either the vertical or horizontal direction depending on what they were reflected from (ground vs rain for example), so the switch is used to filter out some of this clutter return. Similarly, most sunglasses filter out horizontally polarized light due to the reflection of light (glare) from the ground. My guess is that there was a hardware limitation or a reason to reserve CCW polarized reflections so the AIM-7 will only guide on the other 2 settings.
  16. Thanks for these! It makes me feel like I'm being inducted into the 3rd TFS - without having to do all the other hard stuff lol
  17. I'm not sure how or if it can be modeled in DCS, but because the F-4 does not use coherent pulses needed for true pulse-Doppler tracking, the APQ-120 and its computers can calculate a simulated Doppler signal which the AIM-7 uses (in CW mode, not pulsed mode) in order to home in on a target that is moving per what the radar believes is the target. There is no range gating here so the AIM-7 just follows the Doppler return in the expected bandwidth. This Simulated Doppler signal corresponds to target closure over time which is probably why it takes 4 seconds to calculate the signal then tune the AIM-7 accordingly. This is what the APQ-120 does with the Master Arm = ON. With the Master Arm = OFF, it uses a pseudo Doppler signal that - at least in other applications - estimates Doppler return from an antenna moving around a target or an array of antennas replacing the moving single one. I'm not sure how the F-4 applies this principle but at some point, the pseudo-Doppler technique was removed entirely from the APQ-120 and the simulated Doppler was used whether the Master Arm was ON or OFF per 1F-4E-34-1-1. But maybe someone at HB can expand on this or correct anything I've said.
  18. Modern aircraft are amazing in their own right, but I'm absolutely in the same boat as you. These older jets are more interesting to me. I have noticed there isn't much out there on the slatted F-4 vs Mirage III in terms of Israeli pilot opinion, but lots of raw data and comparison with similar platforms infer it has better 2-circle performance than the Mirage III. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence of the Mirage being a better dogfighter but then again, the majority of F-4s by October 1973 were hard/BLC winged. Trends from anecdotes may very well be at least partly a result of human psychology and physiological responses and not just solely aircraft performance. If you'll entertain this idea: Mathematically, the Mirage III's only advantage vs the slatted F-4E would be instantaneous turn rate (and maybe max AoA?) when both planes are in a fully air-to-air configuration and maybe Israeli doctrine for air to air combat prioritized that. After all, they were flying the Mirage for a longer time and adapted themselves well to the its advantages. The F-4 also required lots of force on the stick, per anecdotes with the Blue Angels, so it also wouldn't be surprising if the Mirage simply felt lighter which would make it easier to handle in a dogfight for longer periods - a pilot could reasonably conclude this with better max turn rate would infer a better "dogfighter". To your point, Epstein preferred his Mirage III over the F-16 (great fun factor!) and I've also heard F-4/F-15 pilot Moshe Melnik comment on a similar thing saying that the "F-16 flies itself" so anecdotes are good for pilot opinion but don't always get us very far if we're trying to determine certain aspects of aircraft DACT. They need to be combined with context and data for a conclusion.
  19. I'm assuming maybe the Israelis just flew the Mirage for so long and were so successful in 1967 that they fell in love with it and it's instantaneous turn rate. You're right, there's not too much out there to support that it was a better jet than the F-4. And the F-4 was such a versatile jet that it had to do so much, under very difficult circumstances, I would imagine that those missions were not as "romantic" and classically epic as just the dogfight missions that the Mirage/Nesher had in October 1973. It would not surprise me therefore if pilots associated the Mirage with these missions and had high morale flying them. This is just my wild speculation. Yes, though it's hard to confirm them all, lots of them are indeed confirmed. I believe the Israeli claimed total between 1969 and the end of the 1982 Lebanon War is 116.5. The 85 was all Yom Kippur War. Honestly if even half of those kills are confirmed, that's still an incredible amount in just 2.5 weeks of terrible, bloody combat.
  20. I hope I didn't miss anything but it seems that in chapter 3.2.1 - Engines, the diagram with throttles is numbered but only (3) is elaborated upon. I believe the counter measures dispense button is explained under the ECM chapter but the other labels are not.
  21. Correct, it doesn't precisely match the strobe display (APR-36/37) on most F-4E's during the Vietnam War. However to my understanding, the ALR-46 was around during this time, just being built for Iran's FY1971 block 56 jets (for which the ALR-46 was standard) and for some of the USAF's FY1972 jets post Rivet Haste. So it's not reflective of the battles of the time in which the F-4 participated but it still fits for the era.
  22. Just curious... has anything ever been in pre-order state for that long?
  23. I always get giddy when this kind of discussion pops up again because I can link the analyses that were done in the other threads. Below is my educated guess for some of the jets: And below is Smyth's excellent EM diagram analyses on the MiGs and F-5 based on real available data. Obviously none of this exactly reflect DCS (particularly the aforementioned inaccuracies with the MiG-21 low speed, high AoA turn rates), but it will give us a good idea:
  24. Totally fair, again I agree. As you may realize everyone's got a threshold of what is subjectively realistic and what is unrealistically pessimistic or optimistic. It's totally okay to not agree on the same threshold. I'm not getting my hopes up but I think it's far likelier than what I would consider unlikely. No biggie.
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