Ivandrov

There is not. There was a very specific patch note about this a while back. The AWG-9 will transition to using a range gate and/or speed gate when STT'ed. Apr 8 2022

An IL-78 you can definitely maintain lock on, it's a huge and highly reflective target conpared to ground clutter and there is no MLC filter when STT'ed. So, it not moving is not an issue.

Yes, it is possible. You can lock onto completely still ships out on the water as well.

I regularly launch from above 20,000. I don't think that was your issue. More likely keyhole constraints as noted above.

I think I am looking at the bottom of your plane from this perspective. So, I would say you notched. The first missile is guiding onto you with its onboard radar.

It looks to me in both tracks you are notching the radar on the enemy Tomcat as soon as it fires a missile or in the one case you break lock by hiding behind the hill. If he's not STT'ed, the track is lost or put into memory. (There is some DCS goofiness with how the AI does things as far as RWR indications from their aircraft.) In both tracks, the first missile fired reacquires you using it's own onboard radar and then either doesn't have enough energy to reach you, or runs out of battery power. Your defense here is actually excellent (Other than the dumping of countermeasures near missile launch), because of the trajectory and how slow the missile usually is, it becomes impossible for it to reach you if you turn 180 and burn. It's about what I expect from the AI. It is a very difficult missile to employ against the small fighters.

Because the autopilot doesn't have a route follow mode for the jet. The LAAP acts through the Stability Augmentation System which only has channels for Pitch and Yaw. There's no roll channel to be able to automatically make turns. "Path" refers to flight path. I.E. it'll approximately hold your velocity vector in place.

Looks like AGR mode is being commanded. Like you are in a CCIP or Gun Strafe mode.

Can't reproduce this either.

HMCS turns on fine for me.

Worked fine for me when I tried it. If any of the seekers wandered off TMS Aft stabilizes it back to the SPI.

Yes, the Maverick seeker needs to be boresighted. It's the same procedure as the LITENING pod.

I like its overall functionality better. So I wish to use the Sniper over the LITENING.

I don't find it unfortunate. It's typically how I use these dual mode pods, is that IR is for finding hotspots, and TV is for figuring out what that hotspot is. So, wide IR to find spots, and I zoom in with the TV mode. Which means for me the PiP mode is lovely.

These look about the same to me, with the Sniper actually having more magnification in it's standard narrow mode without digital zoom.

But you definitely would be able to tell if you digital zoomed it in by 9x and started looking at a 57x57 image instead. Digital zoom of that degree makes a massive difference at this lower end of resolutions. I'm quite used to how bad even the 2x digital zoom on the -14 and the -15E LANTIRN pods are.

Don't forget the display resolution of the actual screen you are viewing it on. 256x256 was the number I heard last for the DCS pod but that might have been for the Spanish LITENING II that the Hornet has which is where the 29x29 final digital zoomed at 9x comes from. There's a thesis paper floating around on the forums here somewhere that explains that the AT does in fact incorporate some techniques to help with the image degradation of the digital zoom, so. Naturally as these techniques improve, the digital zoom becomes more useable. But there is no upper limit to how much digital zoom you could apply to anything really. (I guess at the most extreme you can have it zoom all the way down to one pixel, just because you wanted to.) If you want you can ask Northrop engineers whether they were bumping the digital zoom levels just because they could to get sales and the people writing the paycheck don't know any better other than "number bigger therefore better"

You don't really "improve" digital zoom. You can process the zoomed image to get back lost detail, or you can increase the base resolution of whatever you are applying the digital zoom too. The later pods have a higher display resolution which makes higher levels of digital zoom more useful. Modern consumer cameras can have available digital zooms well above even that as the base image they take is so high resolution that even the zoomed in image is still HD. For the pod that we have, the 9x zoom means a final pixel width and height of about 29x29.

I don't agree with points 2 and 3 here. The Aliasing does not look like intentional ailasing in the pod image rather it just looks like game engine Ailasing. I.E. something you are not fixing without increasing performance requirements even more. I can't see what you mean by the thickness changing between the PiP images. I'm looking at the water tower legs in the DCS image and it looks about the same thickness as it crosses from the tv to the thermal image.

The level of detail is in fact higher in the TV portion. The TV modes of these pods have always been my goto for actually identifying details beyond just hotspots. Vehicle type and even the specific vehicle. So this seems very useful in centering yourself on the surrounding hotspots and then have the center object be examined in the higher detail TV mode. Or you can look at it as focusing on the center while having more obvious spots on things moving into the outside frame or even moving within it that you are not necessarily focusing on.

Track would be helpful. Possible you are in a 1 bar search pattern in close. Perhaps in a dogfight mode or something else. Just guessing. Check to make sure there are no keybind conflicts or startup issues.

If you have something other than "logic" to describe how the Sniper should be operating than feel free to share. Otherwise, it's working as expected.

XR mode is not just digital zoom. It is also an image processing technique as evidenced by the unique way it interacts with slewing of the pod and time it takes for the clearer picture to come in. Again, the level of digital zoom available is completely up to whoever programs the software in the pod or aircraft. It has nothing to do with the capabilities of the pods themselves. IRL, the 4x-9x range in the LITENING would be mostly useless as the pixelation would be terrible. Even the 4x in the Sniper also seems pretty useless from the one screenshot I have seen of it.

It's just software zoom. The Sniper is more powerful as far as Analog optics, and it's XR mode. The digital zoom is just a number that's programmed into the pod and/or aircraft software with some max ceiling. If you really want to compare them properly, it would be with the LITENING at the same 1x level in its narrow mode.

The LITENING has always not suffered from any image degradation from the digital zoom in-game. In reality, the 9x digital zoom would allow you to count the pixels almost on your hands. It's incredibly bad. I believe ED still plans to downgrade the LITENING on the -16 to the LANTIRN and this visual fidelity will disappear.