Aquorys

There are a couple that simply no longer work on current 64 bit versions of Windows, e.g. Heroes of Might and Magic III or Safe cracker. Pretty old school by today's standards, but those were kinda cool and fun games.

That's intentional. If you snap it to idle from a high power setting, the engine controls keep it above idle for a while, so it would spool up more quickly if you add power again

I just flew your mission twice by selecting "take control" from the track replay. The first time I flew it with the plane configured as it was, the second time I rearmed to a 5/1 A/A configuration and only the centerline tank. I did not have any problems detecting and bugging the fighters, the only problem I had with the radar was in the second sortie when it was unable to find the enemy E-3A which was beaming. The farthest out I could detect it with my own radar was a little more than 5 miles, that seems excessively bad for a target of that size in my opinion. In both sorties, I fenced in after passing steerpoint 2, then turned right before reaching waypoint 3 to open up some space for maneuvering due to the SAM site on my left side. Radar-wise, I narrowed the azimuth and adjusted the radar to look left, stayed in RWS until I could detect the first target, then changed to TWS. Concurrently tracked two targets in the first sortie, three targets in the second sortie. In the first sortie, I shot down 2 F-16s and the E-3A, then flew along the remaining waypoints and landed on Nellis 21L. In the second sortie, I also shot down 2 F-16s and the E-3A, then flew the TACAN 12X back to Nellis and intercepted radial 209 for a landing on 21L. Detecting and targeting the E-3A required adjusting the radar antenna in the second sortie, otherwise everything was pretty straight-forward with regards to the radar.

Yeah, at least in real life, that's more like it I mean, in general, if fighter pilots fought in real life how people fight in DCS, using the same attack geometries and missile defense tactics, it would be raining burning fighter jets

Valid point, but I think it should go in a separate thread, because it's not related to the HARM.

Depends on whether you're in the USAF or the USN. In Air Force terms, 180 means straight head-on, in Navy terms, 180 means you're on the target's tail.

Pretty much everything else than the minimum basics of doing anything with the fire control radar. If you are only asking about the radar: How about RWS/TWS modes (and VSR/LRS once they implement them, or the ECCM modes if they ever find out enough about them to implement them), antenna azimuth and elevation, spotlight search, the various ACM modes, the various air-to-ground modes, the interaction with the emission control switch, etc. TMS up bugs a target. For RWS, that means you're in situational awareness mode (SAM). If you want a lock, aka single target track (STT), you'd have to TMS up again on a bugged target.

Well, if you're asking for it... in the video you posted you kind of flew that bird like an angles fighter around 2:15, just trying to keep it pointed straight towards the target, instead of establishing a flight path that would take you to an advantageous position (like a displacement roll or high yo-yo), which is why you overshot around 2:30. Regarding the general tactics you suggested, I flew a couple fights against an F-15 ace AI to see whether I would actually do differently what I thought I would do differently, and I don't remember ever using the airbrake to intentionally slow down to ~330. I would rather use that energy to gain altitude, so I can either use that to accelerate later, or to use the additional vertical space for maneuvering.

Bugging another target does not cause the FCR to stop sending updates to the missile, provided the radar is still able to track the other targets that have missiles in flight, which essentially means that your new bugged target cannot be completely out of the azimuth and/or elevation that the missile target is at, because the bugged target is prioritized by the FCR. Also, upgrading more targets does not cause existing targets to vanish, unless the maximum number of tracks is exceeded. In that case, the lowest priority track is dropped. Whether that is all actually implemented in DCS might be a different question though, but what I can say from my experience is that you can normally engage one target, then acquire a track on another one, engage that target too, and both missiles will track (at least in TWS).

I created a couple BVR training missions for the F-16 a while ago, but I guess I could easily adapt them for the F/A-18.

At shallow angles, the range estimation has to be more accurate at long range than at short range for the projectile to hit a target that is flying at a constant altitude, since the danger space is smaller at long range, making it even more difficult to hit the target.

@Yuriks what aircraft are you flying?

I noticed that too a couple hours ago, dropped the JDAM anyway (on an SA-8 Gecko) and it worked as usual. I guess this is either not implemented yet, or just half-baked.

It depends. In general, if you engage a target, you should have a tactical advantage. In most cases that includes being able to make a more effective shot than your opponent, and that depends on the performance of the aircraft, the systems, including radar, and the missile. In general, you should be high and fast in most situations, and you should maneuver to deny your opponent an effective shot until you are ready to shoot. Then you maneuver for an ideal ballistic firing solution for the missile that you are going to fire, if the situation allows it. After shooting, you maneuver to defeat any shot that your opponent may have taken at you, or to deny your opponent an effective shot. That typically includes a crank maneuver with a vertical component and if deemed necessary, a split-S to transition to a drag, or a horizontal maneuver with a similar outcome. Simply turning away and flying fast is less effective than proper maneuvering, and the same goes for notching, unless your only remaining chance is for the missile to lose track. Staying lower than your target is only a good idea if it comes with a really strong advantage, and that would typically be either due to your radar's performance, or due to your opponent radar's performance. If your radar does not have look-down/shoot-down capabilities, making it look up may be the only chance to get a reliable track, however, if your opponent's radar does not have that same problem, you have the tactical disadvantage with regards to your energy state and your missile's ballistics. If your opponent's radar does not have look-down/shoot-down capabilities, then staying lower could deny your opponent a reliable track, making the opponent unable to fire at you. In this case, you still have an energy & ballistics disadvantage, but if you can hit your opponent, and he can't hit you, it should be irrelevant. Things can change quickly though if something goes wrong, or if you misjudge your opponent's capabilities. At very high altitudes, some additional factors (mostly maneuverability and energy management) will have an influence on the ideal altitude during various phases of the engagement. Summary: It's complicated.

You don't, the F-16's cockpit is pressurized to ~5 psi more than ambient pressure at higher than 23k ft - ~ 5 psi also being the pressure that you would experience around 23k ft outside, so it's not much different than standing on the summit of Mt. Aconcagua.

Nevada is sparsely populated, it's mostly desert and mountains. The only area where it's a bit on the heavy side performance-wise would be around downtown Las Vegas and the Harry Reid International Airport there. PS: By the way, my hardware specs are very similar, but with an NVMe card instead of SSD disks and 80 GiB RAM. Runs quite smoothly most of the time. More RAM helps a lot, with DCS multiplayer sessions, the system sometimes runs with some ~45 GiB RAM in use.

The fact that he just said makes this sound kind of funny. Him still being an active aggressor pilot, I guess it might be the other way around: You'll be going through his training curriculum!

I would add "up to a certain number of cores" as a limitation. At some point, you either cannot split the tasks into more threads, or even if you could, using more cores would be less efficient than using only some of them. The question is what that number is, and that depends a lot on the code. For some applications, it would be 10 cores, for others 50, and only very few applications have virtually no practical limit (e.g., some scientific physics simulations running on various supercomputers). For the typical home flight simulators, my expectation would be to see maybe 4 to 20 cores actually being used, so buying a quad-socket system with some 200 cores or so would probably do nothing for performance.

Depends on many factors and has changed over time, e.g. some modern aircraft can hand-off missile guidance to a wingman or other asset.

I was just wondering how accurately the environment (or the universe, if you will) is modeled in DCS. Purely out of curiosity, here are a whole bunch of questions for any DCS developer who might be bored enough to answer them. Are the maps in DCS projected onto a sphere, or is it a simplified projection onto a flat surface? If so, is the DCS earth a perfect sphere, or is there a difference in the circumference around the poles compared to around the equator? Is there a gravity gradient depending on the distance from the earth's center? Does the DCS earth spin? Is the coriolis effect simulated? Is the position of the sun and the moon somewhat astronomically accurate depending on the date and time? Would we ever see a solar eclipse in DCS? For those who never thought about it, the implications are quite significant. It's complicated either way: If you simplify some things by simulating everything on a "flat earth", then the projection of things like coordinates becomes quite complicated. Flying from point A to point B will also give you a distorted flight path as compared to the real world. If you ever want to make a continuous map of the entire world, you would quickly run into some really tricky maths problems. On the other hand, if you project your maps onto a sphere, the tiling of terrain becomes quite complicated, because you can't just load equally sized rectangles. The numerical value of your simulated aircraft's pitch axis is now relative to your position on earth, and you have to account for that to figure out whether you're climbing or descending. As you fly from point A to point B, straight and level, your aircraft's axes in your simulated universe change constantly, because all movement is now relative to the sphere. Now add in a model where your earth spins, and you'll have some additional fun calculating where artillery projectiles and ballistic missiles go, and so on, you get the general drift. Is there any chance that someone who knows the internals of the engine could enlighten me as to what the "DCS universe" looks like?

The southern one of the two airports in Kutaisi city, just north of Kvitiri, also known as Kutaisi west airport. The runway is about 4600 ft. Landed there a couple times with 4 AIM-120s, 2 AIM-9Xs, and fuel probably around 3k. If you are looking for some interesting approaches, try Gelendzhik from north-east (Caucasus), Khasab runway from south, either directly over the mountains or the approach through the mountain valleys south and east of Khasab (Persian Gulf), or the ILS or VOR/LOC X 21L approach into Nellis (Nevada).

Certainly not "DCS YouTubers", but I am somewhat surprised that some of the more well-known (ex-) fighter pilots, who have at least occasionally posted DCS-related videos, were not mentioned, e.g. youtube.com/@CWLemoine with 388k subscribers, youtube.com/@HasardLee with 255k subscribers or youtube.com/@thereadyroom7201 with 25k subscribers. Apart from occasional DCS content, they have a lot of interesting content about flying in general and also some of the real world aircraft that DCS features in-game, including interviews with (ex-) pilots of other aircraft, or even former instructors of the SFTI (aka "Top Gun") and WIC programs.

Most of the others too, and long before the Russians knew about it. As early as during the cold war, the United States actively pursued programs to acquire foreign aircraft for analysis, reverse engineering and dissimilar air combat training. The USAF has had a collection of various MiG and Sukhoi models for many years.

Ballistics and potential energy. Your opponent being low and you being high shifts the range advantage in your favor, and if you have to defend, you have a lot of potential energy (altitude) that you can trade for speed. The nonsensical part is not necessarily diving, but staying low instead of regaining altitude typically qualifies. I did not actively do anything to prevent it from using it. I was expecting that the MiG would use its jammer, I don't know why it did not.

Depending on the launch platform and other assets that contribute information, there are some in real life, but most of them are classified and therefore cannot be discussed. One of the few examples that I can mention, because it can even be found in publicly available advertisement materials, is the Eurofighter's ability to launch at and keep track of targets that the launch aircraft's sensors cannot see, as long as a track of sufficient quality is shared by another compatible aircraft (e.g., another Eurofighter, an AEW&C platform or similar asset); implicitly meaning that as long as there is some valid tracking data available, it is not necessary for the launch aircraft to continue tracking. You can probably make your own estimates about what modern aircraft like the F-22 and F-35 can do with their various sensors and datalink capabilities. With what we currently have in DCS, as far as I am aware, there are none.