KlarSnow

Reposting this from the mag variation thread to make sure it has its own bug report. The steering cue on the HSI/HUD in the DCS F/A-18 is not wind corrected, if you fly the heading it provides you will home to the waypoint, or fly a constantly curving course. This becomes obvious if you put a waypoint over a known position or object, have any kind of crosswind, select waypoint steering, and then follow the steering cue, your VV if uncaged will be wind corrected and point off to the side of the location you are trying to get to. This is incorrect per hornet documentation and how every other US aircraft with an INS works. Where this becomes glaringly obvious is when you are in A/G Auto mode and are attempting to line up with the ASL. The steering diamond on the heading tape at the top of the hud does not line you up with the ASL. It should. Currently in game it looks like this: The key thing here is the VV is lined up with the ASL which means you are currently on the correct steering for a wind corrected release. However the designation steering diamond on the Heading tape is not lined up with the heading caret. It should be. I have edited the same image to what it should look like. This is what an actual lined up attack should look like. Note the little diamond at the top is centered in the heading caret, and the VV is overlayed on the ASL. This disconnect becomes even more egregious if you try and line up the steering diamond with the Caret, then the ASL is in the center of the HUD, but your VV will be offset to the side. All of this should line up, the VV should be overlaid on top of the ASL, and the Steering cue should be under the Heading Caret when you are lined up for a proper release. This is a relatively minor thing, but it is also pretty easy to fix. The Hornets INS simulation is already wind correcting the VV in uncaged mode, and the ASL for bomb releases, just include that calculation into the waypoint and designation steering cues. Just one of those little things that is obviously off and irksome that should hopefully be a quick fix.

Yes, "some" Guard units have purchased the Scorpion for their F-16s. It is not standard issue accross the entire USAF. We are talking about a (primarily) USAF/USN jets, and the jets we have in DCS. Bringing up the entire schmorgasbord of foreign operators or one off cases where the guard got something for themselves doesn't really apply to the discussion. For DCS purposes the F-16/18 are JHMCS, the A-10C is Scorpion, unless ED decides to make it something else...

Its JHMCS (hornet/F-16) vs Scorpion/JHMCS 2 (A-10C 2) if they are calling it that now. Always just heard it called Scorpion. Differences are primarily color, weight, form factor, and ability to display raster images (TGP overlay etc...) Older JHMCS (F-16/Hornet) cannot do colors other than green or raster images. The jet is the primary source for a lot of the "features" that are helmet related. the helmet is just a display and a pointing/cuing device. Everything else is going to be dependent on how the jet itself and its software is mechanized to handle all of that.

Any updates on wind corrected steering cues. The ASL and VV are correctly wind corrected, but the HSI Steering cues, nor the HUD steering caret in either A/G or nav modes is wind corrected. Basically this is how it is currently, and is wrong. This is what it should look like This is a minor but glaringly obvious thing that should be handled by the INS just like the ASL and the VV. Yes there should also be a way to enter and view the wind effects on the aircraft, but the INS is already compensating for it based on "detected wind." It should be a quick fix to update the cues in the HUD/HSI to match, and then save the manual entry/display stuff for later.

We are controlling for the loft/non loft differences. Saw the same behavior differences for the same range shots unlofted between the hornet and the tomcat with the AIM-7MH. IE we uncaged and removed the LOFT cue on the hornet and took a bunch of shots at the same ranges we were in the tomcat. Same disparity in hit results, with the hornet missiles connecting greater than 3/4 the time and tomcat missiles connecting less than 1/4 the time, and yes accounting for target maneuvers and dropped locks in there as well. We only counted as a "miss" what had a chance to connect with the target, radar held lock all the way to terminal intercept, bandit didn't maneuver to cold/ terminal intercept occured with sufficient (~1mach or greater) energy left on the missile for it to aggressively maneuver to fuze/impact. Anything that fell outside of these parameters we are not counting. We also removed Chaff from all targets to remove that variable. We were testing against Veteran AI, medium altitudes (20,000 feet for targets and shooters) in MP, both with Jester and a human RIO, and in SP and saw all of these results mirrored.

Others means friendly surveillance tracks, pushed out by AWACS, its not gonna show hostiles or unknowns, just other friendlies. Members and donors are other PPLI participants. AlA the AWACS itself and other fighters that are in the link pushing out their locations. What I'm essentially trying to clarify here is that you probably arent going to be able to just look around and see every track on datalink, hostile, friendly and unknown in the jhmcs, only friendlies pushed by AWACS, Friendly PPLI's, what you are locked to, and possibly whatever your SA page cursors are on.

So the top image is the helmet reticle, which you can then ground stabilize and then turn into a designation. The bottom is what the designation looks like. The Hafu should only show up for friendlies and whatever you have your cursors on on the SA page. You also other than looking at things cant really interact with things or drop designations with the JHMCS. (Ala you cant make helmet symbology entities SPI or designation etc like you can in the A-10C 2) As far as friendlies on the ground. Yes the Helmet into the hornet/F-16 can show those, but that starts to get into what level or type of datalink they are represented on. IE Blufor tracker may or may not be integrated into Link 16 in the versions of the jet we have in DCS. In the Strike eagle it was only when you were “close enough” to be in range of their on the ground radios. You wouldn’t be seeing that stuff from across the AOR unless it was getting pumped out by a bigger station. Which gets into way more net architecture than DCS looks like its ever going to model. I’d bet its going to be completely simplified one way or the other based on the existence of the EPLRS setting on the friendly units or not. IE if they decide its “realistic” they’ll make any EPLRS units show up, if they decide its not, they will just have that stuff not show up.

Go repeat it in a hornet, in our tests, same scenario, no countermeasures, and accounting for kinematic defeats and dropped locks, the hornet with an AIM-7MH will connect 7/8 times. Repeat that with the tomcat and we only had 1 connect. Of note these are all longer shots 20-15 miles, the missile has the kinematics and ability to make that happen. Up close where the motor is still burning there doesnt seem to be any issue, shots sub 10 miles seem to work just fine. The issue is that in the hornet the AIM-7MH is a reliable BVR missile. In the tomcat, in perfect conditions it is not.

Radar issue inside 15 miles Attached is a .trk file, been seeing this happen rather frequently since the last patch. Appears to be somethin either with jester or possibly the MLC filter that is causing the radar to break lock in situations when it should not. Situation is I am closing head on with a target, lock him up at 40 miles in PDSTT, shoot a sparrow (AIM-7M) at him at ~15 miles. I and the bandit are at 20,000 feet. After launch I perform a simple bunt, drop the nose to get underneath the bandit, keeping him visual, at ~8 miles jester calls he lost the lock and it drops, even though I am in look up (2,500 foot altitude delta at 8 miles) with 180 knots of radial closure (812 minus 632 ownship) This has been happening rather consistently even with much greater look up angles in PDSTT, always in rather inopportune times. Test 7m 2.trk

There is a lot of space in the F10 map and kneeboard card for improvement. One of the biggest pains in this game is when you have to hop back and forth between the F10 map and the 3d world to input coordinates, or go to the F10 map, copy down onto a sheet of paper your coordinates, make sure they are in the correct format for whatever jet you are flying, and then hop back into the 3d world and enter in the data. The kneeboard card has the ability to pull data from markpoints/systems in the jet as has been shown by several third party modules. Here are a couple of suggestions for the base game to make such functionality much more user friendly. Make a scratchpad or notes card with 2-3 blank sheets. Link the scratchpad to the F10 map and set it to only put in coordinates using the current players jets format. Ideal flow would be you are on the F10 map, you either drop a markpoint on the map, or ideally you have a right click menu with the option "Add to kneeboard". When you do this whatever your cursors coordinates are get dumped in the correct format for your aircraft into the scratchpad or notes card of the kneeboard. Make an option or a dropdown so when you add to kneeboard you can choose either add coords, add target, or add MGRS, that way it can automatically change the precision/format of the coordinates added. Multiples of these should be able to be added to the notes/scratchpad kneeboard, so that ideally you can go to the F10 map once, add all the points you want to manually enter, and then hop back to the cockpit, bring up your kneeboard, and then start plugging away. Should be added in a list format with say 10-20 slots available, and as you add more, it starts to overwrite them. This should also be combined with radio communications. So if a JTAC reads out a coordinate either through a comm menu option (readback/add to notes) or for example clicking on the coordinates in the text readout of the radio message in the upper left, you can add a CAS target/coordinates given to the scratchpad/notes page. If this would be considered overpowered in some manner, make adding these notes other than thru comms only possible while on the ground to represent preplanning. This should also be possible for any ingame entities, airfields, navaids, tacans, carriers, etc... Right click on it, hit add data to kneeboard, and then ideally if you selected an airfield, it pulls that airfields chart to the top of the kneeboard pile, just underneath the scratchpad that has the applicable navaids, runway headings and airfield frequencies. Same goes for carriers and AWACS, right click on the entity in the F10 map, and it dumps the comm/navaid channels into your kneeboard/scratchpad. Ideally this could eventually be pulled into the DTC/ mission planning whenever that arrives, so you can quickly build up a navigation card by right clicking and adding various points as waypoints to your kneeboard/ DTC/ flight plan etc while on the ground, and then load them up once you crank the jet.

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/performance/q0146.shtml#:~:text=Any%20aircraft%20in%20a%20level,lift%20that%20turns%20the%20aircraft. Check out this website, its all math. As you approach 90 degrees of bank no amount of G will keep your flight path marker level. All of your lift you are generating is going straight out the top of the aircraft and the VV will fall. As to the rate, that looks about right, again, you can do the math but it should be falling at the equivalent of 1 G acceleration straight down if your roll angle is exactly 90 degrees, since that's purely the acceleration of gravity pulling the aircraft down. This math and chart is independent of aircraft type or performance, only limited by how fast the aircraft can go/how many G's the aircraft can actually pull. All works the same for a Cessna, or a hornet, or an F-16, or whatever.

A2A only AFAIK, and so worthless they removed it/faired it over/replaced it with TCS as fast as they could. Just took up weight and space

The effective strategy is fight aggressively and try and make it a 1v1 as fast as possible. That failing try and put both of them on one side of your canopy, that way you have an easier time seeing both of them at the same time, as soon as you lose sight of one the other one will inevitably materialize on your six at an in opportune time. 1v2 is fighting with the cards stacked against you. If the opponents are competent it won’t take very long for them to kill you so you don’t want to fight them like that if you can’t help it. At least in ww2 fighters, and guns only in a jet fighter you should be able to just bug out if things start to look bad, extend, see if they want to keep following you, and then reposition. As long as you do it before you are out of energy its not too hard to rapidly get out of gun range.

Fighter jets, especially swept wing ones are generally not slipped IRL. Cross controlling the rudder/aileron except in some very specific situations is generally not something you ever need or want to do. For reference a slip is generally an undesirable state of flight in any aircraft and normal flying because it creates a lot of drag. About the only time you use a slip is when you need to lose a lot of altitude at a faster controlled descent rate than your aircraft can normally provide. This is a thing in light General aviation aircraft that aren't designed to fly at 200 plus knots, don't have hydraulically boosted controls, or other speed controlling devices (airbrakes etc). You generally slip if you are trying to land and find yourself in some situation where you cannot get the aircraft to descend fast enough, so you shove in a boot of rudder and opposite aileron to increase your rate of descent while holding the nose level, once at an appropriate altitude/glide path, you undo those control inputs and fly normally. All of that being said If you desire to do a slip, in something like the tomcat or hornet or a fighter jet, you don't have that much rudder authority relative to your direction of flight as in a small aircraft like a Cessna, especially with the aircraft flying faster than approach speeds. This combined with swept wings means that any rudder input is going to not move the nose all that much relative to the flight path of the aircraft without also inducing a rather rapid roll. You will probly never get more than 3-5 degrees of difference in your flight path by holding the wings level with aileron while you are holding in a boot full of rudder. In a cessna, you can easily get 10-30 degrees of heading change by putting in full rudder, and be flying essentially sideways rather significantly. You will not get that amount of authority in a supersonic fighter jet. So all of that to say yeah, all of that seems to be as intended, you aren't really supposed to slip fighter aircraft or cross control flight controls like you are talking about (countering roll reversal in the tomcat aside). In reference to your other post about the hornet, it has a FBW flight control system that is doing its best not to let you slip the aircraft, because that's again not something it really is supposed to do. If you are trying to practice slipping as a flight technique, I'd recommend the TF-51 or one of the WW2 warbirds, or the Yak-52. These aircraft have straight wings, and conventional control systems and flight dynamics. They behave much much closer to something like a Cessna or a piper Cherokee than a jet powered hydraulically boosted supersonic fighter jet will.

Quick anecdote from a training sortie a few years ago. We had been doing a lot of CAS and Air to Air stuff in our training cycle the two or three months prior. I get slated for a night flight range ride to go practice bombing a radar reflector raft out in the middle of the ocean (Donna Nook range in the UK if you wanna look it up) I'm flying as the number 1 WSO, my number 2 WSO is the squadron weapons officer, one of the smartest "gets it the best" dudes I know. We go out to do night TF LGB lofts over the water. nobody has done much with the A/G mapping in a couple of months because that's not what we were practicing. After a solid brief we go out, and the Weapons Officer completely goons up his mapping and switchology leading to several assessed misses on the target. We get back and he crushes himself in the debrief for not having practiced this "basic" stuff often enough over the last few months of flights and sims. Hes easily one of the best/smartest aviators I know, and the target was one of the easiest for this kind of attack, literally the only thing out in the middle of the ocean that we had precise coordinates to. But you can still miss if you are not practiced and proficient for what is going on. And this is only a couple of months of not doing "basic" skills leading to atrophy. Relying on innate skill/old man strength can only get you so far, and just being an athlete and doing it doesn't always work. A/G SAR mapping has its uses, in the real world it has kinda gone out of favor for a lot of reasons that Lex and G B have spoken about. one of the biggest ones is return on investment of training, If its modelled correctly (as RBM modes seem to be) in DCS with actual limitations, its not going to make your use any easier, and you'll start to understand why only specialist platforms (F-15E is honestly the only fighter I know of in the US military) really continue to use it as a primary tool in their mission set. There are tons of other easier/bigger bang for buck tools that you can use when you have a limited amount of training/time that will give you better results. The specific few instances where the A/G radar is the best option, its better to bring in the specialist community, rather than flex the community that never uses it and has no TTP's for using it on a day to day basis.

Regardless of how many assets you have there are only so many hours/days/weeks/months in a year that you can train. reference F-15C vs F-15E/F-18/F-16, which is going to be better at A/A (not just purely on the kinematics or capabilities of the jet), the platform that has to split focus between all of the mission sets they are required to do, or the one that can purely dedicate themselves to a single mission set. This isn't saying one fighter pilot is better than another, its the reality that how much time you spend practicing something is directly correlated to how good you are at it, if you have to practice more things in the same amount of time, you will necessarily not be as proficient. Again this isn't saying Hornets are "bad" at A/A or F-15's are "good" at A/A, its more saying there are limitations in proficiency that a multirole aircraft that has to train to every mission and system possible will have, regardless of how "Good" the aircrew are. Everybody always wishes they had more time to train at various mission sets, and nothing is more humbling than trying to do something for the first time in a year. You can read and study on it, but if this is the only time this year you are going to practice a particular attack/system/skillset, while you may be proficient, you aren't going to be as proficient as the guy who does the same thing every other day.

And in inclement weather with GPS denied single seat 4th gen platforms will be providing escort and SEAD support for the two seat 4th gen platforms that go in and perform the strike... There are assets that specialize in that stuff and train to it as a primary mission set, whereas other platforms do not. Reference desert storm... F-16's and F-18s had Air to ground radar and "all weather" capability, but those mission sets were given to specialists every time: A-6's F-111's and F-15E's. You don't gain/regain a non used skill set overnight to 100% proficiency, that's why fighter squadrons train all the time to specific mission sets, and don't use the systems that aren't useful for their specific mission sets. Also why you have two seat jets around, so that you can compartmentalize those skill sets into two crew members.

Example of what just one missile hitting does to a much smaller ship. Note that it floated for more than 5 days,and they did multiple inspections to see if they could salvage it before it succumbed. Other things to note is that there were many reasons this single missile ended up disabling the ship (state of damage control training, when and how it impacted the ship etc...) But the missile hitting and its explosive effects did not result in a catastrophic kill immediately on the ship. That took several days and an out of control fire that burned the ship down. It was still essentially sea worthy and getting towed. If you look at WW2 and large surface comabatants (carriers, battleships etc.) airborne attacks do a really good job of messing up the crew, burning the ship down and making it unfeasible to operate, but until you get to torpedoes below the waterline or a really lucky magazine hit, you are probly not sinking it outright by bombing or the equivalent/missile attack. IE the yorktown at midway, pummeled, but didnt sink till days later when hit by a submarine torpedo. All of the japanese carriers at midway, not sunk by bombs, burned down and assessed unsalvageable, sunk by torpedoes from their escorts or scuttled. Etc... Note how many hits and torpedoes the Yamato withstood and how long it stayed afloat before going down. (yes its a battleship with armor, but this is a large combat ship just getting pummeled) The Bismarck, same thing...Torpedoes and scuttling over many hours of damage and tons of above waterline damage were required to sink it.

The chart that Chizh posted shows missiles assessed necessary for a mission kill, IE the ship is no longer functionally capable of fighting. Not sunk, that would be a K-Kill, or catastrophic kill. To get there you need to model the subsystems and various other parts of the ship that the missiles are wrecking. It is very unlikely in a combat scenario against a large warship like that to actually sink something like a Kirov with harpoons. They all hit above the waterline, so you aren't going to be flooding the ship, just destroying the various systems on top/putting the crew into damage control mode to stop the fires. If you want to sink a major surface combatant, you either hit it with a torpedo, a nuke, or several really big bombs (or missiles) to crack the hull open. Harpoons aint gonna do that. DCS isn't there yet in its modelling of ships and subsystems, altho it seems they intend to.

So just to be clear, this should help with the first two issues as well, while they will still happen and its still possible for desync/lag or a rapid maneuver to create a false track, it should be less likely to then transfer the original track instantly to the false/inaccurate track. Not saying impossible, or even improbable. Just that this seems to be what should solve most of the track issues caused by all 3 of the aformentioned causes. IE if it gets a hit or two that are obviously spurious due to whatever reason (lag/desync/maneuver) the correlation algorithm should be able to hold onto the original track, even if it picks it up? Cause what essentially seems to keep happening in the current system is it gets a false track for whatever reason while you have a missile in the air, and then immediately correlates the original track to the false one. The original track is still usually being picked up. Then due to track hold it propagates the new track into infinity, essentially acting as if it had immediately lost all radar contact with the original track and gone into a lost lock kind of situation. With TWS-A it then gets dragged off trying to hold onto the false track getting track held and any other tracks will then get screwed. With a single contact resolving into two (res cell) a similar thing can happen, because it sees the second contact, correlates, and then assumes the split between the two is acceleration, and then boom same thing happens, and the track gets track hold yeeted away from the actual position dragging TWS-A with it, all while the radar is seeing two perfectly sane tracks where before there was none. If a track splits like that it should just settle on one of the two or more new contacts as being the original, because it is seeing two actual skin tracks, not propagating an entirely fictitious one that is zooming off into nowhere when it has two perfectly good radar hits that are still present on the radar scope to choose from. IE it could/should do that if the maneuver resulted in a loss of radar contact, IE a notch or terrain masking, etc... But as long as its still seeing the skin returns, and it has some kind of gating logic, it should be able to hold onto a skin return instead of jumping immediately to track hold on a false track. using Near blinds example from above 1st frame: Track showing heading 180 and 400 knots 2nd frame: Track showing heading 160 and 1400 knots (track correlates to false track) 3rd frame: correlated track shows no return goes into track hold at heading 160 and 1400 knots, also shows 2 tracks at almost same position showing heading 180 and 400 knots and heading 170 and 450 knots. 4th frame: correlated track in track hold continues to show no return with the 2 tracks behind it showing heading 180 and 400 knots and 170 and 450 knots. This seems to be how its working, where what it seems it should be doing is disregarding what it sees in the second frame especially as it still has skin hits in the original tracks location. it should then settle on one of the two skin hits as correlating to the original track. This exact same logic should apply to maneuvers that dont result in losing a skin hit on the track (IE not going to the notch), or or most network/desync issues, IE if it gets a frame or two of bad data, and then good data, it should be able to recover it from the track hold march into nowhere.

Gyrovague, regarding 1 ( and 2) Does the AWG not have any correlation limits, or sanity checks. I understand that if the target makes a significant acceleration that this can lead to a false track, however there are some pretty basic sanity checks that could resolve this. For example if the target is going 400 knots in one frame and then suddenly 1600 knots in the next... thats a bit out of the realm of possibility for an air breathing target... and it shouldn't correlate the original track to the new one. This kind of sanity check is pretty normal for any track generating algorithm cause otherwise you could get spurious velocities all over the place from just ambient EM spectrum that can cause false doppler returns and totally screw up your tracks. Essentially there should be some kind of a filter or gating mechanism that prevents it from correlating sudden massive acceleration changes to the original track unless they pass a sanity check. What that limit is I have no idea, maybe its 800 knots, maybe its 400 knots, but when you suddenly see a track walk off at several mach numbers higher than the original track was going... That doesnt seem right

As said unless they start throwing random failures into stuff, IE your radar just decides to stop working, this set of flight controls has a fault for whatever reason, constant bit checks arent really a part of combat flying, and are mostly ignored... When battle damage occurs you are more concerned with the meat and potatoes of flying the jet away, BIT's and what failed and didn't are like the last thing on your mind... If you can even access the bit page to begin with. Last NATOPS Check I did he gave us a "battle damage" setting, it completely blanked ALL of our displays and shut one of our engines down. there was zero bit checking, just running over ok, with one engine down we have these systems and these ones are gone, do your best to fly on the standby and lets get on the ground...

Listen to this, note how the migs are only copying they are dead when the controller calls them dead, thats cause the controller is getting told by the guy copying and assessing shots on the blue air freq to kill Mig 1/Flanker 1/ whomever. At one point on of the migs calls a kill, and the Controller says copy, kill passed, so the mig assessed he killed something so now the comm has to get passed to the blue air that whomever he was targetted to is now dead.

The ACMI system is capable of doing that but at least in everyday Air Force training, and most red flags its not used like that. I believe the navy does use it more in that manner. How it works is all that comm that everybody is saying (Fox 3 medium, Short, Close etc...) is telling either the bandit directly or a go between coordinator called the Range training officer the kinematics of the missile. IE Fox 3 close south group, tells the Range training officer to pair and assess a missile against the South group with whatever kinematics close means. Real world or in the sim when you are actually shooting a missile there is no need for all that comm, cause the actual missile hits the target or doesnt. IE fox 3 medium means nothing when you are shooting an actual missile, but in training when nothing is leaving the jet you have to communicate somehow what its kinematic state is. Then after the flight and the real time assessments from either the red air or the Range Training Officer, everybody sits down and reviews their tape and does a 100% validation of all of their shots, then everybody sits in a big auditorium with a giant screen showing all the jets positions, and they play it through, with everybody calling all their shots and pairing them to individual targets, and then closing them out with the 100% validation they did after they landed. They then compare that to what was called airborne. This allows for example things that might have been edge cases airborne to get resolved, IE somebody doesnt hear that they are dead due to comms or whatever, but in the shot validation it comes out that they got killed 30 seconds before they killed somebody else etc... Basically the correct comm over the radio in a training environment kills what you were shooting at. It’s pretty strictly enforced in USAF/Navy fighter communities. If you screw up the comm even in just reciting the missile shot in the debrief they will probly just say your missile missed to drive the point home. Pretty normal for a young guy to just butcher the comm and have most of his missiles declared non factors for comm buffoonery. Long story short the capability and technology is there to have a fully automated system, but its rare to get actually used, in the 2 red flags, and several other LFE’s with NATO nations that I have participated in, what I just described is standard and the expectation going in.

Take a look at the tacview and look at the missile mach, mach is miles a minute x 10, average it out for the max range. If the missile averages mach 3 and you are 30 miles out, it’ll take 1 minute to get to you if you are beaming it, or 2 seconds for each mile. If you are pointed at it, add your mach to its speed. For example if you are mach 1.0 pointed straight at it, and it’s average mach is 3.0, then the missile is closing at mach 4.0 or 40 miles a minute. The same 30 mile shot with you pointed at it would take 45 seconds to impact instead of 1 minute. These are hypotheticals you’ll have to get the average mach for the missile to figure it out. Obviously this is just a rule of thumb, so pad it by a few seconds to stay safe. This rule of thumb starts to break down once you start getting closer and closer to the SAM but generally holds true.