DarkFire

Ah, fair enough. That would be very annoying if it happens accidentally.

That's probably the best of a bad bunch of options. The F-15C has a superior climb rate over both the Su-27 and MiG-29 (all versions) so hitting zone 5 and going in to a gentle climbing turn may be the best option for extending. That being said, if your enemy has R-27ER/ETs or R-77s then the likelihood of a successful escape is minimal. If you're light on fuel your T:W ratio will almost certainly be better than your opponent, so use your better acceleration, better roll rate and higher climb rate to prevail. The Eagle isn't as inferior to the Su-27 and MiG-29 at WVR fighting as most users believe it to be. Ultimately though if you enter a WVR fight against an Su-27 or MiG-29 at relatively low altitude, then something has already gone badly wrong.

Not entirely accurate because the DCS Su-27 doesn't model the rudder limiter the real one has. That being said, why are you using the rudders? The aircraft performs 95% co-ordinated turns for you. The only situations requiring use of the rudder are cross-wind landings and the occasional aerobatic display, none of which are conducted at 740 Km/h with a maximum missile load.

Hmm I can't find the video any more. It was one of the DCS Q&A videos that Wags used to do. I can only find one of them on the DCS YouTube channel now. The reason that ED have given several times for the artificially inflated Cd is that giving missiles 'realistic' ranges at low & medium altitudes results in them having insanely over-inflated range at high altitude. I guess this implies that the atmospheric modelling needs an adjustment at high altitudes, or that missile kinematics needs a tweek for lower air densities, but there we are, that's the reason.

It's been convincingly demonstrated here on this forum that SARH missiles are being decoyed by chaff bundles that are not even in the main emitter lobe of the attacking aircraft radar, i.e. chaff decoying missiles where the radar on the launch aircraft shouldn't even be able to 'see' the chaff. Decoys in DCS appear to work on a simple cumulative probability system so the more that are launched, irrespective of relative position, relative velocity to the desired target or any other factors, eventually a SARH missile will be decoyed. It should also be noted that all SARH missiles suffer from this: The R-27s do, the AIM-7 does as does the Super 530. With great respect to all, the discussions about various missile ranges are distracting from the real problem. All missiles have artificially low ranges in DCS but the reason for this is well known: they all have artificially large Cd. The reasons why this is the case are well known and have been stated many times by ED, even by Wags in a Youtube video. Missile range problems affect us all equally and that is not the real issue. The real problem here is the effect that chaff has on SARH guidance. It's demonstrably unrealistic and all SARH missiles currently in the game have a Pk, even when launched in parameters, that is about 5% - 10% of the best real world figures that are publicly available. My personal opinion is that this should be a critical priority to be fixed. We need SARH missiles to work realistically before we get any F-14s, F-18s or EF-2000's, otherwise when we do get those 4th gen NATO fighters nobody (outside of a few die hards :music_whistling: ) will every fly a Russian fighter again. I think we can all agree that limited viable choices would be bad for everyone..? Hopefully the review that ED are doing on missile guidance will bear fruit. I'm confident that we'll see some sort of improvement in due course.

Interesting questions. 1) Depends how you define a rigid command structure. If we take this to mean essentially role playing an AF pilot, yes sir no sir and all that, then no, I get enough of that at work. However, during a mission if one person in a flight is designated as the flight commander then I'd expect their orders to be carried out to the letter. So in that respect, yes, but not in any wider sense. 2) Having regular sessions to attend is great. Being required to attend a certain number is less good. We all have real lives to attend to, shift work, stuff to do, families to visit etc so rigid requirements such as having to show up to a training session between 1900 - 2100 Z every Wednesday isn't particularly appealing. Being able to show up on the team Discord channel and having impromptu flights whenever is great, and IMO encourages team cohesion. 3) Yes. Not mandatory (see above) but yes, the more the better. 4) Personally air quake doesn't interest me in the slightest. More power to those who do enjoy it, but personally I want actual missions to fly, with objectives and all that sort of thing.

Some tactical considerations relating to the R-27ET: 1) You'll only get launch authorisation when the seeker head has locked on to a target. As other people mentioned, this means that you'll get launch authority for a 27-ER shot significantly before you get launch authority for the 27-ET. 2) You can override the launch authority and launch on bearing, in which case the missile will attempt to lock on to the first thing it detects. If you're very lucky it will find a target and lock it up, but obviously this can have serious consequences because the missile won't distinguish between enemy and friendly targets. 3) Just like the R-27ER, the -ET has excellent acceleration and an impressive top speed. This makes it an ideal missile for tail-chase shots against fleeing targets or against targets that you've forced to behave defensively. However... 4) The R-27ET shares seeker characteristics with the R-73 so if your target pumps out enough flares it will be decoyed. 5) The -ET produces a very obvious smoke trail and as such is much less effective than an R-73 against targets that have you locked up with a Mk.1 eyeball or against observant pilots in general. 6) The R-27ET has nothing like the maneuverability of an R-73 so firing one during a merge is usually pointless, unless you fire it in a tail chase scenario against an extending target. 7) You can use your helmet mounted sight or any radar or EOS mode to lock a target and launch an R-27ET, but bear in mind that it does not have a good off-bore capability so don't be tempted to launch one significantly off-axis with your HMS the same way you can with the R-73. All in all the R-27ET is a super useful missile, but only in certain situations.

To my mind range as we experience it now is less of an issue (but does obviously need to be fixed) than the RNG nature of chaff effectiveness on SARH missiles. Artificially short range is less of a problem because it effects all missiles equally, being a product of across-the-board excessive drag values, whereas 4-6 SARH launches all going stupid within seconds of coming off the rails is horribly unrealistic, as has been convincingly argued on this forum many times. Fix that and we'd be a decent way towards the realism ideal that DCS subscribes to.

Apparently that functionality is eventually coming. Not sure when, maybe with the 2.5 amalgamation (single DCS world game exe with selectable maps). It'll be super useful for mission design when we do get it.

Definitely. Systems like the SVP-24 and L-150 would make the Su-33 a very competent multi-role carrier strike fighter which would go very well with the forthcoming Kuznetsov upgrade module. Flying the baseline Su-27 and Su-33 against the likes of the F-14, F-18 and EF-2000 is going to be Hard Mode.

Agree. Flight sims have had ACMI features since at least DID's F-22 ADF and probably before that. TacView is so useful that it should definitely be available as an official DCS module and should be closely integrated in to the base game. I suspect that this would solve the issue of 'stream cheaters' entirely.

1st question: not sure. DCS can be very fussy about object placement and some times the physical models of things like buildings can intersect or do other weird stuff. I would imagine that if the roof is sufficiently larger than the helipad then yes, probably. 2nd question: there used to be a way of doing it that involved running 2 instances of the game, one in the editor with the mission running on the 2nd instance, but I think the most recent DCS world update broke it. Nice to see another Welsh pilot on the forum :)

Agreed. One functionality of the F10 map that's badly needed in MP is the ability to plan a route for yourself that's visible to the friendly team. This would be ideal for Viggen deep strike missions because it would display the intended route of the strike flight for escort fighters / SEAD / fighter sweep flights so an entire "side" could do properly coordinated missions. Navigation and time-on-target would all suddenly become important, adding value to and for experienced air to mud pilots. IMO this would be much more realistic and more fun than simple air quake. Deep strike targets and high value objectives to protect / kill needs to be a thing in MP missions.

Thanks. I've searched high and low for any altitude control options and there don't appear to be any. Ah well.

I'm having a senior moment. Is there any way to specify maximum & minimum altitudes for a given flight of aircraft to deconflict them from other flights?

You make a good point here: hopefully the fact that ED have in some ways 'sub contracted' module development to the 3rd party dev teams will mean that they have more time to concentrate on the core DCS World framework, to include things we'd all like to see such as new maps, better core features (accurate ground unit LOS, ground mapping radar etc) and more of the nice progress we've seen on the Normandy map recently. I'm far from being an expert on the subject, but I'm still not convinced that our gaming computers have the horsepower to compute accurate electronic warfare simulations for anything other than the most simple of missions. There's also the issue that EW techniques are usually one of the most closely guarded and most secret areas of military capability, which would impact DCS if we have the objective of making the sim as accurate to real life as possible, which ED clearly do. Anyway, hopefully improvements will come from the missile guidance work that's underway.

I wonder how difficult it would be to simulate a radar set calculating a target centroid based on what it can 'see' at any given moment, to include any chaff clouds that are within the center emission lobe? Having that much capability would likely increase the realism of missile guidance to a considerable degree and would help alleviate the problem with RNG chaff effectiveness.

From what Wags has posted it appears that the Caucasus map is getting a much more comprehensive upgrade than a more detailed terrain mesh, and as the LOS technology exists already in the NTTR map, I would expect it to feature in all future maps, though this is just a guess.

Thanks very much for posting this. Very, very useful information for mission design :thumbup:

Sadly I don't no. I've never read the original assessment and I suspect that it may still be classified. The 1978 US performance review of the AIM-7F & Skyflash seeker heads appears to still be classified: http://gao.justia.com/department-of-defense/1978/2/performance-of-the-monopulse-seeker-and-active-fuse-for-the-aim-7f-missile-and-the-british-sky-flash-missile-program-psad-78-59/ The results of early Skyflash testing at China Lake with at F4J launch aircraft apparently resulted in a >50% hit rate, alluded to in this Flight International article: https://www.flightglobal.com/FlightPDFArchive/1977/1977%20-%200950.PDF The UK report doesn't seem to be in the national archives so it's probably not been declassified yet sadly. I agree that having an F3 (or even better a GR4) in DCS would be awesome! Apart from the above, I distinctly remember reading somewhere that the RAF had also tested the Skyflash over the North Sea and found that the seeker head was capable of achieving hits or within-kill-zone misses under "challenging" conditions. Unfortunately I can't remember where I read this so take it with a pinch of salt.

Well put. I think we'll see the SARH-only in competitive play situation (and it's no bad thing) for the foreseeable future, certainly until either the R-77 achieves some form of parity (if that's realistic of course) with early AIM-120's, or until the R-27ER is made effective. This is an old topic now. Hopefully the missile guidance review that ED have in the works will do something to improve the situation. The only thing I'll add is that an evaluation of SARH missile performance from the 1st gulf war, and the same sort of review carried out for the now-defunct British Sky Flash AIM-7 derivative (AIM-7 body with a home grown seeker head) both show that SARH missiles, when used properly, are significantly more effective than we currently have modelled in DCS.

Agreed. Having the SPV-24 would give the Su-33 an interestingly different capability to the standard -27, though I'd imagine that like all modern Russian military equipment it's highly classified.

Something that I think DCS may not adequately take in to account, but that could probably be implemented at fairly minimal computational cost, would be the exact type of an observer and any equipment they might have. Take for example a covert observation post manned by couple of Royal Marines Arctic & Mountain Warfare Cadre soldiers, equipped with 3rd generation thermal detection gear. Trying to hide a tank or soldiers from individuals who have literally spent months training to covertly observe other military units, equipped with top-of-the-line thermal gear, is going to be nearly impossible. By contrast exchange the RM AMWCC soldiers for some conscripts who, if they're very lucky might have a pair of binoculars between them, and the results will likely be entirely different. I would imagine that the DCS detection API already takes "unit skill" in to account, but I think it could do with perhaps being more granular in terms of assigning "sensor capability" numbers to individual units. Making probability calculations is likely within the realms of possibility, but to do so accurately, especially for ground units v ground units, would likely take the calculation outside of what would be computationally acceptable. For example, visibility is something that even pretty good infantry simulators such as ARMA really struggle with. Calculating visibility and by extension detectability on that level for potentially dozens or even hundreds of ground units in a DCS mission would likely bring even the best gaming PC to its knees. It'll be really interesting to see how DCS models LOS for ground units going forwards, particularly with regards to buildings and trees.

Understood. I think both approaches can be equally valid, and exciting, and I think we'd agree that the more 'open' approach to what the player is expected to do perhaps lends itself more naturally to a co-op or MP mission. On the subject of your mission, when the time comes if you need voice acting I'm always happy to help out, if you can put up with a thick Welsh accent :D