DarkFire

Ah yes, I remember reading about that. Very interesting as it sounds like the USAF upgrade will bring the current F-15C up to the "2040C" specification if I've read it correctly. I guess the only things that will be at or near parity will be fully implemented EF-2000's and maybe the PAK-FA. Up to 16 missiles, AESA radar, active & passive DEWS... That F-15 Golden Eagle is going to be one tasty warbird. I see the descriptions mentions that it'll be getting link-16 as part of the upgrade. I thought that some Eagles had JTIDS terminals installed for Gulf War 1. Maybe I'm confusing it with something else...

He he that actually made me :lol: Horses for courses. Different aircraft built to differing philosophies and in some respects for differing purposes. If we compare a post-Gulf War 1 F-15C with a mid-1980's Su-27S then yes the Eagle is superior at some, even most things. Compare it with an Su-30MKI and the difference is far less clear. In terms of the aircraft we have in-game, the F-15C enjoys a clear advantage in terms of situational awareness, BVR capability, climb rate and acceleration The Su-27 enjoys a significant advantage in WVR combat and, surprisingly, a small top speed advantage. To answer the OP's post: the CAS in the F-15 trims for 1G, so as an F-15 driver you enjoy care-free handling and within certain limits the aircraft will keep the flight path marker wherever you put it. For the period during which it was designed the F-15 had an incredibly sophisticated control system, far ahead of anything else at the time. If you asymmetrically load the aircraft you'll have to manually trim for roll though.

Agreed, pretty sure this bug was introduced in one of the early 1.5 versions.

Apparently the real Su-27 does indeed have a feature like this: in CAC mode the radar can be slaved to the EOS & laser rangefinder, I suppose like some sort of directed flood mode. With certain limitations this would indeed mean that beaming the radar, at least at WVR ranges, would be far less effective. Good stuff, I'll look forwards to it :)

Have to say I was very surprised when I found out the F-15 doesn't have an adjustable QFE setting, particularly as it doesn't have a radar altimeter, and more so as the real aircraft obviously does feature QFE adjustment. The adjustment knob is even shown in the DCS F-15 cockpit...

It'd be great if you could find the time to finish the video - it's a really good training film :thumbup:

Ah my bad, I should have been clearer: the only bit I was referring to as being patently false was the notion that the R-27ER is sluggish. The rest of the guide is actually excellent. I'll edit my original post for better clarity.

"The R27ER are sluggish" Not even close to being true. The R-27ER has both better acceleration and a higher top speed than either the AIM-120B or C model. Some more general points: I'd agree that generally the Su-27 is at a significant disadvantage in a 1-on-1 BVR fight, but going head-to-head against an Eagle in a pure BVR fight is frankly doing it wrong. Plus let's not forget that as a Flanker pilot if you have an AWACS up or EWR available, your HDD gives you better situational awareness than an Eagle driver has. For the Flanker v Eagle situation, as the Flanker driver your ideal situation is to lure the Eagle in to a WVR fight, preferably at below ~6,000m altitude. In a WVR fight your EOS combined with the helmet mounted sight, the off-boresight capabilities of the R-73, your marginally better ITR and STR and ultimate nose authority all combine to give a significant advantage. The trick is surviving to the merge. Don't be afraid to hide in the mountains at low altitude. You have +42% fuel over the Eagle, so even at 1,000m altitude on a full tank you can easily fly 300Km, fight for 5 minutes then fly all the way back to base again. As others have commented, learn to love your EOS, use your radar sparingly, fly around threats using your high cruise speed (85% cruise RPM at 1,000m gets you ~850 Km/h on the deck) and attack from unexpected angles instead of head-on.

I can't really relate to MP as I've never created an MP mission, but as far as SP missions go, I've created a fair few and have always been grateful for ED providing free hosting for them. In many ways the DCS "user files" section is the equivalent of "steam works" for DCS World. Having tighter and perhaps more automated integration between the user files area of the site and the actual game would be nice (in-game mod browser with the ability to automate download & installation of mods would be perfect) but I don't think that user content is under valued as such. Hopefully once 2.5 has been released we might see some attention given to long-standing minor issues.

Depends what mode your radar is in. In scan or TWS modes you have indicator bars at the bottom and right hand side of the HUD that show the elevation & azimuth coverage of the radar scan, and the HDD will generally show whether the antenna is slewed to the right or left. The coverage bars are bounded to the top and bottom and left / right of the HuD so will show the relative position of your radar 'cone.' When you lock a target and drop in to "attack" mode (single target track) the radar antenna indicator (the dot that kobeshow mentioned) will show the direction of the antenna. All the material I've ever read about the Su-27 radar suggests that the antenna indicator should be kept inside the visible area of the HuD. Don't think there's any more accurate indicator than that when in STT mode. Pages 50 - 56 of the Su-27 flight manual explain things better than I can :)

Thanks for the clarification - makes sense. I guess there might be a way to output the trajectory of each cannon round via some sort of lua script possibly? Don't know what performance impact it would have but if it's possible it'd be an interesting experiment for someone who knows lua scripting.

Ah yes, of course, roll inertia is different to roll rate, I should know better than that :doh: I agree completely that fast roll response is very useful combined with a good roll rate. On the subject of guns, I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the gun on the Eagle has a built-in dispersion of some value (6 MOA sticks in my mind, no idea why) for precisely the reason that it offers a greater chance to hit a wildly maneuvering target. Can't remember where I read this but I want to say it was in the encyclopedia that came with Janes F-15E back in the day. No idea how accurate the encyclopedia was, but Janes seems to be a generally well regarded source. I also remember reading a comment by one of the designers of the MiG-29 to the effect that had they known how accurate the gun was they'd have halved the ammunition capacity! The point I suppose is that for all they get compared a lot, the F-15C and Su-27 are in fact very different beasts in many respects.

It strikes me that the best tactic against a target that's ducking and diving constantly is to... Let them do it, and observe from a safe distance. They waste energy while you don't. Easier said than done obviously, but still... As for roll response, the chart in the manual says that the Flanker tops out at nearly exactly 180 degrees / second, co-incidentally at around 750 Km/h, which is also of course very close to corner speed. Can't imagine that this is a co-incidence and was probably a conscious design decision. I know comparatively little about the Eagle but isn't it artificially limited to some insane value like 340 degrees / second?

This. While I'd consider the actual gun on the Su-27 to be more accurate, and out to a slightly longer range, it's relatively easy to get in to a situation where you end up fighting the controls (low IAS, high AOA) not the enemy. If you're not used to how the aircraft behaves under those conditions it usually means death, particularly against a highly skilled BFM opponent. As has always been the case, the F-15 offers more care-free handling and as noted has significantly lower roll inertia. As an aside, I still think the yaw - roll coupling on the Flanker is much too strong, especially at low AOA and above ~250 Km/h, but that's a different discussion...

It depends. Probably depends on the sensitivity of the RWR receiver and the type of illuminating radar. The radar cone for most 'older' mechanically-scanned radar types isn't simply a cone: the beam pattern actually looks like this: So where the target RWR will detect the radar emission at maximum range when the main lobe scans over the target aircraft, it's possible that the RWR could also detect it when the target is scanned over by the side lobes. Radar designers do all sorts of funky things with beam shaping in order to suppress the generation of the side lobes, partly for this very reason. Whether or not a given RWR set will detect and identify side lobe emissions is also down to the very secret digital signal processing systems.

No. Russian military aircraft don't have transponders. They have IFF systems (interrogate & reply) but not transponders. As a MiG pilot, if your radar is activated, i.e. sending out radar energy, if the radar sweeps over an opposition aircraft (let's say an F-15C) the RWR in the Eagle will detect the signal being sent out by the radar of the MiG, will categorize it as a MiG radar and will show the "29" symbol on the RWR display. The angle off the radar beam and maximum range which will cause a contact will appear on RWR depends on many other factors in reality but that's the basic concept. Whether or not locking on to a bandit with TWS1 or 2 modes will generate a lock tone is open to debate. The digital signal processing algorithms used in RWR gear, both western and Russian, are some of the most closely guarded secrets of aircraft avionics design. So, unless we can get the answer from a NATO pilot who's been locked on to by a Luftwaffe MiG-29G during a training mission, we'll probably never know for sure. In game the entirety of electronic warfare is simulated very simplistically, almost certainly due to the fact that our computers have to simulate all sorts of things like aerodynamics, unit AI, graphics, sound etc. etc. Having an accurately modeled EW environment would unfortunately probably be impossible with current PC hardware. As an example, there's a video floating around YouTube that features a talk with some of the designers of the unsuccessful (in that competition at least) YF-23 ATF prototype. In the video one of the designers comments that their prototype aircraft had more computing power on board than the entirety of the rest of the company combined. I'd love to see a properly modeled EW environment in DCS, but the combination of necessary computing power and classified nature of all the systems, probably even older ones, means that it's probably impossible.

TWS1 appears to work like the TWS mode on the Su-27, so while it will give a "29" alert on western RWR, or the airborne emitter alert on a SPo-15, it won't generate a lock alert tone unless you have a target bugged and until it eventually drops in to STT mode at ~85% of Rmax missile range.

The Su-25T, Su-27 and Su-33 all have CCRP bombing modes, the only issue with the -27 and -33 is that the CCRP piper has to be visually aimed using the HUD which makes it of limited utility against all but the most lightly defended targets. Because targets can only be visually designated using the HUD it's a lot less accurate than CCIP. For CCRP mode in the Su-27 and Su-33: 1) When launch authority is not shown, place the HUD piper on the target and hold down the launch key. 2) Hold attitude & go wings level. 3) You'll see a visual representation of the countdown to release. 4) IIRC a tone will sound a couple of seconds from release. 5) Bombs are released. It's also possible to do amusing low level supersonic bombing with the -27 and -33 which makes use of CCRP though it's even less accurate.

Probably done to better reflect reality - maybe the speedbrake on the Su-25A can only be open or closed rather than being variable.

If the Su-27 is anything to go by then the tires are tougher now than they were a couple of patches ago, though it's still possible to pop them if you land fast and simply hold down the brake key. I suppose the obvious solution to hot brakes would be to pour a couple of buckets full of cold water over the disks & tires, but if they're that hot then maybe the disks would warp making them ineffective or even unusable.

Bloody hell, that's like strapping a time bomb to your undercarriage!! I'm surprised there's no over temp indicator for the brakes or tires or both. If I were on ground crew I think I'd be a bit paranoid about that :unsure:

I'm surprised, does the DCS F-15 not model tire popping under heavy braking as some of the other FC3 aircraft do?

Thanks, that clears things up :thumbup: If I'm reading it correctly the -1 manual appears to suggest using aerobraking down to 90 Kts after which the nose should be lowered to avoid excessive nose wheel impact, and then wheel brakes should be used to further slow the plane.

On the subject of aerobraking, is there a chart somewhere that shows expected landing run against aircraft weight? I couldn't find one here and the only -1 I could find was behind a (expensive) paywall.

Depends somewhat on how much of the game is changed from 1.5 to 2.5. Yes, running older missions on newer game client versions can cause all sorts of issues, but often these issues can be solved by simply opening the mission in the newer version of the mission editor and then saving it again. What tends to kill older missions is changes to the game AI and scripting system. A few years ago now when we went from Black Shark to A-10C modules the entire AI system got a very welcome upgrade, the result of which was that none of the old missions worked any more. I certainly don't have any insider information, but from everything I've read about 2.5 it appears that ED are taking the opportunity to add in a load of fixes and new features in addition to merging the 1.5 & 2.0 game branches. It wouldn't surprise me if some or a lot of the AI got a tune up at the same time. End effect? Since 2.5 appears to be the 'foundation' version for the known future of DCS World, I'd wait rather than spending hundreds of hours creating something that may not be usable by the end of the year.