DarkFire

As best I can tell there may be no difference at all between the Su-30KN and the Su-30UBM, or at most the fact that the -30UBM may have an in-flight refuelling probe whereas the -KN may not. I think the distinction could be historical in that the Su-30UBM derived from the original Su-28UB trainer design and was intended for use as a "mini AWACS" by the PVO, the Su-30KN may have derived from the export versions of the Su-30 sold to India, the "K" designation sometimes being used to denote export models. As to whether or not the Russian VKS actually has any, they may do, but it appears that rather than having a load of different weird & wonderful barely distinct types the AF has settled on the core regiments of Su-27SM's with gradually increasing numbers of Su-35's as the "final" upgrade version of the baseline Su-27 family. I would imagine that 20 years from now the situation could be analogous in that the Su-35 or later minor derivatives will form the bulk of the line regiments with smaller numbers of Su-57's becoming available as and when production eventually ramps up.

I understand your point, and with many other games I agree entirely about it being largely marketing nonsense, but as NineLine pointed out, DCS is somewhat unique in that respect due to the sheer amount of experience they have available. On the wider point, by now I don't really understand why the occasional person has such difficulty with the standards demanded of us when reporting bugs and issues when comparing DCS equipment to real life counterparts. I would imagine that flight sims are one of the game types were mathematical modelling and comparison with known real life performance data is most useful. There are endless examples readily available of very well done bug & issue report threads. Of course not all flight sims are obsessive about that sort of thing, and I wouldn't expect to see detailed comparisons with real life hardware in a game such as world of warplanes, but surely by now it should be abundantly clear that DCS does and always has striven for obsessive detail and realism. I'd go so far as to say that a large part of the customer appeal of a game like DCS is precisely that quest for ultimate realism. And yet we still see bug reports and commentary that are based on nothing more than "I'm amazing at this and DCS feels wrong." Ultimately I think this thread has probably reached the end of its utility by now.

I found a max load of FAB-100's to be quite effective, though I think I ended up using the gun on the last boat. Tough mission, but possible. Do make use of your wingman, the AI seems to be reasonably effective against the patrol boats.

Come now chaps, there's an obvious solution to this. Anyone who doubts the fidelity of the DCS Su-27 FM, despite the fact that AFAIK it's been tested by and approved by actual Su-27 pilot(s), all one would have to do would be to create one's own mathematical model of how the Su-27 ought to behave under various flight conditions, apply it to an aircraft model (the DCS Su-27 will do nicely) and then submit it to the likes of Anatoly Kvochur, Sergey Bogdan or really any other Sukhoi test pilot for their comments. I'm sure this will reveal all sorts of issues with the DCS FM that those other real Su-27 pilots didn't spot. Oh, hang on... :doh:

Not bad, we were pretty close then :thumbup:

Agreed. For a normal non-inverted stall the Su-27 is very well behaved. Not so much though for the inverted negative AOA stall. For whatever aerodynamic reason if left alone the aircraft will not recover and will eventually pancake in. It's sometimes possible to 'rock' the aircraft out of the deep stall condition if you have sufficient altitude to do so. I've also read that others have had some success with deploying the brake chute as a means to weather vane out of the stall condition. I was wondering how SUBS17 did it.

Well obviously it's designed with inherent pitch instability. Show me a >= gen 4 fighter that isn't. The point is that the flight control computer applies control laws to the inherent pitch instability in order to make it flyable by a human pilot and to give it carefree handing. My point is that I question the extent to which the control software is able to do so whilst still providing decent WVR performance. Contrast the F-35 demo at RIAT this year with the extremely impressive show that the F-22 put on at the Yuma airshow this year (example video here: ) the F-22 exhibits significantly less tialeron waggle than the F-35 does, though I'll concede that TVC probably helps the F-22 in this regard. I'd be more than willing to believe that the F-22 would be nearly instant doom for whatever flies against it, BVR or WVR. The F-35 as it currently demonstrates, not so much.

Very interesting. Firstly, when looking at the map neither the installation to the north nor the small "town" to the south even appear. That suggests military. Looking at the large northern installation, the layout immediately says "airfield" to me (1st attached screenshot). The length of the single NE-SW track is roughly 5Km which would be perfect for very large aircraft such as bombers or large transports. The supposition that the wide straight SW-NE track used to be a runway is also supported by the fact that though overgrown it's clearly significantly wider than the rest of the dirt track around the entire installation. I think that when the facility changed from an airfield to whatever it is now, the runway was abandoned, turned in to a dirt track which was then extended around the entire site. Looking south at the small "town", there's a just about visible overgrown rectangle, about half of which is totally overgrown. I think the length is approximately 1.5-2 Km in length. This southern "town" suggests to me a smaller airfield with associated areas for all the admin stuff associated with a fighter base. (2nd attachment). I think this entire installation used to be a bomber base with an associated interceptor base for defensive purposes. The interceptor base would also have serviced the nearby Duga radar which appears to have been long since decommissioned. As for the arrangement of tracks in the middle? If we assume that within a reasonable distance we have the city of Komsomolsk-on-amur, the Duga radar and potentially a strategic bomber base, the arrangement of roads in the middle could have been a site for an early strategic SAM system like an SA-3 or maybe even an SA-5. As for what the site is now, hard to say. There's obviously no usable runway any more and road access seems mediocre at best. Each individual area of the northern installation appears to have it's own security and what may be guard towers. As Bushmanni pointed out there are also a serious set of fences. The main entrance also appears to have quite a serious guard house. What needs that much protection? What do you keep in bunkers that needs guarding to that extent, but which doesn't need a runway to transport? Road mobile ICBM storage? Strategic warhead decommissioning? I'd wager something along those lines. I think the "town" slightly to the south is an accommodation village for the site.

Interesting link, and not surprising. I've viewed a couple of videos that various people took of the RIAT '18 show, taken from different places from where I was, and the more I look at it the less impressive it seems. I can't imagine that the pilot was holding back for any reason, why would he since RIAT is actually a sales show, and given that assumption I'd say that the F-35 showed: 1) A surprising amount of tailplane waggle. Makes me wonder if it suffers from pitch instability. 2) An unimpressive roll rate. 3) Didn't measure it, but <20 degrees/second turn rate seems reasonable. 4) High AOA performance that's maybe on par with the F/A-18, inferior to the F-22 and nowhere even close to something like the Su-35 or Su-57. I'm sure that the sensor suite is cutting edge and doubtless it'll be able to use the AIM-9X and AIM-120D7 but the BVR performance had better be world beating because if the RIAT '18 & Paris '17 displays were representative then this thing is going to suck hard at WVR :(

Interesting video. What technique did you use to recover from the deep stall?

Might be worth trying an installation repair just on the off chance that some strange thing is interfering with your sound drivers or something equally weird.

Agreed. Since the F-22 program only produced a (relatively speaking) small number of airframes, it makes much more sense for the Russian ministry of defence to allocate scarce funds to procuring advanced Flanker versions like the Su-35S to replace the ageing Su-27S fleet than it does to allocate the same funds to producing something that won't produce any cash from exports and would be very expensive to produce in any numbers. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the Russian VKS continues to use advanced Flanker versions out to 2025-2030 and maybe even beyond that, with a couple of squadrons of Su-57's for 'just in case' scenarios.

A very well deserved award. Captain Mäkisen made the F-18 do things that I never knew it was capable of doing. He also put on an absolutely point-perfect display which was obvious from the cockpit video. He must have a lot of hours in the F/A-18 to be that good with it. Absolutely outstanding. Have to say I was disappointed by the F-35 demo. Other than a few seconds of high-alpha stuff I didn't see anything beyond what an F-16C could do 20 years ago. It was also really loud, but I eventually realised why: by comparison with other types the pilot spent a hell of a lot of time in AB, which made me concerned about what sort of T:W it really has.

Didn't need to turn it off eventually but thanks, that's worth me knowing for the future :thumbup:

The Sukhoi variant designations can be confusing, but it appears that the 35S is the current VKS line version of the aircraft with the N035 Irbis-E radar, whereas the -35BM appears to be a Sukhoi prototype or development aircraft for future / continuing modernisation of the Su-35 platform. Not sure what new stuff the -35BM features but it appears that one significant upgrade is the ability to carry the R-100 very long range AAM. I wonder what the point of the -35BM is given that the Su-57 appears to be nearing serial production, but given the announcement by Russian defence minister Shoigu that the Su-57 would only enter low rate production for now, maybe it still makes sense. Even more so given that Sukhoi is looking for export customers for advanced Flanker variants. I doubt anyone will be offered the Su-57 for a number of years.

Before a recent clear-out I had uploads going back years, some of which were however still useful e.g. mission files or graphics like graphs etc that were used to illustrate some point in some thread. It's very easy to run out of space for forum uploads. So, might it be possible to implement some system whereby it could be possible to pay some small amount to have increased upload space? Edited to add: apologies, should have added this to the suggestions box thread. Please move if appropriate.

Does the beeping sound like an aircraft sound, or could it be something like a clogged radiator causing a PC system over-temp alarm once you jump in to the actual sim?

Exactly that. The Russian design & control philosophy has always been very different from western aircraft. Russian aircraft, particularly the Su-27 / -33, will allow you to do plenty of things that the flight control system on most western types would prevent. The theory is that it allows for greater pilot freedom to 'push the envelope'... as long as the pilot knows what they're doing. In this example, the probe stays out so that the system can be purged prior to retraction of the probe so that no fuel gets in to places where vapour could react very badly with things like the pilot or powered system like the radar. The pilot is thus expected to only extend the probe during actual (or practice I guess) refueling operations, and is also expected to know and obey the probe speed limits, though the auto throttle on the -33 helps in this regard.

I'm having the same issue. Never happened with any previous update. Does anyone know how to temporarily turn off windows defender? I can't find an option to disable it temporarily. Edited to add: Cancel, restarting my box appears to have solved the problem. Weird.

I think this has been an issue for a long time now. Try disabling FFB for the Su-27, that seems to fix it for a number of people.

Agreed. Hmm, maybe my last post came across as something of a prophecy of doom. To clarify, I've been a member of various ED-related fora since about 1997 and have always been impressed about how they've always managed to be something of a haven of polite tranquility compared to how many other game forums have developed. I am and always have been proud to be a member of this community for this and many other reasons :thumbup: I've no doubt that ED would be entirely sensible about approaching people, but a sensible degree of caution should also be exercised.

This video illustrates the point about the climbing pitch angle: The aircraft falls back well outside of its own smoke trail, proving that the manoeuvre is indeed a bell and not a sharp slide.

Exactly that :thumbup:

Sounds right. From further testing it appears that the closer the pitch angle is to 90 degrees, the longer the period during which the aircraft experiences negative AOA just after the nose comes down. The AOA indexer doesn't show negative AOA past 20 degrees, but my hypothesis is that the closer the initial pitch angle is to 90 degrees, the higher the resultant negative AOA is. There's a good reason for the red marker on the AOA indexer at around -17 degrees. There's probably a critical maximum negative AOA after which inverted departure is inevitable, hence the realistic maximum pitch angle of 70-75 degrees. I don't know enough about aerodynamics to comment on whether or not the inverted negative AOA departure is realistic in its behaviour, but the point and cause of the initial departure would seem to fit in with realistic limits on the usage of the real aircraft. More generally I'd say that there may be some idiosyncrasies around the hairy edges of the flight envelope but in general ED did an excellent job with the FM. I guess there's a good reason for it being signed off by actual Su-27 pilots.

I gave this a bash. I did a couple of fairly gentle tail slides with a maximum pitch angle of approximately 70 degrees. The aircraft failed to depart on recovery on both occasions. IIRC the recommended pitch angle for a tail slide is roughly 70-80 degrees, not direct vertical. Su-27 Tail slide test.trk