Citizen

Excellent job on the Blue Ridge! Wonderful addition to the fleet. The Lewis B. Puller is going to be a phenomenal addition. I'm already seeing fictional mercenary missions flown off of a converted tanker.

I am more excited for the USS Blue Ridge than I am for the F-15E.

Gorgeous!

Are you on Stable or OB?

Weirdly, I think that's what's so attractive about it. Hunting light vehicles and troops in this thing sounds like a blast and probably more fun than spending half an hour looking down at contacts on an MFD.

Understandable viewpoint. My perspective: this is the first trainer-type that I'd want to buy. That may be because this isn't a training variant, but there it is.

I can't speak to that. A simple battery of tests would be required. Either way, this modification should break the heck out of IC, making multiplayer adjustment difficult outside of highly controlled scenarios.

This is not entirely accurate. While it is true that the lua file contains SFM data that the AI uses, there is also plenty of data in there that affects the player aircraft. You can validate this claim by performing the following steps: Test steps: Attempt to fly over Burke destroyer with stock RCS value. Result: quite dead Attempt to fly over Burke destroyer with RCS set to zero. Result: no engagement from DDG.

Open up your /DCS World/ install directory. Inside you'll see the /CoreMods/ folder, open that. Open /aircraft/ inside that. Inside there, look for the /FA-18C/ folder and open that. Now you'll see some lua files. You want to open EA-18G.lua, FA-18E.lua, and FA-18F.lua with your preferred simple text editor(I suggest notepad++). Scroll on down to the RCS = 3 line and change it to whatever your heart desires. Save. Repeat for the other two. Done!

In the modern context the water gets even more muddied. The Ticonderoga is a cruiser and a Burke is a destroyer despite sharing the same parent hull. Well, that's okay because the Tico has improved command and control and therefore earns the cruiser badge, while the Burke is the modern iteration of a Torpedo Boat Destroyer, except guided missiles and aircraft are the new torpedo boats. Fair enough. Then along comes the Zumwalt, larger than the Tico cruiser by a lot and supposed to be more capable. It's a cruiser, right? Well, no, they call it a destroyer. A 'land attack destroyer'; they must practice yoga in order to make that classification make any sense. Other examples abound. South Africa has four Valour-class corvettes. Valour-class corvettes are essentially MEKO warships, which are pretty good yardsticks to judge modern frigates by. Why does S.Africa call them corvettes? Probably to make them sound cheaper/less aggressive and therefore increase the chances that the project would be funded. Politics has a large say in modern classifications, which in turn means that it's messy and there are no firm rules. There are some trends. Corvettes tend to be smaller than Frigates which tend to be smaller than Destroyers. Destroyers tend to be best at fleet air defense while frigates and corvettes may be better suited to anti submarine warfare. It's not uncommon for these ships to be able to passably and independently do many jobs, an ability that historically has been associated with Cruisers. screw it, let's just call them all cruisers and be done with it

That definitely made me do a double take as well. Did you both purchase the same model or some other strangeness?

Wild Weasel + Tomcat = Wildcat I'll show myself out.

Right here in DCS, we can interpolate performance based on Steam data. The F-5 was released in 2016. The MiG-21 was released in 2014. For Vietnam-era dogfighting, these are your two best options. The F/A-18C was released in 2018. It seems to be outperforming the F-5 and MiG-21 combined by about 20-25%. It's an imperfect dataset, but we are working with the law of large numbers. Would including DCS store data change the numbers? I have no doubt. Would it change it enough to make up a 50% delta? Highly unlikely, and given the effort ED has put into getting folks to use the ED store, that data may well favor modern aircraft. The Vietnam era is an important one, no doubt. I believe it's harder to market since it lacks the romance of WW2 or the sex appeal of the modern stuff. That's a shame because for MP, it's pretty clear that it's the most fun.

Very true. I see people talking about competitiveness in MP as a metric of how popular a module will be, and I think they may be misinterpreting the breakdown of DCS players. My understanding is that MP players are a minority and that the vast majority of EDs customers are SP-focused. Historically, Vietnam-era SP flight sims haven't performed as well sales-wise. My gut feeling is that the F-4E, while an important addition to a (thankfully) increasingly Cold War-happy MP playerbase, won't generate the sales performance some are expecting. I don't know if a Greek or Turkish late, upgraded F-4 would even be possible given documentation woes. An F-4G would be neat, but even with gross simplification of ECM, it may be difficult to get sufficient documentation for.

The Sacramento is absolutely delightful. Thank you, Admiral!

I think the San Antonio is fine as-is! If you've sorted out some improvements to it, they're of course welcomed. The #1 thing is to do what speaks to you. It's a hobby for your enjoyment - do what you find moving. You don't owe us anything, but we appreciate what you've done.

As it turns out, not only did my father serve on USN oilers, but he served on one of the Sacramento-Class ships, the Detroit. I briefly set foot on it when I was a wee lad. I still recall the pungent odor.

Definitely looking forward to the Sacramento. My father served on replenishment ships and they have a special place in my heart.