Rhrich

Its no wonder. Most who might want a grip has got it. And while it might be great in the real tomcat (though I would prefer a different layout), I guess its not that suited to a sim environment where you would want more buttons to compensate for lack of cockpit. the real reason I write here though, is an encouragement to those who own it: Make sure to take good care of yours. The item is quite unique and it’s probable that no one will produce anything similar again for a long time. you might therefore own something more hidden and sought after than MH17s black boxes: A piece of PC equipment that might retain and even increase in value.

I’ve been trying my hand at bombing. First practice bombs, but then the real stuff. When I switched I was surprised how much the accuracy decreased from practice to live. As I didn’t seem to kill anything. However after using the F-keys to follow the bombs down I see that they do indeed hit or land very close, but it seems that almost only a direct hit will result in a kill. I’ve seen the result of the bombs in reality countless times, and there’s not a chance a soft skinned truck would survive a close miss. Am I doing something wrong in the setup? Or could it be lag causing the bomb damage to not go around the animated impact of the bomb?

The F-14 does not in any way behave realistically on the ground. Especially not in wet weather. I’ve had my share of landings in wet and snowy conditions, and fast jets does not preform like that. However, I believe it’s not just the models fault. Some of the trouble people have is probably caused by the fact that the model is sensitive to differential braking. And many people’s rudder pedals isn’t that precise. Be careful, and also consider binding an axis to all brakes.

The headline is a play on «have you tried turning it off and on again?», but in all seriousness: Jester often annoys me because he can’t find targets that should be child’s play to find. However, I’ve found (or think I have) that he is considerably better if when I’m on the deck tells him to turn off the radar, and I’ll keep it that way until we are 15-20nm from the ship. its hard to know for sure, but I’ve run test on a few missions, and as far as I can tell he picks up and hold radar tracks significantly better if I do it that way. im sure that isn’t intentional, but bugs sometimes creep in even the smallest gap. Anyone else noticed this? Oh, and also, and this I haven’t tested, but he seems to preform poorer if the TCS doesn’t have an image. But that I’m not sure about.

Aar has become easier for every patch. Now the basked behaves like a magnet and is pulled onto the pole if you get somewhat close. Unfortunate. Use bomb mode. It makes your speed a little less twitchy and as it locks wing sweep you’ll can roughly trim the plane before you’re perfectly on speed. The key to aar is to match the speed of the tanker. Then use muscle memory for throttle position and give little burst of throttle (or vice versa) if you need to close, and quickly return the throttles to their former position. Also, irl you would prefer to use the rudder for a lot of your correction. In DCS, use what you have best quality of. so, if you have a good stick (say Virpil with extension), but <profanity>ty rudder pedals, then use the stick.

How do you define dogfight? To me, a dogfight is 1v1 guns only, mano a mano. First of all, if you find yourself in such a situation with the plane with the longest stick and radar of all - you’ve failed. However, I’ve found all planes, regardless of AI skill, quite easy to beat in the Tomcat B, except the Viper. Even if I drag him down and slow, the viper still is a challenge, though I almost always beat or draw. In general the AI doesn’t seem very clever and resorts to cheating ( I think) instead of outfighting.

Ive never had intimate contact with the USN, but as a general rule: Back in my time the S in SOP was often taken as suggested. Pilots do what’s most safe. If something happens, the less you have to worry about asymmetric, the better. That’s true even if your engines isn’t two an a half tennis courts apart.

I did. Unless I’m mistaken it was terrible. For example, it didn’t care if I did everything right when I dropped LGBs, it wanted me to drop it according to a script. Did a test: Did everything as stated in the script, dropped when I was supposed to, then masked and went in clouds. The bomb still hit its target. What’s the point then?

You don’t want to go too high in the Tomcat, the wing sweep works on Mach not indicated. So in the thin air your in a severe disadvantage against planes like the flanker or the eagle.

If you read what I write, it’s clear that I’m not talking about jester, but other aspects. If I’m not very much mistaken, you where one of those defending their decisions on worn cockpit interior. My point is that jester doesn’t give an realistic example of flying the F-14 and that it should be easy to improve it. While in other aspects they’ve gone overboard to create what they regard as realistic.

I would like a more knowledgeable Jester. While I understand Jester can’t have «god mode», he should be more knowledgeable than he currently is. For example: When I get data feed from awacs jester should be able to see that feed and point his radar towards the hostiles. I shouldnt need to tell him where to look when it’s so obvious. I guess some will defend this by saying that jester is a glorified way to control the radar, and that I should expect to control it. but the same people often defends the strange ideas of creators by saying they’re making as authentic experience as possible. Well, an unthinking and stupid jester isn’t a tomcat experience. so at least give jester access to and knowledge about the data feed. Also, having nevner flown a two seater I can’t be sure, but I guess the Rio will despense chaff or flare when asked to do so by the pilot (in addition to when he judge it necessary). Give the pilot a way to tell him to dispense it. I’ve said this before, and then someone showed me some PC script that allowed the pilot to press the rios buttons. But that’s not what I’m asking for, and it would be unrealistic since it’s instant. make a key press possible to tell jester drop chaff and drop flare. Ideally leave a unknown time gap between say 0,2-0,9 seconds to simulate reaction time.

Depends on what plane you meet. I would suggest going for a drive. Stick your hand out of the window. Angle it a bit, you’ll notice it pulls up or down. Angle it more and it’ll pull more. Keep going, and suddenly it’s mostly pulled back. Use that as a mental picture. Carve as a skier skis down, not skid as he does to slow down.

Lots of good advice. But perhaps a bit too complicated. there are several excellent videos on YouTube that will go into this in great detail and with proper terminology. I’ll assume you’re fairly new to flight, welcome its a great place, so I’ll give you some pointers without terminology and with simplifications. This is not a proper lecture and I’ll skip a lot of things, but here’s how you can think about this before you take the time to learn it the basics: First of all, it’s going to depend on what tomcat you fly. The A is quite weak, but the B is a rocket ship. If you’re flying the B then going full AB while getting as close to 0g as posssible for a few seconds should be all you need to regain speed There are three types of energy: your altitude, your speed and the chemical energy in your fuel that can be converted by your engines. Remember Newton’s first law: Your plane would like to continue in a straight line unless forces are applied (gravity is always applied, but other than that it’s up to you). The only force you can apply has its source in your energy state. That means you’ll loose energy every time you change direction. Thats OK though, because your engines keep turning chemical energy into kinetic energy (speed). As long as the amount of energy you loose from changing direction does not exceed the amount you get from your engines, you’ll keep your energy. One of the great tricks (which at least I find much harder in DCS than in real planes) is to turn without loosing to much energy. Might be helpful to think of a car. You can make quite a sharp turn and keep much of your speed, but if you do it too much you’ll lose grip and loose a lot of speed. Same with planes: If you pull your stick to hard or to fast, you can end up «drifting» too much. I think anyone who as flown a fighter or acrobatic airplane will tell you that you can feel this happening. Not so stationary in a simulator. However there are plenty of cues in the tomcat, and you can always look at the AOA meter as well. If your aoa is too high, you can bet you’re bleeding a lot of energy. Now, there’s a lot more too this, not to mention how you blend your stick and rudder controls, but focus on that as a start. The rest you can learn when you feel more confident. There are one more thing you’ll need to consider: Altitude. If you’re 3000 feet above someone, you have a lot of potential energy that can be converted to speed. That means you can turn harder than your opponent. You will bleed off speed, but you can recoup that better than him since you have more altitude you can trade for airspeed. We therefore like to think of a planes energy as a combination of speed and altitude. How you manage that is key. For example, if you are going to fast, you can trade some speed for altitude, thereby preserving energy. That’s why most evenly fought fights tend to go downwards: To match the opponent’s turn rate both will trade altitude for speed until they run out of altitude. This is extremely hard, and you’re trying to play 3D chess against an opponent at the same time. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you struggle, a lot of real pilots had it the same way. And they knew (or should have known) all the theoretical framework before they ever tried it.

Thank you! Is this also the case with «debridgeing the river x»? I can’t for the life of me get that to work, and when I first started playing a few years ago it worked fine.

Thanks. Yeah, unfortunately the wife came home m, so that wasn’t an option. However. I believe more missions could be bugged? Tried «watching the devil dog», and nothing happened after I checked in. I remember trying it a year ago or something, and it worked well then, but now nothing happened. No convoy and nothing to target.

I tried the «night hunter» mission. Saved it half way through, everything went smooth until I got a prompt saying I was approaching the target and that the Rio saw her and her escort. But there was no such contact on the TID. And I couldn’t find it however hard I tried. Was about to give jester a good honest digital beating for falling asleep on duty, when I realised I couldn’t see the candid when cycling with the F keys. Something I could do when I start the mission fresh. Intrigued, I spent some time searching, couldn’t finish anything. The only bastards alive where two heloes. Could the save game have deleted the mission objective? I can’t find anything in the log file about a crash either.

As someone with intimate knowledge you’ll be aware of how it worked in real life, that’s what’s duplicated here. But as in life, the emergency wing sweep is an axis and can be mapped to one.

Don’t forget the stupid Grumman politics. Having been involved in these sorts of procedure, I’m highly sceptic of armchair office rat officers (not talking about you draconus) who second or third guess the reasons, and the first poster makes it all too complicated. However, I wouldn’t be too surprised if his/hers summary is correct: The tomcat offered better performance and capabilities than the hornet, for a steeper price. But, that wasn’t needed in the 2000s. The USN was racing against dung beetles, so they didn’t need a thoroughbred. Any horse would do - and the hornet is more than decent. Now they’re a bit late with the F/A-xx, but by the sound of it, it will - at least in all but name - be a Super Tomcat.

This is very important. Yes, compared to todays planes with easy two screw panels the Tomcat requires more man hours, but those of us who where active in military aviation in the 70s and got to chat with USN personell then will remember that the Tomcat was actually very reliable when new. (I don’t remember numbers, but they where good). As a former leisureyachtsman I’m all to familiar with how the sea will destroy everything that isn’t 316. Living in the dry desert I would expect the 50 year old Iranian tomcats to have significantly less wear (from the elements) than the USN jets had when they where 10 years old.

I know this is a very small issue. But I’ve noticed that they remain stationary in DCS. Is this a bug or oversight or just a limitation of the engine?

I’m beginning to get the hang of this plane and I would like to try flying in more testing conditions. is there a foul weather training mission for Kola floating around somewhere free on the internet? And is there other interesting missions you can recommend?

Yeah. The F-15C isn’t realistic from what I’ve gathered. What you have tested here is not applicable anywhere, but if I had to name something it would have been for a point defence interceptor like the Lightning. in real life we would have used other tactics. but you have proven why M2 isn’t applicable in modern combat, with some minute exceptions.

A few points: For fighters M2+ is basically only good for bragging rights. Even the most powerful like the Eagle or Tomcat will consume a decent portion of their fuel to reach it, and time. Most M2 capable planes will only reach it clean or with a smallish load. Therefore, it has little use in actual combat. However, high speed sometimes does. I have no knowledge of the Tomcat, but to briefly give an overview of one frequently used method, at least for less powerful planes: climb subsonic, then unload and also trade som altitude to get through the transonic region (up to ca. M1,2) then continue supersonic. I would assume that you would need a quite clean airframe in DCS to reach M2 in the tomcat, but not sure.

If anyone’s interested I would assume they could check Natops? I would be surprised if what Kobal asked for is a fixed given airspeed and I would not recommend anyone using that. In my time we usually used AOA, and I would assume that is still used as its eminently suited in most situations. But as I’ve stated before, I’m old, my knowledge might be outdated or I might confuse stuff.

My English might be as good as it once was. It’s something that occurs in many when they reach my age, we loose our professional English skills and hone our language skills by ordering beer in Spanish. But to make myself crystal clear: The description of what it looks like in the air seems wrong, then the water should bead and be blown off. However, that’s not the case with ground ops when stationary. its close to 20 years since I sold my yacht, she did best in the 4-7 kts range.