Rhrich

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.

But no, water will not bead off, and speaking as a yacht man, it definitely won’t do that when the surface has been exposed to the salt sea air. As I said, I make no comment on the current situation in DCS, but IRL you would expect significantly degraded visibility in ground ops. (Though the description does not sound ok when airborne at speed.)

I’ve been critical in the past about things that destroy the gaming experience, like excessive wear making it hard to read instruments in the cockpit. But it’s not unrealistic that ground operations is slowed and complicated by rain, sleet and snow. Especially for older fighters. I don’t know how it is on boats. But on land we had many «solutions» some by the book, some very much not according to the book. Even so patience, caution, slower speed and bigger safety margins is required. (Having said that, I haven’t tried the Tomcat in IMC after the updates, so I’m not defending the status quo, just making a general point)

The nsfw part reminded me about the legendary Swedish anti uboat surveillance system. They put extremely good cameras with long range zoom capabilities to monitor their coastline and video tape anything suspicious. Right next to and overlooking some of the best beaches in Sweden. Then they asked 19-20 year old boys to run the system. With predictable results.

That’s ROVER. The RIO is watching an image transfer, so sadly he isn’t playing.

Thank you.

Agreed. And, I’ve never tried multiplayer, but I believe I’ve read you can’t switch between seats there? Anything that doesn’t work in all game modes doesn’t seem like proper to me. that said, I’ve read some of Karons work and his knowledge impresses me. but, the Jester must be a reasonable solution to the average player.

Correct. It’s a long time since knowing this was part of my job, but a typical jet engine will produce 1,5-5 percent of max thrust when in idle. Keep in mind this is of stationary ground trust, which is lower than max in air. Small jets with powerful early generation engines was susceptible to this. A Lighting pilot once told me he reached 60 in idle - though he wasn’t sober at the time. In DCS my tomcat B needs brakes when taxiing to keep the speed down, even in idle. I’ve got no idea if this is correct or not, but generally I don’t really see an issue. The game is for flying, not WRC.

The topic says it all really. From other planes I’m used to be able to center my plane on the TDI to get a 360 overview. I’ve found that beneficial, especially with awacs feed. I believe I did find a way to sort of do this using the Jester wheel, when I played last time (some months ago) but now I can’t figure it out. Is there a way? If not, I have been told a Rio could do it, could that functionality be added?

Make sure to check that the trim is correctly set. do that before every time you launch. if it’s still an issue, then let us know.

Thank you, and sorry that I «spam» the forum. Im an old guy and away from my computer for much of the year, so I might not test something before long after you experts.

60s ABS wasn’t what it is today. its hard without feeling the plane, but you had to be judicious when applying brakes. You couldn’t just assume you could leave everything to the system and stand on the brakes. In fact, you would never get the full brake action as you will today. That’s one of the reasons why some used drag chutes. (Though, they still have their uses even today). Anyway, take it easy, and you should be alright. some tips: keep proper AOA and decent rate . You dissipate a lot of energy when you slam into the ground in proper navy fashion. Spoilers and aft stick to slow you down. I once read that it might help to tune the axis on my rudder pedals (I’ve got some cheap ones, and it did help me) to make it less responsive when you’re doing small corrections to stay on centreline.

The glove vanes was an artifact of a mistaken view of how the future of air combat would look like. I remember it well, we thought a lot of stuff would happen supersonic. Looking back on it now it seems rather stupid, but it wasn’t just the tomcat, «everyone» believed this.