Aussie_Mantis

Had a look for your little article. I can't find it on google because it's too old. Do you happen to have a link or a PDF or something?

Did some quick searching this morning- didn't the USAF have an inventory of AIM-9P-4/P-5s during the late 90s? Also, what variant of AIM-9P do we have in game at the moment?

As I said, I've had another look and just can't find anything. I looked through PROJECT CHECO reports to find a similar result. There were no mentions of any radar slaving ability, which you'd figure might be included in a breakdown of missile performance. All it mentioned were caged/uncaged shots. No SEAM.

I was going to say that I've never heard of AIM-9J/N/P lacking SEAM. The manual 1F-4E-34-1-1 mentions radar slewing being available ("aircrew may use the radar as an aid in steering to an optimum firing point"). However, upon perusing 1F-4C-34-1-1 and 1F-4F-34-1-1, both direct to the -34-1-1A manuals, which I don't have on hand at the moment, so I cannot definitively say whether they had SEAM or not. However, I have not heard of AIM-9Js lacking a radar slaving feature.

Hey, a question I can answer! The F-4 used SEAM on most missiles throughout its career, and depending on which air force was using it, was available on anything from USN AIM-9G/H variants (Israel) to the AIM-9J/N/P USAF variants (USAF, Iran, South Korea, Sp... I'm not going to write the full list. Sod off.) and the AIM-9L/Ms that the F-4E saw in its sunset service. SEAM worked like it did on the F-4J and other F-4s before it- you just locked a target with your radar and the missile would automatically slew around to it. Then you waited for missile tone and voila. It'd work just like missile locks work for any other gen 4 plane, except you're using solely the radar screen, and the shoot cue on the big "Meatball" on the reflector sight. The meatball doesn't actually move around, but it would give you a valid range cue. VTAS on F-4Js would use it with a primitive HMD to use the CW Radar Beam to slew the IRM seeker around. In real life, due to complications with the helmet itself, it wasn't particularly popular due to being a heavy piece of kludge. Ingame, if the F-4J is added, there probably wouldn't be an issue.

What are the kinematic differences between AIM-7F and AIM-7M? I feel like they're kinda under-explored in most communities seeing as most communities of flight sim enthusiasts don't really take interest in mid-cold-war hardware and comparing that to late-cold-war stuff.

What's the verdict against some of the other DCS REDFOR planes in BFM? MiG-19, Mirage, VIggen spring to mind- Viggen should be a bit of a challenge to say thr least, mixing it up with a farmer I'm not sure about, Mirage F1C should be pretty similar overall

Not really saying that you have to have a gun, it's just that to me, not having a gun is a bit of a dealbreaker. I'd rather have it than rely solely on the heaters, but it seems we'll have AIM-9Ls and AIM-7Fs from the get-go if the dev shots so far are indicative of what F-4E we're getting, it seems we'll have AIM-9PL/Ps and AIM-7Fs- so you and @Smyth are probably ultimately going to be right. I'm just used to F-4Es from other flight sims and I enjoy the ability to have a gun alongside my regular 9L/7F combo. That notwithstanding, you shouldn't have to get into a gunfight in most cases but I personally find them fun, and seeing as this is a game as @G.J.S points out, I'm going to relish the ability to be able to have a knife fight in a phonebooth, even if not optimal. As Smyth said- this is a game, and I will ergo be doing what I want to have fun with. Full guns-a-go-go, and damn the pod nay-sayers. You raise an interesting point about USN training here to be honest, but I personally wonder if that would differ if the F-4B/J had access to an internal gun. I don't think howver I've ever said that the Phantom was inherently "un-maneuverable", though. I disagree with the popular culture myth of the "Phantom Brick" as far as it goes, seeing as they were plenty capable of a dogfight when pushed into it. As for the aerodynamic analyses by @SgtPappy and @Smyth, I'm not sure why you have the impression, but I'm not calling the calculations nerdy. I'm just a little miffed that manuals for F-4B/J don't have anything about the Mk 4 gun pod being carried.

something I haven't seen mentioned here- people are talking a lot about F-4B and F-4E in BFM, right? I can't believe people, when comparing F-4B/J and F-4E... forget about the fact that to do BFM in an F-4B/J... you have to have a massive gun pod the size and weight of a 370gal (USAF/RAF SUU-16/A or SUU-23/A) or 600 gal (USN mk 4) fuel tank. How much drag and weight that would add, I do not know. But it certainly wouldn't help the Phantom. Keeping that in mind and the fact that I don't think many pilots are going to be willing to fly without a gun, I think the difference might be more pronounced.

I see, that makes sense

There are??? I thought they just used the one J79-GE-17. Do you mind telling me about them?

Boresight was later implemented as a standard modification for the radar starting on the F-4E onwards. It's the forerunner to ACM mode. I have made a post prior about USAF vs USN loss rates/kill rates of F-4s in response to another user's claims that , which I wil attach here: TL;DR, the ultimate USN vs USAF loss ratio is about the same. Sparrow Failure Rates can be attributed to multiple things but it includes things like maintenance, the environment, and shoddy training. The IAF in the 1973 and 1982 wars encountered a lot more success with the AIM-7, with a ~60-70% average kill ratio throughout all those wars, though in 1982, reportedly, Soviet Jammer Pods e.g. SPS-141 were proving a challenge to deal with for the more primitive radars on the F-4E and the seekers on the AIM-7E/F that they were using. I'd also like to ask a question of you lot and also of @SgtPappy, who made a graph on this- Can someone please tell me what the instantaneous/sustained turn rates of the slatted F-4 are? There's a bunch of different values out there and people are saying anything from the F-4E rating worse than an unslatted F-4 to information that contradicts what people here have previously said about the MiG-23, and I'd like to arm up on ammunition for the inevitable fights coming soonish to DCS. aod for Sgt Pappy, you previously made this graph: What is the sauce for your information? You stated 1F-4C-1 for F-4E unslatted, and 1F-4E-1 for slatted ones, but I can't find these graphs. In addition, are these instantaneous or sustained rate speeds? And what in the world are the big blue and big red graphs?

Oh, the speed gate. I thought they were thinking about 4 seconds after launch, not 4 seconds before launch. AIM-7Es in the-game-which-will-not-be-named had this weird 3-4 second delay when they were first released that kept them flying straight until they decided to turn on guidance.

Oh, you think that's asymmetric? Look at this, Thug. Yeah, do the GBU shaker

said F-15 by accident, my mistake. I meant F-16. ALso, your statement is incorrect. F-16ADFs in ANG service had sparrows, as did the block 20s sent to Taiwan, and later on, the export blocks that were sent to Iraq.

A topic expanding off of Air to Air discussion in a Ground Attack related thread. One thing that I've noted in my previous explorations of F-4 vs MiG-21 seems to be that a favoured tactic, contrary to depictions in World of War by Nihongo Entertainment, is to take the F-4E fully vertical against a MiG-21bis into an egg-shaped turn. Apparently the miG-21bis just cannot keep up below 17000, giving the F-4 the advantage. In addition, I wonder what the specific differences between AIM-7E and AIM-7E-2 are.

Israeli F-16s couldn't carry AIM-7s anyway- I doubt the F-16s would have continued not carrying sparrows if they had that ability. Brems makes a good point. Most of the failures of Sparrow in Vietnam were from maintenance/handling plus US Aircrew Training issues. The Israelis, oddly enough, managed a ~70% kill rate with their Sparrows against MiG-21s in the Arab-Israeli wars throughout both AIM-7E and AIM-7F variations, dogfight-fuzed or not. The 4 second figure previously quoted seems a bit weird. I think they're bringing up the original non-Dogfight Sparrows, since those have a 4 second delay between initial launch/booster ignition and guidance start. AIM-7E-2 and AIM-7F rectify this. I am going to create a separate thread for this, this is ground attack loadouts discussion. https://forum.dcs.world/topic/327875-f-4e-air-to-air-weaponscapabilities-discussion/

@Temetre The F-4E will, overall, hold the range advantage in any engagement versus the MiG-21. The weapons are slightly more reliable. As for R-60 vs AIM-9J/N/P, the discussion goes both ways, but I think the AIM-9P has slightly more range (effective out to 2.5nm in a tailchase instead of 1nm). As for these, you could theoretically do it in an F-4E in DCS. It's not totally unreasonable. An example of this scenario would be an F-4E with AIM-9Js and AIM-7Fs going into combat with the very, very typical load of 4 AIM-7F + 4 AIM-9J + 2x 370 gal drop tanks (outboard) + 6 Mk 82s on two TERs. Assuming DCS allows us to use TERs+Winders then we can have the F-4E switch from A2A to A2G at a single push of the "CAGE" switch located on the left throttle, and then use the pinky switch to rapidly flick between Sidewinders and Sparrows and Gun after pressing the "ACM" mode button in the front pit. Keep in mind however that unlike future planes, the F-4E has a few hardpoint interlocks- for instance, the front two sparrows won't shoot if you have anything on the centerline at all- you have to jettison everything off it to fire.

yeah. As I said, I found the answer, page 1-35 F-4E Non-Nuclear Weapons Delivery.

Thanks, but that wasn't what I was confused by- does the manual mean that if I switch it to guns, CAA starts scanning in a scan pattern centered 15 degrees to my right, or does it expand the FOV by 15 degrees? EDIT: Never mind, found my answer already. It just scans in a pattern 15 degrees to the right.

Hey guys, necro'ing this thread again because I had a question about what the pinky switch does- in the non-nuclear weapons delivery manual it states a bunch of azimuth values- what exactly does this mean? Does it mean that when the guns position is selected, the slewable scan centers around 15 degrees to the left instead of directly in front of the plane, and so and so forth?

The stick for slewing Mavs was a hat switch on the main control stick that doubled as trim and nose wheel steering. As for the aircraft itself, a lot of it is coloured by the fact that early on in its life, trying to pull at high AoA lead to the aircraft stalling out at anywhere above ~21 degrees due to an effect called Adverse Yaw, where the wing shape caused a stall on one side, and therefore the plane would suddenly roll in the opposite direction of the intended direction. Many training programs and workarounds (including rolling with rudder only) had to be invented to fix this, but apparently, slats fixed that. I'm not sure about that though. As for the size, keep in mind that the F-4E has a thrust to weight of ~1.27 unloaded at optimum velocity (1400km/h) while the MiG-21bis has the same at about ~1.32 when on the Emergency Afterburner set that can only be used at high altitude and even then for only 3 minutes unless you want to turn the engine into slag. The MiG-21bis- a 1972 plane- also suffers from silly things such as compressor stalling if you adjust the throttle too fast- something that, you know, you might do in the middle of a pitched dogfight, as well as having been solved by the US in the 1950s- and has a wing shape that bleeds energy extremely quickly. The F-4E meanwhile uses an almost completely lifting body design and conserves energy much better. There's also minor facts like how the F-4E can engage and destroy targets up to 20-30nm away while the MiG-21 can't hit anything beyond 10 on a good day. You know, just minor things. Within visual range in the 1 circle, the MiG-21 has the advantage, but in terms of an actual sustained fight, in theory at least, the F-4E should win. As for the MiG-23, the MiG-23 is a joke within visual range. I wouldn't underestimate its BVR capabilities, though.

"Limited dogfight" is a bit of a misnomer. It's a lot better than you realise within the context of fellow gen 3s. It has pretty good Rate/Maneuver characteristics IRL and the slats allow it to outrate earlier MiG-21s, though according to the RU DCS forums' currently corrupted and unviewable graphs, apparently it can overpower the MiG-21bis in a straight rate fight or in a vertical. In real life, at least, if it holds a maneuver that looks like an Egg in the vertical- shallow 2G climb, and then sharp turn at the apex- it can easily get the better of the MiG-21bis by pure engine power alone. You're entirely right, though. The F-4E is the first aircraft that was probably truly "multirole". It had a lot of revolutionary tools to help it- such as TISEO, the TV camera allowing for visual ID, as well as Combat Tree, the IFF interrogator that could interrogate both USSR and US IFF systems for a clear picture in the sky, much like later planes can now. It also had the first HOTAS setup for Air-to-Air Override, which you're probably familiar from on the F-16- push one button on your HOTAS and it immediately switches into Air to Air mode without needing to reconfigure every single control and weapon selection switch on the plane. It also had a three-way switch for your pinky, which you might know from the A-10: Forwards for Sparrow, Middle for sidewinder, and fully back for guns. It also pioneered the whole "Why don't we put all the bomb switches on the same panel?" approach to aircraft design. The cockpit organisation is pretty good and if you've flown the F-16, it might be familiar: Engine and warning lights on the right side, weapons, speedo and radar altimeter on the left, radar screen in the middle. The F-4 also used some nifty multitasking- for instance, AGM-65s were locked onto targets by using the same paddle switch- yes, it had one- for the Nose Wheel Steering. When switched onto Nose Wheel Steering mode in the air, it could be used to slew mavericks onto the target, though I'm not sure whether this was the pilots' thing or a Backseater thing. Other first-ish stuff are fully self-sealing fuel tanks (earlier aircraft, including F-4Es before block 24 and all preceding F-4B/C/D/J/N/Q aircraft had only the wing ones self-sealing), all-digital RWR, RWR with regular iconography (later blocks of AN/ALR-46 were not like early F-4E RWR and were more like the F-5E's RWR where enemy radars are actually shown on a display and not as lines + audio tone), "SHOOT" cue lights for Sparrows (common to all F-4s), One single control switch for all bomb fuzes (some previous aircraft had you fuse them for each hardpoint), and separated JETTISON controls from the actual drop controls (you used to have a wheel that said something like BOMB JETT - BOMB DROP - ROCKET FIRE - ROCKET DROP - GUNS - etc etc, F-4E puts them on two separate dials). The amount of improvement, especially if compared to F-4Js and F-4Ds, is immense. Some people insist that the F-4E is a bomb truck, but really it isn't. It's probably the best at all 3 roles overall due to its ease of actual use.

I can answer these questions! Hold my beer! The front cockpit is a carbon copy of whatever the rear screen is displaying, but there should be a button if we're in the "RIVET HASTE" configuration for the pilot to switch the radar into "AUTOMATIC ACQUISITION MODE", which is independent of the rear pilot and can give it a (sources vary on the range) either a 5nm or 10nm range where it does exactly that and automatically acquires whatever it sees first. It's the predecessor to all the other US planes' boresight modes. The F-4E has the same cold war era radar scope style as the F-5, so don't expect much from it. It also has some issues gaining locks on targets at range and usually doesn't do too well beyond ~37nm from what I've heard. It's a miracle if you pick up anything at 50, let alone the 200nm that the radar is slated to be able to do. The Radar screen is multifunctional. In the Good Ol Days when the F-4's best sighting system was a manually operated doo-dad called "The Zot Box", which was bolted to the side of F-4D canopies- pictured here: you used to have to manually aim the whole thing while the plane entered a pylon turn, and buddy lase for the other poor bastard while using the radar control stick... on the other side of the cockpit. The Pave Knife pod made it so that you could directly use the main radar screen for it instead. Pave Spike, the (slightly) unreliable pod that we use on this F-4E that had a few issues keeping track of things (in its early variants) has the same schema where it displays everything on the main screen. Mavericks also do the exact same thing and display on the main screen- in fact, it's the predecessor to the modern US system of MFDs. For pretty much every bomb/weapon type, the WSO will actually aim the weapon, while the pilot has the weapon release authority. LGB, maverick, HOBOS, et cetera. People often underestimate how revolutionary the F-4E was for its time after the right upgrades- and how it laid the base work for many, many other US planes afterwards.

Dis 'ere is a strickly F-4E thredd! No derty NAVY PUKES alloweded!!! And now for da manny-fist- manna-fest- long-list-thingy of why the F-4E is cooler than da F-4J! NUMBER WUN! IT IZ ERR FORSE! DA EFF FORR EEEEEEEEEEEE wuz yoozed by da US AER FORSS!!! Dat makes it BETTAH! NUMBAH TOO! IT IZ GREEN AND ORKY! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!! NUMBAH THREE! IT IZ MORE MULTER... MULTI... DUZ MORE FINKS DAN DA STOOPID NAVY FANTEMZ! DA NAVY FANTUMZ ONLY KRUMPZ DA FLYING GITZ! DA AERR FORSE FANTUM HAZ GOT DA KRUMPERZ FOR DA GROUND BOYZ AS WELL AS DA FLYER-BOYZ! AND IT CAN USE LAYZER-GUIDENSE AND TEE-VEE GUIDENSE TA BLOW UP DA GROUND BOYZ WIVV OUT NEEDING TA USE A MIL GUNSIGHT AND MANUELLYY MOVE IT AROUND! VERY EFFISH... EFF... GOOD AT KRUMPING! RIGHT PROPAH ORKY! NUMBAH FORR! ALL DA GITZ UZED IT ALL OVAH DA WERLD!!!! WEVVA DEY WUZ TURKISHEZ, OR OZZTRAYLIENZE, OR AMURRKINZZ, OR DJERMINZ, OR IZZRAELITES, OR DA KORREUNZ, OR DA IRANIANZ OR DA JAPANESERS, DEY WAZ UZING DA F-4E OR VARIAYSHUNZ DERE-OF! NUMBAH FIVE! DA DAKKA SOUNDZ LIKE A CHOPPA! EVRY WUN NOEZ DAT DA BEST DAKKAZ IZ ALSO HAVE A BIG CHOPPA AT DA END TA CHOP UP DA ENEMY! DIS DAKKA SOUNDZ LOIKE DA CHOPPA SO YOU CAN CHOPPA WILE YOU DAKKA, OR YOU CAN DAKKA WHILE YOU CHOPPA, OR YOU CAN CHOPPA WHILE YOU, UHHH... I CONFUZED! IT GOOD DAKKA! IT ALL THE DAKKA! NUMBAH SIKZ! IT CARRY ALL THE DAKKA! IT FAMOUSEREST FOR ABLE TO CARY ALLL THE DAKKA DA AMURKINZ MAKE BECOZ IT VERY ORKY! NUMBAH SEVUN! ITZ PAINTED GREEN AND ORKY ON DA OUTSOIDE BUT ON DA INNA BITZ ITZ ALSO RED TO MAKE IT GO FASTERER!!!!!! NUMBAH ATE!!! ITZ GOT DA MOUFF PAINTED ON IT TA MAKE ALL DE UTHA GIZ ANGRY BECOZ YOUR FANTER LOOKZ MORE BETTA AND SKARIER DAN DA UVVAZ! NUMBAH NOINE! ITZ GOT DA SLATZ DAN INCREASE ITZ ERRODYNAMIK EFFISHENSEE TO MAKE IT FLY BETTAH AT HIGH ANGLES OF ATTAK! DATZ A LOT OF ATTAKIN YOU KAN DO! NUMBAH TEN! ITZ GOT DA LAYTEST IN SEEING TEKNOLOGY DAT THE MEKBOYZ BUILT AND HAZ A CAMRAH TO SEE DA DAFT RUSHEN PLANEZ BETTAH! DAT IZ MOY TEN REEZUNZ WHY THE F-4E IZ BETTAH! Thankyou for attending my, that is, Aussie_Mantis's, very coherent and completely hinged, sane and entirely reasonable presentation.