Kalasnkova74

HB hasn’t said, but I earnestly hope they don’t pick the -B and opt for the -J. To understand why, fly the F-4E with AIM-9Bs / AIM-7Es….and then turn off the slats. Most players won’t enjoy paying money for that experience.

Im not surprised. My computer features a mere 16GB RAM & a not-leading edge NViDIA card. Runs the F-4E just fine. As with the airplanes themselves , technology is no guarantee of good results in the field.

Yes. You ditch the HDD for the SSD. There are some optimizations that can be made, but none will overcome the inherent hardware limitations of an HDD vs SSD.

…hello scope creep. This sort of thing is why HB announced they weren’t making one-off Phantom II variants like the Israeli Kurnass, Hellenic AUP, Turkish Terminator and so on. Insofar as campaigns go, remember that HB will release a USN Phantom II down the line. That’ll address many scenarios involving the USN AIM-9D/G etc series.

The AIM-4 is probably one of the most misunderstood weapons systems in American Cold War history. First, a primer. The AIM-4 was built to solve a specific problem, which was NOT shooting down enemy fighters. That was considered an obsolete task in 1948, when the prevailing mindset of USAF leadership was that WWIII against the Soviets was just around the corner. After all, every two decades since 1914 we’d fought a cataclysmic global war, so it stood to reason we’d nuke ourselves into oblivion before 1970. Rather the AIM-4s job was to shoot down high flying Soviet nuclear bombers in head on interceptions. To assist with that, the AIM-4 had a hit to kill fuse. A subject of great lambasting later when it was misused in Vietnam (more on that later), the hit to kill fuse is a mission critical feature if you’re trying to take down a huge 4-engine Tu-95 or similar. A proximity fuse isn’t what you want against a resilient aircraft like that, and remember…WWIII. One damaged bomber making it through equals multiple cities getting nuked. So the missile should hit, bury itself into the Soviet bomber’s fuselage and THEN detonate, maximizing damage. To ensure the missile got there in the first place, Hughes- the builder of the AIM-4- also produced a fairly user friendly (for the time) guidance system to go with it. The Falcon worked like an AIM-54/AWG-9 (which was made by the same firm much later). The missile was part of a symbiotic guidance system, one where the Hughes guidance system (such as the MG-13) would track, lock, and manage firing functions automatically. All the pilot or pilot/weapons officer needed was to maneuver the interceptor to an ideal launch position (speed/altitude/ etc) , lock the target no closer than six miles , and the Hughes fire control computer managed the rest. The pilot gave launch consent for the AIM-4- after that the Hughes system triggered the IR seeker activation, queued the missile coolant, extended the missile from the launch bay and fired the Falcon to ensure highest probability of kill. When employed as designed using a Hughes semi-automated fire control system against high altitude targets , the Falcon was capably accurate. Bruce Gordon cites instances when F-106s would knock down BOMARC target SAMs using the Falcon, and it even acquired high off boresight IR missile capabilities (a first for the USAF before the AIM-9L) when the ADC F-101Bs and F-106s were updated later. So why did the sugar turn to manure? It was a Pentagon dispute over the USAFs next IR missile. After being compelled to buy the capable US Navy F-4B more or less as-is by Robert McNamara, the USAF System Command Generals were forced to accept using the U.S. Navy’s AIM-9B at first. Bad enough they had to adopt a NAVY aircraft, but they weren’t about to keep using the Navy’s missiles. They had some things to say about the next generation of Sidewinder missile. Things the USN didn’t care for, and negotiations for a new Sidewinder variant shared between the branches collapsed . (Incidentally, this is one reason why Cold War era USAF Sidewinders are not compatible with their Navy contemporaries.) So spurned, the USAF System Command generals told the Navy they could take their AIM-9 and shove it. They had a solution in mind- just take the USAF Falcon and lobotomize it onto the F-4D Phantom II. An IR missile is an IR missile, right? There was one problem- the F-4 wasn’t built to accommodate the Hughes guidance systems fitted to the Voodoos, Delta Darts and Delta Daggers. Adding the 50s era mechanical computer to the F-4D would be ruinously expensive , they’d lose AIM-7 capability and would take years to complete - and Vietnam was raging. So all the steps the Hughes computer managed so well in the Air Defense Command aircraft needed to be done manually in the F-4. Switchology was kludged up, the IR seeker had to be manually activated, the coolant manually triggered 90 seconds before anticipated launch (not a problem against a bomber flying a predictable course and heading , but nearly impossible in a dynamic dogfight), and making matters worse the damn thing was carried externally. The AIM-4 was designed in an era when engines didn’t have a lot of thrust and drag was the enemy , so they were built to be carried internally until just before launch. External carriage of the weapon meant the seeker was crazed to uselessness by the environment , and the Southeast Asian humidity didn’t help. The Falcon , designed to be launched with a guidance computer against non maneuvering bombers at high altitude, was deployed to Vietnam attached to a plane it wasn’t designed for, launched in a Rube Goldberg scheme nearly impossible to do manually in combat, at low altitude in an environment it was never tested in, against maneuvering fighter sized targets at low altitude in a regime completely outside its design requirements - and with a hit to kill warhead design meant to knock down Tupolev bombers, not Mikoyan light fighters. The fact five MiGs were shot down at all with a weapon completely unstable for that mission is a remarkable testament to the 8th TFW’s level of skill. Naturally, the USAF System Commands turf war permanently damaged the reputation of the AIM-4 as a tactical dogfighting combat weapon system. A regime it was never built for. The AIM-4- used as directed on the manufacturer label - was nonetheless successful as a high altitude interceptor weapon. One wouldn’t want to use it to shoot down a MiG-17, but then Ferraris are terrible cars to tow with. What should have happened in the 1960s? The USAF System Command people should have swallowed their pride, ordered the Navy’s follow on Sidewinder and had done with it. Put the Navys AIM-9D on USAF Phantoms , Thuds and Huns and we’d have a much better outcome.

According to Shlomo Aloni’s research, the F-4E crews typically jettisoned TERs/ Centerline rails + external tanks via the “panic button” before engaging MiGs. I’m curious to see what the WSOs have to say.

Not if you consider Israeli Air Force doctrine circa 1973. The F-4E Kurnass was tasked mainly with interdiction bombing- unfortunately, many of the Kurnass pilots wanted MiG kills and some left the attack formation to do so in early Yom Kippur operations. That decision scored some MiG kills, but the dogfighting jets threatened the integrity of the flights coming off target -forcing one damaged Phantom II to limp home alone in hostile territory . The squadron commander cracked down and made it clear any pilot who did that again would lose their wings. Since no MiG engagements were expected until the Israeli F-4s came off target, the configuration makes sense.

User HammerUK9 posted this table of refueling speeds:

“I don’t get the impression that these missions are supposed to be quite this difficult!” I mean no e-snark by this, but I think you need more experience with the F-4E before tackling a complex mission like this. It takes months of 8+ hour daily academics and flight training for real-life tactical pilots to learn the basics of aircraft this capable. Even at that rate, someone who practiced this module since Launch Day might be skilled enough to play a tough campaign and manage. Anyone who’s got other responsibilities in their lives -besides playing this game -will simply not be experienced enough to prevail. Few could with just 3 months of experience. Theres a reason real life USAF squadrons almost never send inexperienced LTs to Red Flag. Same goes for wartime deployments- people with years of experience get to go overseas, and folks new to the business got to stay home and miss the war. There’s no rushing the experience tax, and you gotta pay it to git gud enough to win at the more detailed campaigns.

If I recall correctly , the Sidewinder’s fins will not clear a 750lb bomb - hence choosing the smaller 500lb option enables Sidewinder carriage.

An understandable bug submission, but the “mismatched” wing tank is the correct color & the developer need not change anything. Background- in the 1970s, the F-4E Phantom II wing tank contractor built drop tanks in green/white colors for their primary customer- the U.S. Air Force, who were fighting in Southeast Asia. Consequently, every export user who purchased the F-4E in the 70s were supplied wing tanks from that company in the same Southeast Asia green/white - even if the aircraft itself used a totally different color scheme. Early Israeli Kurnass, Luftwaffe, Iranian , and Egyptian F-4Es (among others) flew with green/white external tanks. As time went on many export users would repaint the tanks to match.

The F-111B falls into that weird category of planes where there’s community interest, but the plane doesn’t really fit into a mission set except intercepting bombers. The U.S. Navy’s F-111B was to to be a super-F-4B, meaning a pure long range bomber killing interceptor. It wasn’t designed to turnfight (which undermines Adm Tom Conollys assertion “there was not enough thrust in Christendom to make (the F-111B) a fighter” - because it was never designed for that mission in the first place) , and it wasn’t tested with air to ground payloads. So you’d have a Phoenix missile shooting airplane that performs worse in every metric than the existing F-14A, and it can’t carry air to ground stores like the Air Force F-111s. The same issue affects all dedicated interceptors like the Su-15, MiG-25, F-102/F-106 and F-101B. They can’t effectively turn fight and shoot down bandits , and they can’t strike air to ground targets. That makes them DOA as paid modules.

Thats because the AoA is different between the U.S.N and land based F-4s. Yes the tail hook is the same, but the AoA is different because the slats and airframe configuration are very different from the Naval versions. Between the gun in the nose (more weight= lower nose authority), the extra fuel tank in the tail (which balances the weight of the nose but changes the aircraft’s pitch behavior), and the wing slats vs the early Naval models’ blown boundry layer control leading edge slats , the F-4E is an aerodynamically different animal. Further, the landing gear is different as it’s engineered for land operations.

IMO, this is the role of the operator/player/campaign designer- not the system. A big list of liveries is less development intensive than an interface redesign that requires ED resources to implement and test. In my estimation their developers have much bigger fish to fry than redesigning the liveries menu to enable region locking & independent livery selection. If I’m building a scenario, I know the role of the players and thus should have the flexibility to assign color schemes as required. If that means sorting through a big list of liveries, it doesn’t bother me. What would is encountering a nation lock that forces me to program around it.

Perhaps this is a personal perspective shared by no one else. But HBs brought the F-4E to life in a way that makes so many war stories about the Cold War so much more understandable. Example: it’s one thing to read about the Israeli Air Force’s exploits in books like Ghosts of Atonement , documenting Phantom II/ Kurnass sorties the October 1973 war. It’s another matter to set up an airfield mission at the Sinai map using realistic SAM and Egyptian combat air patrols, fly it, and truly gain a personal scope of just how mother*****ing difficult their jobs were. Which they did, day in and day out, day and night. Short of a time machine , HBs Phantom II will give you the closest feeling of what those crews (and their contemporaries in the USAF and elsewhere) experienced. I don’t care about some dood shooting 3 MiGs in a Tomcat. Big whup. Let’s see a movie about the Phantom II crews who loft bombed SA-6s at night using a low level ingress on instruments and sheer guts. It’s a different dimension of air combat IMO vs slinging AIM-120s at a HUD cursor or plopping GPS bombs on a tank from the bozosphere

Assuming no technical glitch, I’d say something got missed during the cold start that caused the engines to compressor stall violently on takeoff . If it happens badly enough, the engines can shed high RPM turbine parts . The failed parts then shrapnel through the rest of the airframe (followed soon after by a kaboom from punctured fuel tanks ). It was a common problem on early F-14As with the TF-30. Did you equip a centerline tank, and did you select it before takeoff? If memory serves doing this means the tank can overpressure on takeoff, ejecting fuel and then going boom. There may be other checklist steps that could cause an engine failure like this, but that’s what comes to mind for me ATM

I don’t think it’s nonsense. But the change is more realistic, and so is learning how to do it “correctly”. FWIW, I find AAR much easier now with the slower spool time. Lacking the “ON/OFF” nature of the incorrect quick-spool setting, it’s easier for me to control fore-aft alignment

Interesting. I find AAR easier now with the slower spool time.

Thanks. False alarm on the bug note. Apparently the MER doesn’t clear the landing gear in a purely vertical configuration. USAF F-4s and USN F-4s solved the problem in different ways. According to the source below, the USN kept the vertical pylons and canted the MER using an adapter. The USAF fixed the clearance issue by canting the entire pylon, so HBs presentation is 100% accurate. https://tailspintopics.blogspot.com/2016/01/f-4-phantom-outboard-pylon-and-mer.html

What may not be helping matters are canted outboard bomb racks. This does not appear to affect the outboard fuel tanks. Perhaps a bug?

I follow your reasoning, and that’s how I used to manage liveries. Then I tried to build a campaign with a Red Eagles MiG-21 flying for the USAF. You can guess the problem. Also, some liveries correspond to nations that either don’t exist anymore or would align with both sides of a combined task force depending on the timeframe. If you have a USSR vs Imperial Iran scenario, Iran would be on the U.S. side. Obviously after 1979 under the IRIAF they’d be on the other side. Now add in mission scenarios like escorting a defector who needs to be considered “blue air” despite flying a “red air” asset, and you can see having the freedom to assign liveries without national ties is a useful capability. Of course, the trade off is less straightforward livery organization for more clear-cut Red v Blue setups.

Yeah, it’s weird for me too. IMO it’s fine the way it is. The livery names & types clearly show the nation, and they’re all F-4E Block 45s anyway (which is only correct for about half the color schemes available ). No nation lock = ultimate user freedom in assignment , which IMO is a good thing.

IMO, I think down the road adding modernized F-4E variants is a good idea. By then there will be greater aircraft variety in DCS, and an F-4E that can drop modern PGMs and launch AMRAAMs would add variety to the missile v missile duels (since an F-4E does still offer Mach 2 speed in a clean configuration). In the short term though? Learn your bombing tables kids.

It may not look it on the surface, but these advanced variants may as well be totally different aircraft from a DCS development perspective. Perhaps HB will look at these Phantom II variants after higher priority projects like the Typhoon and A-6 are published.

HB’s already commented that they’re not doing any one-off F-4E variants like the -EJ, -EJ Kai, Kurnass 2000, AUP, Terminator, F-4G and so on. Each Phantom II variant basically is its own unique aircraft from an avionics perspective -and thus each version would take years to develop correctly.