Chaffee

Select TGP as SOI with SCS. Double-click NWS to snowplow. Sometimes it doesn't "take." If you do anything to the TGP prior to the double-click, it will "take." I typically triple-click: first click wakes the TGP (or my controller...) up. Double-click following snowplows the TGP. All that said, I'm typically using the ATFLIR, so I can't speak to the other pod.

RWR? I'm not sure how much flooding triggers that regarding active missile launches -- you're definitely emitting when in flood, and I'd assume what that looks like depends on the RWR -- But yes, the F-15C, F-14, F-18C (and F-15E is planned) can all flood to try to give guidance to AIM-7s, and I believe, at least in some cases, without having launched a missile, although I haven't done this. Range limitations are above my security clearance

When you lose lock with the Sparrow, are you putting your nose in flood-mode parameters? (4 degrees left and right of the centerline; 30 degrees above, 5 degrees below). Here's a handy diagram: The AIM-7 is dumb. It needs your help. Help your Sparrow. In the Hornet, Flood Mode covers the same area as the AIM-7 reticle (see page 286 of the EA guide). The missile depends a whole lot on pilot behavior with the radar, especially when it goes stupid.

I think it was simply too easy to land before; you could really slam it into the deck. Now it requires a little bit of touch, at least. Fortunately everything else about the approach is better, so there's no need to slam it down to catch a wire. Old habits die hard (same with muscle memory) Gear breakage complaints will fade as people adjust, I suspect.

This is the way to happiness.

Well said. Arguing with someone already engaging in a logical fallacy (in this case, exceptional fallacy), is pointless. I've landed perfectly well at 850

And hits the water soon after, right?

It takes less than 5 minutes to enter the data. Use Alt-LMB in the F10 map. Put that info into the UFC. PP works just fine. Back to the OP: post a track.

Overlapped (old model is faded)

I read a lot of this discussion and saw people talking about ridiculous spotting distances with zero evidence or calculation, etc. But mate, I'm on your side here. The post was written in objective style, making no recommendations. I have some thoughts on the topic (which I've put in later replies), but I find that the objective mathematical details are more convincing, especially for people who might have better ideas than I have.

1) To demonstrate the absolute limit of human capacity 2) From this basis, to demonstrate that, under most conditions, nothing can be seen at that absolute limit, so that someone else doesn't use this calculation as evidence that something can be seen through an atmosphere at this limit 3) From this basis, to demonstrate that, when emitting light, resolution limit is no longer a factor (in order to cut off arguments like "why can I see this plane 60 miles away at night IRL") 4) to provide an objective basis for any argument made on this topic All of that requires a reader to read, however, not to jump off 10% of the way in. I can't control that.

Correct. If I were to make a recommendation, it would be that zoom do nothing for targets beyond a certain range. In the above example, an F-16 at 27.9nm would appear to be a sky-colored pixel no matter what the zoom setting/FoV/screen resolution. That pixel would be invisible for all practical purposes since it's effectively the same color as the background. Rendering this invisible pixel would start at this limit, but only if the player's FoV was set according to the data I gave at the end of that post.

I agree. Please don't cherry-pick quotes and use them in an attempt to indicate the opposite of the argument I made. To wit: Q.E.D.

Agreed. As someone who does original research in history, I have to account for errors in texts constantly -- misspellings in place names, date errors, etc... and then sometimes you can think something is an error, but it's not, and that can be very difficult to unwind (but also satisfying) because it defies expectation. At any rate, I think Heatblur have done an amazing job on this module, and I plan to make it my next purchase, but I am hoping not to get an oscilloscope that looks like it's shot on video tape from decades ago Seriously, I hope the criticism is taken constructively. I want a realistic airframe, with realistic systems, and I get that it's not like there's an operational Viggen radar just sitting around for everyone to look at. Nonetheless, reconstructing something isn't just about looking directly at a source and saying "yup, that's it!" It's almost always about peeling away the layers that intervening years have added to it or subtracted from it. It's not easy. It is not easy, and someone is always going to think you got it wrong.

Agreed. I'm a DCS (but not flight sim) n00b. That means I've been doing a lot of landings lately, up to the point of practicing TACAN-only fully manual CAT III recoveries. The landing gear is more fragile, yes, but today I've been planting at up to -850 VSI w/o a problem (usually around 650 though, and it's just fine). I have broken the gear, but only when slamming the plane into the deck (which you could do before w/o breaking the gear, but it seemed excessive). The new FM is much better on approach. ATC isn't chasing me around any longer in some weird porpoising algo. (I got used to shutting it off and running the throttle myself) The FCS seems properly dampened in pitch now too when approaching the deck. I, too, see no problem with turn rate, (but I'm no genius at getting the most out of it), and the low-speed high AOA regime is the stuff dreams are made of. The paddle also no longer spikes G-forces, so can be used when you just need that little extra (although I really don't use it). The plane now will "run away" above 485-ish on burner, but it sheds speed very nicely, which seems appropriate for something that can sit on 50 degrees of alpha at 55 knots... It feels like there's more "substance" now. It feels like there's inertia underneath the FCS. Zero issues on bolters: I'm not changing configuration, however. I put it in the water once while testing how lazy I could be on the throttle. The airframe is much more stable on airfield launches, actually staying straight. I've never flown an F/A-18C. I've flown flight sims since the '70s (seriously): everything from WWI to space flight. I've never been more pleased with a flight model than screwing around in this airframe today. I'm sure there are bugs or other issues, but today, this thing felt absolutely amazing. Thank you, ED crew. I think you're on the right track.

Been following this topic. I'm enough of a n00b at DCS that I'm dead no matter what the spotting distance... So let's do some science: At 20/20 vision, the human eye can distinguish something at 1 arc minute in size. Ok, so what does that mean for spotting aircraft? 1 arc minute is 1/21,600th of the circumference of a circle (360 degrees * 60 minutes). From that very simple number, you can calculate a fundamental limit of visibility (which doesn't tell the whole story, of course, but we'll get to that). So, an F-16C is 49 feet, 5 inches long (15.06 meters, for those who speak French). Beam on (or plan view), that's 1 arc minute at a range of 27.9 nautical miles (51.6km). Here's the math: 49.416 feet * 21,600 arc minutes = 1,067,385.6 feet of circumference 1,067,385.6 feet / 3.14159 (pi, to get the diameter of the circle) = 339,759.676 feet 339,759.676 feet / 2 to get the radius of the circle = 169,879.838 feet 169,879.838 feet / 6076 (feet in a nautical mile) = 27.959nm Can you see a plan-view F-16 at 27.9nm with the naked eye in real life? No, you can't, (except under some very specific conditions, which I'll mention later), and there's a reason (or really several) for this. If you're still here, let's investigate those: The first problem is that F-16, even with ~575 square feet visible in plan view, only takes up about 30% of the space of the arc minute at 27.9nm. That means 70% of the light you see at that distance is coming from whatever is behind the F-16. In other words, it's more than 2:1 sky, at the very limit of the resolution of your vision. The second problem is that, when you double the distance to something, you halve its apparent brightness and quarter its color intensity. That means the F-16 that looked normal to you at 400 meters is 112x dimmer and retains about 0.02% of its apparent color at 27.9nm. The third problem is something called "aerial perspective." This is what makes far-away objects look bluer to you: atmospheric light scatters, reducing contrast and clarity. So, at 27.9nm you have an object (the F-16 in plan view) that's only taking up 30% of the space your eye can resolve, at less than 1% of its apparent brightness and 0.02% of its color saturation that it has at the reasonable distance of 400m, and it's blue-shifted behind the scattered light of the atmosphere... Never mind haze, dust, what your blood pressure is... etc. At 27.9nm, an F-16 looks exactly like whatever is behind it... usually. There are 2 things that can change that: The first is backlighting. Remember all that atmosphere between you and the F-16? If you get the correct angle, with a nice low sun behind it (think dawn or dusk), you can get that F-16 casting a nice shadow through the scattered atmosphere, which makes it effectively much larger and increases contrast. At the correct angle, that little invisible F-16 can cast a shadow several arc minutes long. The second is light emission. Turn on the landing lights, and you're visible for a very long way -- well beyond the arc-minute resolution -- as a point of light. This, by the way, is why you can see stars at night, even though you cannot resolve the solar disk with a good-sized telescope (you know, like the Hubble). Points of light are visible as far as their brightness will make an impression on the retina, irrespective of resolution limits. Here are some numbers relating arc minutes to resolution, BTW: 3840x1440 1 arc minute = 1 pixel @ 64 degrees FoV 2560x1440 1 arc minute = 1 pixel @ 42.67 degrees FoV 1920x1080 1 arc minute = 1 pixel @ 32 degrees FoV Anyway, do with all that what you will. Small fighter jets are unequivocally invisible at 27.9nm except under very specific conditions and, given aerial perspective, haze, color diminishment, etc., they are practically invisible at closer ranges than that. Some additional trivia: An F-16 making a knife edge turn in plan view to you at 13.4nm will be 2 arc minutes long by 1 across: it'll actually be dimensional! Even better, its surface area will be reflecting more than an arc minute of light back at you, so now it's only a matter of haze, dust, aerial perspective, apparent brightness, etc. But the situation is massively better. Head on, that same F-16 only has 1 arc minute of surface area at 4.9nm, however, even if its wingspan is almost 4 arc minutes across. The good news is that most of the other issues of visibility have been solved, and it's now close enough that its countershading/camouflage is useful

I sharpened and desaturated the greens in @VikingSail's white-balanced image. This is likely much closer to what the eye would see. Consider the evidence medium here. Note the greens are no longer bleeding into the blacks. While better than nothing, video tape is an absolute garbage source, and requires correction. The key here is to get that image to look like an actual oscilloscope, not a 40-year old video tape of an oscilloscope. I don't think my image is quite bright enough, however.

This^ entirely. This evidence image isn't color-corrected. It's also likely the highs are clipping (reds are bleeding; camera exposure is overdriving the radar scope, which is probably oversaturating the green).

PP. Passed all the usual cross-checks that you mentioned. Could, of course, be bad luck. JDAMs do miss. Good to know it's not my altimeter sloppiness. It was an interesting pattern. I'm possibly reading too much into it.

Sounds like an SME to me. I hope you guys have been talking.

Thanks, mate. This is useful info.

Where do JDAMS get their altitude data? The reason: All is generally well for this n00b (nailing those CAT III recoveries, etc.) Hot-start JDAMS? Awesome... Did a full cold start the other day. Loaded JDAMS. Got an interesting grouping of 4/4 perfect misses. (Sorry, no track. Likely repeatable though). Did a process review: Realized I fudged the altimeter setting (just entered 29.92... ish), then decided to be meticulous about the JDAM stuff (alt-left F10 click and binding the UFC to the num pad is glorious). Thus, my question, stated another way: could a mis-set altimeter mess up my JDAMs? Either directly, or indirectly by messing with the INS? If true, honestly that's an amazing detail with one caveat... In my search for answers, I noted some major reports over the last few years of some well-documented anomalous altimeter behavior on various airframes. Also noted a recent well-documented experiment on carrier-launch variation between hot and cold starting the F/A-18C. So, also, might there be something deeper here RE: INS alignment/altimeter cold starting in this airframe? Anyway. That's a lot. May run a controlled test and see if I can dig something out. Depends on whether I simply botched my JDAMs by fudging the barometric setting. Thanks in advance for your responses.

Dear ED, please take this in good faith and with an intent to problem solving. I'm a relatively new user, and there are issues with custom snap views: 1) Custom Snap Views get 1 sentence on page 49 of the DCS User Manual. Yes, there are YouTube videos. Some of them are even recent enough that some of the suggestions work. This is basic documentation. If it only exists in a feature list but isn't documented, it doesn't exist. (I'm aware that this fails certain Agile approaches, but this is a brief essay on the value of UX/UI in influencing LTV). Recommend striking the "feature" from page 49 of the manual until actual documentation is available. 2) "Cockpit Panel View Toggle" does not work, at least in reference to unofficial sources that show it working in years past. Is this a bug? Who knows? because its function is undocumented in the DCS User Manual and in the manuals for the aircraft I own. 3) Even if the functions for snap views worked empirically as shown in user-produced YouTube videos from 2-5 years ago, this alpha interface should be upgraded with an actual "Save Overlay." See, as one example among thousands, iRacing, which is far from exemplary, but "good enough." This is an hour of developer time (it doesn't have to be pretty). 3a) Is it worth an hour of developer time? That's not for me to estimate, as I don't have enough information. What I can estimate is the likelihood of user churn based on bad UX/UI experiences early in the customer journey. Here's the short version: as a new user, I find the lack of official documentation of snap-view saving a UX and UI disaster to the extent that I can't even assess if the system is bugged, bad, intentionally abandoned, or simply not accessible to new users without considerable time commitment. One might imagine that users purchase DCS products to learn about and fly various aircraft, not to spend hours trying to unpack underdeveloped and undocumented view settings. So, valued content producers at ED, you can Google "churn based on bad UX/UI experiences" and assess for yourselves if this matters at this point in your growth. Looking at your content expansion over the last few years, I think it does. Fewer hurdles to entry are better. The more of us in this together, the better. When you succeed, we all succeed. Thank you for reading.

Those real-life examples are shot through short lenses that are giving 2x to 2.5x the field of view you've presented in DCS as a comparison. If you want a legitimate comparison, put the cockpit hoop in the same place in DCS, occupying the same number of arc minutes as the videos. Or, instead, I can tell you what will happen: You'll have the same sensation of speed, to the point that you can figure out the actual ground speed of the aircraft in the videos from what you're doing in DCS.

Hello. Longtime racing sim enthusiast here. What others have said RE: FOV is 100% spot on. It's why the standard set up for any serious E-Racer is triples. What others have said about relative distance to the ground is also 100% spot on. It's why 120kn in an Apache at 5 feet feels "faster" than Mach 1 in a jet at 150 (the person inside is still the same size, BTW. That 30x vertical scale and some evolutionary biology RE: horizon perception matter here). What others have said about the apparent size of nearby objects is spot on: It's the reason 100kph on a straight, flat country road feels fast while the same speed in the cartoon world of the highway, with its huge signs, feels slow. Here's a question for everyone (or at least Americans): how long are the painted dashed lines on the Interstate? (Answer below) *** Most people perceive them as being 2 to 3 feet long. Those dashes are 12 to 15 feet long, typically (don't believe me? Have a glance at the other side of the highway sometime). They're as long as your car. They're that long to reduce your perception of speed, because your brain didn't evolve for 80 miles an hour (or even 60) any more than it evolved to see in the infrared spectrum. So, simulating that on a flat (or even curved) screen is all about putting what's actually happening in that viewable aperture. How the user perceives that has to do with all of the things above along with some experiential factors.