Chaffee

Personally I trim the Flight Path Vector to center when flying straight and fly the ball to center when cornering. This keeps me out of the trees. Seems to make some sense, given this is a long narrow platform with some weird mass placement. I can't say if it's too much, but it does always feel like there's a lot of wind, as I have to re-trim whenever I change heading. I expect a chopper to be dynamic, but calm weather often feels like a 10-knot wind. Might do some flight tests to see how it's affected by loadouts: there's a lot of mass in some weird places on this thing.

@IronMike Please check your DMs for an editing sample from a professional editor (me), which shouldn't be posted on an open forum. Cheers, and keep up the great work!

If you want a free online option for pdf markup and editing, Kami is excellent.

If it doesn't work, dump the Sidewinders altogether and go with triple M117s on 2 and 8. I believe that's actually HEAVIER, so more BEASTMODE! But seriously, it'll be interesting and fun to see just how heavy a load out we can get the Brick off the ground with.

Okay, looking at the load-out chart here, it appears that the F-4E can theoretically mount 24 Mk.82 bombs with 4 Sidewinders and 4 Sparrows, which puts it only about 1762 lbs. (801 kg.) over its maximum gross take-off weight. So, who will be the first to get the "Flying Brick" in the air on full fuel without ejecting their wizzo on the takeoff roll? Sign-in here to accept this challenge or bow down to lesser pilots. Post pics/videos or it didn't happen. (But especially post "agony of defeat" pics/videos).

Mostly raising a child and some other responsibilities took hold, so I had to be a bit more casual about following DCS and its progress. My last serious sims covered WWI and F-16s, about a decade ago. The child is now 9, so still a child, but is expressing interest in serious flight sims amongst the many other games, (smart kid who likes challenge and depth) so here I am, learning and teaching. Currently have the F/A-18C and the Apache. Love 'em both. My next 3 will be F-14, F-15E, and F-4E, as I plan to do a lot of backseat time supporting the kid in the front (offline, obviously). Online, I'm looking forward to some Cold War stuff, but really doing RIO/WSO in support of the person in front will be a hell of a lot of fun for me, especially since I'll have put the time in with the kid. (I let him shoot things in the Apache, but daddy keeps it out of high-tension wires, but I guess that's strictly backseat too lol). It's not that I don't love the flying part (I have a carrier-ops plane and a helicopter, after all), but pushing the buttons pushes my buttons (as does being that extra set of eyes for SA and the scopes, giving the person up front every thing they need to succeed). I think I'll build a RIO cockpit for the F-14, because operating that radar with real tactile switches and buttons has serious upside, I think, not least because it helps keep you heads-up more. It's just easier to glance at a real scope or a real panel. (It's also the 9-year-old's favorite plane, so I'll be getting serious seat time). DCS has caught me now, and we're committed. I like the approach and the business model, especially for a niche product. I like what ED is developing and understand how both project management and product development works, so EA/bugs don't freak me out. Build, iterate, refine: I see that over the long arc, and they've done well. I get that people get impatient, but it's this or arcade, and what I see is that the development team and its partners actually care, even if every moment isn't a success. I've worked for a lot of start-ups. The long arc here is success, so it's worth investing time and money into. Anyway, that's my flight-sim journey and my opinion. Cheers

Having seen pretty much the whole arc of flight sims, this seems a golden age to me. I remember in Falcon 3.0 the option to turn on canopy arrows b/c there weren't enough references to know which way you were looking in padlock. We thought it was ridiculously cool that the bombs had visible shock waves: literally a hollow white circle that expanded from the impact point... But seriously, if these kids knew what came before, right? That was the first one I recall being able to make sense of in a spatial way. So often enemies had been simple dots, even in dogfights. And yes, older than you, but still pretty...and younger (and prettier) than the F-4E

Altair 8800. You set the bios with switches on the front of the machine. We had two 8-inch (yes, 8 ) floppy drives at $1,000 apiece (in '70s money, no less). The "flight sim" was "Lunar Lander," in which you put in your fuel-burn and got a text response on deceleration. At the end, it told you how large a crater you made. My dad was really into computers. He built a system on a 4x8 plywood board in 1972. It had 1k of core memory, which was an open grid of copper wires and solder joints about 20cm a side. 1k of core memory! Can you imagine? I once asked him what it did: "nothing." RE: Pong -- I played it on an Odyssey in 1973. It had semi-transparent electrostatic sheets you stuck on your TV, and the graphics rendered behind that. Seriously. All this makes me sound terribly old. I have a hot girlfriend.

F-4E Thunderbirds no. 7, Pima Air & Space Museum. Excited 9-y-o for scale. Aircraft provenance here: https://pimaair.org/museum-aircraft/mcdonnell-douglas-f-4e/

Hello. Here are several Keith Fretwell F-4 livery illustrations (and 1 photograph) from "The Encyclopedia of World Air Power," (1980), Hamlyn Aerospace, (which is an amazing Cold War snapshot generally). Cheers

Recently getting back into flight sims with DCS. I've flown a lot of them, going all the way back to the '70s (yes, the '70s. There were computers. We had one). I love the F/A-18C, particularly (re)-learning 1-circle BFM... or just throwing it into a 50-degree alpha, 40-knot cobra to impress my 9-y-o (who is the world's biggest Tomcat fan)... and the reliable, fast-spooling engines... and the strike capabilities... and the SA... and I'm not going to knock other aircraft because I like this one. The F/A-18 just happens to be one that I like.