OutOnTheOP

Out of curiosity, does anyone know how to put a vehicle or ship into the mission editor with a custom loadout? IE, T80 with no ATGM, or a ship with no SAMs, or whatever. I can't seem to figure that one out; they seem to have no loadout tab

That tiny rondel of armour in the nose only protects from hits from dead forward. Not from hits at 15-50 degrees of deflection off the tail. Also, the Mustang has very similar armour behind the spinner... which, in game, doesn't help protect the governor (which, incidentally, the real Dora ALSO has a prop governor... controlled by a hydraulic system, rather than oil pressure as on the Mustang, as best as I know. Either way, it never seems to fail?) As to the fuel tanks, there are two, located in front and underneath the cockpit... and they have no armour. Speaking of armour, I suspect you have never seen what .50 cal API does to armour plating. Inside of 500 meters (IE, any sane aerial combat range), it will completely perforate 20+ mm of armour. There is NOTHING in either the Dora or Mustang that will stop a .50 API, except the engine block... which would be destroyed in the process (no, not like shattered into little pieces, but the block will likely crack, and the interior of the cylinders will deform; engine therefore sieze). The problem I see is that the damage calculations seem to have been decided based on a comparison of how big a hole a 20mm HE vs. .50 cal API will put in the skin of the aircraft, but NOT how deeply they would penetrate and what systems they would hit on their trajectory through. Also, I would add "major structural members", or at least main wing spars, to the list of key components that need to be discretely tracked by internal location in DCS to adjudicate hits.

Think of the difference between a General Dynamics F-16 and a Mitsubishi F-2. They look similar, use the same aerodynamic principles and basic body shape... but you can't put repair parts from the F-16 in the F-2. For that matter, the same is true of the F/A-18C and F/A-18E. Those are NOT the same aircraft. They just look similar. The E probably shouldn't even have been called an "F/A-18", but to the best of my knowledge, they did it because it was easier to get funding for an "upgrade" to an existing aircraft than for a whole new model.

Ok, so, here's what I see as the biggest problem with the damage model: it only tracks hits versus the SKIN of the aircraft, not against internal components. That is to say, it appears to track the trajectory of the projectile right up until it makes contact with the hit box of the aircraft (which seems to be tied to the skin of the 3D model). Different areas of that skin are tied to different damage effects... but not very well. The problem is that what this results in are hits that SHOULD result in more damage, but do not. This is particularly true for AP/ API/ solid shot projectiles; it's not so bad for HE. An example: I am on dead-astern of a FW190D9, and fire a API bullet. The bullet strikes the rudder. In DCS, that bullet does damage to the rudder, AND STOPS. It does damage only to the rudder. In reality, at the angle I shot, that bullet should go through the rudder, go through the tailplane, go through the top of the rear fuselage behind the canopy, go through the pilot seat, and stop in the fuel tank or 20mm ammo bin. The failure to track penetrating damage is a major failure. It means that hits which SHOULD go through major key components, instead are adjudicated as minor hits. This has screwed me over many times, I have put shots into the fuselage in the belly area just below the cockpit, or hit the side of the cockpit, just beneath the canopy rim. Since DCS adjudicates those hits as a "fuselage" hit rather than "cockpit" hits (which appear to be tied only to the canopy itself), it makes it almost impossible to kill the pilot. Also, the "hit box on the skin" method misses on internal trajectories that don't always give the same effect, dependent on angle of entry. For example, if I fire at a 90-degree angle-off-tail (directly above) an aircraft, and hit the wing root near the rear with an AP round, that bullet will pass in-and-out of the wing leaving no damage worse than a half-inch hole on either side. On the other hand, if I am shooting a 5-degree angle-off-tail (almost dead astern), and the bullet hits at that exact same point of entry, the bullet will instead pass through the wing lengthwise, likely blowing right through the main wing spar (possibly snapping it), and the entry and exit holes will be long, oblique tears, rather than clean round holes. Angle of impact matters. Interior trajectory matters SO. DCS needs to track bullet damage not by where it hits the skin, but rather, where the bullet goes through the interior of the aircraft. They NEED to track at least the location of major components: fuel tank, ammunition bins (particularly for HE cannon weapons, whose ammunition had a tendency to detonate when hit), pilot, engine, radiators.

It's not limited to one side: I cannot count the number of times I have hit the Dora in the engine bay with .50 cal (which should ALSO kill the engine with a single hit to the engine block) only to watch it pull away from me easily at 350-400 mph. Or, for that matter, the amount of times that I have put a sustained (2-4 second) burst into the cockpit area of a Dora, particularly from the side or beneath, that did not kill the pilot.

Agreed. I do not think I have ever seen an aircraft fail to loss of coolant or oil- unless, perhaps, those are represented by one of those damage states where the engine instantly dies. But of those times that the engine eventually dies after damage, there was no discernible fluid leaks leading up to it. Absolutely. And not just the visual model, either... you should have fire (and the damage resulting from it) if you hit a location that bears fuel.... or, in the case of cannon ammunition, a hit should have a decent chance to detonate the ammo. Kind of. I have seen visual representation of damage on ailerons (on the Mustang, anyhow), to include loss of an entire aileron. Thing is, anything short of the loss of an entire control surface seems to have next to no effect. This isn't true; the fuselage in the Mustang (and I'm sure the Dora is very similar) is broken into an empennage (tail), left and right mid-fuselage, canopy, and engine bay... possibly also broken into left and right sides. The spinner is another section, as are each propellor blade. HOWEVER, the fact remains that the aircraft is broken into "hit boxes", rather than actual components. This is actually an important enough part of the problem that I will make a separate post in detail. Yes and no. Keep in mind that if a bullet or fragment hits EVEN ONE cartridge in the ammo belt, it will bend/ deform the cartridge case, which will then jam in the breech of the gun. HOWEVER, the gun shouldn't actually jam until it GETS to that round. If the damaged round is the 153rd in the belt, you should still be able to fire 152 rounds before it jams. That's not how it works now; it INSTANTLY jams. I very much doubt you would feel anything smaller than a 30mm HE impact. Keep in mind that you're flying a 5-7,000 pound aircraft with a LOT of airflow over the control surfaces. a 1/14th of a pound .50 isn't going to deliver very much inertia transfer compared to the inertia of the airframe... particularly if it just goes in-and-out through thin aluminum skin that offers very little resistance to penetration. That bullet is only depositing a small fraction of it's energy into the aircraft.

Oh, wow, the ballistic coefficient is even WORSE than I had calculated it at... that's got to be something around 0.26-0.27 BC1. That's... not a whole lot better than a solid lead round ball in .50 caliber. Closure rate between projectile and target in a tail-chase would be mighty low. Better get close!

Ok, but that's the 100% probability circle (and done with a mighty small sample!)... if I recall correctly, the 80% probability circle on weapon dispersion is about half the diameter of the 100%, which means 80% would hit a 22.5 foot diameter, or, in short, within 11 feet of the desired aimpoint. Even head-on, the fuselage is around 4.5-5 feet in diameter... so a hit rate of 10-30% is not out of line.... and that's at 600 yards. Even assuming that the hits were EVENLY distributed in the circle (which isn't how projectile dispersion works), the area covered by a 45ft diameter circle is 1590 ft^2, while a 5ft diameter circle is 79 ft^2... which still equates to a 5% hit rate, even with the terribly unfavorable assumption of evenly-distributed rounds in that 45 ft diameter, and without considering any of the surface area of the wing or tail surfaces. A mere 3-second burst from the paired AN/M2 would be 85 rounds.... even at 10%, that's 9 hits into the engine bay alone... at 600 yards. That attack wasn't even half that distance.

A lighter barrel has negligible effect on accuracy. For a 1000-meter precision rifle, sure. In the context of a machine gun, the heavier barrel is really only important as a heat sink, to prevent reaching cook-off temperature. In the M2 .50 cal, the entire barrel and trunnion reciprocates in the receiver; the "play" the barrel has to wiggle around will affect accuracy more than barrel heat (and recoil will affect it more than either). That said, keep in mind the guns ALSO have a sub-freezing, 200-mph wind blast to cool it. Overheating isn't a big issue here. The "short bursts" bit is to prevent barrel overheating (again, not a major issue in this context), and to conserve ammunition. Mostly, that advice applies to ground-application .50 cal, where you carry far less ammunition (even tanks often carried only a couple hundred rounds), and where you may have to fight for a much longer period before resupplied (days, rather than the minutes or tens of minutes an air battle lasts). For a bomber, they can get a new gun barrel and plenty of ammo in a couple hours, when they land. The .50 is perfectly capable of firing 300-400 rounds in one long burst; I've seen it done. Now, the barrel will be glowing cherry red by the end of that, drooping slightly, and you'll strip the rifling right out of the barrel, but it will keep shooting that whole belt without jamming. Of course, even if heating and ammo conservation WERE significant considerations for bombers, I think the gunner would have just laid on the trigger in this case: extra ammunition does no good to a dead man, and if there was ever a time it was worth shooting out the rifling of the barrel, that was it. At that range, turbulence or not, it's hard to believe that the gunner would miss entirely. I really can't tell if he's firing or not; they don't produce THAT much muzzle signature. He could be firing, but didn't do enough damage... or could be firing at a second aircraft that was attacking with the one that. Or, it could just be that this was a particularly long air battle, and he was out of ammo. Kind of hard to tell. As to needing escorts... that has more to do with breaking up coordination of attacks on the bombers than it does with any lack of lethality on the part of the bomber gunners. I seem to recall having read somewhere that more Luftwaffe pilots were shot down by bomber gunners than by allied fighters. I'd have to see if I can find the reference.

Ballistic calculator indicates that at 1000 meters, it only maintains 765 feet per second/ 233 m/s. Around 521 mph. Not a lot faster than the airplane at which it is shooting! Mighty, mighty slow. As comparison, the .50 caliber maintains 1941 fps/ 591 mps / 1323 miles per hour at 1000 meters. And drops only 297 inches/ 7.54 meters below the line of sight (assuming the gun and sight are parallel, rather than zeroed, similar to where the 30mm dropped 1728 inches/ 43.89 meters). Given the flatter trajectory, it makes no sense to go for the 100 meter zero with a 36 inch offset on the .50: at that setting, the bullet comes up through the line of sight at 100 meters, and CONTINUES to rise above the line of sight, remaining a full 80 inches high at 1000 meters. However, with a 700 meter zero in those conditions, the trajectory is never more than 95 inches either high or low above the line of sight (21 inches above at 500 meters, 95 inches low at 1000 meters). A mere 2.41 meters of trajectory displacement to worry about. I would also note that when you're firing at a maneuvering fighter (IE, turning, banked sideways), it further complicates matters, because the shell isn't going to drop "down" the gunsight, it's going to drop down toward Earth... which means you'd have to aim ahead of AND significantly above, with the 30mm. Certainly makes gunnery a challenge. Now, this probably explains why, with the .50 in DCS, all I have to do when strafing is place the pipper on the target, with no height offset, and expect good hits at any halfway reasonable range (1km or less), while I can't strafe for beans with the 20mm, because it's trajectory is worse. ...and the 30mm will be even harder!

No, it drops 4.6 meters... but since it's "lofted" up toward the line of sight, the displacement between line of sight and path of projectile is lessened.

More important than mass, to ballistics, is density. The 30mm minengeschoss is filled with low-density HE filler, and this means that its inertia-to-drag ratio is really, REALLY crap. It also isn't a particularly aerodynamic shape, as far as bullets go. So you have a slow, draggy bullet with little inertia... that means it's going to lose velocity very quickly. A quick tap-a-tap on a ballistic calculator (at http://www.jbmballistics.com) shows that, with the assumption that the shell has an initial velocity of 500 m/s and a ballistic coefficient (the drag-to-inertia ratio) of 0.3 (which is actually quite high; well-designed solid metal .30 caliber rifle bullets are generally in the 0.3-0.4 range, higher is better), the aircraft is at 5,000 feet, external temperature 50*F, and with gunsight mounted 36 inches above the guns, the shell does indeed drop 1317 inches/ 33.45 meters in the first 1,000 meters. And all that is assuming a "zero" range of 100 meters, which means the cannon is aimed quite high, to loft the shell up into the 36-inches-high line of sight at 100 meters. If you set zero range to null (IE, the sight and guns are aimed parallel, rather than the guns aimed up to "meet" the higher line-of-sight from the cockpit gunsight), the drop becomes 1728 inches/ 43.89 meters. Lines up pretty close with his values for the bullet drop.

Why not? Before WEP engine ratings were permitted in allied fighters, they had to run at that WEP setting for SEVEN HOURS STRAIGHT without failure on a test bench. As long as you keep the temperatures down, the engine will put out that power just fine. Probably need to be scrapped once you get it home, but it'll do it. Also, compared to the Dora, the Mustang seems to me to have a friggin' huge water radiator. As to the Dora, MW50 may add a bit of power, but just as important is the ability of the methanol-water mixture to cool the engine. Try doing that same climb with full throttle WITHOUT MW50, and you're much more likely to blow an engine.

I agree with the above that it's not a terribly plausible scenario for a single pilot... unless you're in an action movie. But if that were the case, you'd just smash your fist in to the Michael Bay Explosions Button and call it a day. ;) That said, my advice for dealing with ZU23s: Come in at a 20-ish degree offset, about 5,000 feet, and snake your plane (smooth jinking) until pretty close (half mile or so). This lets you get close without giving them an easy low-crossing-speed target. Once in a half mile (*almost* gun range), pull hard into the target- you want to end up wings almost level, but with your gun pipper slightly low (about the height of the gunsight glass; 3-5 degrees low). As you come in, pull up onto the target and drag the pipper across him; start firing just before the pipper is on him, and drag it through. This allows you to put rounds on without ever flying *quite* straight. Works well for me. Also, try to time your attack for a lull in his firing. They will fire in bursts, with a 3-5 second pause between bursts. Start that final pull-up-and-gunshot right as he fires a burst; this will ensure that you pull above his final burst with that pull-up maneuver, and will ensure that he's not firing while your nose is pointed directly at him. I know it sounds complicated, but once you get it down, it's really not all that bad.

OP is correct; damage appears to have no impact whatsoever on the performance of the COMPUTER CONTROLLED P-51D/ FW190D9. However, once you do a certain amount of damage, they do "give up", cut engine power drastically, and head for the nearest airfield. You can tell when this happens, because they will turn on their lights. That said, it's rare to see this, because the amount of damage they have to take before giving up is very, very close to outright dead- so it's rare that you do barely enough to make them give up, without killing them entirely.

and as a corollary: when the Ponies DO absorb a 20mm HE in the tail, the governor (in the nose) really shouldn't be the first thing to go out :music_whistling:

For that matter, is there a more revised release timeline than "November"? It's almost November already, and I deploy to Africa in mid-month. I'd kind of like to know if I'll see this before I go, or if I have a year to wait.

And the F-15 fuselage wasn't even *designed* to produce large fuselage lift. Not in the way the F-35 appears to. Ok, F-16 produces perhaps 30-40% of it's lift from the fuselage chines/ LERX. It has been shown that there are aircraft that produce 100% of their lift from fuselage lift. Old tube-with-wings designs generate maybe 5%. Where in that spectrum does the F-35 fit? The answer is that you don't know. So you're just throwing meaningless numbers about wing loading, without full context and data, but trying to backpedal and exceptionalize when someone takes issue with your statement that the F-16 has better wing loading than the F-35. Plain and simple, you cannot back up your assertion that the F-16 turns better.

Not yet. How about we worry about getting *A* version of a different airframe, so it has something to fight with/ against, and *THEN* spend effort on niche models used by very few nations. I'd be much more interested in an F-16, MiG29, Su27 (DCS-level, of course), F-4, Mirage, Gripen, Draken, MiG23, A-7, Buccaneer... heck, I'd rather see a Kfir or Cheetah, or even an OV-10 before another rendition of the MiG21. Not "no", just "let's work on something else first, with broader appeal to people other than a tiny niche of MiG21 fans"

You can argue semantics all you want; the fact remains that both have leading- and trailing- edge lift enhancing devices. If you want to get technical, the F-35 also has leading-edge flaps rather than slats, as they are a drooped control surface rather than a sliding extension or similar. Technically, the same is true of the F-4: it has leading-edge flaps. Perhaps not automatic, but they're there, and as close to full-span as the ones on the F-16. Yes, because external stores are a huge source of drag, and the F-35 won't have them hanging off. Nor will it require draggy drop tanks to manage reasonable combat radius Yes, LERX generate a good vortex. But you have not addressed the issue at hand: HOW DO YOU KNOW HOW THE VORTEX ON THE F-35 WILL COMPARE? You do not know; you are simply saying LERX= good, therefore F-16 better. It's bad logic, and not supported by anything. Although more of the wing is covered up, the lift lost in that area is more than regained from body lift at high angles of attack when the lift generated by the wing begins to diminish because of flow separation. EXACT same source as I had referenced myself; the fact is that the blending both loses and gains lift from different mechanisms- however, it is not a TRUE blended-wing aircraft, nor is it a lifting body. Either way, the F-35 has far more fuselage area to work with, and you STILL refuse to acknowledge that the F-35 has far more potential to generate fuselage lift than the F-16, simply because it has more fuselage area. You're happy to compare simple wing area to get "wing loading", but not to compare fuselage area to get "fuselage lift loading", because it would not fit your narrative. Yet somehow you're convinced that the tiny strakes on the F-16 generate more lift than the fuselage of the F-35, despite historical examples of aircraft flown on fuselage lift alone.

8 SDB and 2 AMRAAM are insufficient for CAS/ BAI? 2 JDAM and 2 AMRAAM are insufficient for strike? I suggest you review the weapons loadouts that F-16s, or even A-10s, carry in combat. It is rare that they ever carry more than 2 air-to-surface munitions and 2 (occasionally four) self-defense air-to-air missiles. External munitions on the F-35 will be the exception, not the rule.

This may be true, but if it were just the FBW, then software and processor upgrades to F-16s would potentially nullify that advantage. We don't really know much about how the flight control software between the two really differ.

Ah, so you admit that advanced aerodynamic features beyond mere wing loading can disproportionately affect the handling and maneuvering characteristics of an aircraft. Fantastic, now we're making some progress. Now, then: 1) Straaaaange, I would swear the F-35 has both slats, and full-span flaps, as compared to slats and partial-span flaps on the F-16. Also, just to note; the F-4 ALSO had slats and flaps, so that comparison doesn't explain the F-16's performance superiority over the F-4. Non-issue, and we don't know enough about their use on the F-35 to compare their effect on performance http://www.modelflying.co.uk/sites/3/images/member_albums/45294/f-35a.jpg 2) The F-35 also has a TWR over 1:1, and a superior TWR over the F-16 when both are carrying equivalent stores loads and fuel for equivalent combat radius. 3) how do you know that the inlet geometry or other visually-subtle features of the F-35 do not produce equivalent (or even superior) vortex states than the LERX on the F-16? It's not the LERX that really matter, it's the effect they have on airflow at high AOA. 4) How, exactly, is a blended wing design inherently more lift-producing? It reduces drag, but does not meaningfully contribute to lift (unless you're talking blended wing designs that are more akin to flying wings... in which case, you're really talking about lifting bodies. The F-16 is NOT a lifting body design). The F-35 appears to have a modestly lifting-body design: without exact blueprints, we cannot compare how much extra lift the F-35 fuselage generates versus the F-16s' wing blending. Given the breadth of the F-35 fuselage, though, my money would be on the F-35. *edit* I would note that in 4, you are essentially arguing that the minor body-lift increase from the blended wing on the F-16 is somehow more significant than the potentially huge body lift generated by the wide F-35 fuselage... lift which you seem keen to just ignore away from any comparison. After all, if you can fly an aircraft using lift generated by ONLY a wide fuselage.... http://rmparchive.com/images/hosting/600Border/NS181-600Border.jpg

You're really arguing that you can visually measure a 2-3 degree difference in the angle the wing- an irregularly curved surface- is set to the fuselage? ....ok.

USAF pilots work for LM now?