Tomsk

Agree completely, was exactly the same in the Hornet: people have asked ED many times if they can allow a slider option for those of us that have a slider rather than sprung switch, or indeed if it could just respect the "slider" setting that is already there like the other axes do .. sadly it has never materialized.

Really handy tip for those that don't know it: a quick way to work this out (approximately) is take your distance from the airfield in nm and multiply by 300 to get the altitude you need to be at in order to be on glideslope. The altitude is, of course, QFE which is the setting you get when you call inbound. So at 10nm DME you should be (roughly) 3000ft QFE, at 4nm DME you should roughly be 1200ft QFE. Really helpful if you need to do a non-precision approach (i.e. without ILS). Similar tricks for descending from altitude to the airfield: for a 5 degree descent take your altitude in 1000s of feet and multiply it by 2 to get the nm you should start your descent from. So if you are at 20,000ft start your descent at 40nm for a 5 degree angle. For a 10 degree angle take your altitude in 1000s of feet and that is the distance to start: so at 30,000ft start your descent 30nm out with a 10 degree angle. Most planes struggle to descend at more than 10 degrees without gaining airspeed, even with the airbrake out.

Totally agree for things like making stuff more readable in VR.

So my understanding is a little different, as I understand it IRL they don't drop the tanks without a good reason, but they absolutely will drop them if they need to. So going into a significant BVR engagement is a good reason since the drag of the tanks really affects speed, and speed is critical in BVR. You'd obviously drop them if you are engaged WVR and need to dogfight. You might also drop them if there's a significant risk you might suddenly need to pull a lot of G to avoid a SAM that is currently locking you. Or if you're about to go NoE and really need to cut the drag to save on fuel, or if there is significant risk of MANPADs you might need to avoid during a pop-up attack. These kinds of situations happen a lot in simulated engagements. Not being able to drop the tanks in these situations is a real hindrance .. so much so that our group currently just runs without tanks since you can't drop them if you need to. As such I'd actually want selective jettison to be implemented more than emergency jettison. Emergency jettison is used in emergencies, selective jettison is used more often.

Also seen this fairly frequently, generally found switching to and from dogfight/missile mode and "normal" mode a few times fixed it.

Bouli, I'd also expect that if you have the HUD as SOI and you have the TGP or FCR on an MFD then you would get "NOT SOI" displayed on the MFD, much as it does in the A-10C and in AnotherViperSim. Is that how it works in real life as well?

That makes sense .. seems like it's not quite functioning in DCS currently. It doesn't really seem to make any effort to adjust the trim for speed .. or at least I find myself constantly having to trim out with an asymmetric load. Did you (or do you) fly the Viper Bouli306?

Yes but once the effect has been trimmed out does the pilot have to keep changing the trim with airspeed. If so .. why? A computer is really good at doing that kind of thing automatically.

I was wondering the exact same thing. Also currently in the Viper roll trim is only correct for one speed. So if you have an asymmetry in stores and you get the plane trimmed out then if you change speed you need to re-trim the plane again. This noticeable increases pilot workload and I wonder if the real plane is like that .. if the pilot has commanded a certain trim why wouldn't the computer adjust that for speed automatically? Would be really curious how it works IRL.

This is my understanding, and how it worked in AnotherSim. Slewing the TGP around positions it relative to the steerpoint, but it doesn't move the steerpoint itself. You can then press CZ (Cursor Zero) on the TGP/FCR display to reset the offset back to the steerpoint location. Interestingly, if memory serves, when you change steerpoint you keep your current "offset" and had to press CZ if you wanted to look directly at your new steerpoint. This was a bit of a trap for the unwary but was actually kind of useful in some situations.

Nice find, the second video demonstrates it especially clearly. That's exactly how I'd expect it to work .. the tadpole shouldn't move around just from rolling the plane.

Note to moderators: I note this has been moved to mission editing, however, I think this is an F-16 specific issue. Other planes (such as the F-14B) also have two radios (one UHF and one V/UHF) but let you use frequencies for either radio, it's only the F-16 that refuses VHF frequencies even though it definitely does have a VHF radio.

Here's a video of me trying to follow the tadpole, as you can see it's totally hopeless because every time you get near to it and level out it moves further away again.

So I'm trying to create a player controlled flight and give it an AI wingmen. The default frequency that gets assigned to a new F-16 group is 305 which is a UHF frequency. However, as I understand it, in the F-16 the UHF radio is used for package comms and the VHF radio is typically used for flight comms. However if you go into the Mission editor and change COMM frequency to (say) 127 which is a VHF frequency, as shown here: The problem is this will not let you save the mission, as on save it gives the error: However, it's a perfectly valid frequency for the Viper! It's just a VHF frequency rather than a UHF frequency.

It surely can't be right .. it's almost completely useless as is .. it's so hard to follow it as even tiny rolls make it fly all over the place, so I've taken to just ignoring it completely and using the HSI.

For me this is the biggest single missing feature for the Viper. You can't fly a long mission and drop the tanks when they are empty, makes quite a lot of missions hard to complete.

+1 also really wanted "special" bindings for the pitch autopilot, e.g. one binding for Autopilot Altitude Hold/OFF and another for Autopilot Attitude Hold/OFF.

The tadpole is wrong in quite a few ways. One particularly weird one is that the tadpole moves (a lot) just from rolling the plane, which makes it almost impossible to actually use.

Overall really loving it so far, really nice to fly and cockpit looks gorgeous. There's plenty of issues to sort out, but I'm really enjoying it :D

Agree completely the MFDs are too dim for VR.

Imagine the situation, you've got a target locked at 10nm you fire an AMRAAM. He dodges so you want to switch to sidewinder to finish him off ... but currently it seems there's no way to do it from the HOTAS. In other F-16 sims this is done with a long-press of the MSL STEP button but this doesn't seem to work here .. is there some other way to do it or is it just not implemented yet?

Ha this made me chuckle, especially since (as I understand it) the entire reason laser ring gyros work is because the speed of light is the same in all reference frames (including rotating ones).

No expertise, but I seem to recall hearing the EGI version aligns quicker. Which it seems is the version we've gotten.

They were put back on the list because it was found that our version of the viper definitely did have the ability to use JSOWs in the period in question. There’s good evidence that 4 Mavericks was used operationally in Desert Storm so if you are simulating that historical engagement (and many of us enjoy that kind of thing) the use of that loadout in that scenario may well be reasonable.

Seems surprising since according to the wikipedia page on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System. This was apparently listed in the Which does strongly suggest that at least some version of the viper active around 1999 definitely can take MGRS coordinates ...