JB3DG

It's actually a pyrotechnic cartridge inside the F-4 itself. The expanding gasses from it are what spin up the turbines and usually accompanied by lots of black smoke.

Got mine in Thailand

For the sake of infodumping/geeking out, the differences are due to the PMP (Propulsion Modernization Program) upgrade and it had some intriguing results. They changed the intakes and I believe a few other engine components to improve low altitude acceleration and turn performance. The intakes however had a costly side effect. They dropped the top speed from Mach 1.6 down to barely Mach 1.05 in a very tiny altitude/weight window. So in short, you will be hard pressed to go supersonic in this bird.

The first time I sat in a full cockpit sim at Sheppard AFB along with the VR sims I worked on for the T-38C and got to try their super heavy active force feedback sticks was when I really realized how your average desktop simmer isn't getting anything really transferable beyond button pushing and number memories. Totally different experience when you have $20000+ hardware involved. I suspect most desktop sticks would snap if they had to deal with the actual stick forces in the real jet.

It's questionable whether they will be able to come to a stop without running out of runway though given the approach speeds required. Tires are likely to catch fire.

This is where I anticipate many users coming unstuck. I remember back in the FSX days with the Milviz F-15E and F-4E, people were complaining about the jets being impossible to land at 150kts. Yeah don't try getting down to 150kts with a full internal fuel load + weapons. Not gonna happen.

I would more likely believe this about the early F-15As than the E. The early E is PW-220s with increased weight, so it is more of a pig compared to a F-15C. The F-15A is considerably lighter than the C, and even with the lower thrust of the earlier F100 engines it still had a superior thrust to weight ratio.

As I recall though, to get actual A-G ranging into the system the WSO does actually have to go full trigger action on the A-G range return even though it is slaved to the gunsight. There's a chance he can end up locking a sidelobe return which will result in inaccurate ranging.

Almost correct. Root extensions are basically just the first few feet of a delta wing applied to a more regular wing. Delta wings and root extensions apply a common phenomenon. Large vortices that stick to the wing at high AoA. Read about Chuck Yeager's testing of the XF-92, the predecessor of the F-102 and F-106. He was able to land it at under 70kts thanks to this feature. Controlling how it develops is a large part of creating a delta wing design, which comes in the form of shaping the delta, or adding root extensions on a more conventional wing, or with the use of canards.

I do find targeting lasers from AI go through them, but not self lased. Had many bombs go stupid because a cloud got in the way of my self lase.

I recall seeing pics of Hornets carrying navigation FLIR pods on their cheeks along with the targeting pods. LANTIRN was a big favorite for a while until the early 2000s. I have a video somewhere specifically on the challenges of low altitude night flight, has a ride along in an F-16 out of KEDW testing the Digital Terrain System (DTS) as a replacement for TFR along with NVGs. Mentions the lack of depth perception in NVGs which caused 4 different aircraft in the Gulf war to crash into sand dunes.

Last I knew from the -1, there is no such thing as no selected steerpoint. Maybe it might not give distance/heading info if it treats a lat/lon of 0,0 as undefined, and exclude all such points from auto sequencing, but even the F-16 and F-18 have an initial waypoint regardless of the mission editor, be that 1 or 0.

Nope. That's just the jet's internal navigation system. You can set STR B to always take you back to starting point, but SP 1A is always going to be active (even if the lat/lon is 0,0) unless otherwise selected.

Actually the LO/MID/HIGH are the PRF indicators. HIGH PRF indicating that the SAM is tracking, not just scanning. While this is for the APR-25, not the 45, it gives a little insight into how the older RWRs work:

EA-6B prowler would be fun too....

Yeah there's no contest even IRL. Although if we're going to go with non AESA radars, the APG-63(v1) (not to be confused with the much older APG-63) is allegedly vastly superior to the APG-70 even.

I don't know about the F-14 as I hardly touch it even as a pilot, but I absolutely adore being a backseater on the F-15E. I think this question will take some time to answer because until now, we haven't really had many aircraft that support multi crew period. It's one of those questions where you first have to make it a reality before you can get the answer as to how many will actually do it.

Nothing to be found on the APR-38 or APR-47. Those things are classified way more secret than even many of the weapons. ECM/EW is the most sensitive aspect of all military aircraft.

I set my target designation to be a little long of the actual target for my planned direction of attack. I get the impression the ballistics are set up to treat the CBUs as where the casing itself will hit, not where it will burst, and not accounting for the momentum of the skeets/bomblets once they leave the cannister before their chutes deploy. Also not accounting for impact angle. A low angle drop such as a TOSS would do can easily result in the skeets falling either short or long. If you come in high, I find one has to set the fuzes to a much higher deployment altitude than with a low angle drop because of the time delay of chutes opening. Too low and they will all slam into the ground before they can even open.

I tend to eyeball aim a little beyond the target during my run in.

My bad, I mixed popup and toss.

If you can go low enough to pop up and destroy the medium range stuff and get back down before Tors and MANPADS and AAA can fire back, they become totally irrelevant and can be picked off from high altitude with LGBs.

If the point does not yet exist (ie lat/Lon are 0) you have to enter it first as a regular steerpoint in order to get to where you can give it a lat/lon. Once it has valid lat/lon, remain in the PB10 submenu and re enter the point as X. To make it a target. Thereafter you can select it for steering from the MENU1/DATA1 pages by entering X.

Welcome to acronym soup. ACQ should sound self explanatory (Acquire), TGP should also be familiar from other jets (Targeting Pod), as should FOV (Field of View), and CCIP/CCRP aka AUTO are standard terms in the DCS community. Confusing as hell for newcomers tho....

Being a WSO is all fun and no responsibilities. Also only a WSO can do this (it's really hard to do in a single seater):