Voyager

Been listening to the Air Crew Interviews podcast, and one of the things that keeps coming up is, in Red Flag exercises, F-15C cruising around at 20,000 ft were mostly unable to stop low altitude penetrators, like the Bucaneer or Tornado. I'd expect in a peer conflict, while you'd have some flying top cpver, you'd pretty quickly have flight dedicated to banging around in the weeds too, to make sure the ornery stirs couldn't get through. Recall, the last near peer type war was Vietnam. F-4s were built as high altitude interceptors, but they ended up banging around in the weeds far more than they liked to too.

Working on putting together a unified key mapping for several aircraft I'm either flying or planning to fly, and was wondering if anyone can point me to a source for what the buttons on the actual F/A-18 HOTAS do? Thank you, Harry Voyager

I am struck by how the index finger button does seem to be the "context sensitive command" buttom...

Does anyone have a list of what the F-16 HOTAS buttons actually command? I.e. the real aircraft's keymapping? While I'm not currently planning on getting the F-16 myself, my HOTAS is largely based on the F-16 stick, so I'm trying to mirror the aircraft's controls as much as possible with my keymappings, to minimize controller confusion between different platforms. Thank you. Harry Voyager

Understood it is in terms of lift. What I've run into is I've got Thumb hat Forward and back reserved for counter measures on other aircraft, so I've bound the wheel to Up and down on the thumb hat. The lift thinking works and is intuitive for the Direct Lift Control, but on Flaps controls the standard is 'Down means lift'. I'm happy with the DLC binding, and if I can't switch the maneuver flaps, I can separately bind the flap handle to the spare lever on the throttle and run it manually. Apparently just dropping full flaps can break them... (That was a fun flight:))

Does that mean one could use the LANTIRN pod to generate coordinate correction points for the main INS on the fly?

My understanding is, if you are taking off from a land base, you put them to 20 degrees and under control on the aircraft computer once you're done with the wing checks, but if you are ship board you leave them in over sweep until sometime around when you are lining up to the catapult. However, I haven't seen the NATOPS manual so that's mostly supposition based on the stuff I've seen here and on YouTube.

Ended up binding the DLC wheel the the thumb hat Up/Down rather than forward/back. This had the surprising reveal that the DLC command for down is also the command for raising the maneuver flaps. I'm wondering if there is a way to bind those buttons so DLC down is the same as Maneuver flaps down? I know, it's not exactly the same ergonomics as the original platform but works better if the axis is vertical.

Trying the air to air refueling and coming to the conclusion there are a number of buttons I'd want to be able to press without looking into the cockpit. I've already got a number of them set up on my hotas, and I've got an old CH MFD with the 50 buttons package, and thinking I could set it up with some more controls, possibly the Displays Control Panel and the air source selection. I've already got the probe, core engine controls,and weapon safeties on the throttle, and the radar and weapon selectionson the stick. What buttons do you find yourselves wanting to move away from needing the mouse for?

Actually, third question: If tanking off of the starbord wing, donyiu still start from the pprtbhold, or from somewhere else?

Ok, two questions: 1: What are the commands to get your wingman to leave the port observation hold position? 2: What are the formation reference points for the KC-135?

I'm actually getting the worst of it pretty far out. What I was doing was trying to line up on the tanker from the spawn point and keep a slow closure all the way in, but was getting kicked around rather a lot. So instead, come in from below the tanker until your close then climb into the slot? I'll have to record and post some tracks, but don't know how valuable those will be with the track uncertainty :/

Good to know. So when lining up for the tanker, how was it usually handled? Push fast through the heavy area? Approach from specific vectors? On the training mission, the wingman set up on the port side and the tanker decided to tank me from the port side, which seemed very tight for the amount of bouncing around I was getting. Is this something one just gets used to, or are there procedures to mitigate it?

Hopefully this generates more light than heat, but was just getting into the air to air refueling mission, and was wondering if the wake turbulence off of the KC-135 is what should be expected? It really kept trying to flipnthe plane over. That seems a bit extreme, but I'm not the expert so wanted to ask if that is what I should be expecting in terms of turbulence. Aircraft was configured in bomb mode and at about 5-10 units of AoA, at sprint 0.7 mach at 15kft. Thank you, Harry Voyager

Looking at Newegg, they've got refurbished GTX 1070 cards in the $300-$400 range.

It's the proximity and beam path. The radars on the plane are standing right next to you, while the high power radars on the islands are mount a up top where people won't normally walk in front of them. Also there's the aspect of flux density. A big aperture can drive a huge total flux, while still having a lower flux density. Kind of the way elephants halve lower ground pressure than people do. Doesn't necessarily mean it is safe to be infront of at full power, but does make safety considerations more complicated.

So starting out in missiles with Jester, and I'm having some issues getting Jester to find and lock targets. Right now I'm more or less just pointing the plane where the bogeys are on the F10 map and telling him to set the radar scan range to a bit further than I think they are at, then either scan high or scan low, or elevation auto, but I don't seem to be actually seeing anything on the radar. I've got the HSD set to TID mode, so I believe I'm seeing what the RIO is seeing on the radar scope. I've also checked that the radar is on. Generally I keep vector img to the targets based on the F10 map, but I'm not seeing to be able to get Jester to find and lock onto them. We've been ending up going to visual range, then I'll use one of the pilot lock modes to get a STT lock on them. So what should the BVR search workflow look like?

https://pcpilot.keypublishing.com/the-magazine/online-content/?ID=7969 Oh 20-23 in the September/October issue.

Very interesting. So is this a sort of a way to runna cockpit off of a secondary computer? Could I basically load this onto something like a Microsoft Surface and use it as an extra bay of controls? (Having devious ideas of 2seating the pilot/rio stuff though applying lots of screens and controllers.)

One thing I wonder is, what regimes does the Flanker out perform the Tomcat in? I haven't seen the curves, but I had the impression that its strength was in low speed/high AoA control, but it sort of seems like that's firmly in the Tomcat's home turf, plus the 'cat seems to have solid high speed agility too if it wants to play the energy fighter role. Or am I reading to much into the AI Flanker performance?

It will do it on the ground too. If you start in >50 degree sweep and switch to Bomb mode, they'll stay back. Oddly, I think you may be able to sweep the wings back further from 50 degrees too, when in bomb mode on the ground, but I need to retest that to be sure.

To expand on that, Grumman managed the 9-G dog fight requirement by having the Phoenix support equipment on the removable missile pylons. It is rated for 9Gs with Sparrows, but, I believe, only 6-7 with Phoenixs. There's an interview up on YouTube with the lead designer about the design of the F-14 that he explains it in.

As I understand it, isn't the buffet primarily from the amount of vortex lift the plane uses? I'm also given to understand there's still tuning work being done on the pitch behavior. I'd expect, especially for an aircraft with a high reported pitch sensitivity, that once that gets all fully nailed down, we may see less, but still quite a lot, or the vortex buffet we see now. Also, I believe HB has started they're working through some behaviors with the DCS sound engine. I'm wondering if that's why some people are hearing buffet, and others are not? I know I'm not getting any speed noise at all, but I believe I'm hearing the wind buffet along with the plane shaking. (Seriously, I genuinely can't tell the difference between stalling and super sonic without looking at the guages.) Last bit, I'm coming to the opinion that this aircraft needs a stick extension and nearly no joystick curve because of its range of controls. My ability to control the plane was greatly improved by adding a 20cm joystick extension and setting the response curve to linear. This plane has massive amounts of control authority, and can be extremely sensitive to inputs at the same time, and changes trim like nobody's business, so any scaling curve can put you in a bad spot in a hurry. I'm definitely getting what the FPP F-14 crews they interviewed were talking about how the F-14's low speed handling was an "acquired taste".

Had been planning on just keeping the engine at idle if I was going to do touch and goes. So at touch, I should run both engines to mil power? Also, how are engine out landings typically handled at the carrier? If they can't divert, do they still do them? It struck me the usual full AB on contract might not work so well without the ability to use burner.

Good point on the single engine operation. So, thinking: 1) Spin/Stall behavior testing 2) TACAN navigation and tanker rendezvous 3) Air to Air Refueling 4) Single engine idle operation: level flight, high speed flight, low speed flight, landing profile. 5) Mid-air engine restarting 6) Landings with one engine Can the plane so single engine touch and goes? Or do I need to plan on coming to a adult for each single engine wheels down? Seems like a high yaw issue might prohibit it.