blkspade

This! Repairs should be impossible and impractical with an enemy CAS flight with-in 5nm from the airfield. That would demand fighters to clear the area immediately around the airfield, and subsequently require CAP from the attacking side to be maintained while the Helos move in. Imagine an A-10 circling an airfield. Is he really just gonna watch new vehicle drive out of storage and get setup. Much less would guys on the ground be in a rush to poke their heads out after being decimated by a still present CAS flight. At the worst you'd have guys with manpads trying to force them off.

The thing to point out about its poor placement is that IRL, you'd be stuck having to pan your head to look down at it. Sure in game you have the benefit of being able to play with the zoom/FOV, but you give up readability on the instruments/HUD if you aren't on a very large screen.

Well battlefield 3 did, and BF4 expanded on that making use of up to 6 I do believe. So the capability in general is there in the Frostbite engine.

No DCS isn't forgetting the CPU. That graph is CPU package performance, meaning its looking at all cores/thread. DCS can only max out a single thread which accounts for 25% load on a 4 thread CPU. It uses an additional thread for Audio, but is probably never loaded as much as the main thread.

Res of cockpit plays is whats inducing the stutter BTW. It should be set to any "Every Frame" option.

You know I hadn't actually looked at it before replying. Maybe they have a really low refresh rate to save on power.

LOL, have you never seen a camera pointed at a CRT before?

You know the Eagle's radar along with 120s can simultaneously attack 6 targets right. Flying in trail would be the worse possible way to engage an Eagle with 120s that could work at range. Unless you're more than 5nm apart, but then you're too far apart to be an effective unit. That's basically pitbull on lead, and cheap shot on the wingman if you're too close. Number 2 would be denied the ability to press. Vertical or lateral separation that denies the Eagle the ability to keep you both on the scope at the same time is what you need.

Winchester basically beat me to it, but anyway. If you fire at a bandit he absolutely has to maneuver, at which point its going to be 1 of 3 ways. Break away, break into or split S. If you didn't completely jump him, you are already cued up for his shot anyway. If you did jump him (and didn't opt for an ET), attempting to spot the launch is like missile defense 101. The real Eagle hotas is setup where you can manuever, hit AACQ, and enable CMs pretty much simultaneously. So you can do that while cutting across the missile's flight path on your way to the beam. If you get picked up in the process, you'll be fired upon as a part of the defensive process. Its more about forcing a reset than killing, but you'll likely get killed by an ARH missile if you don't break off. Immediately disengaging just means running home or to your nearest friendly flight. It is easy enough to outrun a flanker if he doesn't have any ETs for you to worry about.

Once again radar is not a laser point, so chaff is rather continually prone to illumination. The ARH missile itself likely has a more narrow FOV positioned closer to the target. The IRST is useless for Radar missiles. I've watched numerous bandits pop flares against my 120s though.

Well for games that are CPU limited and not very MT capable, IPC (instructions per clock) is king. So a new CPU is likely going to have higher IPC, a higher clock, or both. If you could get a decent overclock from your non-K i5, that would be beneficial, but unlikely. Technically both your CPU and GPU are below spec for the Rift, well the CV1, but the only real difference is resolution with respect to the PC parts.

Well the CPU is always a bottleneck in Sims, but the reason it doesn't get loaded is the sim can only make use of 2 cores. One of which is for audio work. I don't have any first hand experience with the rift, but either a sim bug is limiting performance with the Rift or the CPU can't keep up. If the dual rendering is handled like the mirrors where object counts go up where they are turned on, then that definitely weighs on that CPU single core perfomance.

Pretty much this. Unless we see real RF modelling, we're always going to have a probability approach. The enemy finds the magic number until they are out of chaff, and then they go home. No different than running out of flares to find out the other guy has 1 IR missile left. The real point is airspace denial, by which kills are an eventual by product (perhaps cause the other guy wasn't paying attention to his remaining CMs) not accounting for death by ambush. Everybody wants to be an Ace though, and will often do anything for a kill, or 5. That probably doesn't only apply to Sim pilots.

Given the detection/engagement range of the MiG-21's radar, it would be rather moot. However given that there have been debates about how an enemy missile launch would be detected IRL, what if the only way to differentiate between lock and launch is actually picking the launch up on radar?

The weight is only really an issue while trying to climb, which becomes easier as a by product of burning fuel while climbing. Once you're level the real issue with the tanks is drag, which is lower at altitude. The drag will affect acceleration more so than top speed, and speed is what you need to maneuver. Thrust is pretty much constant (though improved as you actually get faster) as long as you have any fuel, which will eventually get you to a desired speed to maneuver and also grants you lift against gravity (the part where weight matters). Any of your "hard" maneuvers from altitude are generally into a dive, which as you might guess converts to speed. So your argument basically boils down to why are the Eagle's engines just better than the Flanker's.

Well that resets the radar, it doesn't really turn it off. I can see this being frustrating if you bugged targets in NAV mode just to lose them.

Yeah I was talking about them showing up on the Eagle's AN/APG-63 radar. It wouldn't surprise that Mig-21 wouldn't/shouldn't have such detection capability.

Umm, aren't the external stores currently modeled with too much drag? I just watched the Raytheon award video again, and the Eagles in there seem to be quite agile at pretty high altitude with tanks on.

The KH-58 ARM showing up on radar is what gave the idea that missiles like the R-33 and AIM-54 could likely show up as well.

Its news to me that air to air missiles are showing up on radar (I speculated to the probability that this should happen a really long time ago). I have seen various A-G and SAM show up on radar though. I don't think they IFF though, they just all show up as enemy contacts. I just realized that this is the MiG-21 you're referring to. I have seen the described behavior in the F-15.

Raptr absolutely does work with DCS. I know it doesn't seem to pick up the Alpha or Beta game locations, but definitely sees the stable build. There were some problem with 1.2 and MP because there were separate executables, but that is no longer an issue.

Are you still running 1.2? I use Raptr but have not had this problem. Certainly not in 1.5 anyway.

I am fairly convinced at this point the B is better at low altitude intercepts. While an edge case, in the past when guys would do airfield raids with Su25Ts, I always had a better hit rates against their HARMs with 120Bs and Aim7s than 120Cs. Just yesterday I engaged a low bandit firing a B first and then C as fast as I could possibly switch between them. When he broke defensive one missile hit the ground ©, the other got the kill (B). The C hit ground 2-4 seconds before the B made its intercept.

If SARH missiles were designed to work the way you envisioned (solely with radar in mind), it would be just as easy for the targets radar to fool it, or any number of things that would conflict and cause it to misguide. The proper tactic would be to fly with ample separation so that the Eagle can't track/engage you both at the same time. Committing on one leaves him open to the other.

Sadly, 1440p doesn't fix this. I have a 27" 1440p monitor and its still a problem. The best experience I had with visibility (and overall scale) was when I played on my 47" 1080P TV. Increasing pixel density (as you would going to 1440p) by design makes it harder to distinguish individual pixels. So when pixels are physically larger in the case of a large TV, single pixel rendered aircraft will ultimately be more visible. This may require being around half the recommended viewing distance.