blkspade

Yeah I have seen this a lot, but never made the connection to what triggers it. Its been around for a while and you won't get any targets while its gone. Since I have a button on my hotas for Radar ON/OFF I usually cycle that to fix it.

Medium PRF usually solves that problem.

In the Eagle, burn through is 21nm vs flankers and eagles and ~27nm vs fulcrums. If you should happen to spot an Eagle at 40,000ft and want to climb to engage, you can (and likely will) be killed by a 21-25nm shot. The ET can score a kill vs this high eagle from about 18-22nm if you have speed and altitude with them in burner. NCTR works at 24.9nm against anything not jamming. Now using radar will hint as to you being Russian, but if you avoid this and use ECM you buy ~3nm before the eagle driver at altitude has to be conscious of an ET by knowing you're Russian. All these only matter for those bold enough for the head to head approach.

I'm a fan of more non US planes being released. Mostly to have different things to shoot at from my eagle though... I'm probably more interested in the F-18 for a full fidelity (120 slinging) fighter that can come off the boat, that can maybe do SEAD should i feel like it. If that comes out before the F-15E, I might not be too compelled to get the 15E. However as person that pretty much only flies the F-15C, a DCS F-15E would give me all the nice missing bits from the C with more time on station and bombs (if I were so inclined). I can imagine the strike supplanting the C for cap in MP for a lot of people for this reason. Or a faster A-10C, that you can't harass. From a single player perspective, if they aren't coming with campaigns designed around their RL application its like half a product. The P-51 for example can really only be properly enjoyed online on a WW2 styled server, cause AI skirmishes can only offer but so much. Oh and AI wingmen have the tendency to go full retard. There are still no WW2 assets, and was quite some time before contemporary opponents existed at all.

If you further click through that site you'll find AIM-120 was always something intended as part of the BVR package for the F-16, at least for the US. Further more it was the first aircraft to actually use it in combat, and score a kill. They mention certain at least block 10s being structurally sound to carry the 120, which I find interesting considering considering its lighter than the Aim-7. As much as you seem to be against it, any F-16 released for DCS with BVR capability will have 120s.

As GG pointed out and something I tried to allude to was that chaff has an effect on the host radar all the way up to guns range. I couldn't remember which jet was involved but, apparently it was a hornet having its gun pipper misdirected by chaff. How likely would it be that if the RL hornet's radar can become confused by chaff at guns range, that our in game flanker wouldn't be equally as bad if not worse? Because this lock degradation isn't modeled or visually represented in the HUD, what we get is a result that seems illogical (you believe you're perfectly maintaining lock) when it is ultimately what would likely be happening anyway. This behavior is actually apparent from the missiles perspective looking at tacview though. More so with actives, where you can see them briefly lose and reacquire due to chaff. Granted the fact that SARHs act terminal off the rail is probably wrong at range, you can't expect the chaff to be noneffective.

All that I've ever heard about the SARH missiles depicted in game, all rely on radar for terminal guidance. Also the chaff in game is apparently invisible to the platform radar, when it should actually be affecting it. So seeing missiles mistrack due to chaff by itself may be a misrepresentation of what is really going on. As in we don't perceive any degradation of lock stability on our MFD even though its happening.

Landing that way should likely cause damage that isn't currently modeled.

These things effect the AI at BVR as well. They used to know you launched an active missile TWS and react prior to pitbull. They used to see you through ECM. This not only allowed them to launch at Rmax before burn though, but they would climb with you to negate an attempted altitude advantage. The AI behaves predictably enough to test engagement parameters of both your weapons and the enemies. I got in the practice of doing this after every patch (pretty much since the release of FC3 or late FC2), so when they started to behave differently I noticed. All of these AI cheats have been fixed. I think the only things left is that they still use SFM, and possibly still having 0 spool time between throttle settings.

That's actually not quite true any more. The AI stopped being all knowing some time ago, where they rely on LOS and sensor input. If can you break LOS with the cockpit, and not show up on radar/RWR they will actually lose you. It becomes way more apparent WWII AI since there are no sensors, but I have done it vs modern jet AI as well.

And I just noticed there is a ranked red flag event coming up mid January. So probably sooner rather than later for me.

I can see a dedicated WWII map and assets being huge as that demographic is the single biggest divide from all other MP combat. Dividing the relatively small numbers of available modern combat pilots between potentially 3 different maps isn't going to go smoothly. Its a concept that still largely favors a single player mindset. Like NTTR will probably great for the Red Flag campaigns that accompany it. However since I spend the majority of my flight time in MP (at altitude), with my SP being mostly for looking for changes between patches, NTTR doesn't do a whole lot for me. So I'm certainly not in rush to pay potentially $50 a pop, for something IMO is less functional (combat area). Yeah I'll likely get them eventually on sale, unless more superficial reasons "force" me to ahead of that. Like trying to maintain my position on the SA-SIM leader board.

Yeah, one of things I strive for when getting tangled up with a flanker, is staying inside rMin and make those 73s go to waste. That is the easy part though.

Perhaps, but I'd imagine straight climb could potentially put the eagle in the FOV for a helmet shot.

Yeah there is probably a very small window for a snapshot that doesn't end in collision, but the flanker should probably be dead before the eagle even got that close. Going left/right and over the top after during the flanker's recovery, probably safest solution.

I've had one flanker try to pull a Cobra while I was on his 5'oclock high. Besides seeing it coming a mile away, he didn't make it.

The 1.2 system is still terribly broken. Not only in providing poor visibility where you should have it, but also where models go transparent at certain angles. For instance, try to dogfight a F-16 in 1.2 and maintain visual. You'll definitely lose him in the merge, while never breaking sight. I'm on a 27" 1440p screen. Ultimately the new system has even greater importance for WW2 aircraft where you would almost never see them without some sort of aid along with zoom.

Yeah. Its apparently in a data center in Colorado. Not only interesting in what it kind of says, but also that isn't even a valid host name.

So I just kicked off the update, but the update source IP address resolves to something shocking/interesting.

Well there is logical explanation for this, mostly tied to how terrible text based communications are while trying to fly. I'm in a squad but will generally only reply if on the ground, or flying solo and unengaged (obviously). Only if I'm flight lead will I respond in the air in a group. Keeping formation is generally way more important. At least in a FPS you can stop and hide somewhere to respond to a message. An integrated voice system would be great (like Arma), but the sim already struggles to manage bandwidth. I actually mostly like the new chat system though. Most of the problem with it is a people problem.

For the purpose of the test he's running it in a window has the game render at a higher resolution but the extra pixels are off screen. You effectively end up seeing and focusing on 1080p slice of the whole image. At a 1080P native the area being focused on has less pixels available, to being with.

I proposed ray tracing as a potentially more accurate way to come a conclusion, but realize implementation probably wouldn't be efficient. Which makes it less likely to be something used in a 1999 SIM. Seemed interesting that it is/was a thing tested for actual military application. A real-time construct would probably be way more useful for debugging.

Who is this Spike14 in relation to the sim? I haven't come across anything official to indicate ray tracing was in fact used in real time for the Radar model. Considering 1999 hardware, I'd be amazed if that was the case. Even more so in how no other sim since has done such it seems. I could imagine maybe a model built from ray traced data. Wags was apparently involved with the Janes F-18 development in some capacity.

Something I know would be a long way off for any desktop sim but could be interesting to have, would be real time ray tracing, but for Radar. Documents can be found going back to at least 1996 about its use for radar simulations. This would probably the best and most realistic way to handle modeling of radar and effects of chaff.