Biggus

J/S/K/M and the late C and early D for me are perfection. There was a J out there with a B/N radome though, the bicentennial bird.

I think this is a pretty fair criticism. Particularly the end of 2022 passing with nothing said. I do recognise that there is no way that any dev can avoid a crowd wielding pitchforks in literally anything they do. They will always have some part of the audience in an unhappy state, no matter what course they choose. But if a date is going to missed, there should be some acknowledgement. We have a clear statement that right now, it is expected that the module will ship in the next couple of weeks. We have been told that if there is a delay, we will be informed. As an outsider, I'm inferring because that there is presently no announcement of a Steam pre-order and no firm release date, there will probably be a delay. But I can also imagine that working with at least two other companies (ED and Steam) means quite a few internal targets that may or may not be achievable in the stated time and therefore it is not yet time to announce a delay. It'll be here when it's here.

There is sometimes a bug that seems to cause a significant weight increase if your aircraft is delayed for spawning on the boat.

Seconded. The Tomcat has bind to both raise the guard and switch master arm to on, and another to switch master arm off and return the cover to the guarded position. It would be really useful to have this in the F1.

First impression is that it looks good. Tweaking some settings at the moment as the standard 50 intensity and 25 saturation are a little much for me.

Tested today following the patch. No matter what I did before, I suffered that brutal frame drop. I've just had a few minutes to test, but I've observed a serious improvement with low terrain textures. High terrain textures still leads to that immediate massive frame drop below 900ft though. Time will tell but I'm feeling quite positive about the progress being made. Edit: Built up areas still suffer quite drastic frame rate drops. In one instance, I was able to restore performance by alt-tabbing as I flew over Rio Grande. But at other times it did not help. This patch is definitely a step in the right direction overall.

Fantastic vid, guys. Can't wait for the next one!

Looking at the upcoming patch notes, there's an entry for bomb fuze delay for penetration. I am hopeful this will fix the problem.

@Jocman I don't have the required permissions to send you an invite to the HOTAS/HOSAS/SIMPIT Discord, but I'm sure if you do a little googling or possibly post in the hotasdiy subreddit, somebody should be able to help you join. There's a channel dedicated to Freejoy there, and the dev seems to post pretty regularly.

I won't lie. The Belsimtek Phantom was a heart breaker. I've waited for a decent Phantom combat simulation since Chuck Yeager's Air Combat Simulator. Knowing that it is so close now, it's a combination of enthusiasm, frustration, anxiety and hopium. I guess with this length of time waiting for something like the F-4E to happen, the naval bird really isn't that far off either. A handful of years.

I'm trying to tell myself the wait is character building.

Of respondents, sure. Of DCS users as a whole, not a chance.

This is an amazing contribution. Thank you very much.

Sounds like a fantastic system, @MadMonty. When you enable XMP (after you're sure the CPU is good and stable, of course), it might be worth spending a tiny bit of time seeing whether your DDR5 sticks can be tweaked a little further. I've just gone from 32gb with really timings to 64gb with very loose timings, and I've gotten nearly all the lost speed back purely with a bump from 3600mhz to 3800. Memory tuning is hell in my experience when going beyond this, but for a couple of evenings of gameplay and a night of stress testing, I think it was worthwhile. Congratulations again on your new system!

I'd be shocked if it were even 15% faster than your 5800X. You have a 4090. I would avoid any G suffixed CPU.

I'm not sure how Link 4 equipment not being on every carrier calls into question whether F-4Js received AN/ASW-25s at production. October 1965 being the first combat deployment of the Link 4/4A system on the Kitty Hawk. VF-213 was also aboard with their F-4Gs equipped with AN/ASW-21s. Up until this point though, fighter control relied on voice communication between controller and fighter. If we're talking about Vietnam, there were a number of controlling agencies that a fighter may have been subordinate to, both shipboard and airborne. Voice communications appear to have remained the primary method of fighter control throughout the service life of the F-4J, despite the availability of the datalink.

I'd have expected to see some notes in the 1972 tactical manual regarding Js that had not been fitted with it during production if it was added later. Everything I've yet come across states that it was part of the baseline J and later retrofitted to the B. GIven that the G had been in operational testing for some time before 1966, I would be surprised if this were not the case.

Introduction was earlier, I believe that the Js rolled off the production line with the AN/ASW-25 and it was retrofitted to most of the remaining Bs relatively quickly.

@kksnowbear and @LucShep, this has given me a lot to think about. I'm open to running my system from one of the SATA drives. I guess I need to look at my system holistically to make a decision as to which direction I should go. I feel like I'm learning a lot from this conversation.

Thanks for the response, @LucShep. My board can only accommodate a single M.2 device. I currently have DCS on a pair of SATA3 SSDs (main folder on one, savegames on the other). I think I'll find a DRAM-equipped drive.

Thanks @Marshallman. I assume you mean that the Crucial P3 is noticably faster? That's a good sign, it's one of the drives I'm considering.

Tacview is quite a stutter-generator for my system, which is also a 5800X. Might be something to look at.

I'm currently shopping around to replace my main drive, a 500GB m.2 Samsung 860 Evo. It's on a B450 motherboard so I don't really require more than PCIE 3.0 but I'm considering building a fresh system in a year or so, so I'm looking at PCIE 4 and 5 drives in the hopes that I can do a little future proofing for once.. One thing I've noticed is that there is a reasonable price difference between m.2 drives with DRAM and drives without. I'm curious as to whether the DRAM-less drives are problematic for DCS. I've seen at least one Hoggit post regarding a DRAM-less drive being the cause of one user's stutters, but these drives are so widespread that I'm wondering whether that was an outlier. So can I get away with buying a DRAM-less drive as my main system drive which also has a DCS install on it?

The other thing that the J is great for is variety. Pre-DECM Js up until 1975ish, DECM-equipped Js from late 1972. You've got super Js with smokeless motors and AWG-10As from 1975, you've got J/Ss that are effectively S models that haven't yet received the slat kits from around 1979 til 1983, you've got the F-4J (UK) with it's own different systems up until January 1991. All of them offer meaningful points of difference that would be relevant to us in DCS. While an S would be my dream rendition, I can acknowledge that it's probably not a viable choice if HB continue their trend of including a couple of variants in each module.

Cobra mentioned that the J was the main contender a few months ago on Discord, but that the decision was not yet firm.