Biggus

Can't do a reasonable Vietnam War map without including Cambodia, Laos, both South and North Vietnam, some parts of Thailand and probably some of China unless you're happy skip the more interesting and significant campaigns of the air war. That's a truly massive area, and even if we have destructible foliage tomorrow without any performance penalty, it's going to be a long time before commonly available consumer hardware will be able to run it adequately.

It's a great set of pedals. I've actually removed the damper from mine. There's a little bit of slack in the tension on my damper and it doesn't quite return to centre even at the lowest settings and with lots of preload on the spring. I'll eventually rebuild the damper to fix it, but for now I'm just enjoying the precision of these pedals.

After flashing the microcontroller, yes. But you'll need to have diodes for each switch to avoid ghost presses, and doing it like this severely limits your number of inputs. Spend some time reading the wiki and working out how you want to configure your hardware. I generally prefer to use shift registers but a diode matrix is fine too. I'd strongly suggest switching to an STM32 and using Freejoy though. MMJoy2 is no longer in active development and can be quite confusing to configure. I liked using it, but Freejoy is vastly more intuitive and the developer is generally active on the forums for another WW2-centric sim.

It's important to differentiate between models when discussing the IRST chin pod. The J left the factory without it. There is one image I am aware of where an F-4J has a radome from a B/N with the chin pod, and that's the VX-4 jet wearing the bicentennial livery. The B left the factory with the chin pod. The N retained it until retirement. From around 1967, it housed antennas related to the Shoehorn mod. At no point did they use the smooth J radome in any widespread fashion. I've never seen any evidence of a B nor an N with the smooth radome. It's possible that a test bird somewhere had one at some time like the VX-4 J, but as a rule it seems to have not happened. The C and the D are interesting in that they have a greater variety of radomes in actual service. The C initially retained the B's radome. My understanding is that the USAF desired smooth radomes and these became available very late in production (likely in preparation for production of the J to commence). Early Ds continued to leave the factory without the chin pod until the USAF realised that they would need to install RHAW gear, at which point a chin pod was reintroduced. The USAF chin pods would change a bit over the subsequent years. My understanding is that in the late 1980s, some USAF squadrons were able to procure J radomes from AMARC, so there's a real mix of possible radomes for late Cs and Ds. On a slightly different topic, perhaps we should have some other threads for Phantoms that aren't F-4Es? It would be nice for this one to be cleaned up a bit so that skinners don't need to wade through pages of irrelevant images for the long nose birds.

You're lucky. I'm still cockeyed in the game. I really hope they make this tool work properly with OpenXR soon.

You should probably ask in the home cockpits subforum. But yes, that should work with MMJoy2.

I can understand that perhaps the OP could have been a bit more descriptive, but I also completely understand his frustration. It's an extremely old bug, and it appears that no progress has been made toward fixing it. For now, the work around is to change slots before respawning. The last bug report ended up being locked a year ago after merging threads.

Yes, my eyes are looking in two different places when zooming in. I was able to tune this out with SVR and the alignment tool, but it doesn't work for OXR. It's not fisheye. If I focus on the flight path marker, the deviation is too great for my brain to correlate it into a single FPM. Instead, I have the left eye looking at an FPM low and left and the right eye looking at one that is very high and quite a distance to the right.

Worn gimbal. Mine did the same. If it sat in the twisted position, it would output some roll. Eventually I replaced it with a WarBRD base, an expensive decision I do not regret in the slightest.

I think the alignment tool will need to be updated for OpenXR. Hoping it'll happen soon, because the alignment for me is horrendous.

Same guy talking about the difference slats made in exercises against CF-5As. I'm inclined to say '81 at the earliest. It's a pity that nobody had small handheld devices with high resolution cameras in their pockets in the 1980s. Is this a good thread to speculate about the Link 4 implementation in the J/N/S? Tactical manual has a pretty good description of how it looked in the cockpit, much like a mostly text version of the Mirage 2000's TAF, but with a steering dot inserted into the radar video.

The N had VTAS. VF-41 and VF-84 used the system on their 1975 Med cruise. You're assumptions I wouldn't. I've got an account of a guy in VMFA-235 using it with the F-4S. Others are less specific but if they're talking about using it with a -9L, it's going to be late in the career of the Phantom. The hard part is finding photographs.

It could well have been a Marines thing. Given that it required repeated applications of dessicant, I can imagine that shipboard maintenance could have been quite painful. I'll keep my eyes out for pics.

Perhaps one day DCS will be at a point where in a dynamic campaign, the way you treat your equipment will have consequences for further missions. Along with some factoring for the environment the campaign is taking place in. Add in some proper squadron or air wing management and it'll be an incredible experience. I live in hope.

Worked well with everything from the AIM-9D through to at least the -9L and probably -9M on the heater front (22 degree off boresight due to missile gimbal limits) and all the Sparrows that were ever loaded onto a 1972ish- onward Navy Phantom. I believe it was usable to around 60 degrees when slaving the radar to the helmet. I'm not so sure I'd agree with @LanceCriminal86 that it was gone that quickly, I've seen plenty of stories of it being used well into the 80s. It looked very much to me like something that some squadrons made good use of and other squadrons practically deleted it.

Thank you so much, @NotBonk!

Assuming to know where other people's knowledge originates is disrespectful and rude. Despite the F-14 not implementing it, F-4S squadrons were using the system well into the 1980s because it was useful despite the limitations and rather difficult serviceability. I'm sure that Heatblur will be able to find a way to simulate the system, warts and all. And again, using it would be completely optional.

That's very helpful, thanks @NotBonk.

And anyone that likes a later Phantom isn't a real enthusiast? Sorry, I can't agree with that. I've used sims since the late 80s and the single greatest desire for me has been to have a late J or an S. You can have your own desires, but there's no need to belittle or gatekeep the desires of others. And as others have said, if you don't want to use VTAS, don't use it. It's perfectly historically accurate to not use it, because plenty of squadrons ignored it. It's a very limited system with only around 20 degrees of off-boresight capability on the seeker head, best used for pulling a bit of lead before a tail aspect sidewinder shot. Worked well with Sparrows too, but the main intention was to help crews get into better parameters for a fox-2.

@Diesel_Thunder, you've been enormously helpful. I've got yet another request, with absolutely zero sense of urgency about it: Could you please get some images of the assembly with the flaps switch? Thanks to your pictures in the other thread, I've got plenty to work with now. It is massively appreciated.

@Diesel_Thunder Thank you very, very much! That's perfect!

@Diesel_Thunder could you grab some pics of the right side front seat console please? Nearly every other image I've found has the O2 tube and other things laying across them.

Yup, I've been using the F-4C and G there, but didn't realize they also have an RF-4C. The fighter cockpits have been enormously helpful for the left side and the front, but the right side is really hard to see. The right side is much clearer in the RF-4C but I'm not sure how different that will be from the F-4E. Still, it's a very big help and thank you for drawing my attention to it!

I'd have a lot less to be annoyed about if they'd just documented it somewhere that users will see. I spent a couple of hours of my time trying to chase down a non-existent binding, thinking I'd made a mistake.

I'm bumping this, because I'm making a very abbreviated front cockpit and I'm struggling to find useful images of the front seat right hand side consoles. The 3D cockpits have been an enormous help for the left side, but there is stuff laying on those right side consoles. Has anyone found a decent set of images?