Biggus

Agreed, you haven't turned on your O2 supply. First thing I do when I load into the cockpit.

I have a question, IronMike. Are there still tweaks coming to hook physics? I get the "bolter" callout when I trap when I should probably have had a hook skip (or just trapped when I should have waved off). Maybe that's the problem, rather than Jester.

I just tried it. Saw a slight improvement in frames and significant improvements in loading times and Track IR input latency.

WarBRD is Virpil. Both Virpil and VKB have F-14 sticks, but I believe only the Virpil one will work on the WarBRD. If you need both a base and a stick, then you've got a lot of painful decision-making to do.

I'll second IronMike's post. I thought the Warthog felt good. Bought in 2012, many good years with it. I upgraded to a WarBRD a few months ago. It's a night-and-day difference, just the same as it was a night-and-day difference going from an X-52 to the Warthog. I'm sure there are a few people out there who do prefer the WH base after having tried the higher end bases, but I'd be genuinely surprised if they were anything other than statistical outliers. If I had an MS FFB2 stick in my stash, I'd likely just mod that and use it. It's a pretty incredible piece of equipment even now. There are a few good resources for modding sticks on the internet. There is a subreddit named HotasDIY, and there's also a Discord associated with it. Worth considering.

Yes, I can confirm that this seems to be the case. Air start - fine. Land start, trap on the carrier, rearm and launch - fine. Spawn on the boat - not fine.

I vaguely recall discussion that the -54As required one of the tunnel palettes to house coolant for every Phoenix onboard. I don't recall if that was also true of the Charlie variant.

Yup, aware of him entering the mission-defined WPs, just curious if interrupting this process and setting up different WPs would be a big problem. I haven't tested it at all, I might tonight. That's not a huge deal-breaker for me. I'm MP only usually, so I can't jump between seats. Interesting though.

Are you guys talking about it from the RIO's perspective? Does getting Jester to enter it from the front seat cause any issues? I vaguely remember very early after release that things could get a bit messy so I've never really tried it.

Seconded.

I find this very common with F-5s, and every now and then it'll happen with Su-25Ts. I've never had Jester call friendly on a hostile Flanker or Fulcrum though.

This would be a really good fix. If it were ever so slightly delayed to account for reaction times, it would feel much more like working with a meat-based RIO. Then it can be bound using VA and it wouldn't feel out of place.

It appears that this is still an issue in the 2.5.5.35461 OB patch. Still seeing differences between air start and boat spawned aircraft in exactly the same state. No weapons, 1500lb fuel. Air start Tomcat is on-speed at 124kn, carrier spawned is on-speed at 131kn. Fuel flow figures are improved though.

I've had one of these this OB patch too. Online, land-based start, right engine fails to start and only closing the game and restarting it brings it back. It certainly hasn't been as common for me as it was a few months ago. I don't use auto-start.

Just to follow up on this, I added an F-14 lined up for takeoff at Al Minhad with enough fuel to put myself into a 10 mile straight-in approach to the boat with 3,000lb. No weapons besides gun, totally clean aircraft. On-speed AOA around 126kn. Trapped, opened rearm/refuel dialogue and had the plane fueled up to 4,000lb. Launched and trapped again from 10nm behind the boat, maybe a knot or two slower on-speed than the first time but I was a touch lighter on fuel also. I then respawned as the lighter Tomcat on the catapult and noted higher fuel flows and higher on-speed AOA by about 5-6kn. This would appear to indicate that the issue is at least partly with carrier spawned aircraft, not with any rearm/refuel interaction. If there is interest I can upload the revised mission file. I am currently testing to see whether setting up aircraft with stored heading alignments is a contributing factor but I don't have many other things left to test after that.

Tonight I'll try a land-based spawn with a flight to the carrier, a rearm and then launch and recover. Maybe that will narrow it down to a carrier bug vs a bug that gets applied when someone spawns. Judging by the normal patch note omissions I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is the case. I really hope you get answers soon.

I've done some testing too. My very rudimentary test is a mission I've attached. It is a modified version of the PG case 1 mission with some F-14Bs in different states. Two are ready on the catapult with no weapons (aside from the gun), one of which is at 53,596lb (9396lb of fuel) and the other is at 48,610lb (4050lb fuel). A third is about 8-10nm behind the boat, again clean but with loaded gun and weighs 47,152lb, of which 2593lb is fuel. The issue is most obvious when you launch the max-weight bird, dump fuel down to 2500lb and compare it's fuel flow and on-speed speed to the plane that air-starts behind the boat. I believe there was a difference of 11kn and a significant increase in FF. The air-started bird was on-speed with flows around the 4.8-5.2k mark, and by 1800lb of fuel was on-speed at about 124kias. The max weight one was pushing 6.5k FF and was on-speed at roughly 135kn. Experimenting with the low fuel weight carrier start demonstrates figures roughly halfway between. This can't be correct behavior. F-14B_IA_PG_case_1_modified.miz

I am an unapologetic Sparrow lover. They're great for shots in close proximity to friendlies, and they're excellent in tail-chase engagements. You do need to take into account your rate of closure when firing, but I regularly shoot around 5nm against fighters under 10,000ft. Many Sidewinder hits merely damage an aircraft, but the Sparrow more reliably puts them down. They are very limited at low altitude and speed though. You can't really use them as BVR missiles against any enemy fighter newer than about 1984, and even against older stuff like Floggers, you want to have a significant altitude and speed advantage to use them in head-on engagements. They're also far, far lighter than -54s if you care about your max trap weight and don't want to jettison perfectly good weapons at the end of a sortie.

Precisely as sLYFa said. He's taken them down for a reason. As mentioned already in this thread and *numerous* times in the stickied threads, he doesn't want them to be distributed. As such, yes, I think that this fits the definition of disrespect. If anything, this sort of behaviour runs the risk of updated documents never being released.

This seems somewhat disrespectful towards the author.

I did it in bomb mode for a long time, but I've recently changed to 40deg following some discussion in another thread here. So long as you're in a manual mode and you've got enough lift and throttle resolution (aka very fine control over your airspeed) at your chosen position, I don't think it matters enormously starting out. Quick edit: Your hardware can make a big difference too, so don't beat yourself up too much. I was far, far below average in performance with my Warthog stick. Constant disconnects, great difficulty approaching the drogue, etc. Replaced the base with a Virpil one and immediately was able to hook up and stay connected.

Thanks Mike. Things are definitely moving in the right direction. One of my missions was an air start with 2000lb of fuel, a pair of GBU-10s and a pair of GBU-12s along with a sparrow, a pair of sidewinders, the LANTIRN and two empty external tanks. I hit the tanker and filled to 20,000 and then jettisoned the bombs, lit the burners and headed for the boat. I accelerated until I was hitting my top speed and then punched off the tanks. Speed increased as you would normally expect. I entered the break with the pod, the sparrow and the sidewinders and roughly 5,000lb of fuel. Getting on-speed was a breeze, fuel flow was a little under 5kph and there was very little sinking through the turn into the groove. Very happy even if it's not perfect yet. Well done to the team.

Is it my imagination or has today's patch made her behave more nicely around the boat? I feel as though the weird undeleted stores/fuel weight/drag issue is likely gone based on a couple of sorties and some quick case 1s.

Just to add that I am getting the same issue and it is making it very hard to fly my primary module, the F-14.

This is why I was asking about expanding the ground stab options in another thread, and I would like to echo Larkis' suggestions. Right now, Jester is practically a loud and personable RWR. I need a Radar Intercept Officer, ie someone providing the front seater with information to conduct an interception. Preferably sophisticated enough to not place me on a course to be inside the target group's radar scan. I either need to be able to control the ground stab functions myself from the front seat, or preferably have Jester providing me with options to prosecute the contacts he is calling out and exclude calling out irrelevant contacts I'm not committing to, provided that they're not a danger to me. The flow would basically be to have Jester call out contacts and at that point provide a context menu selection to commit to a specific contact from what is currently visible. From that point I either need Jester to provide calls for bearing, range, altitude and target heading so I can calculate my intercept correctly, or I need Jester to know how to make that calculation. I need to be at a point where at 10nm I have 40,000ft of lateral separation from the target. That's my objective in an intercept. Arrive at a point where I'm close enough to conduct a stern attack immediately or have room to turn in pursuit in order to conduct an attack with my sidewinders, whilst being outside of enemy radar gimbal limits the entire time. All of that stuff is probably very hard to do, but I think if anyone can do it, it's the Heatblur people.