ShuRugal

hard to stay calm on my leisure time, i use up all my calm on duty.... no worries about 1 2 and 3, I run on an MSI GT70. I do 4 whenever nVidia shadowplay is working, but it usually isn't :( still doesn't support full-window mode very well. got any reference resources on that subject? some basic time-to-intercept tables for various speed and altitude i could load up on my tablet for quick reference during combat? I would love to be able to use Datalink in the SU-27... except that it seems to be a unanimous opinion among the guys running 104th that AWACS and EWR are both the spawn of Satan. If i'm aware of both of them? one ER and one ET at the first one, then run like hell and pray to god there's not already a slammer in the air (if there is i'm dead either way)

Right, I'm suffering from a fit of rationality, may as well take advantage of it and ask a useful question while it lasts: The general consensus is that my SA sucks. Whether or not this is responsible for what I described in the OP, I do not know, because I still can't get a replay of that track that doesn't have me dummying into the ground instead of landing for fuel before my last sortie... anyway, what can do do to improve my SA? I am always scanning with radar, normally in high PRF, though i check medium periodically as well. I typically start scanning at my altitude, then high, then low. Then I repeat with the set shifted left and right. I typically set my altitude-scan range around 50km and before engaging any target i scan up to +15 and down to the ground to see if he has a buddy. I used to use IRST heavily as well, but since the last patch, i can't pick up anything on it that isn't cold aspect. What else can I do to improve my odds of finding what's going to get me? I feel like I usually have a pretty good idea of what's in front of me, but since y'all are convinced that i don't...

right, sorry, i keep getting too worked up about this. Before i go on reading the rest of your post, the altitude was 7km. neither of us should have been able to kill the other at that altitude and range. edit: you know what? screw this argument. I'm getting rather tired of being called a liar: I -know- that an AIM-120 launched at 40km and unsupported should not be able to hit me unless i fail to evade. that's my entire point in this thread saying that it is impossible (which is also what I am saying it should be) and then telling me that it didn't happen that way (IE: calling me a liar) is just as piss-poor a contribution to this discussion as my repeated failures to remain calm. and yes, I am pissed off. Yes, I am posting angry. That's what happens when you go and repeatedly tell me that i'm lying when i tell you something happened that we both agree should not have.

possible, except, again, he was never within 35km of me with anything other than his reheats pointed at me. hey, your man doesn't keep pestering me for something i already told him is broken, and then implying that i'm making shit up... Possible my SA sucks, or his is good enough that it didn't matter: His missile was in my canopy before i leveled out of my turn. It seems to me that breaking contact against someone who is more skilled than I am is not something that will ever get me anything other than killed. or both. I may not be a good enough pilot to go head to head against yourself or maverick, but i shouldn't need to be to evade a missile which stopped being supported almost as soon as it was launched. I had a plenty good plan for re-acquiring him: resume my previous bearing and scan the sky around his last known position and altitude. He just killed me before i could put it into action. Because he's a better pilot than I am and was able to bring his plane into position to do so while i was coming back around. Just like i said would happen if i tried to disengage before assuring the kill. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining that he killed me. I did something that I knew would get me killed, and it got me killed. Five minutes later I tried it my way again and sucessfully kept him on the defensive long enough to close into R-73 range. He ended up splashing me with an AIM-9 because, again, he is a better pilot. It just shows that the advice people are always giving me that I should go cold as soon as I see an F-15 do the same is a pile of garbage: going cold in a 1v1 fight yields the initiative to the other guy. The -only- time this is not true is if you have an ARH close enough to the other guy that he has to focus on evading that before he can re-engage you. I'll be the first to admit that I am frequently not as level-headed about this sort of thing as some of the other people around here. But the fact that I do not always remain calm when discussing this sort of thing does not automagically invalidate anything i have to say about it. Whether you like the way I say it or not, the fact remains that a missile which has no support and has not yet gone active should have no way of knowing where i am if i make radical course changes. The fact that I know that missile guidance in the case of no launcher support is excessively effective and could have chosen to disengage fully to evade it also does not invalidate the point that it is overkill. You have said repeatedly to myself and to others in other threads that SU-27 pilots would be up that certain creek with no paddle if the AIM-120 were correctly modeled with last-known-position intercepts, datalink guidance, etc etc. I say bring it on. I'd rather fight a missile that is "even more effective than it is right now in a head-on engagement" than one that somehow knows where I am when its pilot has stopped supporting it before it ever turns on its own radar.

very few over 15 minutes, none over 45. 2 hours? hell naw.

Except his hypothetical buddy didn't get named in the kill message, he did. yes, it is awful convenient how the problem with tracks not recording correctly helps maintain the status-quo for the F-15 fanclub.... And to people who say i should go cold when the f-15 does: I just tried it, it worked perfectly. I was head to head with Knight, went cold when he did around 30km, and when i came back around, I had no radar picture on him and he had a sparrow in my canopy. Y'all suckered me into that one.

while that is entirely possible, it would be irrelevant. As you have pointed out to me in the past regarding the 120, there is no data-link or buddy-guidance modeled for it. If the launcher turns cold before the missile enters terminal guidance, it should go blind. I am willing to concede that possibility, but that is not what should have been the case here. right, the idea is to force the other guy to react. create a problem for him to solve (inbound missile) and add a task to his workload (evade it) good. With a 40k launch, i'm not trying to kill him, I just want him to go cold, as this lets me close to a more effective range, gain altitude, or otherwise position myself to press the engagement should he come back around. you would do that, he didn't. He went into a crank on the same side as mine (we both cranked to the south) and held it for about 5-10 seconds before going cold. When he went cold, I reversed my crank and went north. I should have been nowhere even close to his missile when it went active, yet it found me anyway. again, you would, he didn't. at no point was his range to me under 35km while he was hot. I do launch at 20k, after launching at 40. I have taken the advice of my betters, and no longer worry about how many missiles i expend to engage a single target. didn't help me here.

because staying hot is the only way I can continue to threaten him? And because until his missile goes loud, I don't know if he has fired or not? If I had ARH, I could go cold and not have to worry about getting a facefull of AMRAAM when I turn to re-engage. And 40k is the perfect distance for a first launch. I don't have slammers, I have to use more than one missile to get a kill (unless I have all the cards, speed, altitude, and surprise). 40k puts the other guy on the defensive sooner. that is what seems to be the problem. I would rather deal with a missile that was more dangerous if the launching aircraft stayed supporting it, not one that magically scans the whole sky when the guy goes cold...

Yeah, this subject again. Nothing pisses me off more than an F-15 who goes cold the moment i launch, at a range of 40km, and still kills me regardless of how i manuever. Why is the tracking hardware for the AIM-120 mounted in the F-15 tailpipe? If they stay hot, I can get the kill and survive it, but they go cold and suddenly their missiles get even more insanely reliable? </rant>

my old boss was into jet skis and go karts.... Watched him drop ten grand on it all over the course of a year. I know folks who spend twice that on guns. I prefer cheap hobbies like model helicopters ($3k over 5 years) and flight sims...

The biggest advantage the 120 gives an F-15 pilot over an SU-27 is the ability to disengage and still threaten the enemy. With an ARH, if the situation looks too nasty, you can disengage with the confidence that your six will be covered long enough for you to put on some speed. When you only have SARH, your best defensive option is to stay hot, because that's the only way you can threaten the other guy. Find yourself suckered into a fight against one high and one in the weeds? if you had active missiles, you could throw one at each and get away while they are forced to evade. otherwise.... better hope one of them goofs.

it should be noted that when you change the "range" setting on the radar, you are not changing where it detects targets. What you are changing is the range at which it will scan the selected altitude. IE: if you set it to scan +10k altitude at a range of 10k, the radar will be looking up at 45-degrees. If you set it to scan +10k at 100k range, then it is looking up at 4.5 degrees. In both situations, the radar set will display information for any signal returns it receives along that path, regardless of how far away they are.

i've always had this issue, the F-15 drivers says it's normal...

That really is a terrible way to fix problems with your computer. Even if you have local backups of everything on your machine, you could easily be looking at spending in excess of half a day getting everything back the way you had it before. Better place to start solving the problem is to completely uninstall all saitek software, download the latest versions, and reinstall. This is all that wiping your OS would achieve anyway.

I don't have a video of it, but I used to do this with with the river route heading up the valley into Terbeda on the "Back to Terbeda" mission. Crazy hard to do at speed with a fully loaded bird, but hella fun.

ATtT is not an "override". All it does is tell the yaw channel to point the helicopter at where the shkval is looking. With route mode disabled, this is the same as using the rudder pedals (and only the rudder pedals) to steer the nose of the helicopter. With route mode engaged, the AP takes the heading generated by ATtT and treats it the same way it treats the headings generated by the PVI-800 or the Datalink Automatic-Ingress. The only way in which ATtT could be considered an "override" is that the heading generated by ATtT will be used first, even you already have the PVI-800 or the DL-Ingress (or both) turned on.

For this example, auto-turn to target only produces command input on the yaw channel. At a hover, all you use to turn is yaw, so this works. At cruise speed, you need to make coordinated turns to change heading, so yaw is not enough. For auto-turn to work when flying at forward speed, you must engage auto turn (tell the helicopter where you want it to point) and route mode (tell the helicopter to use all three steering axis to get there) The trimmer commands autopilot hold to maintain the heading, pitch, and bank angles when the trimmer button is released. Holding the trimmer down tells the AP that you want control of the aircraft. Setting the AP in route mode tells the aircraft that you want it to use all three channels of steering to achieve a certain heading and direction. the AP gets heading information from the following places, in order of priority (least to greatest): PVI-800 waypoints/target point Datalink target point (when DL Ingress mode is active) Shkval azimuth (when auto-turn to target is selected) Additionally, when following PVI-800 waypoints, the PVI-800 generates a tracking angle, and selecting the DTA (desired tracking angle) switch on the AP panel will cause the AP to generate steering commands to follow the exact path. Hover-hold and route mode do opposite things. Hover mode tells the AP to use all steering axis to maintain a specific point over the ground. Route mode tells the AP to use all steering axis to maintain forward flight in a certain direction. Obviously both of these cannot be done at the same time by the same helicopter. Flight-Director mode tells the AP not to put any steering commands to the helicopter, but to instead display them on the HUD so you can do it manually. not sure what you mean by "an AP override". The AP override switch on the cyclic kills all AP and flight-stab channels and returns the helicopter to pure manual control. it is important to remember that these three channels are not only "holds". Without using te AP modes (route, auto-turn, or auto-hover), they function as holds, but they also allow the AP modes to work. If you turn off one of those channels and turn on the AP, the AP won't work right. I mentioned this above, but what you are seeing is the AutoPilot Route Mode taking the heading information generated by Auto Turn, and turning it into fully-coordinated steering commands. Without route mode, Auto Turn only tries to yaw the helicopter to achieve the desired heading. auto-turn and disable heading hold will do nothing. the heading hold button enables the yaw channel of the AP. if you disable this channel, auto-turn wont work. yes. Not sure if it is a bug or not, but it has always behaved that way. Collective brake -should- tell the AP to let go of the collective, the same way trimmer tells AP to let go of cyclic and rudders, but it doesn't. order of priority for route-mode steering points (least to greatest) is as follows: PVI-800 waypoints/target point Datalink target point (when DL Ingress mode is active) Shkval azimuth (when auto-turn to target is selected) So if you are following waypoints, but point the shkval somewhere and turn on auto-turn, the shkval azimuth becomes your new route-mode heading.

that would be correct behavior. at 90 deg AoA, the wing is making no lift. past 90, it would actually be pushing the plane down. Additionally, the engines running fully wet produce 244 kN of thrust total (25,000 kgf) fully loaded, the aircraft weighs 30,000 kg. Obviously, this is not enough thrust to overcome the weight of the aircraft.

I gave up on the SST software for this reason. I discovered that certain keybindings and button press combinations did not play well together. What i ended up doing is setting a blank profile for X52 in SST (only one mode, deleted all shiftstates) and this let me bind everything (including the mode and pinkey switches) in the sim. The way control binding works in DCS (bind with keypress/axis motion, pressing key shows bound command) makes setting up a new bird very easy (if a bit tedious, all those buttons) and beats the hell out of half a dozen clicks for each command in SST.

silly question, but have you checked your control bindings? sometimes updates break them for some people.

don't use the H.U.D. software to program your switches. Saitek's new "improvement" on their old SSD software is even worse than it used to be. they removed functionality in several areas. The only thing it is good for is calibrating your axis and setting curves.

no, I should red out, and then i should gradually recover as the g-load drops back below 5

sounds like you have engaged bank-hold AP.

in that case i apologize for the misunderstanding, I thought we were discussing the digital modelling of such. And I will definitely join in on the finger-crossing.... please please please, give me control over my brakes! SU-27 would fail VA state vehicle inspection with the brakes in their current state....

Except that we are talking about computers? We are talking about a computer (Digital) representation of mechanical objects. yes, binary means, loosely, "having to do with or consisting of two". A binary star system has two stars; a binary compound consists of exactly two elements; a binary chemical weapon consists of two (relatively) harmless chemicals, which combine to produce something much nastier upon release. However, as far as 90% of the places you are likely to see the word used, 'binary' is linguistically indistinguishable from 'digital'. Prior to the 1950's, the word binary was scarcely used at all (Source). It was only with the invention of the digital computer in the 1940's that the word began to spread into society, and really only within my own lifetime has it become a common word. as you say, then. can't wait for the patch, taxiing on eggshells sucks.