HubMan

Hi Pilotasso :) Thanks for your post :smilewink: You raised one very good point : putting a Mirage on the F-15 slot, would have allowed to use completely the cockpit of the A-10 or F-15 :) And, yes, you are right, the general configuration of the F-15 cockpit (MFDs), the way the RWR displays information and the imperial system would probably have looked better if we would have used the Eagle. But the F-15 is just too powerfull : its radar and thrust are way over the capabilities of a Mirage, besides we found a strong analogy between the Mig29A and the Mirage 2000C (2 Fox 1 only, short legs with full payload...) As a result, we made the choice to replace the Migs :) Concerning the symbology, as Azrayen said it, we are stucked with the one of the migs : it's hidden somewhere in the compiled code and there is no way to reach it :( Cheers :) Hub.

Hey, thanks a lot :) It has been a long and hard work (actually, it's our 3rd version of the mod, but we wanted to get the best results) :) Cheers :) Hub.

Hi Colt40Five :) Thank you very much :) And about the Jaguar, We thought about it :) We wanted to replace the Su25 with a Jag', the same way we did with the Migs and the Mirages :) But unfortunatly, we haven't found a decent 3D model to add to Lockon yet :) Too bad :( Hub :)

Hi all :) Sorry for double posting in the main section and in the "mods" area, but we wanted to reach as much forum users as possible :) The short video clip is available at the following places : http://www.lockon.fr/video.php http://www.virtual-jabog32.de/index....=770&lan g=en http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=P9pK-0QxgII&v3 (low res, bad for the subtitles / readability) Do not hesitate to let us know what you think about it ! :D Thank you very much. :) Hub and the AdA team :) PS : Please, do not post back directly in this thread, but go in this one instead :)

Ok, thank you very much 159th_Viper :) Hub.

Thank you Viper :) And Mitch developped some very beautiful fictionnal Mirage skins based on the "real" two seats versions used for conventionnal strike (2000D) or nuke (2000N) :) Considered that A/G ordnance is available, I think you should get some fun :) Hub out :) PS : we did not managed to get in touch with Mitch and asks his permission to use its skins. He is in good place in the readme.txt and due credits are given to its work, but we wish we could have ask him first. If you know a way to reach him, please, let me know :)

Hi all :) We have been working since last february with a couple of people of friends on a projet called AdA Mod- "Armйe De l'Air" (ie "French Air Force"). The general idea was to : - integrate as much french hardware as possible (Mirage F-1,Mirage IV created by Knell..., AWACS...) - replace the different Mig29s by flyable Mirage fighters - to entirely reskin / resound the Mig29s cockpits, to make you feel as much as possible like flying a Mirage 2000 or F-1 :) Right now, only the pit of the 2000-5 has been completed, but the others are under development. :) And considered the fact that the flight model, the avionic... could not be properly tuned, the result is something like a Mirage 29S or a Mig 2000-5, but we really enjoyed making it :) We hope to be able to make a beta version available at the end of August (we are still working on a big 25+ missions pack : takes a lot of time to create and to type the briefings in french -and- english ) :) Meanwhile, a very nice teaser made by Lothamroth is available here : http://www.lockon.fr/video.php or http://www.virtual-jabog32.de/index.php?section=downloads&subcat=28&file=770&lang=en or on low tube (low res : bad for the text explaining what the mod is all about) http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=P9pK-0QxgII&v3 Hub and the AdA Team :) PS : we spent a lot of time on this project and do not expect anything from it excepted a "thanks guys". Please, do not assimilate our mod with some eventual anti-french feelings or your dislike for Dassault fighters :) :D PPS : a little idea of what to expect :

Thanks for the vid DPS :) Very good, like always :) And for those you wondered why he mixed Lockon and Falcon : it's all about getting the best aspects of the existing flight sims : Lockon looks sure very good and has great flight models, but the Falcon avionic is far more complex and provides richer cockpit work :) (no flame war intended, I'm a retired falconist and a decent lockonner now :) ) Anyway, I really like the way he mixes those different gaming universes : Lockon, Flight Simulator, Falcon... in its tutorial / promotion / 100% british humour video (and I wasn't even payed to post it ;) :D ) Hub out :)

Hi Alfa :) No problem and thanks for your post Actually I was asking the same question than ijozic that made our points clearer here . Sorry for the lack of precisions and the post slightly out of topic :) Anyway, I still don't know what to believe : (old) flight manuals or personnal conclusions :) : I'm almost sure, that most of the modern Fox 1 can still steer themselves on a target : - even if the plane radar lock has been broken by the target or the shooter, (with lower pk if the target changed its heading/speed : the seeker needs to be able to "find" back the target and the missile may be largely off the new inteception course) :) - by using a "scan" / "tws" mode and not a "stt" one, but due to the fact that the updates will not be frequent enough to get enough accuracy during the end game, firing all the way a Fox 1 against anything else but a lumbering bomber on a steady heading / altitude will almost be useless :) I wish I could put my hands on the firing procedures of a recent Alamo C :) (and not getting as a result a one way ticket to Siberia ;) :) ) Hub out :)

Yes, "flechettes" ! :) Some kind of nails / little blades spread by the rockets at high velocity (kinetic weapons). The effect is more or less the same as the one of a giant shotgun :) Used at least since the Vietnam war (Snakes) as anti infantry weapon. :) Hub out.

Hйhй Pilotasso :) It has nothing to do with the parts being -French- : the world is complex and a cruel place :) Hub out.

Hi Pilotasso, :) Sounds kind of rude to make of your personnal opinion / experience an absolute and complete truth on french 'hardware'...;) :) The world is slighly more complex... ;) :) Hub out.

Hi Alfa, :) Are you sure that CW illumination is required for the guidance of the Alamo ? Because one of the -big- advantage of a 'modern' fighter monopulse radar is to be able to generate a HPRF coherent signal for tracking, that can be used by itself to guide a recent SARH missile (AIM-7M/Super 530D/Alamo ?). For me, there is no need for 'illumination' as provided by a CW illuminators, excepted to give fighters with LPRF/non monopulse/crappy radar the capability to fire newer missiles or as a backup / 'historical' feature . As a result, tracking a target in real life with a decent radar is enough to guide a Fox 1 (and a RWR will have a hard time trying to distinguish a lock from a shoot :) ) I'm know that I'm not saying anything you don't know already, I juste want to make sure I did not miss something about the behavior of the AA-10 :) And by the way, I have another question : are you sure that the AA-10C cannot be fired from a TWS mode until the time the SARH seeker takes control ? Because, from a practical point of view, the only thing the missile needs during the first part of its flight is the command guidance signal provided through the secondary lobes of the radar. If the missile is tuned properly before launch, it should be able to make its way without "lock" up to the point where the seeker can/must be used. Of course, if the radar do not go to STT at this point, the refresh rate of the radar on the target will probably be not high enough to provide the accuracy needed during the end game, but STT "time" sharing between two close targets (like in the Mig29 and M2000) could still be a solution with lower pk... :) I've always be wondering about the "limitations" of the missiles : as exemple, I'm almost sure that most of the modern Fox 1 fitted with an INS can be guided even if the lock is lost and then regained. It should be really suprising from a tactical point of view to develop a weapon with a INS and not to use all the existing potential : firing, notching if spiked and then relocking your target, sounds far logical to me than cranking all th way and hoping that your missile will be faster than the one of the bandit :) It's just a feeling, but to me, SARH missile behavior in flight sims seems far too close to the Vietnam war technology. It should be really surprising that 90's SARH systems would be that primitive :) Ciao :) Hub.

Hi Force_Feedback, Are you sure of that ? Because the Alamo C is supposed to be guided by datalink updates during the first part of a long shot. :) Hub.

I should have thought about it ! The genesis of MiniZap Thread ! :) Thanks for digging this one up as well :) Hub.

Thank you very much 159th_Viper... :D (couldn't resist to post below what I found on this page... :) ) Hub. PS : GGTharos does it look like the graph you saw ? :)

Thanks for the data :) Hehe :) Too bad :D Hub.

Hi tflash :) What makes you think that CW radars are easier to jam than the other ones ? :) And absolutly, jamming can interfere with radar activity, especially if the radar you are trying to "brute jam" has a frequency similar to the one of your own radar. But most of the modern ECM systems are integrated with the rest of the electronics carried by your aircraft and you shouldn't be jamming your own radar. :) Of course, if the jammer is just an independent component, just throwing out noise all around (barrage), on a bandwith covering also your radar (spot) or stepping on it from time to time (swept), there is nothing you can do about it... :) Ok :) Thank you for digging through the archives :) I'll have a look at the Jane's "Air-Launched Weapons", but I doubt I'll find that kind of information in it... :) Anyway, considered the range of the R27R, it's very probable that the missile will use PN (and probably get to burnthrough range before the end game) :) Hub.

Considered the angular accuracy an processing power of modern ECM systems, that sounds fair enough :) Especially if your reasonning was "orientated" by someone 'in the know'. But I still wonder if the hardware available in the supposed to be Lockon time frame (beginning of 90's) was performant enough to provide proportionnal navigation against a jamming source (ie no tracking, because as you said it, if the target is locked, using pure is a waste). :) Hub.

Thanks GGTharo :) And yes, I understood you were talking about RL AIM-120A :) Yes :) Rolling a virtual good old dice with a bonus / malus would probably be the -best- solution (more below) :) I would tend to agree with you : proportionnal navigation does not depend on knowing the distance to the target and could be used for a HOJ shot. But at the same time, I wonder about the effect of : - intentionnaly "moving around" a thin jamming beam over the radar to confuse : that would be fairly simple to do and would probably force a missile using proportionnal navigation to manoeuver almost constantly. The same thing could even happen as a side effect if the jammer is slow to "track" a fighter and its radar. - ECM producing a "large" jamming beam : the problem will be about how to keep "looking" at the same point, especially if the jammer modulates it's emitted power : because you know that there is some jamming in that direction, but probably not with the angular accuracy needed for proportionnal pursuit at medium/long range. As a result, I'm not 100% sure that using pure pursuit for a HOJ shot is unrealistic :) Hi centermass, :) At a "microscopic" level, your solution is probably the closest to "realistic" ECM. But at a "macroscopic" one, ie the one that matters, I definitly think that the semi random principle of GGTharos is better : - ECM / ECCM is too much classified. Even more than missiles range ! Lomac historical period is just to "recent" to get accurate real life data. ED would have to make wild guesses, probably quite far from the reality or breach some national security secrets to modelize the game properly... :) - right now, Lomac only modelizes -explicitely- "noise jamming" / ie range obscuration technics. That is the simplest and oldest ECM technic, used to conceal the -distance- to the target. But real life jammers have other purposes, one being to to break the radar lock of a fighter / missile. To do so, a -lot- of different "deception" technics are used to generate false information about the range / angle / velocity of the target (such technic being not real far away from the result of ECM blinking... *no flaming, please :)* ). Considered the complexity and the large number of technics involved, I'm not sure it would be a good idea to try to modelize precisely the behavior of every (or even a few) ECM and ECCM component included in this electronic fight. That would probably take months or years... And such a large time (money) investment would probably better be used somewhere else (missiles behavior ? ) :) - actually, What only really matters is the outcome : what will be the probability for a specific radar / missile be able to defeat a speficic jammer ? As already suggested several time on the forum, using a simple semi random algorithm (like rolling a dice with a bonus / malus) would probably be far easier to code and not further away from the reality than some semi accurate modelisation. Simply because the parameters involved in ECM / ECCM are just too many to be considered and that introducing some randomness is the only way to introduce this "complexity" in a game. - there shouldn't too difficult to establish an "ECM" hiearchy ie the bonus and malus of every jammer against every kind of threat family in the game. The problem then, will be to get the game "balanced" and for readers of this forum to survive the following thousands of posts like "DEVs, FIX THE ALQ-135 !!!". Hub, out ! :)

Hehe :) No problems :) Posts are filling up this thread just too fast to keep the pace :) I missed myself the post of golfsierra2 here :) Yes :) Stimson wanted to demonstrate that the ECM battle between a radar and a modern jammer could be hardly won by a radar using "raw power" and no ECCM. Or at least how negligible the burn-through is against a "spot jammer" that can focuses all its energy in the precise direction / bandwith of a radar (and the absolute necessity of ECCM in a modern radar). I think you are mostly right, but "Burn-through" range is not always negligible : - if you are facing a "barrage jammer" ie a noise jammer that spreads energy over a large bandwith, the power density (ie Watts/surface) will be greatly reduced. If in addition to that, the jammer is not directed very precisely toward a threat, but emitting in the general direction of the radar, the jamming power will be against greatly diminished. Finally if the jammer is "on" all the time and not "tuned" to only emit at the same time than the radar, you have again another reduction in jamming capability (strong radar "burst" against mild constant jamming noise) As a result the radar will only have to deal with a small fraction of the total jamming and will be able to defeat it by "force". By the way, a couple of radars have a "burn-through mode", where as much emitting time as possible is spent on a precise direction (more or less similar to "tracking mode") to get locally the maximum power density. That's probably what ED tried to simulate at the time when the russian radars were raising an SPO/RWR alert when locking onto a jamming target (and the F-15 radar being in contrary "discreet"). - depending of the shape of the beam generated by the jammer (and the thinnest, the more jamming power...), the radar will or will not be in the main lobe of the jammer. Considered that the power available in the sidelobes is far less than the one of the main lobe, a radar will be able to burn-through far easily a jammer not "directed" at him. (being in the side lobe of a jammer is far better than being in its main lobe) - talking about sidelobes : if you digress from the self protecting jammer case and have a look at the "standoff jammer" aircraft (like the Prowler) that provides ECM support for other fighter, we can see that they need to be positionned in such a way that their noise jamming reaches the enemy radars through their radar main lobes. In other words, if the jamming signal is received with too much of an angular offset, it will be located in the same direction than the side lobes and will be easily discarded. Of course, that's not too likely to happen in the self jamming case, because the radar is pointed at the noise source and jamming signal and radar main lobe are coaxial. - as already said burn-through largely depends on the capability of a jammer to focus its power (direction / bandwith / PRF...) against a radar. That's the reason why planes like the Prowler or Growler are usually advertised as able to jam "n" radars at the same time. Put enough radars in the air ("n+1") and you are more than likely to get a non negligible "burn-through" range for some of them or the fighters they are protecting. - finally, if a radar is just too agile for a jammer to adapt precisely (large and fast variations in signal "pattern" ie frequency, PRF...), the jammer will probably have to fall back to some less accurate / widened jamming, though forcing it to "dilute" its power. That enough, mean a non useless "burn through" range (talking about that, considered the huge power available to ground radars, burn-through in such a case is very likely to happen at significant range against a recent SAM system). Neither do I. I'm not building radar for a living :) But I read a lot on the subject and I think I start to apprehend some concepts :) Hey Crusty :) Thank you :) And too bad you don't have enough time to read it :) But it's probably good to have some things left to do in life by the time we will get old and retired. They might even be a chance that pulse radar will become obsolete by that time and that some nice unclassified information will start to emerge :) (the same way than heaps of data on the original SA-2 can be found since a couple of years). Anyway, if you need to buy some other nice books for your office in anticipation of your hollidays/old years, I can give you a few titles :) Hi GGTharos, :) Personnaly, according to what can be guessed / extrapolated from the web / tacitly understood, I would agree with you. My guess is that : - 30nm is a "far shot" for an AIM-120A/B ie it's extreme operationnal limit with low pk. - 20nm would be my guess for a shot with a reasonnable pk at high altitude or low pk at medium altitude. - at low altitude against a manoeuvring target, the RtR (NEZ) is probably below 10nm. I would tend to think that 10-12nm low in the weeds is the same thing than 30nm, high against a hot target... :) Hub out :) Ps : sorry for the delay, I'm slow at posting :) PPS : going on week end this evening, I won't be able to post back until next monday :)

/BUMP :D

Hi D-Scythe :) Does the equation takes in account the fact that a modern radar is changing its frequency all the time for strictly technical reasons and ECCM ? My question is related to the fact that if you don't know pretty well the emitting characteristics of a radar, you have to "noise jam" it by "force" ie by spreading the jamming signal over a large bandwith (ideally a good portion of the X-band), while at the same the radar emits its power over a narrow bandwith. As a result, a jammer does have far more power available than a radar, but a good / non compromised radar can "focus" it's emitting power far more than a jammer will... :) Ciao :) Hub. PS : I don't have my copy of "Introduction to Airborne Radar" at my office and I wanted to be sure of the meaning of the content / variables of the expression you gave.

+1 :) And in real life, R27ET seeker has more or less the same capability than the one of the R73... The R27T being more or less in the same class than the R60... :) Hub.

Hi all :) Before being a "realistic flight sim", Lockon is a game. A game is fun when the different units you can play are balanced. A "real" F-15 just would be -no- fun, fighting against a fighter that : - carries 8 AMRAAMs almost immune to chaff and beam manoeuver once they get pitbull and only raise a launch alert 10s before impact. - has a very powerfull radar with very high multitargeting capability. - has a RWR that can identify and gives an estimation of the distance to the threats / gives the opportunity to use the good tactic for a given situation (close/medium/far spike) - has evenually a link 16 display. - can eat alive in the transonic / supersonic envelope any of its contemporary fighters ...just would be no fun and spoiling : everybody would play the Eagle and the ones who wouldn't would just die (virtually). You cannot have a -fair- fight against a BVR monster like that with a Fox 1 and "realistic" Alamo equipped Su 27... It's a simple as that. An eagle can be shot down, but the fight won't be "equal" : it would be about playing the "underdog" against the "Über Killing Machine". Not much fun for the russian players :) As a result, keeping the game fun and balanced with a "realistic" F-15 would require an absolutely "unrealistic" overpowered Su27, probably carrying R77s or soupped up Alamo with a 95% pk. That would not be that much fun either, for US fan boys at least... :) That's the reason why the Lockon team went halfway : they undermodelized the pair F-15 / AMRAAMs and overmodelized the couple Su (Mig) / Mig R27ET. That way, things are balanced : each side has more or less the same kill capability (8 AMRAAMS vs 2R27 ET + a couple of ER/R73). Honestly, a russian company, selling a game on the russian and occidental market, -has- to produce a balanced game between Su/Mig and US F-15 :) I'm not saying that I enjoy this situation : I hate the way this "balance" was reached : the very poor lookdown radar capability, chaff over efficiency, missile maximum speed not being related to the launcher speed and seeker behavior against ECM (blink, blink...) just spoils what could have been left of "realistic" BVR. Altitude in BVR is supposed to be good for you. In Lomac, that's just the other way around : the benefits of flying high are far too much spoiled by the game modelization. On the other hand, another consequence of this game "balance" is to reduce the distance at which a kill can be made : this way, the probability to end up in a dogfight is greater. And dogfights are fun, because you can see your opponent, put some BFM moves in practice and even use your gun ! :) Unfortunatly, before getting into some good old CAC, you need to survive to the BVR weapons, that are almost efficient, while used in the far CAC / very close BVR... As a result, you end up with no real BVR and no fun furball ! :) You die in the between ! And I hate that as well, because survival in this area is mostly about game "exploit" (chaff spam/maddogged R27ET/AMRAAM spam/altitude tracking limit/holly barrel roll...), no BFM or BVR knowledge. Anyway. I love this game. :D I'm sure the developpers did everything they could to create the best flight sim they could produce, while getting probably more frustrated in the process than we are... I just wish that "balance" adjustement patches would be more frequent than the official big releases like FC or BS. A couple of very small iterations would probably have saved a lot of frustration :) Cheers all :) Hub out. PS : Don't flame me too much : I would be the first one to love a "realistic" Lockon... :)