pyromaniac4002

Thanks for putting this together! We S77th guys had a great time and can't wait for the next one. Also thanks to Maverick for his work in organizing and RIPTIDE for the technical stuff and the Tacview. Tried to make it myself but I was too impatient with the time acceleration and it was all screwed up. In game and out, an all-around top notch performance.

Seems legit.

That is the objective.. It's not 100% but in the heart of the flight envelope, like with a minimum radius turn, you can consider it a pretty damn reliable representation of the real deal. At the edges is where it's much more difficult.

They're going to charge what they're going to charge. I'm sure it will be fair and I'm sure I'll have no qualms paying it, there's no real point in discussing it before LN says anything about it. Still I don't want to pay $100 if I don't have to, so if you people could stop getting yourselves in a frenzy, I'm sure a lot of sane DCS: F-14 buyers would appreciate it if you didn't arbitrarily drive up the price with hysteria. Though it's not like I think LN would actually listen and set their price according to it. This time would be much better spent talking about the F-14 itself and how it will fit in to DCS rather than speculating pricing points or saying how you want to spend $100+ so you can be the only guy in town with a Tomcat.

My C-101 module and I would love to see your market research.

If you own the module, you own the module. If you own the module, you're free to get in it and use it how you like. I would be very surprised if they did it any other way, and nor should they. With the Su-25T and TF-51D, we've gotten more than our share of freebies in DCS. Not many people want to get in a JTAC slot either, but you don't get it for free just because that's the case. Flying backseat in an F-14 is going to be a totally new experience in DCS and anyone that appreciates some good systems modelling is going to enjoy the hell out of it I'm sure. There's more than enough to justify it being a paid-for privilege.

I'm no programming expert, but as far as whether or not this is possible, it'd definitely be a much more extensive mod than anything we currently have in DCS. It might be easy enough to copy and paste the visual of the sight from the Ka-50, but there is no mechanism in the A-10C module for slewing sensors to a point you're looking at. As much as any of us would like to have it, it strikes me as very unlikely.

It would be nice to implement some sort of way to account for the capacity of the hangar rather than be spawning in only a handful at a time because of the limited deck space. For example, say you're loading up a co-op mission with some buddies in F-14s and (somewhere down the road) F/A-18Cs. As many as can fit on the flight deck would be up there, getting their loadout spooling up, and whatnot. The remainder would start from the hangar and be moved up to the deck as space permits. I don't have any specific suggestion as to how far it needs to go, like whether you will have a first-person view inside the hanger or some external view of the ship while you're down there, how much of the moving around is actually player-controlled, etc. However it's done, it would add a lot to the carrier ops experience for the elevators and hangars to actually do something and not limit us to waiting until somebody launches to even spawn.

The D was the only one to have Link 16, earlier variants had their own proprietary datalink to use their AWG-9s at their maximum range.

Yes, the Su-27 does. All variants of the F-15 have had provisions to drop bombs, but only in foreign service have any models but the Strike Eagle actually used it. In DCS you can load a Su-27 with bombs and rockets and you have a nice air-to-ground mode that will also work for strafing, but the F-15C doesn't have any of it modeled.

Sure, the F/A-18C is going to have a lot more on tap in the ground pounding game, but the F-14A/B could do it too. Why not enjoy it? And there's been no indication that an AIM-120D is in the works. Even if they did make one I see no reason to think it will be any less screwed up than the current state of every air-to-air missile in the game. It'd probably only buy us another 15 nm of effective range. The AIM-54C is as new as any variant of the Phoenix as far as fighter interception is concerned. The only "newer" one is the ECCM/Sealed Round which featured improved ECCM (as one could probably guess) and deleted the cooling system. The AIM-54C is in game now and will most likely be the same Phoenix we'll have when the F-14 comes out. Load up a mission against an AI F-14 with AIM-54Cs and see it for yourself. Put the missile on your 3-9 line and pull max G and you'll trash it every single time.

Phoenixes aren't going to be some magical "kill everything 60 miles out" weapon by a long shot. They're big, heavy missiles designed to take out cruise missiles and cruise missile carrying aircraft. It has too much inertia to keep up with a fighter piloted by someone who knows what they're doing. Really, against a fighter all you can count on them for is forcing them defensive while you close in for a Sparrow shot. I'd happily take a couple bombs in at the cost of AIM-54s.

Well, for a start they're a hell of a lot more comparable than an A-10 is to a B-52. They're both fighter-bombers, they both are meant to infiltrate an enemy's airspace by nap of the earth flying and high speed, they both have a crew of two, I mean this list can go on and on. The list of differences would be shorter. You can forgive people for making comparisons.

So there's the stupidest thing I'll read all day.. It's an outstanding strike platform. It was a piece of crap in the jack-of-all-trades role that McNamara originally envisioned, but that's what you can expect whenever you try to cram an obvious deep strike fighter in to a carrier-borne interceptor role. It kicked ass in Libya and Desert Storm, and the FB-111 served an essential role in SAC as a low level supersonic fighter-bomber while B-52s were becoming relegated to standoff cruise missile attacks owing to the Soviet SAM threat.

The datalink should be there, there's no reason it shouldn't, but it's not a big deal. Just take out their A-50 and you're back on an even playing field.

lol, I love how it fills the cockpit with smoke too. Very Soviet.

How much does the standalone A-10A cost? It's $10. And the A-10C, after being out for so many years, goes for $40. It was a lot more up until relatively recently. With the C-101 you're getting two versions just like the separate A-10 modules, only the trainer version is a lot higher fidelity than the corresponding A-10A. Relax. You're getting a plenty fair deal.

Recently upgraded from a GTX 460 to the 980 myself. Night and day difference, but of course you're two generations up from where I started. I say DO EET. I'm sure you're not going to regret it. And the 1000 series won't be out until 2016, so no worries there.

It's a beta, so I would keep my expectations low and be pleasantly surprised by whatever they do put out with it. That's been the norm with all of the modules.

To hell with giving up on a DCS: F-16! I love me some F-14 as much as anybody else, but the only proper response to its development is to want the F-16 even more so we can complete the teen series fighters that have ruled the skies for the last couple decades.

MiG-23?

The bottom line is "defeating stealth shaping and coatings" is a relative term. No matter what, stealth characteristics provide very tangible benefits compared to non-stealthy designs. Lower radar bands make some progress against stealth, but they're still very, very far from seriously degrading the tactical advantage that it gives.

Leatherneck, you guys rule. I love the MiG-21 and I love that you're most-probably-definitely making an F-14. I can't wait. The top banner says "Cats and Ducks" as one of the topics of discussion, obviously "cats" is referring to the Tomcat. So what's the "duck" referring to? There's a Grumman J2F Duck, an amphibious biplane from the 1930s. That would fall in line with LN "catering to almost all of our tastes" cause that's pretty unique.

I don't recall LN ever saying anything to that effect. There's been general discussion about DCS: World not having multi-crewed aircraft for a while yet, but that doesn't preclude developing multi-seat aircraft like the Huey and Hip that we already have. It's a twin-engine jet that the US Navy flew but the US Marine Corps didn't, and Cobra's past few avatar picture have all been easily found via image search to be taken from F-14 squadron insignias.. Obviously, we'll hopefully get a conclusive answer soon, but if it's not an F-14 it would have to be something extraordinarily vague. I'm no slouch on fighter jets and there's nothing else I can think of that fits the bill. And I don't think LN is shooting for a vague follow-on to their MiG-21Bis.

If time and focus allow, I'll usually zoom in on my target for that extra degree of confidence that I'm aiming at the right thing. I use different burst lengths and slant range for different targets, for the heaviest armor (T-80U/Abrams/etc.) I'd probably go for 300-400 rounds, maybe a little less if I'm hitting the rear armor or have a good steep dive angle to hit the top, and try to wait until 0.7 nm to start firing. T-72s can be taken out with ~200 round burst pretty reliably, and anything below that (T-55, APCs, and unarmored) I'd go for ~100 round bursts. For APCs and unarmored vehicles I will sometimes push out the slant range to 1.2 nm or so, especially against BMP-2s or BMP-3s with their respective 30 mm and 100 mm guns that'll really screw up any repeat gun runs. A steep dive angle (40-50 degrees nose down) can help both to hit the weaker top armor as well as keep the gun on target. Lining up I'll use everything at my disposal, there's no real secret to doing it, it just takes time and practice to get a feel for it. If you don't have it already, this is one of the areas where TrackIR makes the biggest impact. If you find yourself oscillating back and forth trying to aim at the target adjusting your joystick/rudder curves could be helpful, but I'd do that as a last resort. I'm sure there are plenty of strafing videos on Youtube, even if they're not explicitly instructional. Watching a bunch of examples of how other people do it is probably just as good as someone narrating the process. Good luck!