Stubbies2003

Well for whatever reason bottom of the left strake right around the side air intake there is a door you can open where you hook up external cooling air to. The external canopy switch is inside that door. Or even better yet go to 7:36 in this video and you can see the switch. Hope the TSgt in this video is good at his job as acting isn't in his future. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E__uZk3jW8

Well actually only partially true. The canopy WILL close but as soon as you release the external switch it is coming back up. :P That has always been an amusing one to watch the CC put the ladder down close the canopy all the way just to have it open itself right back up and have to put the ladder back to center the switch in the pit. Even better if it is a D model. Done it a few times myself as avionics...

This really is getting a bit over the top. It should be simple. If you are set on realistic only then load your aircraft that way and press on and enjoy your sim. If someone wants to load six mavs and the sim lets them and they consider that to be fun then why all the focus on urinating in their cheerios? Let people fly it how they wish to in what the sim allows and stop trying to push.

Auto leasing? We buying cars here? :P Jokes aside the F-16 does auto lase based on what is set in the DED from TTI.

Quite possible. Not exactly the largest community of peeps out there. From 2006 to 2011 I was on the CV-22 Osprey. That was my final hoorah before retirement.

Well unfortunately not mentioning it and dating myself doesn't make me any younger. ;) 312th from 86-89, 308th and 309th from 91-96 and 21st and 63rd from 97-05.

Ah okay. Yeah I cannot speak to anything from the F-15 community. The closest I got to those was walking by them on the ramp at Luke AFB walking to the F-16 side.

Well I think at this point we are getting into the weeds of semantics. I cannot say if they kept the name EGI or reverted back to INU and GPS Receiver. At the end of the day it doesn't much matter as regardless of what it is called it does the exact same thing.

They did the exact same thing with the MMC which combined three boxes into one so sorry but the military does do this kind of thing. Ramsay's post makes perfect sense in that they broke it back apart to not lose INS due to faulty GPS though. Perfectly believable outcome. Not the case on the F-16s I worked on. They managed a pretty good FMC rate so "as much time broke as FMC" is, at best, anecdotal to your experience and, at worst, hyperbole. Do they break and need fixing? Sure. Every piece of military equipment will need to be fixed at some point.

Speaking of the semantics below you wouldn't have a two INU box solution as the INU has been a one box solution in all F-16 blocks. One would do the INS portion the other would do the GPS receiver. I worked on F-16s from 1986 to 2005 and it wasn't until close to the 2005 point that I even heard of EGI for the F-16. Now if by -15 you mean block 15 aircraft the only time I ever saw A & B models were at the beginning of my career and in FTD. They were phased out by the early 90s for the AD USAF. Ramsay covered this several posts above. Both one box and two box EGI solutions existed in the F-16.

That answers that question. Both one and two box with logical reason for splitting them again. Nope. The RLG was upgraded on USAF birds LONG before EGI was a thing in the AD USAF. Well you are getting the story from someone who worked on these systems for the USAF for 19 years. :) I was around when the RLG INU upgrade happened and upgraded block 30 aircraft in the early 90s. Perhaps in the 92-93 time frame.

It's not likely because why?

RLG INUs didn't have anything to do with CCIP. It was done as a single replacement of the mechanical INUs.

It is correct that RLG isn't block specific as the RLG INU is a drop in replacement for the mechnical INU not requiring any change to the F-16 itself but the only way they didn't have RLG was if they had EGI. RLG was the standard by the time the block 50 was produced so no you wouldn't see USAF block 50s with mechanical INUs. I cannot speak to foreign sale birds as a lot of times those were a hodge podge of F-16 technology but I can to USAF birds.

I cannot say with 100% certainty as I didn't get a chance to work on EGI equipped F-16s but I am pretty sure EGI is a combination of the INU and the GPS receiver boxes thus replacing two boxes with one.

They were initially all mechanical but, at least in the USAF community, all were switched over and using RLG prior to block 50s.

Yeah just more so than the F-16 world. Even the F-16 had WoW interlocks to prevent dispense on the ground unless you also had ground jett enabled as well.

F-16s had GPS long before block 50 was a thing so yes it should have both INS and GPS by default. EGI only integrated the two so shouldn't exactly be a big deal that people will have to work two switches instead of one. :)

Well yes and no. Not sure if this is how it is *supposed* to work but you can turn the switch to on ehile on the ground still and when you take off and gear up it will turn itself on automatically albeit to standby only. Likewise it will turn itself off when you land. In this regard the F-16 has it better as you can turn it on and set it up on the ground just fine. Definitely a peculiar choice they made with the F/A-18. Guessing it was thought of as a default safety feature to prevent inadvertent flares on the carrier deck.

Hrm I don't recall there being a HSI page in the F-16. Perhaps you were thinking of the HSD page? Yup. Good point and fair enough.

Suggest you launch from TOO mode. It is only a few buttons to learn/get muscle memory for and works good.

I think it would be a bug if you could SoI to the HSI display in the first place. Remember what SoI stands for. Sensor of Interest. HSI isn't a sensor but a display of data from another sensor. It would be like trying to SoI to the EW page. There isn't anything to control there thus it wouldn't make sense to be able to SoI to it.

I am not implying anything isn't correct. I am simply stating there are different reasons to fly and own both the F/A-18 and the F-16. Nothing more.

Ugh they do need to have some way of changing this since if all the 16s will be on 1688 hope they aren't all in a small area dropping at the same time.

For some DCS specific reasons the F/A-18 carries CBU-99 and Rockeyes whereas you will be able to use the CBU-97 on the 16 from day 1 and CBU 103/105 later in development. Likewise the F/A-18 can only carry four mavs wheres the 16 will be able to carry six mavs. They will have their individual strengths this way. The F-16 couldn't carry 10 AMRAAMs plus 2 heaters on a dare. Plus it is an F-16. :)