lunaticfringe

Formation is a major factor here. Disregard all of the Sidra II talk and look st the first. Hank and Music entered the engagement with offset in all three dimensions, the latter ahead, well to the right (better than one turn radius at the given speed), and above the former; when FE 102 made the head on pass and was the target of the first round, 107 was already turning to point at the Fitter lead. He could have punched him on the spot, but position issues with his own lead, the sun, and his desire to be absolutely sure of clearance before dropping the hammer came into play. It wasn't until Hank had blown up the wingman and he- along with every other jet in the air at the time confirmed he was clear that Music then fired, but he held the aggressor in check the whole time, all based on the benefit of the original formation that gave him room to maneuver, an advantage at the start, and altitude to maintain his state. A more simplistic, but entirely viable option in a multi-bandit fight is classic Navy shooter-eyeball VID style approach. Set one up in trail of two to four miles. Lead hits the merge with bonus knots and exits, calling confirmation of the threat as soon as he can ID or see smoke from a weapon. The extra miles give you time to convert an IFF'd track (remember, you're looking for validation to shoot, so be down the matrix before you get there) into an immediate STT and pop somebody, thereby bettering the odds from the start.

The most certain way to plug on every approach is to slow down. Get the jet set, trimmed up, approach to pre-contact. Then *walk* the jet to the basket. Baby steps. Gentle adjustment and readjustment. The less hurried the process, the faster the stab ultimately is, and the better set you are to take the big gulp on one touch. The more time is spent getting it right before the plug, the faster the actual refuel, with the added bonus that the experience and comfort in learning the look speeds things up in successive attempts. Your brain is literally learning to stop and smell the roses, and over time memorizes the look and the scent, thus allowing you to get faster as you practice. The sight picture becomes more natural, you get ahead of the control inputs, throttle, and trim, and pretty soon what used to be a two or more minute walk from the "ready" call to the basket is now less than 30 seconds- and you go from fumes to full up on one tap.

There is no civil aviation autopilot system that can autonomously position itself within a roughly 3.5 cubic foot box to make a plug while referencing another moving aircraft, and compensate for its deviations in three dimensional space in real time, to hold the formation require for AAR. Air to air refueling is a skill to develop base upon flying formation. If you can't hold effective formation with a tanker, work on your formation with another fighter. If you're unable or unwilling to develop that skillset further, the unlimited fuel checkbox is the feature you're looking for.

Fictional aircraft skin with undefined callsign font, no known apostrophe match, and a slightly over-large tail flash is LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE. Instead of curbing their enthusiasm for having some fun, curb your expectations for a minor deviation into levity. Or, make your own. And if that doesnt work, don't use them.

There's this thing you can do with Phoenix; it's called STT. The ASE compensation for the TWS loft profile is not accounted for in STT. You always center the dot on the VDI. Doesn't matter which mode you're in.

He didn't say center the steering T in one axis; he said center the steering T precisely. It's amusing to watch people argue that everything else is wrong when they're not following basic, correct guidance. The machine is telling you what to do. The SME is telling you what to do. "Lemme do what I want to do!" Fine. Then don't come back and complain that it doesn't work, that the missile goes chasing after the nearest Spacelink constellation piece, etc. Center it. Let the fire control do its thing. Overlofting is killing your shot. Being too slow is killing your shot. It's not going to hit 100 percent of the time, because that's life and the other guy- whether it's AI or a human, gets a say. But stop thinking that it can be "sweetened" with poor technique, and maximize it instead. Tacview-20220524-130055-DCS.zip.acmi

AMRAAM wasn't rushed into service; it was nearly ten years late to replace Sparrow. The loft shouldn't be assisted. The dot should be centered. So yes- people are wasting shots by bad technique.

And they're taking it back out.

Let's see some Tacviews of what you see is happening. Use the free demo.

There is a fundamental difference between a check turn or momentarily flowing cold based on detected range or an elevation in SPO reported power, and the AI immediately going evasive on a TWS launch at any range. The latter was the issue. It's currently not. Conflating matters just to have cause to speak offers nothing.

Turn off the setting to swap to P-STT, and if you feel the need, tell him manually to do so while in the 30-40 mile range.

The latter has no bearing on what has been observed for years. You should have considered what was said and watched the track first. Good on you for coming around to the same thing I'd already said twice- that is, AI should not immediately respond to missiles it wouldn't know are inbound.

There are guidance issues for missiles, but against AI they have been aggravated in the past because of the responsiveness of said opponents to weapons that no human would know was inbound. Because of this, higher AI levels would begin defensive maneuvering and chaff well in advance of when they should, compounding the rate of missing Fox 3s. So yes- this is a a correction that is going some way into solving old issues to a degree. Guidance should still be fixed, so that the correct tactical implications should be in play, but this is a step in the right direction.

Their loss. Literally. Even a substantial auto-rudder implementation is going to have areas where it will over or undercompensate for inputs. It wouldn't catch the opposite rudder into aileron roll acceleration, nor, if its an auto-rudder as opposed to a mock FBW system, would it be able to know when to invoke pedal for roll acceleration at high AoA. I wouldn't oppose this for anyone who needs it to enjoy the Tomcat. I would, however, ask if Race has possibly noted regimes or situations where his friend is having difficulty and not able to get the jet to respond like he needs it. It may simply come down to practice under certain settings (such as the ECS disabled to lower cockpit sound) to more confidently learn the cues and how to respond to them.

Definitely not the intended direction of the comment, and I cast no aspersions towards or opinions on that event. It is simply a matter of recognizing that while his willingness to go to the limit is why so many adore him, that comes at a cost to the guys turning wrenches. This. When people want to mention what Snort did with the flaps handle and a fuse disabled, I expect them to be capable of performing as Snort did without pulling those tricks. Come back when your decision making and aircraft handling is on this level.

Let's go hunting heads down for a mark on the outboard handle frame during head out of the cockpit BFM- that sounds like an idea. The big boys were up, or were down. There wasn't this min-maxing game being played in the middle of a rolling scissors at the top of the loop. The actuation of the flap handle was applied as an axis as a matter of convenience to those who have a controller that would be more useful to have it on an axis, not for a gradation function targeting a specific angle in a methodology that wasn't available in practice. As has been expressed by HB's SMEs- Snort was an amazing stick and talent. He also had a habit for breaking perfectly good airplanes and leaving hell to pay for maintenance staff. You too can enjoy this exact level of realism with the system as it already exists.

Improved Phoenix FM against BVR-enhanced non-god's eye/spastic Ace AI in TWS? *chef's kiss* AI shouldn't react to what it shouldn't know is coming. And when it's ingress is potentially in error, it should pay the price. Now it does. Tacview-20220518-112458-DCS.zip.acmi

Absolutely superb, Sooner. Many thanks. If you ever put a tip jar somewhere for this work, please link it here. And for those wondering if they can do this in a basic printer volume: remove the back panel (by deleting the wire support bodies) and you can fit both panels in the basic volume of an Ender 3.

Glad it helped!

If you're ever in the mood to get the "right" gating lengths, see the following. While 2" for the MIL band seems small on paper, at proper arm height its better than 4" measured at the top of the handles.

Stop flying straight at the bandit with a radar missile out. Whereas a crank with a semi-active radar missile is purely for controlling closure, with an active missile shot in TWS the cut forces their hand. If they continue to press, they've got to turn at you, which aids your missile late- either he turns back and through the missile's flight path roughly 100 degrees or so to try and defend (and when it's the AI, especially "Ace"- that means absolutely perfect notching, which was happening consistently here, but the extra delay caused by maneuver you make is where the missile can often catch them based on timing), or he turns away from you to go for the notch angle, which gives you easy access to tail aspect and zero SA. Compounding the problem for the bandit in some fashion always helps your current shot out, or the next one you take. Also, don't loft the missile yourself; let the Phoenix guidance do its thing. It has work to be done, but forcibly pitching it further right now is messing with the lofting gain.

Three veteran Su-33s loaded for bear and maneuvering/evasion capable (Fighter Sweep/Evasion on), one F-14A with four AIM-54 Mk60s. Three for three. All three shots taken at or above Mach 1 and 30,000', each roughly a minute apart from ranges of 72, 57, and 40 miles. Basic 30 degree crank turns to control closure, and their one return R-27ER shot was trashed by my third Phoenix catching the shooter by the difference in effective missile range. It's how it's being used. We've got folks shooting all out of parameters, from slow at SL to crazy round dumps at middle altitudes and below the Mach, and we've got people putting consistent steel on target by using even the most basic applicable technique. How does this conversation proceed when people don't even recognize the clues for why they're having trouble with the weapon and why it's not working for them is in the data they're presenting as evidence? Tacview-20220218-001928-DCS.zip.acmi

Look at the altitude loss. It wasn't two seconds- it was over fifteen. Aerial 2-2 descends 15,000' between those timestamps; 2-3 descends 18,000'. They've both got the blower on, using God's G to add even more knots, while the missiles are having to turn into final engagement parameters, coasting, and descending into heavier drag air. What accelerates faster- an unloaded airplane in a dive producing roughly 56,000 lbs of thrust in reheat, or a missile in a dive with no more thrust?

You are. You're asking for performance to supplant reality in a simulation to overcome a fundamentally skewed AI- one which would be grossly detrimental in PvP engagements. As Frostie illustrated through effective technique- even with his own noted mistakes in the engagement, this claim is false. ED admits their own issues regarding the AI, and is currently in the process to update it accordingly. Your proposal is that HB would perform this process of performance correction on the aspects they have control over twice, somehow modifying FM performance to increase potential in the endgame to overcome EDs issues regarding guidance logic in both APIs (neither of which HB has any control over), thus bringing about the same- or greater amount of overperformance in all regimes than they just solved for, thus making pretty much everyone but you upset in the meantime. Because, as you admit, your technique is poor. And then, when ED decides to release their AI update and turn off the God-eye, they get to perform this iterative process *again* to fix it. But again, you still won't like it because you're getting zapped by the first R-27 off the rail. And the root cause isn't their issue. It's like demanding the grocery store carry auto parts because you got a ticket for a broken mirror in the parking lot because some biddie backed over the handicapped space lines. Direct those at fault to fix their faults; things tend to work better that way.