Cmptohocah

After more than 10 years flying this amazing simulator I have decided to make one final post as a sign of fare well. I hope this post won't get deleted as the contents might not be in line with the company policy. I've seen this sim bring me much joy over the years, but as the platform gained popularity I've witnessed many dark moments about it also, which ultimately led me to a decision to drop it. For who ever has time or cares to read this post, I would like to briefly state the reasons why: 1. Eventually the sim moved from a "let's have as close as possible to real life" to "we need to sell as much as we can" and "we need to keep paying customers happy". 2. My impression is that every time core issues are addressed on the support forums, there is an "army" of users that try to discredit such claims by spamming the threads with nonsense and "watering out" the original issue. 3. Every post that is in line with the company's "let's sell more products" get swiftly replied to and marked as "investigating" (yes I mean you "holy" AIM-120 posts ), but anything critical gets neglected, buried under a bunch of useless information (please see point above) and ultimately conditioned by the famous "provide valid track" clause - not every nonsense that happens in DCS MP can replicated easily on a private track 4. Simulator clearly moved from Soviet - US era, to "hey we have all the documents we need to produce high-fidelity NATO aircraft/weapons which are not classified" to "sorry we can't use any Soviet hardware 'cause information on these needs to be provided to use by unclassified public sources" - double standards if you ask me, but this is just my impression. 5. Neglecting one thing that keept this thing (DCS) alive since its inception: "Flaming Cliffs" or as it was called in the good ol' days (personal opinion) "Lock On" \m/ 6. Last, and the most important thing for me personally, caving in to market pressure instead of pursuing realism in one way or the other. I know my post might seem opinionated and I am ready to accept that. If I am being truly honest to my self, DCS died for me the moment it became "pay to win platform", but I have ignored this fact for some years in hope that I was wrong. Since my adventure with the sim started in the days of "Lock On 1.2" I felt the need to post this in the "Flaming Cliffs" part of the forum. I would also like to thank @dundun92@GGTharos@Falcon_S @mousepilot@okopanja@Ironhand and many, many others that were there over the years trying to make this "sim" better. P.S. If any of the admins has time, please check my "stale" post about the 120's contrails issue, I've provided real live proof. "So long and thanks for all the fish!" All the best, Nix

What is preventing the control surfaces from going back to neutral if there is no energy source to counter the relative wind force imposed on to them? Mechanism friction?

How can a pitch change occur with AoA staying the same? Maybe TacView mesures AoA of the control surfaces?

Not much I can reply to this, except you might want to re-check on how lift is generated by a lift surface.

Pitch of the missile does not matter here. First of all it's impossible for AoA to stay the same with a lower pitch, so there is something wrong in how TacView interprets pitch I guess. Anyway at a constant AoA, from what it seems maximum attainable for AMRAAM in this case, there is no way its physically possible for it to accelerate. It just physics. Also notice in the last slide #5 it's pulling 0.1G than slides 2 and 3. And yet it's accelerating.

Drag force on an object no moving in a fluid is zero - that is correct. This question is not valid. There is no Angle of Attack for an object that is not moving through a fluid (air). The lift surfaces are not "attacking" anything since there is no flow, so I guess the correct answer would be "infinity"? Maximum AoA (just before stalling) of a lift surface, in fact equals maximum attainable lift force for a given speed. So when ever you have max AoA you will have maximum possible induced drag happening for a given speed. The amount of that drag will vary with speed, at higher speeds more lift is produced and thus more drag is produced. What I am talking about here are not absolute values, like: is there more drag at 5km/h or at 500km/h? At both speeds and any other speed in between and around these, induced drag will always be at its maximum at max AoA. To put it more simply: induced drag (and there for total drag) will be higher at max AoA than at AoA=0 at "X" speed. Now you can substitute the "X" with what ever speed you like, but the statements holds true.

Yes that's technically correct, but I don't see your point. It is one of the contributors to drag, how does this change what I have stated? Again correct, but I was trying to explain how AoA influences the drag force. Of course if you fly 90deg straight up and have your thrust reversers on, then both gravity and thrust oppose movement. This is incorrect, but when you slow down to 400km/h and keep your original angle of attack, the effective lift is less than what you had at 500km/h because the airflow over the wing is not sufficient anymore to produce the same amount of lift. The only way you can keep the same lift force at 400km/h is by increasing the AoA so that your lift surfaces produce the same amount of lift as if flying at 500km/h. The effective lift force stayed the same, 'cause the weight did not change, but what happened with the increase AoA is that the drag component of lift (remember total lift has 2 components: one acting up to keep the airplane in the air, second one opposing the thrust) is now facing further back contributing to total drag. That's why you need to push the throttles forward in order to keep 400km/h. You have lowered the parasitic parasitic drag, that is correct, but you have increased the induced drag. Finally I think this quote sums it up really nice:

Angle of attack is important because it dictates the ammount of drag force produced. Drag force oposes movement, think of it as a brake. Engine and gravity promote movement. For example, if you are flying straight and level, at 500km/h at 50% engine power if you slow down to 400km/h and still want to keep level, you need to increase your AoA to increase generated lift. You got more lift out of your wing so you can stay level, but since there is no free beer you also incresed drag and that 50% engine power ain't gonna cut it. So now you need more power to overcome that drag, otherwise you will continue deccelerating.

Very good point, and if you actually look at the graph you can see that when this erratic angle-of-attack "dance" started, the loss of speed actually started to slow down, instead of speeding up. One would expect that with hard maneuvering the drag force increases, not the other way around. I actually waited for a very long time, before I have decided to make this post. It seemed that AMRAAM's loss of energy was way below what it should be, but I never actually had any concrete evidence that this is happening - until this track that is.

Ok the arrow is a bit skewed, that's my bad, but take that yellow line as a reference then. You see a dip in airspeed left of it? This means that there was some acceleration occurring while the AoA stayed pretty much the same. P.S. Technically AoA was not constant, but what happened to the airspeed is not consistent with what the AoA was indicating in a sense of conservation of energy.

I agree it has nothing to do with the notch, it's just that he mentions it before the notch part and it reminded me that we have perfect binary radar acquisition in DCS. It would be great if we had some sort of radius inside which you can't really tell how many targets are there. Another pair of Eagles, had the same issue in '99 against the Fulcrums as they initially taught there is only one there until they got separated enough and/or Eagles got close enough to be able to discriminate between the two. Is medium pulse repetition frequency more resistant to notching? If so, I would be very happy to learn why.

I am having major issues spotting targets visually. In the screenshot below you can see that I have a target locked at less than 4km and I can't see it - possibly even less as the screenshot does not capture it. I've heard and seen people spot targets in DCS in excess of 20km. Someone on SRS mentioned that they can see at more than 20NM. Any idea what might be happening here? My graphics settings: My hardware: Monitor - LG Flatron IPS225 GPU - GTX 1660 SUPER P.S. My eyes are fine - had them checked already

Here you go: Shame we don't have cell resolution implemented in DCS

Ahahahahahaahah, I could not stop laughing. Not according to the pilot that encountered it. He specifically said that the MiGs went into notch preciselly at a distance at which the Eagle's radar was most prone to it. I will see if I can digg up this interview...

F-15C's during "Dessert storm" by Iraqi pilots. You don't need RWR to notch a radar, in fact SPO is next to useless for this. It's enought to know the emitting radar's heading, which you can use your own radar for. RWR is DCS is a bit arcady. P.S. you can use a data-link also if available