TAW_Blaze

They may or may not be better than a real life instructor but as far as DCS goes they are good as you can find. And regardless of how dedicated you are, you still might not have the chance to be taught by them. Albeit the chance is proportional with the dedication, and the curve is exponential. Not sure what you mean with this degrading "some game techniques" comment because that's exactly what real life people teach too, except those are real life techniques. Guess what, they are based on their environment. And if you think sticking to real life tactics and only that is the best way to go then you have no idea. There's a few of the best guys I've met who don't give a flying **** about what a real life engagement might look like. Environment defines the rules.

I'm pretty sure burner trails can burn up the grass. :megalol:

Best defense against any missile is not letting it reach you. This SHOULD be your #1 strategy to defeat anything aimed at you. This is also why SA is as important as it is. Positioning yourself to be in energetic superiority and maneuvering properly will create a hug difference between his missile's legs and yours'. Albeit if you do the wrong maneuvers at the wrong time you'll fly right into his missile energetic advantage or not (this is especially important with the shit ranges we have). I'll give you an example. Say you're flying at 25k and the bandit is in the dirt and at 5-7 nm you try to pull a split S after firing. Now ideally this move would either make his missile fly into the ground or lose you in the vertical 'notch'. But if you set it up wrong it'll actually make it easier for his missile to catch you. This is where experience becomes king. A high amount of flight hours combined with a high level of knowledge combines into a killer mind that can and will understand what he can get away with in a given situation. As far as winning a fight on energy your main tools are using your great climbrate/acceleration and cranking that I explained before. Every other type of defense should come after this on a strategic level. Obviously not every fight comes as you want it so you will have to pick the right tactic for that exact scenario. Sometimes you have as much time as a blink of an eye to decide. Other than defeating attacks based on energy you can defeat their guidance too. Depending on threat type this can involve a lot of things: 1) against SARH breaking the lock of the opponent's radar. Mostly done by notching or breaking line of sight. 2) putting terrain between you and the missile, or making it pull into the terrain. 3) ducking inside Rmin at launch, most common in BFM where you avoid IR SRMs by either not giving up angles or staying close to the guy. Trust me on this you should start with the default method I described, winning the energy fight is by far more crucial than any of the other methods. This is especially true in fights that are more than a 1v1. Don't sell your soul to the devil and become a lawnmower like the rest of the fools. :megalol:

Missread, thought you said 10 hours per week. So your band-aid solution is that you just throw in far far more hours. Great. Soon we'll arrive where you have to be a full time DCS pilot to be competitive in BFM. Too bad this is unrealistic for all the 100% of players. Not to mention the part where you say "very competent" instructor. As far as instructing BFM goes, off the top of my head I can count them on one hand, and I know some of the best that's around. And don't tell me the community is full of hidden BFM gods because inaccessible monks that practice their religion on mountain peaks that mortals can't reach might aswell be nonexistant to everyone else. :D So your way might be a thing but realistically speaking nobody has the chance to go through with it.

And who do you think flies 10 or more hours of TRAINING per week WITH an instructor? That's right, ****ing nobody! I flew a shitload of hours when I was a 104th cadet and I'm fairly sure I didn't have that much per week spent in actual training. I might have flown over 30 hours a week overall though, but that's a different thing. Point is you require way too much extra work because other things are impossible to represent in the game, and you know what I mean.

You can lose him even if you're padlocked on him. Glancing at the HUD is mandatory at least every now and then because there's no sense of speed. You can go from 500 to 200 and often not notice until you already start buffeting. SFM was far better in that. If you fly about 20-30 hours a week and most of it is BFM practice then you can probably develop a skill where you'll know how much speed you're going to bleed in a given situation but otherwise I seriously doubt that.

In a BVR scenario your best friend is your memory when you need to reacquire a guy. Essentially the more information you can remember the better it is. Make a note of his heading, range, altitude, range, general behaviour in your head and it'll often be much easier to find him in case you had to turn into a direction where he's outside the gimbal limits. Or you could have me as your wingman, because I'm usually like a tiny AWACS. :D Keeping track of people post merge is a totally different story. Needs a lot of experience and understanding of BFM to predict how people maneuver and where they'll likely be regardless if you can see them or not.

Yea but it's either modeled wrong or PRF selection changes a hell of a lot more things in the system than the PRF system that we don't know about. Decreasing the PRF itself wouldn't decrease the max. unambiguous, but rather increase it. In the game you have HPRF with a far longer range detection limit. That's the complete opposite.

I'm not the best reference on this because albeit I've read Stimson's book my knowledge is still very limited. But from what I gather ingame PRF affects things highly different than how it should, realistically. What I can tell you for sure that if you use HIGH PRF against anything near beam or cold aspect, he will drop off your radar and never show up again. MED is usually good in any aspect once the guy is inside 25nm.

That's why I said it gives a very rough indication of range. :)

HOJ is useless in this game. None of your missiles fly far enough to make use of it. General rule of thumb of not getting shot down is building situational awareness continously, which mostly consists of mapping enemy and friendly positions around you. To do this efficiently you first need to be very good at using the radar. This is where most people fail, but then again there isn't that much good information about it. In general use RWS to search for bandits and once you find someone use TWS to gather information about him without having to STT him. Read the manual, it has some things about how to use the radar, although some of the most important stuff are missing. PRF selection should be MED once a bandit is within 25nm and HIGH once he's outside 25nm. Don't use the one that keeps cycling between HI and MED. You can't avoid being locked. You can jam people outside 25nm but they can still lock you, except they wont know your exact position. RWR can only alert you of radar guided missiles, all IR are passively guided. Avoiding IR missiles is mostly about your SA and either spotting them in time or just presuming they are already there. RWRs have an angular limit and if you're in a steep bank or the guy is attacking from directly below/above you it's possible the RWR won't pick up anything. You need to be aware of this when you're turning hard. RWR indication will also give you a very rough indication of how far the guy is. The further towards the edge of the circle he is, the further. But this is relative, for instance a MiG-21 at the edge of the circle will be already at 20 miles! Using this information is all about experience. If something's firing at you what you have to do first is identify where the guy is attacking from. You can't really defend against a guy if you don't know where he is. For the moment let's assume you'll get bearing and launch indication from the RWR, this helps a lot. Depending on how close he is (you can guess this based on RWR like I said before) and other empiric knowledge like how missiles perform in the game you can make a decision whether you can fight back or you have to run. There's a part of the range scale where you HAVE to run. There's also the part of the scale where he's so close you have to fight. If you have the room to fight, you need to find him with your radar. Based on RWR input this should be easy if you know how to handle the radar. There are some thumb rules of how to win a BVR fight. It goes something like this: - be higher and faster than the other guy. If you can't do one or both, then you'd better be sneaky as ****. - minimize closure towards the opponent and his missiles. This is done by NOT flying directly towards him. Think of a little trigonometry and you'll see how flying straight at something is not beneficial to reducing closure rate. Combine this with your elevation/azimuth steering limits of your antenna and you'll end up with the infamous "crank" maneuver. This is basically taking an offset from a guy while maintaining picture of him to reduce closure. - fire earlier than the other guy. This should be taken with a grain of salt because inproper application of this will result in bad things. With sufficient empirical knowledge about the general behavior of things in the game you'll be able to tell whether it's good to fire early in a given situation or not. Stop bothering with AI. Install tacview and play MP. Join the 104th TS for example, lots of friendly people who'll happily answer questions. Tacview will help you figure out the things that can't be explained over TS.

No, it's just the internet language. :) Ignore ATC calls they are useless. Not getting a loadout might be due to a lot of things. What were you flying? You can look for some brevity PDFs but it's not the most important thing tbh. There is a core set of brevity that almost everyone uses but other than that everything else varies with groups.

I can break it down for you. YOU'RE GONNA GET REKT. And then you're gonna get rekt again. And then again. And then some more. But hang in there it's the best thing you'll ever do. The point is, you should be improving every time you get rekt. Eventually this will add up and your knowledge will be over 9000. Although you kind of need an entry level knowledge to be able to learn from your mistakes. That can be hard to come by without a high level of dedication. Flying in a group, TS and or having an insctructor is a bit of a shortcut that'll make it easier.

Yea it was TARS. Was a fun little thing. You can set up whispers on TS for stuff like that to declutter comms though.

+1 on the keyboard smashing part.

I'd love to have the good old noisy radio transmissions. They have a certain feel to it, it's just awesome :D

Waypoint synced posit calls OP. Inbefore they get nerfed. :megalol:

Sounds ridiculous tbh. That would involve reopening the production line aswell.

Okay, where do I start. Cockpit interior color makes me sick. Horrible cockpit layout with the RWR being in a positon that you have to abandon all hope of seeing outside the cockpit to look at it. Radar display on HUD. Not a chance.. Radar operation and display. Real great that I can tell where the middle of my cone is pointed, except I don't know what the altitude ranges are at the range I'm looking at. Dream of a pilot! Inability to distinguish altitudes between targets of same range and azimuth. There's a lot more but these are the main ones. I might have a NATO avionic syndrome though, who knows. :D

Why not? It can be pretty entertaining to read some of the posts. I also like to stay in the loop.

I'm all for making the game as realistic as possible, like I said before. But it's not worth the effort to bother, I've learnt that with ED. Don't expect anything and you won't be disappointed. Pretty much every game I've ever played was all about a challenging competitive environment. If it wasn't for the nasty avionics I would probably fly the flanker and could work with it, not that this situation is ideal. Read the thread again and then read some other missile threads and you'll see what I mean. All you see is people throwing mud at each other. Useful posts only once in a blue moon. I know. Just posting for the fun of it. As you can see I'm not arguing about anything which would involve some level of effort. At the moment that level is close to zero. :)

I don't know, but like I said, I stopped caring a long time ago. Maybe time for you to do that too. This back and forth bullshiting probably doesn't help convince the devs there's something wrong though. :D

George W. Stimson: Introduction to Airborne Radar

Recommend the radar bible. Great book, got it right here. :)

I think I stopped at the part where it says 'written by Carlo Kopp'. Sorry, it had to be done. :megalol: