TAW_Blaze

One bunch saying chaff makes ER totally useless in all circumstances, enabling the opposition to fly straight at any ER launches and defeat them by spamming chaff and barrel rolling. Another bunch now saying chaff is useless at head on and only becomes useful in the beam or cold aspect. Another bunch claiming ER is fine. Probably a few more bunches inbetween these. Personally I'm in the 'not giving a damn' bunch. I just posted to point out how funny things are. My own perception based on personal experience is that ER is more capable than it's claimed to be. Whether they improve it or not, I frankly don't care. I'd like DCS to be more realistic but I can't be bothered with this anymore. When you fly a certain amount of hours and experience things one way and then some guys try to convince you of the exact opposite things become interesting. Eventually I figured I'd stop caring because it's not worth the effort.

Seen them enough times. It's just hilarious how everyone claims totally different things.

But they are claiming you can fly head on into ERs and defeat them with little to no effort by spamming chaff.

Don't let him attack both of you? Seriously it's not that hard. If you have enough angular separation he won't be able to launch at you at the same time, not even with TWS. That by itself will give enough time to the guy who didn't get shot at to push in for WVR, especially with the current missile ranges. If the guy is really good he could pull a shot on both of you if he knows where to look for your wingman by ditching the lock after launch. But with this you have about 2-3 secs to find the guy pulling 7-9 Gs, not exactly the thing you expect out of a random guy. But even then if he manages to shoot at both of you if you have a slight range separation, the guy in the back will be able to keep going unless he was within a given range. If you treat your missile as if it was completely useless then you might aswell not carry it. I've been there with the 120 and it was far from the reality. Last week we trained 1v2 ER vs Sparrows and we kept losing planes regardless of how big of a chaff cloud we left in the air.

You don't necessarily need a group. Our server and the TS would be a start, you can usually ask other people about things. Obviously not as good having a trainer, but it's alright. As far as squadrons go, I have no idea. There are a lot of them now :)

I know if you're not already good flying MP seems like an impossible learning curve but you should just fly MP regardless. Plenty of people to learn from. It's also probably better to stay at 1v1 and 1v2 at most until you're very good at those. Flying against the AI will only teach you silly habits. You'll develop tactics based on the AI's reactions and this is not something that'll work against any human opponent.

I'm interested in this too. Default green is unreadable on my end under pretty much any day condition, especially over white or bright terrain. It'd be nice to have the yellow default instead of having to cycle it every time you spawn.

Sounds like the infamous error where your throttle axis is also assigned to rudder. Due to some lunacy this happens to be default in some configs, like the Warthog profile for F-15C for example. LOL

You should post a screenshot what's your most common view. Some people have the idea that being almost totally zoomed out is the way to go. Generally zooming in until you can barely see the canopy bow or the mirror in the F-15C would be good. Something like this, maybe even a bit more. To spot planes visually you usually have to use max zoom or very close to it unless they're within 1-2 miles.

Remember Falcon's test? AI missed every ER because they kept losing lock or just had the wrong PRF or whatever was the case. This is the problem. We don't know how the AI uses the radar.

A sample pool of 3 tests ain't nothing. Any result from AI missile launch is irrelevant because the AI doesn't know how to use radar, like I said on the other page. And in one of the player tests it worked. Also on the first player scenario the 2nd ER hit from very close range. Make more MP tests and then maybe you can draw a conclusion of what seems to be happening, that might help figuring out what the problem is.

I think we already established the fact that testing any kind of missile performance against the AI is useless a very long time ago. Remember when Falcon made a thread where he spawned a gazillion flankers around himself and all of them missed their ERs? The AI doesn't even know how to operate the radar for ****s sake. How do you expect their missiles to hit then? The last video shows 2 misses out of 3 medium range scenarios. It could be warping but on the first 2 it seems to be doing the exact same bullshit, pulling too much lead. Maybe this is some kind of pattern. Need far more experiments to make sure though. If we figure out what seems to be happening most of the time, maybe that would help the devs find the problem, no?

I'm sure the real life F-15C is some sort of abomination too, because it has the ground attack capability. They just never used it. :megalol:

I was going to PM the OP to give a few comments on his tacview but I figured the public could benefit from it too so I might aswell just put it here. Basically before any engagement you need to observe the environment and figure out what kind of threats you're facing, how displaced they are, etc. It's not enough that you found some bar on your VSD and noted there's something there. Thumb rule of radar use is that if you find something you extract every piece of information into your head as soon as possible. Information that's available now might not be there in the next second. For every bandit popping up on your VSD you should look at his altitude, speed, angle off, NCTR ID (inside 25 nm this is gonna tell you what type of AC it is), and usually his general behaviour over time. And honestly don't STT him please.. Once you have all this information you can prioritize things. You need to decide which guy you're going to engage first and how you want to position yourself in the environment to best accomplish your goals. Usually you want to stay close to your friendly units while creating as much displacement between incoming enemies to maximize the time between your fights. Albeit you already observed the environment, it's highly dynamic and you need to keep looking for new threats as much as you can regardless of what's happening. Never go full tunnelvision on someone way outside the actual engagement range unless you know for fact there won't be anything else coming up. This gets increasingly difficult as the ranges close down. Another rule of thumb is that you never fly straight at any threat unless you're shooting at it. You want to take an offset in some direction so that you reduce your closure. This will make any incoming missile fly a much longer path reducing it's endgame and giving you more time to react. After you launched you usually either crank again or just start running away, the latter is far more common as it takes a lot of experience to know if someone's missiles won't be able to reach you from a given situation. If you're running you probably want to recommit at some point but this is tricky as the SA you have will be heavily degraded. This is where your first setup's impact and good memory becomes important. If your perception of the results is that someone could be chasing you (because your setup didn't go the way you expected it to, etc) then you probably shouldn't try to turn back. Oh and don't ****ing target strikers over fighters unless you have those covered already. Mission objective might be to defend a ground unit but you can't do that if you're dead..

15 nm shot against a target flying straight into it and not maneuvering. There's nothing to see here. ET's below M2 before it's inside 5 miles of the target. Had he done anything at all, it would've missed. Like, literally anything.

In the age of 6 mile slammer you'd better take your chances to have your missile fly 1 or 2 or 3 miles further, no? :)

On the flying high and fast thing, it really is great but it has it's limitations. You're using a hell of a lot of resources to get and stay there. Against organized opponents it'll be equally or more difficult to get a kill from this position, because they'll be a lot more careful with you. If they don't see it in time then it's dangerous, so it's kind of worth a shot. This is why you usually see people doing this at the start of some events. But if you want to keep your offensive position you'll be presenting a very good target to anything that wants to throw things at you. Because of the speed and the steep lookdown angle it'll be extremely difficult to maintain SA. If they spot you they'll probably just dodge the fight until you either get too far and get shot or you have to turn. Once you turned it's not uncommon to have to burn away even if you have support, so you're practically out of there. Simply put flying at medium altitude gives you comparable fuel economy and a hell of a lot more options. Being in space is a killer but if the guy sees you far enough you ain't killin. :)

They aren't. You made the mistake of reducing the problem to a one parameter equation, which it isn't. Making his missiles climb for you is a huge kinematic advantage. Download tacview for ****s sake :) Until then nobody knows anything.

STT doesn't do anything once it's active in the game. Regardless of you fired it in STT or just switched to it after.

:) The reason I said on paper because in practice any move can be good. In some cases you have to do the most unreasonable things to throw the guy off. But that only works if you know the basics real good. I agree on the fact that training on the AI is a bad idea. It'll teach you habits that won't make any sense to pull off against players and it'll be hard to unlearn them.

I ****ing hate this shit system with the auto logout losing whole posts all the time if I accidentally click somewhere else other than re-login. Seriously **** that. Well in short if you're in a 1v2 you either wanna offset one so you have time to deal with 1 before the other arrives (this obviously doesn't work if they're close), or you have to take both at the same time. Then you wanna screw them on the first shot because if they're still alive after your initial volley then you don't really stand a chance. Snaking before launch is useless on paper, you're dumping energy instead of banking it. Better to stay calm and analyze the environment, pick a direction you want to crank towards and then plan your fight from there. If you have to fight 2 guys at once you'd better be stashing as much energy as you can because if you don't get shit done in the first shot chances are extremely high you'll have to run back to base anyway (if you even get the chance).

The other important question is what you're doing before launch. :)

It works exactly like I said. The higher you are the further the missiles go, dumpstering your position over a bandit on paper is the worst tactical move you could pull. The effect of altitude, air density and drag on missile ranges might be overall bullshit compared to what it should be but it still works. If it's not working for you then it's your fault, not the system's. If you run into a guy who's waving at you from 1 kft and you're sitting in your sofa at 20 kft ish and his missile gets to your first then you really have no idea what you're doing. Not to mention we're speaking of AI. LA and DLZ are irrelevant in the game. They're not even close to an approximate of what the missile can do. Your best bet is to know from experience what they can do and act on it. The point of having all the eye candy in your cockpit is to gather information and make use of it :) If you upload some tacviews I can have a look and tell you what you should be doing but I really can't be bothered to record tracks.

Ditching your altitude advantage isn't gonna help you win the fight. Against a flanker with such a height disadvantage you can usually keep pushing without ever turning cold, it's just a matter of sacrificing another missile. A shot from slightly above 10 nm can force him to turn by the time his ER could get close and the ET's are really easy to dodge. After that there isn't a lot he can do because you'll be closing the gap while he's busy turning, in a clean scenario where you can chase if he ever tries to recommit he'll be under 7 miles and that's a definite kill while you can just turn around before he even gets the angles to have a good shot. Not the usual approach on the server because it costs atleast 2 missiles to get one guy and if he just runs away you won't be able to catch him. You should probably fly MP instead though, fighting the AI is pretty useless.

One screenshot doesn't prove anything, I've seen people flying at 100+ kft in a steady climb at M2 or higher with full payload because of server desync or crash.