TAW_Blaze

I'm rather mind blown that people are shooting down this quality of life improvement in n+1 threads. When you want to customize your control axes to deal with improper flight hardware it's all good. When you want to customize some other features such as TDC or trim sensitivity (again because of improper hardware) it's suddenly witchcraft and you shall burn at the stake for wanting such an evil and overpowered feature.

Using TMS right to designate TWS targets is an excellent way to shoot yourself in the foot. It always locks the most irrelevant targets. Just manually select your targets with TMS up, and make sure they are appropriate system tracks before doing so. It can be a bit messy sometimes, especially on close formations. If you're within 20 nm I would not bother using TWS.

It's a common problem to have control axes cross linked between multiple input devices. i.e. your throttle controlling rudders and your stick controlling throttle and other type of stupid things. I'm rather mind blown that this is still a recurring problem with the default controller setups after the game has been around for over a decade.

I've been doing my range science forever. I find it amusing that you're just pretending one of the top A2A squadrons are just lazy people and don't know their shit. I'm talking about defeating the guidance, not kinematics. Of course kinematics are reliable. There is a range for every scenario where you can safely get out just by split S-ing and running. But you could 90% reliable dodge almost any ARH no matter if fired within 5 nm or even closer by dumpstering the guidance. Since you're being rude I'll return the favor and say if you could not do this then you're simply not good enough. :) Sometimes you can set up the geometry to be impossible to defeat, but this is usually only possible of the other guy is in a tempo disadvantage or he doesn't see you. SF are one of the best but they are not known for their safety flying. Look at past years SATAC / SATAL ACMIs and you will see them doing unreal piloting to just push and outplay just about anyone. If I faced anyone from SF I would count on it as the least likely option that he will F pole turn and run.

Just double checked.. I used to fly with around 85-90 degrees of FOV in the Eagle, and in the Viper I have around 65 degrees to be comfortable. Which is very weird, because the lower the FOV the better the spotting should be..

Because you will always fly with a certain zoom that suits your preferences. You simply have to be able to read certain instruments at any given time without having to zoom no matter how good HOTAS you have. The Eagle had the perfect cockpit layout. You could zoom in till the canopy rails were around the edge of your screen, giving you vision on all important instruments and also a relatively high zoom with clear forward vision to spot anything in front of you. In the Viper it sucks a lot more because the MFDs are very low (and a lot harder to read). I've been contemplating on getting MFD exports because that'd solve the problem most likely, but I've been lazy about it.

Interesting. I have only flown in closed test sessions online but experienced the opposite. Almost impossible to defeat the guidance of the new 120C, no matter what you do. It was more than just me but I've faced atleast 50-60 shots within 10 - 8 nm that was specifically set up to test whether the old tactics still work and outside the odd luck almost every single missile connected. I didn't bother testing long range shots or defeating them kinematically but I expect those should be more deadly too.

FOV in 2D would be your "usual" zoom setting, since it always changes with zoom. I checked at some point because I also thought this would be the culprit but I don't remember the results anymore.. I think on the Viper I have to fly on a totally different FOV than I would in an Eagle.

Just a different POV on the topic: Currently open beta allows for a faster feedback loop in terms of bug detection. It is apparent that many bugs are not found in internal or closed testing therefore they often rely on the community on finding the important bugs. If everything goes to stable most of this is cut off and the feedback loop is increased. For a developer it's much easier to fix a problem that he might have caused a week ago than something that he has done a month or months ago.

Not really. The typical kill range was 6-8 nm against good pilots and the best would still be able to evade them, and very often completely negate any 120s especially in 1v1 scenarios. It was comparatively easy to notch them and very often you did not even have to notch for a long time but rather just a split second and it would trash the missile. If you fought against a good opponent 1v1 generally you ended up in a WVR merge without missiles because all of the missiles would get notched. You could defeat missiles at pretty much any short range including even 2-3 nm shots with relative ease when normally you should have no business being alive in that situation. Now it is extremely difficult to notch a 120. Even in laboratory environments it's a struggle where with the previous model we would consistently end up in gun merge because we notched all the missiles. The one before the rework had very silly guidance problems. What we have now might be a little over the top in some areas, but otherwise is a huge step forward. I'm very happy to see missiles finally not pulling G to avoid the target or to missposition themselves by agressively resetting to 1 G dumping all their energy. I think there might be something wrong with the seeker, the missile seems very good at tracking targets in a perfect notch with ground clutter. I don't really know how this is possible with a pulse-doppler radar. On paper, flying in ground clutter holding a good notch should mean you're invisible to the radar. This is all without chaff.

I also have the same experience. Removing the tint helps a lot, but I still feel like it's more difficult to spot other aircraft sitting in a Viper.

I don't understand everyone being hung up on a few knots here and there. For more than the last decade the most glaring problem has been the extremely unreliable guidance allowing people to get away with a lot of scenarios where the only reality should be guaranteed death. All I'm going to say is the new guidance is lightyears ahead of the previous. I think it's a little too good against notching bandits, but otherwise based on our internal testing what I can see is that they eliminated the most critical issues that caused many many missiles to miss for absolutely silly reasons. Ultimately as long as you and your opponent have sticks with similar performance it does not matter how far they can fly. What matters is that they are reliable when you need them to be. If @chizh ever sees this, GREAT ****ING JOB!

So far I've only seen this 360 turn by the missiles in Tacview. To me it feels like a data export / desync bug, I could not observe such behavior ingame using F6 views. But I've only tested it a bit so I can't be sure.

I hope the F-16 HUD brightness and the antenna elevation issue gets hotfixed :)

F-16 is their newest module built on technologies pioneered by the F-18. If they managed to build it into a spaghetti, then we are doomed. I'm sure the legacy core game code is a disaster and some of the older modules too. But this? I don't understand how people see "beta" as an excuse to repeatedly break functionality that has been implemented months or years ago. A2A functionality in the F-16 has been steadily getting worse since 2.5.5. Even if there is not much active development of the F-16 it is hardly acceptable that the overall usability of the aircraft is going in negative direction. I can accept F-16 not being developed too much in favor of F-18 provided it has the currently existing features working as expected. But they do not and have not been, ACM modes are mostly bugged, and since 2.5.5 we've had plenty of additional bugs to only make it worse. I applaud the datalink fix some patches ago but it has been the only major bugfix I've seen, however at the cost of multiple critical radar bugs that make A2A very difficult. I would have liked to fly on the weekend but with the elevation display bug this is certainly cancelled unless it gets hotfixed today.

I get it. But there is no chance you have to turn at 35 miles in that scenario. If you do a level turn at 40 kft from M2.0 you will be M1.4+ most likely exiting and you will continue to regain speed very quickly. At the same time there is no reason to not drop to 30 kft and there is no scenario where you have hard deck above 30 kft. Most SAMs that put you on a hard deck have a limit of 25 - 30 kft and you dont have 10 kft highlands in general areas in any DCS map. Any higher caliber SAM you simply cant overfly so harddeck is irrelevant. Lofted shots are the most lethal against high & slow bandits. Anyone high & fast still has to be careful, especially up close you can be killed regardless of how fast you are running away if you stay high.

Interesting, I gave a friendly hint that your tactics could use a bit more sharpening and you choose to use various personal attacks. In terms of my experience. Let's say I've been a member of one of the most successful PvP squadrons for ~6 years now that has operated almost exclusively in Eagles until this year. Competing in various tournaments throughout the years, sometimes even using these high and fast tactics as you described as "unknown to me" to counter opponent tactics. Despite your above tone to me, I took the time to jump in a short mission to test some basic scenarios against AI F-15C. Here are some pictures: https://imgur.com/a/cw05Jim So far this confirms to me that there is absolutely no change. - Detecting head on F-15C at 60 nm in RWS, able to TWS bug immediately and able to STT shortly after around 53 nm. This is all in HPRF. Other modes will suffer in long range detection. - Beaming target visible around ~23-25 nm in MPRF and also shortly after TWS buggable, needs a couple miles closer to be able to STT. Beaming targets with altitude advantage can be seen further, typically using HPRF. - Cold aspect shows up around 20 miles in tail chase, however need to be a bit closer to be able to STT. This completely falls in line with how this worked since 2013 and before. I do not claim my test covers a broad spectrum, there may be some scenarios or aircraft where there could be a problem, but since you are the one complaining here about a supposed "bug", you need to provide some proof about what you believe to be wrong. So far I see nothing out of order.

This is irrelevant to DCS. You are not updating radar and EW software in here. :) Yeah, but in old times it did not work like this as I recall. Some years ago especially big aircraft started appearing much further than normal even when beaming. Not really. If you have a hard deck of 35 000 ft or higher and you're flying at M0.6 you might have a kinematic abort range of 30 nm, but that scenario is not any more realistic than flying around in afterburners at M2.6. The only real limiting factor is your hard deck. If you have a hard deck of 20-25 kft then you have to seriously rethink your gameplan because the missiles will retain a lot more energy than your usual "hit the deck" setups. Back to the original point though, 35+ mile kinematic abort range is significantly overdefending any threat. If you're in a combat area you should be atleast M0.8 which will be somewhere around 25 miles where you really have to turn and run, even if you must maintain 30 kft. This is assuming a slightly supersonic bandit lofting 120C. However OP is describing they are flying in high supersonic speeds above 40 kft. Doing this you can get away pushing potentially even up to 20 miles or closer even if you have a hard deck of 30 kft simply because you will remain supersonic throughout all of your flight and will be extending M1.5+ ignoring most of the problems of high altitude flight by simply having a shitload of airspeed. I'm not considering any scenario where you're flying straight into a lofted 120C from 40 miles at M1.5 and expect to stay alive by the time you hit 20 mile range because this is just straight up silly :)

You could never STT other fighters outside roughly 40 nm. Not that there is any point in doing that. Cold fighters are and have been essentially invisible outside 25-30 nm atleast since FC3 but probably even well before that. In the last few years there were some weird changes where beaming higher altitude contacts could show up significantly further (mostly bigger aircraft), but that's it. If you're considering 30 nm+ as MAR then you have a lot of homework to do on your tactics. Even in a scenario where you're head to head both M2.0 flying straight towards each other, MAR will be significantly less than that.

104th_Blaze - F-14B

For anyone struggling in the Viper I recommend making a custom slider out of his throttle axis instead of the default linear map. The lower throttle range is overly sensitive and makes it very difficult to fly formation at < 90 % rpm. I think I had similar issues with the Hornet and Tomcat too but I haven't flown those in a while so I'm not sure anymore. As far as stick input goes, unfortunately having a high quality stick like Virpil or VKB is a game changer. I was struggling a lot with AAR with the Warthog, but once I got my Virpil stick it became a breeze. Lower quality sticks tend to have shitty precision around the center, and for instance despite the Warthog being fairly good quality it has so much inertia around the center you basically can never let it go otherwise you will always overreact when you have to do something. Adjusting between A/C also takes a while. I could do AAR in my sleep with the Eagle for years now and when I switched over to the Viper I was mostly just cursing. The input dampening is something you gotta get used to, but after 5-10 AAR it's gotten fairly comfortable too.

So an aircraft 40 years later would have inferior tech? :) These are some of the most basic radar DSP techniques used for many many decades now. It's been a while since I've read the radar book but as I recall most mechanical airborne pulse-doppler radars use chirped frequency with a fairly low duty cycle setup. Then comes all the magic of DSP. But really it's not difficult on paper to implement time of arrival filtering compared to a known fixed point transmission, if you know where a target is i.e. in a track mode. In a search mode it might be tricky but if you implement a "spotlight" kind of mode where you look at a patch of sky this could also be done. I'm saying on paper because I haven't done it myself, but given the software can run in fast enough cycles I don't see a problem. In any case some kind of range gating exists by default to throw out targets that lie outside your normal cycles, i.e. you have no interest in getting false detections because your waves bumped into a 747 from a transmission 4 cycles ago. Disabling MLC based on look up angles is a very simple thing to do. I'm surprised you mentioned that because I don't recall having issues with this in the 16, but I didn't actually test in detail - I know for fact however in the F-15 this works just fine, but that's FC radar.

They work fairly well against poor or average defense techniques. Albeit even often arguably poor against bad defense techniques if you happen to have a good timing. A very simple example is a target having a stable G turn in a certain direction, if it happens to go through the notch at the perfect moment, even if for a split second the missile returns to 1 G and will miss even if reacquired because after the neutral 1 G moment the intercept geometry is impossible. This actually occurs a lot, resulting a lot of situations where a bandit should absolutely be dead but gets to live another fight. If it only had a simple extrapolation method, a sustained G in plane turn should not be able to spoof it if the notch is only occuring momentarily. Typically if you go against an AI he will notch you every time with a 2 G U-turn casually, notching for maybe not even 100 ms. I haven't checked in the recent months but ~ half a year ago this was the case.

People are asking to have commonly known behavior of radar guided missiles finally represented instead of the broken mechanics we have currently. This would significantly help improve the realism of all missiles. Not sure what "downsides" you meant by flying near ground, most aspects are already represented or already worse than they should be. Flying not in the notch generally results in the clutter being ignored unless you're flying under the trees, and if you're anywhere near a good notch all radar guided platforms will miss. The main issue with notch reliability is actually the network desync.. The problem is not that the missile we have is not the end all be all missile. The problem is that all missiles suffer from absurd behavior that is very far from any realism. Implementing appropriate radar techniques would solve many of these problems. The exact implementation on a particular missile is most likely not even available privately, but a generic approximation of i.e. range gating would bring much more realism than not having it at all.

Apart from experimenting with what's possible modeling a METEOR in DCS is pointless. It has no contemporary opponents and the majority of relevant infrastructure is nonexistent in DCS. I'd much rather see this effort go to something actually useful.