TAW_Blaze

@Chizh: These missile flight model updates are great, however it all results in handicapped missiles regardless because they are gimped by poor guidance. What is happening in this area? - When can we expect to see modern missiles be able to extrapolate target trajectory in case the lock is momentary lost? - When can we expect to have more reasonable representation of ground clutter filtering? - Are ECCM updates planned at all? i.e. chaff modeling Currently all active missiles are just returning to 1 G neutral when notched resulting in physically impossible intercept geometry even if the target is found. It is enough to be in the notch for a split second and it will spoof most of the missiles. People are notching at altitudes above 20 000 ft with < 20 degrees look down angle where there is no ground clutter within 10 - 15 miles yet a missile with an active radar range of < 8 miles is getting notched.

Thank you so much! I'll put it in our squadron sticky, this is a huge improvement over the default and I've often had issues trying to discern whether some guy is a 18k ft or 10k ft for instance. This is one of the things that has really bothered me about the FCR setup but only recently thought to modify the font. I cannot believe such a basic usability issue would exist in the real jet. There is literally no reason to try to have crossed zeros, this is a standard way to distinguish them against the letter "o" in normal text but you pretty much never have letters in your FCR.. Even the double digit < 10k ft display of "00" is a little questionable but I can see some software arguments behind that.. :)

I have 32 GB RAM and experimented with 32 GB pagefile for a while but eventually reverted to 16 GB pagefile only. Interestingly with 16 GB pagefile I have better performance. My only explanation is that maybe this results in a tendency to rather use RAM over pagefile, but this should be the default so I'm rather puzzled at this. However fixed over dynamic pagefile is a huge improvement by itself, mad stutters when it has to allocate more pagefile because it ran out..

Lock lines were working even in the patches before and typically if you bugged someone, especially with TWS they would go red both on your own FCR and datalink. The important question is whether AWACS track by themselves are working properly.

You need to distort the turning circles by accelerating then pulling repeatedly at times instead of a steady g rate. Since the AI does absolutely nothing to react you can missalign the turn circles to give you an edge at certain time windows. Put into practical example, make sure to have enough energy banked at the bottom of the loop, you can even relax the stick a bit and catch the guy in his nose high phase. He'll be slow and a fairly easy target. Haven't tried this in the F-5 specifically but works in all 4 gen against 4 gen AI.

I hope at minimum this year they fix all the bugs of the current radar modes and datalink. Including all ACM modes, because they are a total joke at the moment. Actually comparing to some previous patches we have negative progress on these because they got a lot worse than they were i.e. in 2.5.5..

There is a lot of truth to what you're saying but in reality it's not so black and white in my opinion when it comes to online flying. Typically you have 2 (3) categories of flying - your everyday fun / learning - realistic scenarios - (competitions) Now by the nature of these categories they implicitly define how people behave. A lot of people tend to fly daily for fun or to get better at something. Therefore continously running realistic scenarios is not practical for this purpose. On the other hand continously limit testing yourself is very practical because every single fight is a new experience that makes you a better virtual fighter pilot. The key is to be conscious about what you're attempting and evaluate the results objectively using Tacview etc. 1-1 coaching or airquake in a server is far more efficient at training the main elements of fighting than running a 5 hour combat scenario where you're AFK for 90% of that time. However of course you do have to train the part where you make your own flight plans, timelines, group tactics etc. The nature of limit testing itself can also widely vary. In order to grow your skills one day you can choose to limit test by always trying to push the merge no matter what, another day you might limit test by staying in the air for the longest possible time while still staying alive, getting kills and/or achieving some arbitrary objective. You can even fly simulating VID RoE against otherwise uncooperative bandits who will try to kill you without any kind of RoE of their own. Obviously the online environment itself can impose some limitations on what you can "reasonably" train, but theoretically almost anything can be done. In fact I'd easily say this is how you should train yourself. If you are constantly sticking to the same tactics because "this is how you fly in a realistic environment" you are only limiting yourself because you will not experience all those other situations and you will not be able to make the best decisions if they occur (spoiler alert, they do). A pilot who understands the vastly different possibilities that can occur in a fight will be able to make far better decisions under realistic scenarios because they are more aware of their own capabilities. Bottom line this is not an encouragement of unrealistic flying but rather to add more knowledge to a person who can otherwise also train himself to fly in a disciplined way to achieve his objective. Ultimately no matter what scenario there are no guarantees that people are not pulling complete wild card moves even in real life. For instance there was a mig pilot in the korean war who pushed if I recall a -2 or -3 g nose dive to try to counter a bfm scenario.

Agree with this, majority of playerbase is all to keen on blaming "this and that OP" instead of sucking it up and actually learning to play. The phoenixes, especially the mk60 are a rather special case in my opion, and albeit they can be worked around however because of how idiotically it is modeled at the moment with the passive magic guidance it essentially removes most of the skill behind employing that weapon. Make no mistake, you can absolutely defeat it, but it's still stupid and it's very far from any kind of realism. And let's be honest it's not fun to fight a platform that is borderline void of any skill that puts you on defense for multiple minutes without being able to close the distance and fight back in most scenarios. If this was a realistic misson like the old OPFORs etc. that happens once a while I'd concur it'd be an interesting fight, but the majority of people are here to have fun and/or learn day in day out and you're not learning a lot fighting a guy that presses a button at 40 miles then turns cold and goes to eat a pizza while you're still defending his missile because of scifi guidance. Actually you are :) missile modeling is very far from it, especially terminal guidance. CCM and ECCM modeling is extremely poor / nonexistant. Some aircraft systems are nicely modeled, but that's about it. Other environmental and support systems and general simulator core is in generally an even worse state. Take the AI AWACS for instance, it's been the same since probably FC1. You're merged and calls popups at 200 miles. As I described, the tactics found in DCS are developed based on similar phenomenon as in real life, this is why you can see basic building blocks like cranks, notches, however the overall picture of how people use it in combination is an evolution of it's own. Overall I treat as if this was an alternate reality that allows me to be a fighter pilot who develops his own tactics based on this alternate reality. To me it's not super interesting to try to replicate exact real life tactics, and not only because they are generally top secret. Instead by sinking thousands of hours into it you end up developing an intimate understanding of the mechanics that allows you to put up a fine controlled on-the-edge fighting envelope that no real life fighter pilot could ever dream of, because they don't have the freedom or intelligence* to explore the environment in such detail. *the freedom of reproducibility and consistence of simulation and the foreign intelligence of enemy weapon systems

I know, but unless you run cold war setups it's even less likely to have merges in that kind of scenario. I've also flown missions with 1,5h+ flight time doing point defense 200 nm from your airbase with no AAR where every pound of fuel matters and you have to think carefully when and how you want to use your weapons because wasting them puts you out of action for more or less the remainder of the fight. We also had some missions where in the initial phase you could CAP for 2-3 hours with AAR only which was quite fun aswell. The trend is that the more serious the type of scenario you're running the much less likely random shit starts happening just like you described. Airquake offers the best learning environment for pure fighting in a dense environment. Essentially there is nothing to worry about other than the fight itself, which gives you a very time efficient training area that has a lot of depth and randomness. It allows you to master the fighting techniques required to win duels and this is essential to all other type of combat flying. Once you understand how these things work you can expand on flight planning, resource management etc. that have more weight in a "realistic" scenario. I might have been a little vague saying that real life tactics have little impact on DCS, what I meant is individual tactics. Group tactics probably have a lot more relevance.

I don't even know how you arrived at this since I'm clearly explaining how online gameplay works, not real life. I do not claim to be an expert of real world tactics, but anyway.. You just made a fool out of yourself by thinking real world tactics apply to DCS. They do not. The only place where real world tactics dominate is BFM and it's not because they mimic reality but rather the experience and training of real fighter pilots compared to your average DCS user. On the other hand the majority BVR tactics are somewhat based on real life phenomenons, but due to DCS mechanics they are developed in a totally different direction. I'm well aware of what is and isn't simulated in DCS and how it affects the "meta" in DCS. Real life issues have absolutely ****all impact on how people fight online, which is what I was describing. Your average DCS user fires at practically 0 pK positions turning around to run away. Fairly low fraction of the online population will push a merge willingly simply because they are not confident in themselves and do not have the skill to control a merge. Once you throw in a lot of terrain people tend to merge more often not because they want to but because there's practically zero supporting infrastructure to help them build the kind of SA you'd have in real life and they fly without any real objective typically resulting in circling around in a valley. In the end what makes a good pilot in real life (minus the physical ability) is basically the same that makes a good one in DCS. The ability to understand the driving factors of any fight and being able to adapt to them.

All you guys must be new here, there has been basically no change in missile guidance since the beginning of FC3 minus the APN update which is a fairly simple change of a 3 breakpoint table gain instead of a single value. The FM changes are cool but when my missile starts actively avoiding the target in terminal phase what does it matter? At least now we know something is in the works in the background.. for the last decade there has been absolutely nothing, I cannot comprehend how a supposed "air combat simulation" blatantly ignores any improvement of completely insane missile behavior that is one of the #1 defining factors when it comes to actual combat. Instead we have more maps and worthless modules with no environment to play in. Great. There are myriads of other small issues that would've only taken a little bit of attention to bridge to something that isn't completely silly. For instance most FC3 aircraft can very often survive frontal missile hits and continue to fire and guide both IR and radar guided missiles despite their radar and/or complete weapons system probably being damaged beyond use and also the pilot most likely being killed in the process (albeit this happens sometimes). It would not have been necessary to have a completely revamped super-duper state of the art damage model to fix this, but rather with some basic scripting to disable certain functions in the jet as a placeholder until a generic solution is available. This seems to be better addressed in FF modules (although I did not specifically test), however for instance this has been an issue that basically plagued some aspects of combat since quite frequently you ended up getting traded by a guy who was essentially dead when he started shooting back. Yet completely unadressed for over a decade. This is my problem. Completely immersion and realism breaking issues go unnoticed and ignored for essentially infinite time. Honestly feels like a storefront simulator. Looks very shiny on the outside but once you start looking inside you discover the mess. I'm not saying *certain other simulators* do a perfect job of simulating every single particle, but they tend to have a better approximation of the end result. However this idea seems to have escaped DCS completely. /Rant

They should go a step further and just give us DCS: F-15C :)

I agree completely. However sadly we are getting completely incoherent module development with no connection to each other. Now we have 2 late 2000s NATO fighters in an environment with a long retired F-14 variant, against some other random timeframe modules and mainly frankenstein low fidelity redfor aircraft. It seems nobody at ED cares at all about this, even though this would be one of the very foundations of having a successful environment. I equivalently don't comprehend why they are sinking loads of resources into trying to hopelessly compete with another WW2 simulator that is a thousandfold better in every aspect except FMs. Imagine if all those resources were focused on core development of modern DCS..

It looks like it's guiding on a totally different target illuminated by something else.

The real problem is that the so called "stable" version is also full of bugs, some existing for years or decades and critical core features being neglected for eternity. Basically ever since I've flown DCS, in order to be able enjoy and excel at flying and employing the aircraft existing in it, you have been absolutely required to not only know how the aircraft and it's systems are supposed to work, but also to follow patch by patch what little bugs get added and understand how exactly those bugs work. In my opinion this combined with a lot of things being straight up ignored in terms of development creates a very toxic environment for the community. Essentially I feel like I'm a walking encyclopedia of A2A combat related bugs (or missing features resulting in absurd and unrealistic behavior, however you want to call it, since very often it gets labeled "this is always how it worked"). The rest I generally choose to ignore but I know other people that are stuck in that corner too.

It's painful to see missiles tracking a target turning at 600 kts only to give up, pull back behind him and intercept a chaff doing 0 kts instead :D If only some kind of ECCM existed to reject completely implausible target behavior..

I posted the same in another thread somewhere. If we have curves and basically complete fine tuning of our axes, why cannot this exist for other critical flight or avionics functions? I just don't understand these double standards.. these things should have been in DCS from the start. You should simply have an option for the specific command where you can define what kind of amplitude you want it to have. Instead we have thousands of threads where people get told they "don't know how to trim". Please, like there is anything to know here. Your aircraft is rolling in one direction, you trim the other way one notch and now you're rolling to the opposite direction.. fantastic.

There are probably many but I'd be careful with tutorials. Instead of looking for tactics you should seek to understand what are the core mechanics driving a BVR engagement. Once you understand them you can much more easily develop your own tactics or be able to employ tactics developed by others. A tactic by itself is of no use unless you know when to use it and why. Some very basic pointers: - missiles have a limited amount of energy and you have relatively infinite, however the missile is more powerful within those limits than you are - guiding platform and missile guidances have several limitations - missiles and aircraft are severely affected by air density, combine this with my first point and you can already draw some very simple yet powerful conclusions (i.e. dragging a missile down into low altitude is a reliable way of reducing the missile's energy even further) - geometry, more specifically geometry of shooter and defender platform at various times of the engagement.. also how proactive and reactive geometry changes affect (i.e. you maneuvering before the bandit shoots at you vs. you maneuvering after he already shot, with various time intervals) the fight There is many more but if you can already cover this you should have a decent foundation. To your RWR question: in general you should not defend missiles after you spot them on RWR. You should observe the bandit's behavior and if he's behaving as if he was fighting you or he's even showing signs that he fired you should be reacting (or pre-acting if you predict it) accordingly. If you react to a missile when your RWR is blinking it's far too late. To put it in a very simple example, if I see a guy drastically climbing at a medium range like 20-30 miles at high speed only to all of a sudden stop, start descending and turns into a crank, this means most likely has a long range lofted shot that he's guiding. Equivalently in another simple scenario, if an ARH capable guy is painting me with his radar (not STT lock) at a good firing range then proceeds to turn around or maneuver in any agressive way you should presume that he did that because he fired at you and he's maneuvering preemptively to deny your shot. The SA is not the pixels on your screen. The SA is the information you have in your head. Just because I cannot see the pixels it doesn't mean all previous information is now erased from my head too. It's important to control how long you stay cold because of course if you stay cold too long then your information is outdated, but if you stay cold too short then the missile might hit you. The important thing here is to make conscious decisions and be aware of what you're doing. This is in my opinion the biggest downfall of the average DCS pilot. They just "do things". Once you are making decisions about what you do, it becomes a lot easier to keep track of what's happening mentally and predict where the bandit should be.

I'm familiar with these problems, but it's clear there were already attempts at fixing and something just went wrong. Having a release train that is incapable of delivering specific changes on demand is a sign of a lot of problems in general. The VR issues are debatable since it's not just "one specific bug" so I can understand how that goes on for a while. I've seen a lot of VR users turn away personally because it is just straight up unplayable. I'm lucky enough to have retained good performance on a normal screen.

Holding back critical bugfixes for a month despite internally being fixed is nonsensical. Looking at the Viper datalink for example..

Put 8 jets or more in a 20 x 20 nm airspace and it's chaos. You're lucky in fact because if you have AWACS the datalink gives you about 90% of the awaraness with no effort. You still need the skills to interpret it but it's a totally different challenge than building and maintaining all that information by yourself. You simply have false expectations, with no comms and the idiotic AI it will always be chaos. Focus on individual BVR skills and building / maintaining SA in a crowded environment and this will give you the ability to monitor your environment and quickly adapt to the changes. Even if you had 7 skilled player wingmen with voice comms it'd still be chaos. The easiest way to fight a big group of bandits is by keeping a clear front and making sure you are close to your friendlies and don't end up mixed with the bad guys. Fighting along one axis significantly reduces eventual SA problems you run into in extended fights and gives you clear exit windows. There are some other stuff you can do but once you start getting to merge territory you're just straight up gambling. Although in case of AI wingmen I think sticking close to your friendlies is relatively irrelevant.

The 120C loft looks quite efficient too, although in the Viper you don't yet have a loft cue and requires good manual pitch control to not send your missile to orbit :) However the endgame guidance is still very susceptible to even arguably poor defensive maneuvering i.e. a target performing a 3-4 g slice turn chaffing only momentarily entering a notch at best, while flying at 20-30k ft with no terrain cover to be seen within 15-20 miles of missile LOS. For a missile with an active radar range of < 8 miles I'm very surprised something like that can happen, unless range gating is not simulated at all. Overall I think the general guidance has improved a lot, especially at early and mid flight, but next to no changes in the endgame and this tends to outweight what was gained in other areas. It seems there is still no extrapolation in case the target is lost, it just rather tends to overpull the same way quite consistently resulting in unsolvable geometry, even if it finds the target again. One would expect that a modern missile such as the 120 family has smart enough ECCM to deal with a lost target for 100-200 ms that had a steady previous data, indicating that it is performing a somewhat "stable" maneuver i.e. targets pulling consistent g without any sudden jinks.

This sounds cool, sadly however in DCS even if you're careful about G buildup and have done G warmup you can barely sustain 8 G. I also think there are problems with the FM too but I think the biggest problem is the fact you cannot sustain 9 G for more than 3-4 sec until you gloc. I expect around M0.8 you would have your best turnrates at 9 G at PS = 0 while i.e. other aircraft like a Hornet will probably bleed at that airspeed pulling 9 G. I don't get the point of a 9 G fighter specifically designed for high speed turn rate fights if it the pilot inside would be incapable of sustaining 9 G for atleast 2-3 full turns, which would typically result in a kill if you have 1-2 degrees/s of turnrate advantage. There are plenty videos out there pilots even taking 12 G for 15 sec.. now those guys are probably the top, but still.

These are some very basic level sustained turn rates for 100% internal fuel, no load Viper / Hornet with the pylons installed ~ 100 ft ASL: f-18 full fuel 100 ft, no load - 360 kts 6g 17.5 deg/s - 420 kts 7g 18.5 deg/s - 460 kts 8g 17 deg/s - 500 kts 8g 17.5 deg/s f-16 full fuel 100ft, no load - 370 kts 5.5g 16.5 deg/s - 430 kts 6.5g 17 deg/s - 470 kts 7.5g 17.5 deg/s - 500 kts 8g 17 deg/s I'm not saying that this is conclusive since it may vary with remaining fuel but it backs what I've experienced and heard from many friends.. you're losing by a pretty wide margin below 450 kts and above that you're restricted to 7.5 - 8 g otherwise you're glocing. This is the region where you have real 9g capability and where the jet would shine because the Hornet would most likely severely overbleed speed pulling 9 g while you can maintain yours.

1c against a good Mirage is auto loss in every platform. The problem is you lose 2c against things where 2c should be your winning card.