Xavven

Sure are getting a lot of these. I once again respectfully suggest the devs label the HARMS on 4/6 as inoperable or remove them from the menu.

I tested this for myself over my lunch break and my conclusion is the F-14B Ace AI is fairly tame. I will say that the F-16C handles like a wallowing pig if you keep 4x AIM-120 and 2x AIM-9X on it, compared to clean. The added weight and drag prolonged the fight but the result was always the same -- the F-14B Ace AI loses in both 1C and 2C flow. This isn't meant as a dig at anyone, just that I agree that beating the AI says nothing about whether DCS's F-16C's flight model is correct or not.

LOL! Yeah, I went through both USA's and Russia's "Air Defense" list and none of them look exactly like that. I dropped JSOW-A's in a test map on both EWRs and they were reliably destroyed, or else reached critical damage and were destroyed after catching fire for about 15 seconds. Are you sure it wasn't a tracked vehicle? Also what country did it belong to?

Hmm, not sure then... Was it this?

I'll upload a track. @CybrSlydr what radar installation did you find was virtually immune to JSOW damage?

^All good tips If I may nitpick, it's possible to enter a merge with 100% fuel if you had taken 2 fuel tanks and weren't all the way through them by the time you jettison them shortly prior to entering threat range.

You can also open the mission planner before you start (if singleplayer) and edit your loadout. The Liberation devs will probably add the CBU-105 in their next update if I were to take a guess. They were pretty quick about adding JDAMs for the F-16.

Can you manually account for the drift and set your SPI a couple hundred meters against the wind's direction?

Yes. @totmacher has. Here are his charts: https://dcs.silver.ru/70,73 Here's how he tests. I'm guessing he uses some mod to fly the aircraft in nearly perfect parameters.

Some of the comments under the YouTube video suggest these are dummy or reduced power warheads so that the testers could better observe the accuracy of the weapon. The real weapon supposedly achieves on average mostly mobility kills, not catastrophic kills, so the massive explosions we get out of CBU-97 and CBU-105s in DCS are way over the top if that information is to be believed.

Okay, here are two tracks, one against Veteran AI that has 100% fuel and pylons, and another against Ace AI that has 70% fuel and no pylons (which was much harder!). In both tracks I'm 100% fuel with no pylons. I had to restart a LOT of times until I got tracks that were all 2-circle, since the AI likes to climb at the start and force a 1-circle fight, and also dogfights are messy and the AI can reverse the turn and force me to use tactics other than 2-circle, which is fine by me but defeats the purpose of this -- which is to demonstrate where in a 2-circle fight to pull maximum G and when to relax G. You'll see I'm pulling when I'm losing altitude and at 350-450 knots, or when I'm pulling into the control zone, and relaxing when I gain altitude and/or when I'm low on energy and trying to get back to 450. Also not depicted: Me losing sight and restarting Me accidentally letting my airspeed run away to 550+ knots and restarting Bad gunnery worthy of internet shame and restarting F-16 100 Fuel No Pylons vs MiG-29S Ace 70 Fuel No Pylons.trk F-16 100 Fuel No Pylons vs MiG-29S Veteran 100 Fuel with Pylons.trk

I only got to the 5:30 mark in your video but I think I get the idea. It's hard to tell definitively because you don't have your helmet mounted display on (or at least it's not being captured in your video) so I can't tell your indicated airspeed or the G you're pulling, but my general observation is that you're spending all your energy pulling as hard as you can to get nose-on and taking high-aspect gun shots (HAGS). I am guessing your other car is a hornet? That works when you are 1-circle and you want to get your turn radius down (which necessitates spending as much airspeed as you can as fast as you can). But that's not as good in a 2-circle fight until very specific circumstances, like the final pull into the control zone on the offense, or guns defense. Regulate how hard you pull on the stick to keep your airspeed in certain parameters, and for turns that have a vertical component you will be pulling harder over the top of your turn to get your nose started downhill, then relax to build airspeed, then as you approach 450 knots you'll bring the G back on. This means that your target will seem to gain angles on you while you're unloading, but then you make it back up during your hard pull as you cash in your altitude. It takes patience and reading your opponent's energy state to win a 2C fight with a low-aspect gun shot. I'll see if I can upload a track if I have time tonight. Edit: other observations -- you pull pure or lead pursuit too soon to get snap shots and this causes a flight path overshoot. It doesn't look like you're getting radar lock in time to get to EEGS L5 a lot of times. And I just skipped to 8:00 and it looks like your helmet mounted display is up. Yep, it's just that you're pulling on the stick too much and bleeding all the energy out of your plane before your first 300 degrees of turn.

Airspeed for best sustained turn is a good number to know, but in a 2C fight where you're anything except horizontal, you are going to be exchanging altitude for airspeed and back. You might be 350 or less (even less if your opponent is low on energy and you're trying to prevent a flight path overshoot) over the top of the turn and 450 at the bottom of the turn as your nose crosses the horizon. You should be constantly reacting to what your opponent is doing and not flying a set airspeed. Against Ace AI MiG-29 with pylons removed (not just the "empty" loadout but pylons completely removed) and 50% fuel against an F-16 with pylons removed and 100% fuel and a guns only neutral merge, I end up defensive quite early in the fight, but he ends up running out of fuel and crashing just as I'm getting to 2500-3000 lbs remaining. If I bump him up to 75% fuel then I can get to the control zone using 2C tactics and kill him as I'm reaching 2000-2500 lbs remaining. So it's a tough fight but depends on initial fuel levels. OP what are your starting conditions, specifically fuel levels and whether your and your opponent's pylons are attached?

Yes, they do formation take offs, or yes, they shelved them due to safety concerns? Sorry, just want to erase any doubts!

The DLZ changes depending on aspect and speed, selected radar range, etc. The DLZ has a rectangle for the RTR (range turn and run) which is in essence a no-escape-zone where your missile is very likely to hit unless duped by flares. Above the closed rectangle is an open shall we say "three-sided-rectangle" missing its right vertical line. It reminds me of a squarish pirate's hook. That depicts the RPI (range probable intercept) zone, where you missile has a chance to hit but it depends on how the target reacts and how capable they are of maneuver. So in your screenshot, I only see the RTR zone, a fully closed rectangle. That is your DLZ, it just isn't showing the RPI zone because for your selected radar range (5 nautical miles), that entire range is RTR, likely because your target is flying towards you. If your target was flying away from you with max afterburner going 600 knots, then you'd see your RTR zone shrink and you'd see that pirates hook of the RPI range grow.

Mavericks. Favorite loadout is 2x AIM-120, 1x AGM-65H, 2x fuel, 2x GBU-12

1-circle at 450 knots? Have I been doing 1-circle wrong? I cash in as much airspeed as possible to get turn radius down...

That is both beautiful and terrifying Thanks for the link. I knew HOBS would be cool but that's even better than I imagined

I have not. Got a link?

It's common. It happens to me most often when using the TGP and pressing TMS fwd. It tries to auto-handoff, then fails and I can't switch from PRE to BORE or VIS afterward. If I have some time I'll make a track.

There are really in depth training documents and videos on the subject but the pointers that helped me the most were: Don't perform a negative-G nose-over (don't push the stick forward into a dive). Fly up to the left or right side of the target as if you were flying the base leg of a traffic pattern and turning to final, except the glide slope is more like 30 or 45 degrees Roll in to the target (pretend it's the runway) and pull positive G while entering a dive. Roll out gently so that the target is bracketed by your pitch ladder. Don't worry about the CCIP bomb fall line yet. Just get the target horizontally between your pitch ladder and level your wings. Next you choose your Aim Off Point (AOP). This means putting your flight path marker past the target by some distance. The closer the AOP to the target, the closer you're going to be when you pickle, and vice versa. There are tables and charts for choosing the correct AOP depending on your dive angle, speed, altitude, etc. but it's certainly possible to learn it by feel. Experiment until you get the general idea if you want. Next I put in a little bit of forward stick pressure in order to hold the AOP stationary (or close to it). Definitely not enough to get to 0 or negative G, but I often end up with less than 1 G. Fly that way, making gentle corrections as necessary, allowing the CCIP pipper to climb up to the target from the bottom of your HUD. I haven't learned yaw correction personally, so I just use roll to correct for left-right error. Pitch should not be used to move the CCIP pipper up and down the HUD -- it should only be used to hold the AOP stationary, and you let the pipper track up the HUD naturally. Then you just time your pickle button for when "the thing is on the thing"

I think it means they have it fixed in their current branch of development but it hasn't been released to open beta yet. In other words, it's in the next patch. It's bad development practice to push individual fixes to open beta or production because of the overhead and the chance you introduce other bugs. The usual cadence is you have a sprint, get a bunch of fixes and new features together in a patch, then send that through QA (quality assurance) and if it passes, then you push.

Thanks for the info on your previous post link. I definitely learned something today. You could suppress a SAM site by tossing 4 JSOWs at it, or 4 (or hell, 6) mavericks, and for systems that have the ability to shoot incoming missiles, they would use up ammunition on them that would otherwise be used on other mission aircraft. No HARMs needed necessarily. And if they don't shoot your JSOWs or mavericks down, well then they die I honestly have to agree here, but not because I think HARMs on 4/6 would be the only solution to the boredom equation here. I think it could still be exciting if we had competent AI wingmen who could use their HARMs in a more coordinated way with the player leading the flight, and then if you still think having fuel tanks on 4/6 instead of additional HARMs is boring for lack of action in a single sortie, I would suggest you take some Mk-82s or CBUs on 4/6 for DEAD followup after the HARMs take out the engagement radars. Unfortunately as it stands I think the wingman AI is really lacking, so adding more F-16s to your flight with more HARMs doesn't help enough. It is pretty clear at this point that ED is not changing their mind on 4/6 HARMs, so personally my message to ED would be 1) improve F-16 AI HARM employment (and F-16 AI in general) 2) remove HARM from the dropdown for stations 4/6 or add an "inoperable" label to it. That sounds really fun. My multiplayer experience has come up really short of that, so honestly I prefer singleplayer for a variety of reasons. If the AI was any good then a lot of the need for unrealistically heavy ordnance loadouts could be mitigated by having more F-16s in your flight, at least for singleplayer folks like me. As a side note, I also tried using the alt-J keys to jump into my other AI F-16s in my flight. I figured it's like getting an "instant reload" of ordnance every time I do it. This would be a workaround to the AI being lacking, but unfortunately I get strange behavior from the F-16 I left behind (jumped out of). Like, it'll fly off in a straight line until it runs out of fuel and crashes. So, no dice there either *sigh* Surely you've heard of the JDAM Blues? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ0EVXaaXug Seems to me pilots complain about the boredom plenty! We all want different things from DCS. The fact that I'm not flying a real F-16 means that I make up for it in getting near constant action in DCS. I have no desire to in DCS fly a 6 hour mission crossing the Adriatic sea, doing AAR a bunch of times, being in the AO for 45 minutes, and then flying home without firing a single missile, and then waking up the next day and doing that again and again. Of course there are DCS players who do enjoy that and will gladly tell me it's about the systems, following correct procedures and radio comms, etc. I like all that too but I want to blow shit up at the end of the day. What can I say other than I totally agree.

I voted "no" but only because the question is so broad I don't know where you intended to draw the line. Could I suggest a new poll but state specifically which weapons you want allowed on 4/6?

Huh... Must be using that new non-flammable fuel.