tovivan

They already are, just check the statistics on the Situational Awareness. They will be even more so if we don't get a modern Red fighter. One of the tactics Harrier pilots used and that caught the Argentinians by surprise is Harrier's ability to fly at extremely slow speed and hover. They used that to get the enemy to overshoot and then send a missile up their six. In a modified way that's exctly the ability thrust vectoring gives Su-30. I agree, but modify that to 2000's, not the 80's. We already have plenty enough and too many frames from the 80's, now we need something modern and up-to-date. Don't forget that one of it's enemies will be one of the newest and best fighters in the world, the Eurofighter. Which makes me wonder, isn't it classified? How could the developers get enough documentation for a module? Why can't a Su-35 or a MiG-35 be made then? IIRC there already some British planes announced, Vulcan, Vampyre and so on? If the market was big enough, the size of MSFS, then it would've been a commercial unsuccess. The thing is that the community is so small and the offerings so few and far between (and many players seem quite affluent) it's quite possible that almost any module gets grabbed up just to be able to fly something new for a change, especially during sales. Even if that person never cared for that plane or will even fly it longer than a few weeks the more affluent player will still buy the module. Thus it's simply impossible to foretell how the module will fare commercially. The Indians have Su-30s, plus plenty of other countries and the Americans and the British have had plenty of chance to see them up close, study them and see their worth in air combat against own planes. I have no doubt the various intelligence agencies have produced thousands of pages of reports on this plane and what it's capable of. And I'm pretty sure they're objective in their assesment. Thus, not only is it being exported and thus it's secretiveness is in question and documentation not necessarily being out-of-reach, but it's also quite realistic that enough data (and REAL data, not Red-bashing, Blue-glorifying propaganda) is available in the West to serve as development documentation. Either publicly accessible or through FoIA. Or LNS could just ask any of the other air forces that fly them, their pilots would probably help. I'm not very familiar with the plane, but what is so good about MiG-23 that quite a few people want it? From the little I know it's old and not really competitive nowadays. I've been ill for the entire past week which also means unending splitting headaches and just a few minutes ago someone elsewhere riled me up, so please forgive me if I'm suffering a sense of humor failure and responded a bit too sharply. I tried to edit it after several readings, but I'm still feeling my brain throb in agony when I move even for a mm. :beer: Well I don't have any appreciation for a plane I never cared about and am not gonna apologise for it. We're also not getting these planes for free and they're actually quite expensive. Each plane is the price of a full game and to operate them properly you need peripherals that cost pretty penny as well. I know too many people who can't afford these modules even on 70% sale. The problem is not the plane itself, it's the bigger picture. It's the tactical imbalance in the game that will become horrific when all the modules we talk about get released. Just think of the Eurofighter which IS a super-duper plane. I'm not talking about deathmatch competitiveness. I'm one of the players who flies for enjoyment and not stats, but when you get killed again and again without being able to mount a good resistance because the enemy has such good kit it simply overwhelms you with it (especially if they're good pilots to begin with and also have numbers on their side) it takes all the enjoyment out of the game for me. It's one of the reasons I stopped flying on 104. It just wasn't fun anymore. There are already too few planes in development and ALL OF THEM are known to be Western kit. And then there is this one unknown... it could be either. Thus this one plane is crucial, it's significance is bigger than it is itself. It can either help restore balance at least a little or it will further the "unfairness" of the situation. It will either make it still sensible to fly Red in the face of all the modern opposition or it will help convince players to abandon the red side. As you know, Red side has 3 fighters younger than 40 years and, against the flood of Western kit coming, it doesn't look this situation will change for at least the next 2 years. At least I didn't see any Red fighter on the module timeline thread. True, Blue has only 1 fighter atm, BUT that one plane dominates all of the Red planes through it's superior avionics and missiles. I don't think anyone serious would dispute that AMRAAM has no equal opponent on the Red side. 2 of those planes still have SFM, only 1 has PFM. Then again, that PFM is so bad the plane borders on unflyable, so maybe SFM is a blessing in disguise. 1 of these planes still has 2D cockpit, no 6dof (witch to land on short runways) and a simple exterior model (hopefully to change with 1.5). None of the 3 has clickable cockpit or high fidelity. All of these planes have systems from the 80's. And none can go equally against the Eagle in a fair and equal fight. Statistics and mp server experiences prove one-sidedness. The Eagle will also be joined by a large line-up of planes with high fidelity, clickable cockpits, some of them planes that make Russian defence strategists highly worried in real life. Sadly the only plane that will be usable for people doing role-playing of Red pilots will be the Tomcat because it's used by one of the 3 main Red countries in real world: Iran. Don't misunderstand the "sadly" part, the plane is awesome by itself and I can only suspect politics, corruption and backroom deals are responsible for why it was phased out by the USN in favour of the Bug as it was still damn good for it's mission and superior in the fighter-part compared to the Bug. I will maybe even buy it, dunno yet. But it's still not really a Red plane. In genuity regarding Red heritage it's like a BMW 316 whose owner glued the M sticker on to fool people he's got the M and not the cheapest model (and it happens more times than you think lol) or a Fiat Uno sporting the Ferrari stallion (seen those as well). :D Anyway, I hope I explained my position as politely as possible given the explained situation.

Don't worry, I've seen enough apologists to know it's useless trying to convince you even when you can see yourself that that plane has issues and not just in LEVEL flight at any alt, but also in dives, pulling out of dives, etc. It's lauded as one of the best fighters in the world, so why are people stopping flying it in DCS? As that old saying goes "there are none so blind as those who will not see". So, I'm done.

:D :megalol: Loved it! :D :thumbup:

And which did you get?

Ahem, stalling at 600kmh in level flight? :megalol: Also, if it's "this argument again" then obviously a lot more people disagree with you than they agree and there IS something seriously wrong with the current FM. Considering this, it will then be "this argument again" until it gets fixed.

Exactly! And contrary to Viggen, it's revolutionary and definitely unique... Harriers from Falkland war would disagree. :thumbup: Also, the 30 has the avionics and weapons to survive (if not kill the enemy) until the target is in dogfight range. And then it dominates. Imagine an F-15 trying to make a circle/loop/whatever where you can at leisure turn the nose far into his path and either let go a 73 or just guns. Or 15 trying to follow you into a loop/circle that you then abort at the top and do a quick spin to let him fly past you and you then using TV to immediately be on his six... From what I've been seeing on the forums there are many more people wanting to fly a modern Russian aircraft that would be able to hold it's own against the flood of super-duper-high-space-tech Western kit coming (Eurofighter, Tomcat, Hornet, Superhornet, Mirage F1, Mirage 2000...). Many people wanting a Russian plane = more money from sales. A niche plane/worse performer like Viggen= less money from sales. :beer: Though in the end LNS can disappoint us all and come out with something completely third! Completely relative. I've met people that impressed me by the simple fact they managed to stop at a red light, but that doesn't mean they were good drivers. :dunno:

Yeah, I'm currently running the game at 1600x900 and all settings at min or medium to get somewhat bearable framerates. Actually noticed performance drop with each new update over the course of this year, together with a strange increase of problems with lag on servers since this summer. I'm gathering money for CPU+mobo (and maybe RAM) upgrade (either i5 4670K or 4690K; if I get a good discount MAYBE i7 4770K; with a Z87 or Z97 mobo), so sadly can't upgrade the gfx card as well and even that upgrade will have me eating rat food and drinking sewer water for the next year. :(

To add something constructive to speculation. LNS said that one of the mystery planes will have ground radar, right? Correct me if wiki's wrong, but doesn't the Russian Bars (N011M) radar (in Su-30) have A-to-G capability? :D "In the air-to-surface mode the radar is capable of detecting ground and naval based moving targets, determining their location and maintaining a track on two surface targets at once.[1] The N011 is capable of detecting the group of tanks target to a maximum range of 40–50 km and a destroyer sized target to a range of 80–120 km.[1][4] Bars also features a mapping mode using either real beam, doppler beam sharpening or Synthetic aperture radar with a maximum resolution of 10 meters.[1] The Kh-31 anti-radiation missile is also compatible with the radar.[3]" Could this mean they're making a Su-30? :thumbup: Or even Su-34? :pilotfly: If they are I'm gonna love them forever! Lol, no worries, no-one's gonna flame anyone. :beer: I actually didn't think of using ECM because there was no other enemy group on the map, only these two TCs that were so far I didn't consider them a threat. I didn't see them on radar because they were too far, only knew they were there because of my AWACS (that they then shot down :cry: ). As said was at 1500m alt max and among foothills, both factors I mistakenly believed were enough. The biggest problem I see, next to the fact that they could see me on radar from that range and that his missile actually reached me, is that there was no frantic beeping from my RWR (it was turned on). Phoenix is a semi-active missile, right? Shouldn't it set off the RWR? Yeah, noticed it's flying awfully fast. Was actually holding my head in desperation. Gonna pull the Tomcats out of that mission, they're too much of a headache right now. Btw., is there any East SAM site capable of shooting down MISSILES, like Patriot does for the West side? I could make the AWACS and the tanker immortal, but where would be the fun in that... Thank you lord! :)

No offense, but he wasn't talking about graphic quality EDGE vs older releases. :beer: Agreed! I like those videos too! :D I don't think it's actually possible, personally I've never been able to go more than 12km high with FC3 planes. Can't remember which plane it was, but it could go only 500kmh (F2 view) with full afterburners at max alt and refused to go higher. T'was last year so I can't give any exact details. Especially the Su-27 behaves extremely badly at +10km and at times is almost uncontrollable (at 11km it floundered for a bit in level flight, yawing left and right like a ship without main mast on heavy seas, then suddenly suffered uncontrollable roll-and-dive -- similar to what can sometimes happen at low alt). Hopefully 1.5/2 will fix the 27's FM.

Is that F-15C that I see on the list the FC3 beta module or is a separate module of MiG-15 fidelity with clickable cockpit and so on?

Thanks for your reply, Murrey! :thumbup: Right now I'm running a Bulldozer clocked to 4 Ghz, 8GB 1333 mhz ram and HD 6770. 21 and 8 usually run at 20-22 FPS, 15 at 33-35 FPS. MiG-29S at 50 FPS (guess soon I will have to say goodbye to such nice fps :cry: ). Looking to get a new Intel cpu, mobo and possibly ram if I find a good enough deal.

I can guarantee a day one prepurchase as long as it's a modern Russian jet fighter with modern avionics, radar, missiles, etc. Or a MiG-31 with R-37M. - I namely got a taste of the future last night, what it will be like when Tomcat comes. Took off from Nalchik in 27 with buddy and managed to get to the foothills just south of Nalchik at 1500m alt. Enemy F-14's were about 20km north of Kutaisi at 10km alt. From there they sent us a spam of AIM-54. We never got a launch or lock message, suddenly we're just exploding and falling down in flaming balls. That's a distance of about 200km iirc. At roughly the same distance they also took down our AWACS and tanker that were far back in the "safe" zone, "protected" by SAMs. I don't really care for playing a game where I get killed by an enemy from 200km without even getting an opportunity to evade, much less shoot back.

We actually briefly touched that incident in my 20th Century Eastern Europe History class years back at Uni. There's more to it than what meets the eye. The backstory is that the US were using spy planes for quite a while before that masquerading as civilian airliners to spy on anything they could and everybody knew it. Of course it's easy to portray shooting down innocent civilians as "typical barbarism of a brutal/inhumane totalitarian regime", but the truth is never as clear-cut as that. Did the pilot know there were actual civilians in the plane? Or did he think there was a chance it was the crew of the intelligence-gathering equipment dressed in civilian clothes IF he could even see the people inside? Did the GCI know? Did the General who ordered the shooting down know with absolute certainty? Or was there enough doubt to think "the Americans are up to their usual tricks" and were exploiting protection given to them by using a civilian-looking airplane? Was there maybe something extremely top-secret taking place/being there right at that time in that area when suddenly an airplane appeared that could've been a spy plane? Btw., that's not the only case of an airliner falling prey to a military: a US Navy ship shot down an Iranian airliner (Iran Air Flight 655) in 1988, quoting: "in Iranian airspace, over Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf, and on the flight's usual flight path". The ship was knowingly violating Iranian waters at that moment. The US never apologies (to anyone, even the families of the victims) for the shoot-down, nor did it ever accept legal liability. There were no tribunals called for either of these incidents. IIRC, without going to check, it was over USSR territory. Spies are and have always been treated differently than openly military-units. Due to the nature of their work there is no quarter given to them and were usually executed after being interrogated. For example, during WWI on the Western Front it was enough someone was caught with rubber gloves for him to be summarily executed as a spy by the Germans (German Western defences had an electrical wire system as part of the protection). Some secret agencies tried to prevent that by giving their agents military ranks (British SOE) and even having them wear rank insignia on sabotage missions, but that usually didn't work. Opponent's order (on both sides) was almost always to execute after interrogation to get useful information. Unless there was a chance to recruit them as a double-agent (England-Spiel). And if they catch a foreign/hostile plane over their territory and it turns out it's a spy plane then very few countries would hesitate shooting it down if they had the capabilities and no-one would question their right to do so. Not only is such a plane violating sovereignity of that country's skies, but it's also spying. As said, spies are always treated differently. The proof of such spying by losing it's plane got the US into quite an uncomfortable diplomatic mess. To get back on topic: Totally agree! It would bring a new aspect to air engagements, as a MiG-25 would be able to engage and disengage at leisure, but still being hampered by obsolete systems and missiles. Almost boom-and-zoom. PLUS the MiG-25 isn't really a top-secret, is it? I mean the American and the Japanese had one for a few days and they took it apart (the Soviet engineers found American and Japanese electronics hacked onto the systems and the fuselage was full of holes), so it's technologies have been discovered decades ago. That's what spurned the development of the MiG-31 - move-on from technologies that were known to the West and get back advantage given by using secret tech. IIRC the entire Western scientific community was laughing because they found some obsolete technologies in the plane. It stopped laughing when they discovered those obsolete technologies allowed the 25 to operate after a nuclear strike and EMP blast while their own planes would've fallen out of the sky. If the Russians are not forthcoming with the documentation and specifications required to make a DCS level module, then the only thing ED has to do is file a FoIA request in the US for the reports IF they're not public-access area to being with... :D Thus there is no reason or even excuse not to make a 25. :D /case

Good news about the fixes! Sorry for not coming back earlier, but after my last post I managed to get the script run just as I want it and has thus replaced a much bigger mission for the combat flying with my buddy. There's a big difference between waiting time for him to join if my computer sends his a 100kb file at 50 kbs upload or 35mb file. ;-) Settings I'm using are Sometimes we get double-CAP spawns (Tomcats and Eagles, lol), but that just makes it a bit more interesting. :D Had to build up quite a protection zone for the AWACS though because some enemies DO get through occasionally and then it's bye-bye AWACS.

Out of curiosity, what are the specs of the computer that was used for the stream? At what FPS do MiG-21 and/or Mi-8 run on it? Was the map empty or were there AI traffic or maybe even other players on it? Was the starting airfield empty? These are just a few questions that I'm wondering about the circumstances in which the video was taken... trying to get an impression just what kind of improvements, if any, 1.5 will give to less powerful computers like mine. Also wondering whether the L-39 is better optimised than the MiG-21 and Mi-8. For example, flying in the MiG-15 I have much higher FPS on same map and same mission than in the 21 or 8, at least 50% more FPS if not 80%.

Thanks for the tip! :pilotfly: :thumbup: IIRC the R3R has a range of only 7km so if you let an enemy get that close to you without you noticing you've already done a fatal mistake and are dead anyway by the hands of any Russian plane flown by at least moderately capable pilot. That range is nearly in 73 launch range. Much closer and it's a guns dogfight where you'll get taken down by anything from 109 to a MiG-15. Whate are you flying? American or Russian? Are you trying to stick to the ground or rule the sky from above?

Nope, they are just called "retards". :P They don't have plane-to-plane datalink yet, we are still waiting for that. Don't forget 80's avionics, radars, missiles... Looking at large-scale battles and statistics on Situational Awareness the F-15 is the clearly dominant plane in air-to-air and AMRAAM vastly outperforms anything Russians field. Example: "Out of the 25 aerial kills, none was by an R-27ER missile, 4 by R-27ET, 1 by R-73, 2 by cannon and 18 by AIM-120." http://sa-sim.com/rf1-battlefacts-th...reign-supreme/ True, but I can't help but wonder how long to wait for the PFM. And whether it will be a mess to fly like the Su-27 after it received it. And whether it will get it's RL maneuverability (irl 29 manuevers better than 27 and 15, quite the opposite in the game). Quite honestly I would be more grateful if we would be suddenly surprised with the K version as replacement for S for the FC3. At least something to give us a chance against the upcoming Eurofighter, Mirages, Tomcat, Hornet, Super Hornet, etc. As nicely made as they are and as much as I enjoy flying them, sadly the MiG-15 and 21 just don't cut it.

+1 Worst case scenario it would server as an excuse for that other side to start an all-out war, best case scenario a diplomatic mess that would take a lot of time, effort and money to resolve. Unless of course that other plane was shot down violating sovereign airspace and refusing to land or go away, that is (U-2 for example, that was a big mess for Americans, not the Soviets).

Flying air combat over the last week with a friend extensively we noticed something peculiar about the ET. Too many times it fails to lock, even with LA given in IRST, range much lower than launch range for maneuvering target and circumstances being optimal if not outright perfect. That entails shooting at a unaware target from it's 5-7 o'clock at 8-12km range. The LA is given and missile is fired, but then it simply flies forward ignoring the target, even if no countermeasures were deployed and even with the target being quite close and on 12 o'clock of the plane launching it. The lock probability is right now about 50% for me - and I'm not talking about missile going off because of countermeasures. Also, the 73 is quite prone to being duped by flares. Can happen that I use up all of my IR rockets on a single AI target even though I have superior position. Then I either have to use cannon or the radar missiles. Ironically the ER (and 77) has been more lock-and-hit reliable in dogfight this last week than the IRs.

That's a sad situation for a Russian-made game and developer, isn't it? :cry:

Um, the announced DCS 2 performance improvements? :dunno:

Is the 33's model getting redone or something? Cause the 27's template has been out for quite a while.

I've been using this in conjunction with my T.16000M and I have to say that I'm more satisfied with this Saitek's build quality than the Thrustmaster's. It's lot more solid and it's parts definitely didn't start wobbling after just a week! It's got 3 levers you can program any way you want (in DCS I use them for separate engine management, while using throttle on joystick itself for radar range, elevation and mfd range; in IL-2 I use the levers for throttle, flaps, prop pitch). The best thing is you can combine it with more of them, creating almost limitless possibilities, like this: Limited only with the space on your desk and the number of USB ports you have. You also get additional lever "caps", so if you want they are either all black and rounded, or red or blue. Each quadrant comes with 3 levers with a LOT of up-down (compared to only 3cm on 16000) and 6 buttons that give a lot of different options in DCS. I have one button always mapped to push to talk for TS, another for wheel-brakes and another for gear, so I don't need to take my hand off it. Was not even that expensive, only 45 EUR locally (the only computer stuff I've seen in my country that's cheaper than in the rest of Europe - usually our prices are 20% higher - and paychecks only 1/3 of our neighbors'). You don't need the most expensive stick, the most expensive throttle and the most expensive rudders to be a good pilot! Don't waste money on gear, rather spend time on improving yourself. The best pilot I ever saw (and that was in IL-2 Cliffs of Dover patched with TF patches - where you fly propeller planes, close dogfight and careful engine management) was a guy using an ancient Logitech 3D Extreme without any pedals or separate throttle. I'm not sure he was even using TrackIR/Freetrack. Yet he dominated without competition everyone else, even those with the most expensive setups, that spent over 1000 eur on sticks, rudders and pedals only...

Soonest: release of 1.5. Release of 1.5? Rather not ask. :smilewink:

You planning on getting some impressionable Russian girl in the chopper and take her to heaven and back or how would you fog up your windows? ;-) :D