WinterH

Can't find the individual videos/comments/posts etc now, but I'm pretty sure that ED staff, afair including Wags did say that a few times.

Except they aren't, original F-4E had no slats, nor the later RWR. In any case however, what we are getting is going to be two F-4E variants (as you probably know well, a letter does not denote a clear-cut variant in fighters, and the have various blocks and updates over time to significantly change what the aircraft is). First one is from 1974ish, but also with the possibility to add later weapons that were compatible without much in the way of changing the aircraft. This is basically the "definitive F-4E" that can roleplay both earlier Vietnam F-4Es to some degree, but also fit with international F-4E service very well from 70s all the way up to 90s. It will also probably be the variant to see most often on usual Cold War servers. This variant is known in short as "DSCG". Second variant to come later in development is F-4E "DMAS", roughly a very late 70s to 80s upgrade, operated mainly by USAF, but also exported in small numbers. This was mainly an upgrade for strike role, with a better navigation system, digital bombing computer with CCIP mode, a better (and also a lot heavier/draggier) targeting pod etc. So, air to air missiles it looks like we'll have avaiable in both variants: - AIM-9 Sidewinder family including B,J,P rear aspect variants, as well as P-3,P-5,L,M all aspect variants. I'd expect Cold War servers probably not including L and M, maybe not even P-5. - AIM-7 Sparrow family including E,E-2,F, and looks like M. Likewise, servers will probably allow up to F, but we'll see. Manuals from up to early 80s speak of AIM-7F at the latest as far as I recall, but looks like M will be possible as an option too. As for the air to ground, for DSCG: - AGM-65 Mavericks, I think up to D or G, not sure, and I don't remember Heatblur clarifying possible Maverick versions yet. It is possible to carry up to 6 of them, and it is also possible to still carry 4 sidewinders over the Mavericks, tho weight and drag wise it wouldn't be "fun" experience. - AGM-45 Shrike anti radar missiles. Cool to have some SEAD capability. But the missiles are truely quite garbage :)) Up to 4 can be carried, and to be honest, if you want to even hope to hit anything, you better have 4 - All sorts of iron bombs and cluster bombs, I think it is possible to have up to 20 Mk-82s on. There is some computed bombing capability, but more akin to that on A-4E. - GBU-8 TV guided large warhead bombs, maybe GBU-15 too, which has an extended range over the 8, as well as a less horrible sensor. Some suggest AGM-62 may also be a possibility, normally a Navy/Marines weapon, but during Vietnam War some Air Force birds did use it from a shared base afaik. No "man in the loop" capability with any though. That is later during mid 80s for the DMAS version with a datalink pod. - Lots of rockets of either FFAR/Hyrda variety or I think Zunis are an option too despite also normally being a Navy weapon. - Heatblur didn't show anything of sort, but I think submunition dispensers similar to Soviet/Russian KMGU could also be a possibility. You can see CBU-2s on A-4E, if we get some it'd possibly be those. - Laser guided bombs from Paveway family. - Pave Spike day-only targeting pod with no auto tracking and limited cueing options for self lasing with LGBs. DMAS will add: - GBU-15 for certain, along with its datalink pod for controlling the bomb post-drop - Pave Tack targeting pod which is FLIR, so night usage is also possilbe along with much easier spotting of targets. It has some automatic tracking features and better optical capabilities too. It is however, HUGE and heavy, and uses the centerline pylon. Unlike earlier Phantom, DMAS can't use smaller and lighter Pave Spike that went on forward Sparrow pylon anymore.

Well except that "myth" has been what ED and Wags always used to say explicitly "we are open to 3rd parties doing it" etc. The reason ED themselves don't want to do it is many of the devs are Russian nationals or straight up living in Russia, and military secrets laws over there seem to be pretty open to interpretation if one wants to just arbitrarily decide something is not kosher and put someone in prison etc. That has been the "party line" so far at least af as I know/can recall. Thus, even if it is VERY possible to find working airframes and documents, unless they are explicitly declassified over there, it can be risk for ED personnel. And whether due to gigantic bureucratic inertia or paranoia (possibly a combination of both) even some of the stuff from like mid-Cold War are still not legally made public in Russia afaik. As for the full fidelity MiG-29A, I personally remain somewhat uninterested in it, but I can see how it does make a lot of sense to be in DCS. It has been in the arsenals of many countries from Cold War to more or less today, including some really available map-relevant ones like Iran, Syria, and if we stretch things a bit Iraq. Of course also obvious others like Soviet Union, and Russia. It fits well into two periods that fit DCS the best for various reasons: late Cold War and 90s. MiG-29K, aside from being VERY unlikely to happen, would also only fit Indian and Russian navies, and being an 2010s aircraft, from two very tight-lipped nations, I can't quite fathom the argument how is it either the best choice or the most well fitting to be developed for DCS. Would it be cool, would I like it? Yes, and yes. Do I think it is likely, and a better fit than older (even if, subjectively, less interesting) MiG-29A? No, and no. If "India has it, so info-permissions etc can be obtained, and it is a great fit" arguments held any water, we could have been enjoying a Su-30MKI too, but alas I don't see that happening anytime soon. Though, would be quite pleasantly surprised if it did! Honestly however, I really hope we'll get more 70s-up to mid-ish 80s aircraft, including from ED themselves. Please give us Su-17M4, MiG-27K, Su-15, MiG-25 of some description, Mirage IIIs and Vs, Jaguars, Etendards/Super Etendards, late Cold War AH-1 Cobras etc. They are a lot more likely to happen, and at the same time a lot more likely to have both historically or "balance" wise more matching opponent sets than more modern times, and also fit pretty well with seemingly very popular Cold War setting in DCS. Despite not being particularly enthusiastic about more modern stuff personally, I'd be VERY interested in a mdoern Flanker, Ka-52, Mi-28N etc, even if just because they would be interesting from the point of view of "doing the same things differently" etc. But I also see that they aren't that likely to happen, and older birds actually fit into a lot of possibilities in DCS much better, other than the usual "free-for-all f***fest all eras PvP server" meme.

I have a better feature suggestion: make it so we can rate forum threads -(minus)5 Clearly, a much needed feature that one!

Are you all entirely sure you aren't pulling the short stick statistically? I almost exclusively carry 4 of them, and almost every time 1-2 of them fails to track for me. I can see if you are only carrying 2, you may see lots of situation where both fail to track?

Without some weapons grade mental gymnastics, no, we can't. Because, yes, compared to F-4E, worldwide operations of naval phantoms is a footnote in the history. And if we take a look at actual conflict participation, naval phantoms have so little to show for past Vietnam, one could be forgiven to call them irrelevant in that sense.

Exactly. I really, reaaally hope it won't be a Z or 2000s W if/when we get a Super Cobra. Gimme a W.

Could be, but I'm sure it isn't the reason holding back Corsair regardless.

Nah... DCS is about aircraft foremost, I wouldn't give a damn myself if a well made aircraft won't immediately come with a relevant map at first, and I'm sure neither would ED and 3rd parties would about a selling a ready product just because some other related product isn't ready. Looking at DCS history tends to align with this too. I'm inclined to think that the reason we don't have Corsair yet is, that it's just not quite there yet, still. I don't believe we have nearly enough info at hand to come to this conclusion. There would be little to no overlap between the workforce required for making core engine/graphical rendering updates and making a map.

When it comes to forward visibility, I expect it to be about as bad, or even a bit worse in Phantom compared to those old MiGs, but maybe it will be better than MiG-21 in rearward and upwards visibility. Periscope does a number on visibility up top on the mig, and rear visibility is near enough non-existant.

As far as I know, that particular switch isn't implemented. Everything is normal, that is Shrikes in a nutshell :)) What works for me is, at least with AGM-45As, get to 10nms or less from the target radar, get a good tone, launch all 4 if you have that many onboard, hope for the best. If they track, you will see them loft by themselves. If you manually loft them up, you can extend the range up to about 12nm from medium altitude. With newly added AGM-45B, ranges may be a bit greater, but employment methods and accuracy remains the same. Now, sometimes I do get "one shot one kill" occasions with them, but that is not to be relied upon in my opinion. Fire all of them on the same radar in one go method increases the chances for them to do enough damage to either kill or disable the radar with enough near misses, if one hits, great. Then I go in with unguided weapons to mop up the rest of the site if it doesn't have any serious SHORAD defenses.

Hi-fi tanks were kinda-sorta teased about for more or less a decade now I think, with Wags entertaining the idea in interviews and such as far as I can recall. I have mixed feeling about this. On one hand I'd definitely prefer the efforts and resources to be dedicated to making DCS the best it can be as a flight and air combat simulator, and it sure has lots of roads to thread there, with long standing issues and/or new things that be introduced. On the other hand, a proper tank sim is something I'd love to explore, and Steel Beast is too expensive. If this is more of an "avenue for revenue", in light of number of crowd-pleaser aircraft that are feasible to develop drying up, I'd actually be kinda mad about it. There are many cool aircraft, cooler than them modern popular boys I'd rather get their sims to a DCS standard rather than getting tank sims in DCS engine. I'm sure DCS can model individual ground vehilces to an amazing degree no problem, but the environment they exist to fight in is, lacking to say the least, with ground AI being just sad, and infantry being a token presense at most. They almost work well enough for us being pilots, but for a tank sim, environment would feel hollow in my opinion. Guess we'll see. Having said all that, I would enjoy some proper sims of modern-ish or old tanks alike. Though, mid to late cold war and ww2 would be the best focuses again imo, because they'd fit better with existing and upcoming aircraft modules.

I don't give a darn about my country flying this or that, it flies E, but that's not why I want it. I want E, because it is by far the more interesting, and also by far the more iconic. Contrary to what some people thing, Vietnam War isn't the only place where F-4 cut its teeth. But it is more or less the only place where Naval F-4s did anything I guess. My country bit aside though, I sure do care that a lot more countries flown/flies the E, as that makes it much more useful in plethora of scenarios.

Actual fix would be reining petro in so he is down to human levels, not introducing a magical extension of Raduga's optical capabilities. I know people scream "please make Hind's optics like that on new Gazelle implementation", but honestly, as it is on Gaz, it allows player to zoom further when looking into the sight, and artificially improve it's magnification, quite significantly at that.

Just so everyone's on the same page, above quote is not something I've said, but something said to me by SharpeXB that I replied I think buceador above quoted the post wrong

Maybe so, maybe not, what's certain is, others' life priorities fit pretty well into "none of your business" category. And again, many of us are concerned with the storage footprint of liveries regardless of availability or affordability of it.

Irrelevant, I might have spent my existing budget on other bits of the computer, or on another peripheral, or on modules, or, indeed, blackjack and hookers. What matters is, it is an item of not insignificant size for many budgets where the available moolah is indeed limited, for this or that reason. And thus, it competes with other such things for such budgets. Once again, "storage is cheap" meme needs to take a step back, a pretty long one at that. It isn't so for some of us, and even if it is, that is not the only reason people want liveries to stop causing a runaway disk occupation. Having to sacrifice this or that important software just so I can do every large sim update got old quite some time ago.

It is, that it may not be for you, or even the majority, is nice for y'all, and is also besides the point.

Yes, it is.

And my point has been, slatted F-4E has been pretty damn active in conflicts vs MiG-21s, Israeli and even Iranian Phantoms are very similar, near enough the same with the first bird we are getting afaik. Bis has been exported late but conflict over Middle East lasted into 80s and it did see action in wars that involved both types. And for the earlier periods, Bis is closer than older types to the M/MF generation that was around during the 70s wars over there in my opinion. Most people wants from Mag-3 for the overhaul is... actually making the Bis up to the current DCS standards especially in system modelling and also the art to some degree, I personally don't mind the art part though. An F-13 wouldn't be an overhaul, but a new module TBH. I also want an F-13 in DCS, or bettter yet its J-7 equivalent that is the same but slightly better in that it has a couple more pylons and afaik one more 30mm. I also want a very late J-7 too :P. I actually want that early -21 a lot. PF generation however, has been something I am very hostile towards, MiG-21 and Bf-109 are two of my favorite fighters of all time, and for both, I detest the main war-star variants with a burning passion: PF/PFM for the 21, and G-6 for the 109, they're practically the only variants of the respective types that I wouldn't buy, and we had a pretty long and colorful discussion with Bremsepropeller on the thread over Mag3's about that Though, I've been, very slightly softened on MiG-21PFM... maybe... not so much about the G-6 tho, give me any other 109 instead of that :P.

I was also considering 80-88 Iran-Iraq War there, but to be honest not %100 sure if Iraq had Bis then either, I'm inclined to believe they had, but not sure.

That's a bit of an overstatement. First off, DMAS is going to be the second, later addition to the module, we'll first have DSCG, and MiG-21Bis vs that is a pretty iconic matchup that happened IRL over Middle East a few times AFAIK, or something close enough did. F-4E we are getting is roughly a 1974'ish bird, with a few potential later weapon variants being an option too like later Sidewinders. F-4 = Vietnam War meme needs to die imo. But even then, there too the MiG would probably be more PF/PFM than F-13, and F-4 can be anything between C to E. Finally, even if it was DMAS, in air to air engagements, there's little difference between the two, if anything DMAS is probably less suited being somewhat heavier and slightly draggier with inclusion of TISEO. DMAS was more intented as a strike capabilities upgrade over earlier F-4E's. By then, Air Force already had a good helping of F-15s and F-16s to do air combat. The F-4E DSCG we are getting and the MiG-21Bis is a pretty good matchup, and is close enough for great majority of historical scenarios, real or what-if alike.

In case of 4th gen fighters huge root extensions, lifting bodies, and lots of high lift devices, and sometimes also FBW muddy the waters a lot, so it's not quite an apples to apples comparison of just wing area and/or wing loadings. Mirage 2000 though, kind of shows that a wing with lots lift and lightweight with good TWR still can do it just fine. Though with a helping of FBW and almost full span slats. Still, it lacks gigantic root extensions and AFAIK has no lifting body features either. It also has some of the least thrust among the engines of its contemporaries. Yet, it's one of the most agile by some margin. Not sure if quite up to in DCS level of margin but still, shows that good TWR and a good wing alone can work wonders up to late cold war and a bit beyond. Edit: F-16 and MiG-29 both have relatively small and AFAIK somewhat highly loaded wings, but make up the difference with lots of high lift features and power, 29 isn't really that big tbh. Same goes for the 'ol F-5 tbh. Rather small wings, but multiple other high lift features to make it turn well and keep lift at higher AoA. But it doesn't have the power to keep it up for much, and when the speed decays those small wings begin to become bit of a liability.

Well, while I usually find fighter generations to be a marketing meme, it is still sometimes useful I must admit. This is one of those cases in my opinion: in my observation, the focus on agility and pilot ergonomics/workflow/cockpit visibility as primary design goals from get go is a 4th gen thing for the most part. Things like MiG-21 and F-4 weren't necessarily designed to be super agile from the start, and they sure as hell weren't designed with cokpit visibility and ergonomics in mind either. For the former, they did prove to be agile (at least for their time) as a side effect of having lots of power and wing area on relatively small-ish airframes, and for the latter, it was a period where avinoics were developing very rapidly, so with updates being literally tacked on, it became progressively less user-friendly in their cockpits. MiG was designed to be fast, very quick to climb, while also relatively light, and as an aside the design that provided these also ended up being fairly agile. Phantom was also designed to be fast, and also to carry a lot, big engines and the big wings ended up giving it its agility. But in this generation speed/acceleration/climb rate were usually the main design goals. We can see as time progress, both actually started getting some more dogfighting oriented upgrades: slats for the Phantom, strakes and emergency afterburner for MiG-21 etc. F-5 is an outlier. Nortrop leaned closer to "light, simple, agile" mantra, and wanted do make a Western answer to seemingly light and agile MiGs. US military didn't really care much for the idea, but the bird became an export success. Looking at its design, great visibility out of the canopy, high lift devices such as leading edge slats, leading edge root extensions etc are features I consider associated with so-called 4th gen, and clearly it was designed to be agile from the begining. But bad to so-so avionics and weak engines held it back as well, so imo things like MiG-21s and F-4s retained some competitiveness with it anyway. On the other extreme, we have MiG-23 which went full "speed-acceleration-climb-also big radar plz" and both Soviets and its customers seemed to regret that pretty quickly. Soviets drastically lightened the 23 and progressively added extra aerodynamic fetures to make it less dangerous to fly and more agile in a dogfight setting. By the time of MLA and especially MLD they did mostly achieve it, but arguably too little too late. Finally, other likely opponents from the period would be Mirage III, Mirage F1, and Kfir. With its tailed design, high lift devices, and decent engine, I was expecting the F1 to be more agile, but I was surprised to be proven wrong about its agility, I do expect a well flown slatted F-4E, especially when light, to be able to do just fine against it. Mirage III and especially Kfir will probably be better dogfighters, but we'll see. Of course, F-4, even E with its less than sophisticated radar, will have a decent bit of advantage over Mirage III before merging, but that comes with "situation allowing" disclaimer of course. But my expectation, only considering a WVR dogfight: Vs MiG-21Bis, F-5E: Ballpark, they have advantages, you have advantages, can go either way. Though, both will probably be easier to fly well than F-4. Vs Mirage F1: In my opinion F-4 will be the better dogifghter. Though, a well flown Mirage can probably still win, and it probably won't be easy to fly the F-4 well enough for its potential to make a difference. Also, F1 simply has a better cockpit/workflow. Vs Kfir: I expect Kfir to perform considerably better up close, but we'll see Vs Mirage IIIE: Probably it will be mostly similar with MiG-21 and F-5 situation, perhaps Mirage will be a bit more agile, but it will not have great missiles to back that up. Vs MiG-23MLA: People love debating this to death. Personally, my money is on the MiG BVR and on the Phantom up close. Yes, Flogger MLA has technically some advantages on paper, at certain parts of the envelope, and at certain wing sweep angles. But that's too many "at certains" and I belive it will be even harder to get the best out of than F-4. And its canopy visibility situation is at least as atrocious, possibly worse. Other things beyond these: let's say Phantom pilot is at 10/10 of their potential, and 4th gen pilot is more 6-7 out of 10, I expect the 4th gen to win great majority of engagements. And someone here said "including likes of Mirage 2000", don't know if that was a typo on their part, but that's one jet I ain't even attempting to go against in an F-4 when it releases. Just no... I can even happily suffer trying to fight Vipers, Hornets, Eagles, Tomcats etc every now and then, but not THAT... NO...

Probably because of version not matching. Originally the module included only the M with Viviane if I recall correctly, which wasn't the variant used by a few of the liveries like Cyprus, Syria, Yugoslavia, Serbia, etc. Hence they got that "fictional" tag. At least that's how I remember it to be.