Why485

This is my biggest beef with the RWR. Usually you can tell where the lock is coming from based on what my RWR was doing beforehand. For example if the top right light was blinking and the beep was very rapid just before lock that's probably where it's coming from. However, there are sometimes situations where it's near impossible to guess where the lock is coming from because your RWR can get so saturated from radar energy all around between friendlies, enemies, and SAMs alike. In those cases your only real option is to start banking/pitching to try and figure out where it's coming from if you think you have the time. If not, just hit the deck and try your best to break lock and re-assess the situation once you've broken LOS. Flying low is something I do practically constantly because up high it's easy to get pinged from every direction and it's very, very difficult to get any good information from that. When low, you'll be masked from most radar signals because of terrain and there's less of a volume of air to keep track of when you do start getting pings on the RWR.

I would be perfectly happy with a MiG-23/27 (I'd love a MiG-23), but at this point I seriously doubt that it's not an F-14. Cobra said in an interview a while ago that the MiG-23 or 27 was planned, but it wasn't the next couple planes they planned to tackle.

If it doesn't have a gun or launch missiles I'm not interested. Trying to use DCS as a civil aviation platform is as silly as trying to use FSX or X-Plane as a combat flight sim. Can it be done? Yeah, but it was never designed for it and will never be as good as a platform designed from the ground up for it.

Despite being a huge fanboy for the F-104, I will say that I agree that an F-5E or early Mirage would be a lot more useful in the current DCS situation. I'd also have a hard time getting mad at somebody developing an F-5 over an F-104 because the F-5 is second on my list of "easy" planes to develop that I'd really love to see in DCS.

Here's the flight manual for the F-104S. It's super detailed with graphs on everything you can think of and even wiring diagrams. http://www.avialogs.com/en/aircraft/usa/lockheed/f-104starfighter/aer1f-104s-asam-1-flight-manual-f-104s-asa-m-series-aircraft.html

Although I couldn't exactly be mad about somebody building an F-4, I'd still prefer an F-104G/S or F-5E. The Starfighter is one of my dream DCS jets, so I'm still holding out hope that's what you guys choose, especially if you go for the modernized F-104S.

Tango please. I'm looking at buying the C-101 now just to support a prospective DCS F-104.

If you guys are hinting that an F-104 is in the works I would probably pre-order it the instant it's available. I've been wanting to fly a fully featured Starfighter in a combat sim since forever. It is one of my dream planes for DCS. The F-104 is a fascinating plane because it's so off-kilter. It was purposefully designed for one thing and that's going fast. This is my kind of plane, and it would make for an interesting counterpart to the MiG-21, a plane that sorely lacks a NATO counterpart. I'd prefer the modernized Italian F-104S because it's something of a Super Starfighter, but I'll buy any flyable Starfighter for DCS in a heartbeat.

I don't know, you should pretty much never win a dogfight against a Flanker. Especially if he uses his missiles. The one time I've survived and killed a Flanker after the merge I was both elated and wondering why he let me do that. In that fight, if I didn't have the R-60s I wouldn't have killed him either because there's just no time to try and get your radar to lock at that close range.

By my understanding, the radar was horrifically complicated for fighters of that generation. The MiG-21's super crappy radar should give you a taste for that with having to manage filters to detect something and that's only a simple, short ranged, radar. The F-14's radar was significantly longer ranged and more capable, and so even more complex. Enough that it was worth having a dedicated operator so the pilot can focus on flying the plane. I've also heard stories of how awful early RWRs were (might not apply to F-14A, I'm not sure) and that pilots would just turn them off. Meanwhile, planes with dedicated RIOs had the time to listen to them and mentally filter out the false positives and instruct the pilots. This was one of the jobs of the RIO in Wild Weasels. Even just flying planes of the third generation was a lot more cumbersome and involved than a 4th generation jet. Again, the MiG-21 is a good example of how many things can go wrong in a combat situation when you want to shoot a missile or fire your guns. You can of course practice and drill your way into minimizing screw ups, but the fact of the matter is that there are a ton of variables to remember and check every time you want to fire a weapon. The third generation of jets has always been interesting to me because it was the apex of mechanical complexity while flying. It's why two seater jets were so common during that era. Electronics and sensors were getting powerful enough to approach what we consider "modern air combat" in the 4th generation, but the computing power and automation just wasn't there yet to make it reliable and foolproof. They had these powerful, but awfully complicated equipment, and the ergonomics of how to mount and display this information hadn't been fully resolved yet. It was the uncomfortable transition age of modern air combat.

Missile smoke specifically and contrails are still using the old system wherein the sprite flickers through different rotations any time the camera is moved relative to the effect. It's a really odd looking effect and has always bothered me. I've tried my best to mod it out but haven't ever had any luck. That specifc effect might be hardcoded or I'm missing something. That something as minor as the flare smoke got updated gives me hope, but it'd be nice to hear some confirmation from a better source.

An F-5 (or maybe an F-104S) is still my top choice because they're the closest thing the MiG-21 has to a NATO counterpart, something which is sorely missing. However all the clues dropped by LNS have pointed towards an F-14, enough so that I'd be surprised if the next LNS plane isn't an F-14. An older Mirage might work too, but I know very little about the Mirage so I can't say.

I could've sworn I asked this already, but my post history shows otherwise. Is there any word on replacing the super dated and flickering missile smoke and contrail effects that DCS has been using since LOMAC from 2003? Despite its importance, it's one of the worst looking in the game and has been that way for over a decade.

The jamming filter works extraordinarily well and so do IFF checks during jam. It makes jamming practically ineffective against the MiG-21. The only reason to not just fly with the jam filter on 100% of the time is because locking non-jamming targets becomes more difficult because you can't move the locking gate. When locking a jamming target, it doesn't matter where the lock gate is, which is why it locks it in place with that filter on. To lock a non-jamming target, you have to specifically put the cursor over them, and because of that I've had trouble locking non-jamming targets with the filter active.

The total unreliability of locking a target once any maneuvering starts to happen is what prevents me from taking 100% R-3Rs. Even using the beam mode isn't a reliable way to target, and if you use beam mode you have no way of checking if your target is friendly or not because if I remember right (hopefully I'm remembering wrong) the IFF check doesn't work after lock, only during scan.

I started out with DCS on Steam but after switching to standalone I see no benefit to using the Steam version other than having it keep track of your hours. Standalone is more reliable, only one layer of DRM vs two, you get updates quicker, have easier access to beta modules (MiG-21 came out 2 weeks standalone before Steam), and you don't have to worry about Steam mucking with your DCS folder.

R-3Rs are essentially radar guided Sidewinders, so I imagine they would be highly maneuverable, and at this close of a range a SARH missile would be highly reliable due to the very strong radar reflection. The guidance might be a little too good though, see this shot in particular where I didn't even see my target, I just followed my missiles crazy path in. As for deploying countermeasures, I can't recall any F-15s dropping them. I know I've had MiG-21 drop countermeasures when defending against me, but those are also the planes that got away from me because they blocked my line of sight rather than dodged a missile. The thing with most of my kills is that they are radar off IR shots, so they don't see anything coming unless they physically see me launch the missile and if I've done my job right they won't even know that I'm there. Of my three most recent kills, they've all been IR and only the Flanker knew I was there because he merged with me.

These kinds of deaths are the most annoying, because I know that I could have easily defeated this AMRAAM with a better RWR. Aside from this death though, I went 1-1 tonight with that one kill being an amazing one. I defended against two incoming missiles from a Flanker, merged, and Immelmaned into an R-60 kill. Most satisfying thing I've ever done in DCS. It was such a great kill. If I can get some awesome formation and/or low flying footage tomorrow with taylor and lucien, I'm going to be putting together a MiG-21 video of all these kills.

It tells you if he's above or below you based on where the vertical tick marks are, which to be honest is more info than the Flanker/Fulcrum will tell you at a glance. What I'm most annoyed about the radar not showing is direction or speed. You can guess if somebody is a head on aspect based on how fast your DLZ moves, but that's it. At a distance it's very hard to tell and by the time you've figured it out it could be too late. That's something that cost me last night as I wasn't sure if the target I had locked was head on and locking me or if that was somebody else. My biggest problem with the MiG-21 from a systems point of view is the damn RWR. I get annoyed enough about the way the modern Russian RWR works, but the Fishbed's becomes completely worthless once you are fully locked. You have no idea where the lock is coming from if you didn't see a spike beforehand and once you start maneuvering you're relying on guesses and terrain masking to try and figure out where it's coming from.

Got two silent R-60M kills tonight against high flying F-15Cs not minding their contrails. I had enough deaths that I stopped counting, but it's whatever. Practice, practice, practice.

I play weekends mostly, but if I ever do play on weekdays it's late EST time (10PMish to ~2AM I guess?) I'll PM you (and lucien) my contact info so we can keep in touch. I use Shadowplay. I think all Nvidia 7xx series and up support it. It's almost like a built in capture card and records footage at extremely high quality with virtually no performance loss. It's incredible and I use it for anything that would be too demanding to capture otherwise.

This is actually why I prefer flying the Su-27 and MiG-29 over the F-15C. The F-15C is just so boring to fly. I don't feel like I'm really doing anything because the AMRAAMs do all the work for you. There's just a lot less thought put into flying an F-15C effectively than there is with the Russian jets which have a more involved radar and rely primarily on SARH missiles. Completely agree. Very well said. I actually haven't touched the FC3 jets in a while because I'm having too much fun trying to do what I'm doing in the MiG-21. Now all we need is an F-104 or F-5 so the NATO guys can have just as much fun.

Oh so that's why you recognized me! I was really confused by that. Next time I play I'll be sure to have my headset ready in case we meet again. Trying to coordinate a flight with text while flying is impossible, which is why I tended to go off on my own.

I've finally started pulling kills after a lot of training and going back to the basics. Last night I scored a kill on an F-15C and two MiG-21s(!). Apparently people are flying them now, and I guess I'm one of them. I think I saw ff4life4 on 104th last night complaining about how he should have had 6 kills. Not sure who it was, but one of the highest scoring fighters on the server was a MiG-21. Pretty great proof that pilot skill goes a long way. My first kill was on an F-15C with an R-3R displaying some pretty hilarious and wacky guidance. I'll have a full video up sometime soon with more kills than just that unlucky F-15. I don't feel like shooting down other MiG-21s really counts, so I'm not as proud of those kills as I am that unwitting F-15. This forum could really use webm support.

Oh wow, so this really is a thing. While sitting on the ground or taxiing I've kept wondering to myself if the plane is actually level or I somehow broke something with the gear. At first I thought I was just going crazy or maybe my TrackIR wasn't working right but I can confirm I've seen this behavior as well.