Aluminum Donkey

Welcome to the MiG-29 bud :) It's not an effortless plane to fly like the F-15. Make sure your flight stick is set up well, appropriate dead zones etc. to prevent 'stray' control inputs when you don't want them. Fly it until you get the hang of it. It's a "raw" aircraft without too many electronic control assists. There's the autopilot damper, and that's pretty much it! AD

Are you sure you're talking about the stick deflection limiter? You use it by holding down the Y key, which allows you to reach a higher AoA than about 26 degrees. That's all it does, it doesn't affect the aircraft's handling at all. Everything else is still the same. If you're talking about pressing L_Alt+9 for 3 seconds, and getting the beeping tone, that's the autopilot damper. It's on all the time by default and makes the plane fly much more smoothly, especially in pitch. It doesn't limit the aircraft's performance in any way, though. If you find the MiG-29 seem to have very bad pitch response, it's because you're at full afterburner and you're going like a bat out of hell! At very high speeds, the turn rate is limited so you don't exceed 9.0g. All aircraft are like this, not just the MiG-29. AD

It's a simulator man, you get unlimited free crashes... just fire it up and land away :) AD

Ragnar, The MiG-29 is a little hairy to land. It seems to be a MiG thing, the MiG-21bis is pretty tricky too. If you're touching the runway at 200 km/h, that's too slow. You can only land with the nose so high, because the exhaust nozzles will scrape the runway. So, at 200, your sink rate is much too high and that's why you bounce. 250-270 km/h seems about right, maybe a little faster if you're landing while still carrying lots of fuel and weapons. The heavier your plane is, the higher the landing speed has to be. AD

Use some positive pitch trim before starting the takeoff roll. A slight amount is needed, press R_Ctrl+Enter to display the control position indicator. Apply pitch-up trim until about one marker-width of space is seen between the stick position marker and the horizontal neutral line. Then take off eh :) When you get it right, the MiG-29 takes off nicely. AD

Yep, tried all that. Damper disabled with L_Alt+9, stick deflection limiter overridden. I almost got it to happen once :pilotfly::joystick: AD

Visual effects are cool and all, but let's nag ED about fixing the roll trim problem first, and maybe the large throttle dead-zone, instead of spending their time on this kind of stuff. This comes later :) AD

None that I can cough up, but I saw the real deal at the Ottawa (Canada) Airshow back in 1989. Tail-slide as well as Cobra, same flight, MiG-29. I don't know what variant it was, but it was probably an A. Our A and S© versions in the sim are very similar. It certainly can be done by the MiG-29, just not our simulated one :) AD

Sure it would, it doesn't use flight control input for pitching down after reaching the very high AoA. It's the aircraft's natural stability that causes it (center of lift is behind the center of gravity) AD

Glad this one is making its way through, 'cause it's a major pain in the arse while trying to fly this otherwise great aircraft. I wonder how they missed it :) AD

Thanks for that :) Mine was missing, I don't know why. AD

Wow, that sounded rather confrontational. Anyway, both the Su-27 and MiG-29 have relaxed pitch stability, and the control systems both have pitch dampers. The MiG is more stable in pitch than the 27, but both require dampers for normal flight. The reason I assume that the MiG is capable of the cobra maneuver is because I've seen it do so in real life, although admittedly it was nearly 30 years ago. AD

Just a little observation... Even with the pitch damper turned off, the MiG-29 is really resistant to the Cobra maneuver... Anyone else noticing that? I can get a good snappy pitch-up at around 400-450 km/h, but even yanking the stick back all the way, it 'quits' at about 45 degrees AoA or a bit more. There isn't a sharp snap to vertical (90 deg. AoA or more) like there is with the Flanker. Is this right? AD

Greetings dburne, Since you're spending that kind of bread, I'd just get two drives: 1) a big (1-2 GB) M.2 NVMe drive for DCS, and any other really demanding games (usually only DCS) 2) a really big (2GB, +) SATA SSD for Windows and everything else. Keep in mind, that the uber-expensive computer you're talking about isn't really going to give you better performance in DCS World compared to the machine you're already using. You already have a 4.5GHz CPU, 16GB of memory, and a GTX 1080 Ti. That's about it. There isn't much else you can blow money on that's going to improve your framerates in DCS--that i9 won't do it, a GTX 2080 Ti may help alittle, but it's expensive and DCS doesn't use hardware-based ray tracing, so the "expensive" part of the card will go un-used, and using an M.2 NVMe drive will only reduce load times slightly (DCS 2.5.x seems to have issues with mission load times, even on uber-fast drives.) Have fun spending bread, but DCS World just doesn't make much use of big-$$$ uber-PCs with 32 cores, 64 threads and all sorts of fancy doodads. It probably never will. The best thing you can get for your computer to run DCS is a really great graphics card, and you already have that. As long as you have a CPU with a high clock rate (4.5GHz is great), pouring cash into a hefty graphics card will give a more noticable improvement than ultra-expensive CPUs, mobos etc. You can spend much less cash and get equal performance by buying an i5-8600K processor, 32GB of decent DDR4, and a GTX 1080Ti--which you already own :) AD

I wouldn't mind trying one myself, but the co$t is just nuts! It costs even more than the screen itself, because if you want the absolute best picture quality, you're gonna be running a 4K screen at the highest graphics settings, and that means you'll need the almightiest of video cards, forged from cosmic-energy infused Unobtainium in the fires of hell by the Devil himself. That sort of thing tends to get a little expensive. AD

Awesome, thanks so much for posting this, Imma use Joy2Key for now because it does work well. I'll probably look into this again eventually, I really can't believe that a sim of this caliber doesn't have functions like this built right into the software itself. Lots of flight sticks & throttles (homebuilt or otherwise) have SPDT switches, and it seems obvious to me that Mode switches will have a center position that should activate a Safe mode or Nav mode when centered, releasing the mode it used to be in (cancel function, like releasing a button that was held down). Peace and happy warfare AD

I agree, I'd *love* an AB set function for all the aircraft that have AB. Why it's not there I don't know. Anyway, I try to avoid using hardware mods to my HOTAS just to iron out a shortcoming in one module--especially when I have to undo it to fly other ones :) AD

Hello everyone, I have a HOTAS Cougar with a 3-position (SPDT, on-off-on) switch on the throttle called the Dogfight switch. I want to use the switch to select BVR, NAV, and WVR modes on the Su-27 and MiG-29 modules, but since the center position is off, it doesn't generate a button-press function like the other two positions so I can't map it to NAV mode. I'm using a Leo Bodnar USB interface board with my Cougar, so it's no longer programmable. Any ideas? I've read on here that I can modify a .LUA file to do this, so I don't have to run Joy2Key or something like that. I'm pretty sure someone has done this already and it isn't even that hard. I just don't know how :) Thanks! AD

All discussion aside, it still sucks to have a big dead spot in the throttle travel from full Mil to first afterburning stage. It makes throttle control too vague. A very small range of throttle travel between full Mil and low AB would be best--just the way it was done on the Su-27. The dead spot on the MiG-29 is far too large. Please ED, iron this out! :) AD

Yup, the Su-27 and MiG-29 radars (and EOS as well) are very similar, at least in the sim. The MiG doesn't have the really nice top-down view on the secondary display like the Su-27, which is a bit of a pain in the arse, but other than that, the two share pretty much all the same radar and EOS functions. The exception is the MiG-29S with R-77 missiles, which has a TWS2 mode for engaging two targets simultaneously. The Russian Flanker can't carry the R-77, only the Chinese version (J-11). Once you've gotten a hang of the Flanker, the MiG-29 radar will come to you naturally. Oh yeah, one more thing--if you haven't flown the FC3 aircraft a lot, you're in for a treat flight-wise, because the F-15C, Su-27, and now the MiG-29 all have awesome flight models! If you've stuck to the numerous other modules all this time, you've missed out on some of the most convincing (and entertaining) flight models in the sim! :) Peace and happy warfare AD

The trim is *very* coarse indeed, and I suspect it's because the autopilot uses the trim mechanism for controlling the movement of the stick. So, to have sufficient control, the trim needs to move the stick center position quickly enough. With the A/P turned off, the pilot is left to deal with the excessively fast rate of trim. Again, I find the pitch trim fine, but roll trim is *far* too fast, making it impossible to use. There's no way to find a decent center position. AD

It doesn't really wear out, just the fan bearings. I have my vid card fans set up to stop with no load on the card. When the plain-bearing fans crap out on me, I just replace them with dual ball bearing ones. With the PC at idle, they can run slowly for 10 years no problem :) AD

Plugged into a motherboard rear USB port.

'Cause sometimes I like to fall asleep watching a vid or two (or just listening to the sound). So, 'pooter stays fired up, but monitor backlight turns off. Anyway, my Cougar had a bad throttle pot. Doesn't seem to be too much of a problem anymore, I replaced it with one of the other ones from the stick (pitch/roll axis pots) left over from when I converted the stick to Hall effect sensors. It was the throttle pot jitter/wander that kept waking up my PC. Problem gone. Still, I wish I could disable Waking through the game controller! Device Manager won't let me. AD

I've noticed that too. The pitch trim is great, but the roll trim is so fast/coarse that it's impossible to trim for a good roll center. It would have been no trouble at all for ED to sort this out before releasing the module, but it'll probably be months now or longer before it's addressed. I wish they'd patch it up right away, or at least let us know of a file that we can modify to reduce the rate of roll trim by a factor of 2 or 3 or thereabouts. Roll trim rate is *much* too high, ED!! AD