Swordsman422

The future promise of Navy variants fills me with interest for this module. If it was just an F-4E, I'd know it was gonna be a great module but I'd pass on it. Jets whose runways don't move bore me.

The animation for moving visors could apply to him as well, so it's more immersive (there's that word again) for some communication than just a hotkey to apply to both.

Evolution continued to improve the helmets and masks. The APH/MS22001 combination that came before the HGU-33/MBU-14 was even heavier and more awkward. Hell, the butterfly attachments for the MS22001 were pretty weak. I can pull it loose with only a very little effort. Prolonged extra Gs will put the mask in your lap. And then there is the discomfort of the nose and mouth having their own holes in the mask. I don't know how mustachioed fighter pilots of the 1960's were comfortable at all.

One has to wonder, if the Sidewinder is broke, have you considered loaning it some money to get back on its feet, financially? Ignore me. I'll see myself out...

My most expensive mistake was trying to turn a MB Mk. 5 into a comfortable gaming seat. To parody Tom Connelly, there wasn't enough padding in all of Christendom. And it didn't help that I wasn't bringing any of my own to assist. Being a nerd in similar fashion to Lance, I have also strapped on all 40-odd extra pounds of the gear and it already wasn't fun without the additional Gs. And this was 18 years ago when I was running 3 miles a day. Now, 35 pounds and one catastrophic knee injury later, I wonder if I'd rather eat my own uncooked foot than shimmy into all of that stuff, shoehorn myself into a tacjet cockpit, an subject myself to anything worse than an amusement park thrill ride.

Nitpick: It's not rocket science. It's aerospace engineering. With you on this one. These threads generally go OP: "Hey, I found a problem." Dev: "Okay, cool, we'll look into that." Everyone else: "Yeah, but we think you should fix right now! It should never have been wrong." I don't apologize for Heatblur, but I will challenge the impatient ones to do it better themselves if they think they can.

Nice. All classics. My first combat flight sim was 1985's Jet, where the planes were wireframe vector graphics. I was really too young to understand it then, but that's how I got bit by the bug, and it's carried me this far. My point was that technology and technical ability has kinda spoiled all of us. And yeah, it's great that awesome developers like ED and HB are so very willing to push the envelope, but it has some unfortunate side effects. We get impatient (I said "we," so this goes for me, too. Hell, I want the pilot body added even though I'll probably turn it off) and start loading up threads with complaints about how one particular feature or other, which wasn't really possible a decade ago or more, hasn't been added yet when we were still enjoying the flightsims of yesteryear without it (and some of us still play those anyway), and we all think that the one feature that serves our particular enjoyment is the most important missing piece. Whatever it is, it's not going to changed the fact that all that really separates DCS from Spacewar is time and we aren't doing this thing for real. Patience is important. Victory205 might tell you to go get better at what you can do in the sim, and if that's not good enough, go outside and be in the sun for a few minutes.

Where would this world be without digital editing, I wonder. All this talk of immersion makes me wonder where you kids were when flight sim "cockpits" were rendered as low-res 2D overlays you couldn't interact with.

Heh. God, no. That post was entirely lacking in subtext of any kind. I do think it's a funny story, though.

So, funny story, the R-3/K-13 was based on an AiM-9B recovered unexploded from a Chinese MiG-17 where it had gotten lodged when fired from a Taiwanese F-86.

Maybe instead of sunglasses, animate the visor and have moving it be in the Jester menu. "Hey Jester, visor's up/down." Though TBH, regulations usually require visors be down at least in critical phases of flight. Though having a clear or tinted visor depending on night or day flying would be neat.

Knowing something about flight helmets, I can actually chime in a bit. Standard daylight visors on the helmets are smoke grey and have about the same effectiveness of unpolarized sunglasses. They do cover a much larger area, so you don't have gaps in your peripherals like sunglasses do. But that's the standard daylight visor. There are gradient visors which are fully transparent at the cheek/mask line that fade to shaded towards the brow. Iridium visors also exist, which offer about the same protection as iridium sunglasses. Finally, you can also get spectral visors, which block against a particular color of light, but they can tint your vision and thus negatively affect your ability to read or see specific colors. If I was ever doing any flying that required a helmet, I just used either the standard or gradient visor.

A visor function would be pretty neat, seeing as how there actually is one on the helmet. Unfortunately, in my experience flying into the sun in real life isn't much better with sunglasses or visor on. It just makes the glare bearable enough to read your instruments and find your horizon.

I can do it without VR or Track IR. It just takes a bit of practice. Get into precontact and put your wing sweep in bomb mode, one click down on the wing mode switch. Trim for level flight, approach the basket slowly and power back half a notch right before you contact the basket. I usually keep my eyes on the drough nacelle on the tanker wing with occasionally glances at the tanker fuselage, making sure to park both the nacelle and the roundel in a specific place in my canopy and being mindful of both direction and rate of its movement. Make VERY MINOR corrections when you have to make them, usually half or less what you want to make, and don't blink particularly often. Unless the tanker is in an orbit, these techniques really help me hold connection for the entire transfer. If the tanker is in an orbit or turn, I rudder in to the turn with it, first more than tanker's rate to catch up and then slack off rudder to match turn rate, keeping an eye on his wing to determine if he's leveling out and steadying up. Once transfer is complete, back out slowly, drift over to formation position, start trimming as you set sweep to auto and continue to hold level. Once trimmed out and all aircraft are complete, kiss off and continue mission. I wouldn't call myself the best basket fencer, or even particularly good at it, but using these techniques has helped me hold contact without VR.

VF-31 also used the callsign "Bandwagon" and VF-143 frequently went by "Tap" or "Taproom."

Ah. You young kids these days with your internet slang and your obsession with medieval siege weapons...

Can you? Are you sure it's not F-14AAD-1 without the A on the end? Does it include Chapters 31-36 and 39 and the functionality data for the AN/AAS-42? I'm sure we, Heatblur, and the US Navy would love to have a link to it.

I actually second a wish one day for the 70/75-GRs, and least as a visual model. I'll take a pass on the P-412 engine. I know there were only ~ a hundred of them but how they got frankensteined over the years fascinates me, and until the early 1990s were kept a match in capability to the more modern blocks. BuNo 159025 is at the museum at Patriots Point, and it's so interesting to see a jet that is a fully modern F-14A in front and vintage 1970's relic in the back. Adding to this argument, the 70/75 served longer than the B(U) did and wouldn't need avionics modelling beyond the scope of the module to create.

Delta only, and literally the very last part of the very last F-14 cruise.

It's going to take a different approach than using the system DCS inherited from Flanker 2.0. Back when it was originally devised, the old AI F-14 model only had to represent two F-14 squadrons in VF-51 and VF-111. Dynamic modexes might seem like an easy fix, but to pull it off to the degree that HB expects from themselves, it's a bigger plate than it initially appears. New technology will have to be developed to handle the placement, size, and kerning issues for even straight digits. Anybody holding their breath for this one is probably gonna drown.

The ultimate solution is dynamic modexes, but that's a problem that's going to be long on solving and is a can of worms that's been opened several times. Still, I look forward to the day when a squadron of 12 jets can be rendered with decent accuracy by 2 or 3 skins.

Notice that they don't really pay attention to these threads anymore except to come in and occasionally straightjacket the lunatics. As soon as the paranoid rants begin, the objective discussion of the topic based on facts and SME testimony are lost. I believe Heatblur has said before that they cannot discuss missile API developments and aren't responsible for weapon behavior once it departs the aircraft, but maybe that's the cover-up for the true narrative that ThEy'Re BrEaKiNg ThE gAmE oN pUrPoSe. Same.

And any AI eyeballs track through mountains and clouds. But where's the complaining about the AI always knowing where their opponent is?

Far as I know, it was consistent by the label until ~1993 when VF-213's livery moved away from the constellation rudder. The retro jet seen for the last cruise used a custom paint mix that doesn't match any fed standard paint chip.

He's not the troll. He just has "concerns" over his "game experience" and "balance" being in danger because Heatblur is out to specifically ruin his experience. No, no. I'm the troll, and I'm being so gleefully. And truthfully, whatever problem he's having with DCS, I'm not having and I'm choosing to say so in a snarky way.