Kirk66

Yep, it is a pretty complicated story. The Royal Jet 600s were dangerous - if they didn't feed you HAD to abort you mission and either jett them of fly back at very low G and hope they didn't fail. No way could you do anything tactical with a full one. My squadron commander had one fail at high speed and low altitude - it had failed to transfer but he was leading a squadron attack during a Cope Thunder exercise so he pressed on - and when it failed it basically ripped the guts our of his plane and caused an over-G that destroyed it. They both got out but the WSO was pretty badly banged up; he was checking six when he got punched out...not ideal ejection position. I was in the jet on his wing when it happened. F-4s full of fuel make an impressive fireball when they impact a ridgeline at 500 knots... Soon after the USAF started to switch to the F-15 tanks. Vulture

Again, this could all depend on the jet - but in the F-4 (unless you are using Dive Toss), if you roll in and put the pipper on the target you WILL miss long if trying to dive bomb. It's not a "put the thing on the thing and press the thing" delivery, like in some other jets. Which is why I'm curious about what jet you are using that uses this technique. F-86, perhaps? Vulture

So the disconnect is that the reticle is not on the roll axis - in A/G it will be considerably below (about 40 mils for guns, 130 mils or so for MK 82s, etc. So you cant use the pipper as a reference to roll the jet. As I mention, depending on where you put your seat, and your speed when you are rolling (which affects where the rolling axis is), you learned to use an approximation - something like the top of the gunsight glass, or the top eyebrow on the caged sight, etc. If you look at the bombing tables we used, there is an AOD (aim off distance) that you point the jet at (using your imaginary flight path axis) and an IPP (initial Pipper Position) where the pipper should end up, short of the target, when you are established on your diving attack. You then maintain constant G (which depends on dive angle, but a bit less than 1) while the pipper tracks to the target, and after adjusting for any error, pickle or pull the trigger. Roll-ins are usually at one or less Gs (unloaded), coordinated rolls, NOT looking at the pipper. An uncoordinated roll is asking for a departure (especially in a hardwing, less so in a slatted E). Here are real world strafe and dive bomb numbers, note the mils and aiming info (AOD, IPP, etc).

Here is a photo of a Royal Jet 600 CL tank, note the bolted seam along left lower side of the center of the tank. This is not present in the McDonnell tanks as far as I know.

Two points: What is in the ingame model is the High Performance 600 gal CL tank - basically an F-15 tank - that was introduced to the F-4 fleet in the mid-late 80s due to the notoriously low g limits of the horrible throw away Royal Jet 600 CL tank. The Royal Jet and McDonnell 600 gal CL tanks look identical but are NOT the same. The McDonnell CL had much higher g limits while the Royal Jet was a disposable tank the AF had to purchase after dropping all their McDonnell tanks over Laos and NVN. Easiest way to tell them apart on a non-Navy F-4 (I don't think the Navy ever used the HP CL) is that the nose on the newer HP tanks tilts up, while the older tanks tilt down in the front. The older tanks are also WAY cooler looking instead of the goofy Eagle tank (although it does work well). You are correct that all the fuel tanks in the Rearm and Refuel menu are incorrectly labelled "Sergeant Fletcher 600 (or 370) gallon tanks" - obviously only the wing tanks should be labelled as such. In the photos you linked above, the first is a McDonnell 600 cl tank under what looks to be a Navy jet (narrow main tires). The Royal Jet looks similar from a distance - same overall shape and mounting - but I think it had an external seam on the outside. But not visible unless doing a preflight on it. The rest of the photos are of the High Performance CL tanks ("F-15 tanks"). Cheers, Vulture

Now I'm really confused with your statement. With all the augs on, or roll and yaw off, or any combination, the rudder authority is pretty much the same and you can move the nose all over the place on a gun run (not that you should, thats a stupid way to waste bullets IMO since you have NO idea where they are going unless the ball is centered). With Yaw aug off, the nose oscillates a few more times before stabilizing if you push then release rudder; with Yaw stab on it damps out pretty fast - but steady state rudder feels pretty much the same. Incidentally, the stafe technique used by F-4s in USAF was to bring pipper on target, track , shoot, track, then recover; shooting at about 3000' slant range or less, cease fire at 2000' and pulling out to avoid ricochets. This is from a pretty shallow (15 to 20 degree) dive. What plane do you get the "spray bullets with the rudder" from? And why cross controlling? That just makes your nose travel in an arc while you roll, while what you want is to put the flight path on the AOD (in the F-4 the top center of the gunsight is a pretty good point of reference for where the jet is going, depending on your seat height); unload, do a coordinated roll, then start moving the pipper up to the target. Again, where go you get your techniques from? Not saying they don't work for some other airframe, but they are not normal or usual for the F-4, IRL or in DCS. And yes, I do currently fly aerobatics in power and gliders, and have flown F-4s in the distant past - but OTOH am not a "gamer" so my priorities may be different. Anyway, the HB F-4 FM is pretty close to the real thing as I (and others) remember. It's not perfect yet, and a sim will always have some inaccuracies. Cheers, Vulture

What specific behaviour is being corrected by turning off Yaw aug? I'm curious because I havn't noticed anything out of the ordinary. I do know that rudder authority is a bit low, and yaw stability at high AOA a bit too good, but not sure how turning off Yaw augs will help that behaviour. And when you say "current behaviour with it on is ...pretty awful" exactly in what way? Compared to what; and based on what? The flight model is pretty close to the real thing in feel, at least with my hardware (with some notable exceptions at high AOA that are known). And please don't say it is awful compared to any of the teen jets - because well duh - that's why they were designed that way! Vulture

Why turn off yaw stab? Roll stab of course - it's called for in the TO for a good reason, but IRL yaw was never turned off. If it's helping in the game it's a bug. Vulture

If you mean the UHF mode selection knob, labelled OFF/PULL/GD, it just means that the knob has to be pulled out to turn it to the OFF or GUARD positions, to prevent inadvertently switching your UHF transmitter off or to guard (243.0) when changing modes without looking at the knob. All other positions keep you on the selected comm freq. Vulture

It's pretty simple - the flight all stayed on the same freq, unless the flight lead told someone in the flight to go to a diff freq to get some information (like the weather at home base, etc) and come back to flights freq. You could use the Aux receiver to monitor other freqs (like an AWACS broadcast freq for threat warnings) but you just changed freqs as you went, everybody on the same. It got cluttered often, as you can imagine. Usually only the lead would talk to any agency. Here are some procedures from the 70th TFS at Moody AFB in the late 70s: We didn't have a private "chat" freq like the kids today. At most, lead might direct the flight to a freq to discuss something, using a less-used freq. "go cheap suit" was 299.500; "go winchester" was 303.000, "go springfield" was 300.600, for example. nullAnd there was always Navy Common, 243.000. Vulturenull UHF ADF was a legacy system that was almost never used by the time the F-4 was in service. It could give you a bearing to a cooperating emitter, but thats about it. Just put the UHF mode in TR+G and you are good to go, Aux will be in a receive mode for whatever aux channel is selected, main on whatever preset or manual is selected, and guard receiver is on. Vulture

First of all, you are going to have to get high enough to lase a target and not have the laser all over the place due to graze angle and podium effect. You can ingress low and loft, but you eventually have to expose yourself to threats while designating. Thats true of all TGPs due to the pysics of lasers and LGBs, unless you have a target with a lot of vertical surface. In my day we were more concerned with radar AAA than SAMS (which should be suppressed by the WWs). So Lofting was for range, not so much low alt. After release, no lasing (only on for last 12 seconds or so), turn to put target at 9 o'clock (for standoff and not overfly tgt which causes weird pod rotation), turn left and fly a pylon turn around target, WSO fine tunes aim point and lases to impact. I've been able to do this from front seat with pod controls mapped to pilot seat side stick - but you really need a live WSO to make it happen properly. If you have to loft and stay low, then buddy lase from higher with stand off. Vulture

I think our (my?) misunderstanding is that once we got in the jet and it was time to start engines, we had helmets on and so did the crew chiefs - because they had just fired up the dash-60 for power. Of course, before startup, while strapping in - you could talk to the CC helping you, but once the -60 was running we had helmets on and it was hand signals or intercom. Some pilots preferred just go cold mike and do everything via hand signals - more fun that way. Just the perspective from the aircrew side. It would be nice to really have hand signals - we are already using head nods in VR for formation takeoffs; if we could track hands in DCS and show them we could add a lot of hand signals for launches. Ever hear the story of the F-105 that blew it's tail off taking off from Holloman AFB when TA filled the water tank with fuel by accident? Thuds used water injection for AB takeoffs, and TA had their water and fuel vent recovery carts painted the same color...surprised the daylights out of the pilot when he started his takeoff roll and the back of his plane blew up! It got written up in a TAC ATTACK safety mag. Cheers, Vulture

The irony is that now, Pilots are being replaced by machines, so they will be standing in line behind the Nav's to get a chance to fly a drone... Payback is a bitch. Vulture

It's pretty lenient, I think 10 to 60 degrees or so (there is a chart somewhere) but the sweet spot is about 30 degrees dive angle, releasing at 4 to 5,000 ft AGL. Some tips: - Don't wait until your pipper is on the target to tell Jester to lock (context long), pipper anywhere near the target (and not even wings level) is fine - you are locking on to the Earth, after all! - The DT range input is taken when you pickle, so after you see the range bar in the gunsight indicating a good radar lock on the ground, smoothly move the pipper onto the target, track a moment, pickle, then start a smooth pull up keeping the wings level (use the roll tabs in the gunsight) while holding the pickle button down until the bombs come off. Doesn't have to be a hard pull, just ease off the dive angle smoothly - once the bombs are gone (tone stops) then start pulling and jinking cuz you just pissed off some guys! Vulture

Make sure you bind a control to toggle the mouse control; when in VR you need that to activate the mouse cursor. Not sure what the actual binding is called, I think it's in the GENERAL commands. I have to enable it for all my modules to be able to use the mouse and click controls in VR (Quest Pro here) - I have it bound to a button on my throttles. If you are still having problems please email me at kirk dot stant at gmail dot com and we can sort it out. Vulture

All very interesting, except for one detail: The 3rd TFS's F-4E were all ARN-101 jets, that didn't even have Dive Toss anymore. They had CCIP and CCRP, just like the F-16s. But the ranging accuracy with the Pave Tack pod laser made it even more accurate than just plain CCIP (which was a lot better than DT in the older pre-DMAS jets). Incidentally, I was on the 1983 PACAF Gunsmoke team. We had ARN-101 jets back then even (transition at Clark was in 1982, I think), and our CCIP accuracy was a lot better than 20 meters. The biggest advantage the F-16s had was their HUD, which had a bomb fall line for CCIP; the repurposed optical gunsight of the ARN-101 F-4E just had a "floating" CCIP pipper, so the pilot had a tougher time predicting when it would be on the target. Interesting factoid: between every delivery, the Peugeot WSOs would enter the specific location and ejection velocity for the next station on the TER, to account for lateral and vertical velocity and displacement from the centerline of the jet. Interesting in the pop pattern as you were typing numbers into the computer while upside down prior to rolling in... Taking the Pave Task pods was a good choice in 89; not sure why we didn't in 83, a laser altitude update makes sense. Vulture

I'm pretty sure cockpit fogging is not modelled yet. It has been discussed and asked for. It was definitely something you had to deal with in the jet. The current "issue" is that the gunsight glass is somewhat dark, which under some lighting conditions can make target acquisition difficult. This is also being discussed, Vulture

Interlocks have nothing to do with the missile seeker, it just prevents you from firing when not in valid parameters. 2-3 miles is a good ACM distance for AIM-7s. But you can shoot them a lot farther. But they are not AMRAAMs. Look-up helps A LOT. Go down and try to get a clear sky look up at the target, locks will work a lot better. And don't forget to try BST (CAGE selected), target in reticle inside 5 miles, and context long. With look-up it's really a neat way to smack someone prior to the merge. Good luck! Vulture

You must have had better ears than me - anyway you are absolutely correct about Rhinos leaking (during preflight, it it ain't leaking, it's empty) so HB did do the fuel venting when the externals and wing tanks pressurise, and when you fly inverted. Thats a start., now we need the wing vents pissing like a horse on a flat rock on a hot day after a fillup of cool JP-8 starts warming up. Cheers! Vulture

Never been to a Red Flag? Or a squadron ramp during a sortie surge? Pretty loud, and my custom fit helmet did a good job of muffling the sounds - including anything the CC would say until he plugged in with his headset - which had special mouth cups to block the ramp sounds. So before puttin on helmets and starting the dash-60, sure you can talk to the CC. Once the start process begins, it's hand signals or a plugged in intercom. At least that's the way we did it. Vulture

Joker and Bingo for the mission are figured out during mission planning, briefed during the mission briefing, and written down on your lineup card. If you lose your lineup card you are SOL, cuz the jet won't know. Vulture

Can't be done. Unknown technology at the time the F-4 was designed. Vulture

Trust me, 3 units is exactly right. The F-4 takeoff procedure is a bit different from most jet; instead of pulling the stick back to raise the nose for takeoff, you relax back pressure on the stick as the nose starts to rise, stopping the rise at 10 -12 degrees, then holding it there as the jet takes off. You continuously ease off the back pressure until reaching about 300 knots, when the jet will be in trim, with gear and flaps up. Thats how it works in the real jet, and how in works in the sim. Vulture

Except you could be on a ramp full of running jets and dash-60s - and you are wearing your helmet - so no you usually can't hear your crew chief. Which is why hand signals are used. As in real life. Vulture

Hi Nealius, This is not normal, and I have not seen this while flying the jet. I also use a 20 cm extension. I find it flies best with the blending option enabled and set to the default 60 (both options checked), and at first a 10 curve on pitch to take some edge off pitch on the tanker, but otherwise you have to be easy on the stick - it doesn't need to move very far, and it's important to keep an eye on AOA (the tones help a lot). Trim it a lot (small inputs at a time). But yes, to roll, either unload and roll, or use lots of rudder if loaded up. Vulture