RedTiger

Because topics like this have a tendency to not end well. I'm assuming that you are not new to the internet and I'm sure you've seen this before? Besides the possibility of someone taking the forum rules and applying them to the video and finding it offensive, this controversial nature of this creates, quite obviously, controversy. Now magnify this this a couple times if you're on an international board with a diverse group with equally diverse opinions. Magnify it again if its a board having to do with military topics, which by their very nature involve killing human beings. All it takes is one post as a spark to start the poo-throwing. Then its "Hi mom! IBTL"

Sort of regarding the previous post from Breakshot, has anything been tweaked regarding how missiles behave when launced high and fast? That always mattered in FC, but something seems to have changed to make it even more effective. Last night I was testing the regular R-27 on the Fulcrum against friendly fighter acting as drones. I wanted fighters because I wanted something actually capable of evading a missile. If launched around 12,000 m and well over mach 1, those R-27s were easily killing stuff at twice RMAX. Again, I understand that long range kills have always been possible launching high vs. high.

Yeah, but if you leave him alone for a few minutes, does he start to hoof it back himself? For that matter...why happens if you eject and land near hostile ground units. Do they shoot at you?

You can already do that fairly well. Pit F-15Cs with Aim-7s vs. MiG-29As or Su-27 armed with R-27s. Or, substitute the MiG-29S to allow datalink and just restrict it to the payloads on the A model.

Answering what I can: 1. That feature never worked for me in Lock On or Flaming Cliffs 1.12. I'm not sure if feature even exists. It might be a leftover broken feature from long ago. 2. Sounds like you have your solution. I didn't have problems with this one. 3. I noticed in the PDF files with key commands that there is some overlap in the funtions that doesn't apply to particular aircraft. "SPO" is referring to the radar warning receiver on the Russian planes. I've also seen something like "change expected target size" on the key card for the Su-27, which is obviously a function from the Su-25T.

Wasn't Flanker and Flanker 2.0 simulating this aircraft or an aircraft that was very similar to this? I'm not suggesting that ED go backwards and start doing things the old way, nor am I saying "go play Flanker". I only find it interesting that the Flanker in those sim had the *exact* same capability you speak of. Even the air to ground "radar" worked more like LANTERN or a Sniper pod.

Can someone in the know please make a thread explaining the ins and outs of the Su-27 modeled in the game vs. the reality of the 1990s post-Soviet industrial military complex vs. the F-15C modelend in FC 2.0 vs. the 30 years worth of on-going improvements and constant day to day tweaks of radar software? Pretty please? Maybe EvilBivol? Because with the interest in FC 2.0, this is going to pop up a lot. Newbies reading Yefim Gordon books or that one Australian guy's web page wondering why the Flanker in FC can't track 10,000 targets and firing on over 9000 of them from 250 km away. Maybe a simple chart? Su-27 developement timeline: first conceived -> [----------------THE 1990s-] <- now F-15 development time line: first conceived -> [----------------------------------------------------------] <- now ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ (continuing development uninterrupted due to the lack of economic and political collapse) I'm sorry if someone takes offense at the reality of the events of 1991. However it happend. I saw it. The wall came down and the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Unfortunately for the Su-27, its development suffered. There are no politics involved in this statememt, do not infer any. This is simple history. If you do what I do and take the planes for what they are, with the history behind them, you will enjoy it more. This is one reason why I fly the MiG-29A often and personally hope with see a DCS version some day. I'm confident that we will, seeing as there is a lot of info out there on it. I love the fact that its so simple, so lightly armed, a natural successor to the MiG-21. I imagine it like a pilot-driven arrow launched at invaders en masse to repel attacks over home soil. I like that it was so greatly respected and talked about despite its simplicity and rather limited capability. I like the rumor that it changed NATO tactics because it was the first to have true look-down capability. The fact that it wouldn't stand a chance vs. the F-15C is meaningles to me.

Sorry if you saw what I said as an attack, it was more disbelief. Blame my exceptional memory. :D Two things: In the past I actually suggested LOPEing R-77s onto the F-15 to solve the gimpy Aim-120 problem and I clearly remember the near-comical levels absolute lack of tolerance any type of LOPEing in Lock On for fear of cheating. It verged on being comical because I also remember suggesting on simhq.com that the R-77 should be LOPE'ed onto the Su-27 to make everybody happy. IIRC, one response was something like "why don't you allow the Aim-54 on it and just be done with it". It was treated as damn near heresy. So, I hope you can imagine the irony I see in what your doing. Add to that the cries of how crappy the AMRAAM was and how within a week or two of it being fixed we already see people crying about it in the opposite direction. If you get away with adding R-77s on Flankers, more power to you. :thumbup: This is just the beginning though. If anyone has a problem with how BVR currently works in FC 2.0 when using Eagles vs. Flankers, I highly suggest they avoid head to head multiplayer in DCS if we ever have the same two planes fighting each other. Stick to the campaign and maybe enjoy a nice game of Starcraft or League of Legends.

You know that makes you look foolish, right? Care to refute what I said? The funny thing is, if you refute what I said you'll might be contradicting your own post I was responding to. I was only reinforcing what you originally said. ;)

Yeah, so like I said, Lock On multiplayer at large isn't where its at. Your argument is kinda proving my point. The tools to do all of what you described are all available in FC 2.0. You want a real war? Flamming Cliffs can do it AND do it better than Falcon in some ways. Much of Falcon's realism ends at the cockpit canopy. Even the original developers in the original manual admit that Falcon is "hyper realism" and not at all true to the 90% routine, 10% sheer terror reality of war fighting. Lock On might not have all the button pushing or a sandbox campaign to play it, but it will reward you if try something realistic -- especially now! (I cite GG's A-pole/F-pole example) If whoever sets up these servers doesn't want to use the tools, that's their perogative. If they don't set up an air defense network and don't task some F-16 AI to kill it while YOU the player are part of the package to sweep the area clean, who's fault is that? If those tools are used to set up a reasonably realistic scenario and players don't like it and just want Air Quake, have at it, but don't blame the sim. Again...dedicated multiplayer game, anyone? I love Lock On to death, but its multiplayer is a blank canvas at best. Unless you have two squads who only play with each other in some sort of Red Flag scenario, who are in complete agreement on everything (which is exactly what some do), there will be some disagreement. One way to fix this is to force hard-set goals on each side with some sort of time limit. These goals can and will funnel even a disorganized group of strangers into some sort of organization with the understanding that if they do not complete this goal in a certain amount of time...they lose completely. All the ego-driving stuff is a means to an end and will be meaningless unless you actually use it to win. Then you need a ranking system that ranks you on winning and actually completing goals. Example: If the F-15 pilot wants a high rank he needs to ensure no one in the strike gets killed and the target is actually destroyed, not worry about kills. IMO, this is all out of the scope of what ED is willing to do. They're making sims, not games. ;)

LOL! Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing? Balance just won over realism in Lock On?! You guys can do whatever you want on your server but I'm surprised by this. Can someone opt out and just use SARHs? What are you guys going to do if the DCS series ever models these fighters? Not play DCS sims I assume? Not only will you not be able to add fictional payloads but you're going to have a lot more to put up with in terms of workload on those Russian fighters. Lets pretend its F-16 vs. MiG-29. Even if you "cheat" and map all the Fulcrum's dashboard stuff to your HOTAS, there's still going to be more to do to get from NAV mode to radar locked on and ready to fire than what the western fighter will have to do. Not to mention the nearly total lack of automation and reliance on your GCI/AWACS controller having their crap together. Will it be F-16C blue vs. F-16C read all the time then? :P This is where I think Black Shark had the good fortune of being only co-op multiplayer. You have a very limited air to ground helicopter with fairly limited mission roles and almost no chance of surviving anything except those roles...even then...you can't expect miracles. For example, no one complained about how unfair it was that you couldn't operate at night. Probably because there weren't any players in those ground units with thermal sights to actually get into an e-peen measuring contest with. You just didn't operate at night...because you couldn't. No one cried about that, it was just accepted. You didn't feel like you were being unfairly beaten by a bunch of nasty human players laughing at you and high-fiving each other in their tanks as they drove around in the dark unopposed. This is yet another reason why I keep my flight sim time single player and I keep all my multiplayer stuff in actual multiplayer games where balance doesn't have to be based on reality. That way if I want to cry about something, no one can just point to reality a smirk at me. :D

D'oh! :doh: I should have realized that the launch authorization also took into account the potential energy of the missile. I'm glad you tested it. That makes complete sense.

Better range? The seeker in FC 2.0 is supposed to true to life -- the same seeker found on the R-73. So better energy? Yes, but you're not any farther away. The missile still has to be under the same conditions to "see" the heat source. Does better energy > better agility in FC? In the case of that stealth attack, yes, certainly, but is there that big of a difference? Well inside RMAX vs. just at RMAX vs. a non-maneuvering target that must be completely taken by surprise to have a bandit that close to even launch. We know what the T versions are used for and I'm betting that there aren't too many "kill the B-1s flying NOE before they level your base" missions on hyperlobby (which would be cool and somewhat historically accurate, btw :) )

This Su-27 vs. F-15 stuff has me wonder, in multiplayer do you see fewer people using ETs? I tended to see R-27T use as a product of the fact that they had capabilities prior to FC 2.0 that they should not. Other than that, frankly, I always saw them as a waste of two good pylons. That should be even more apparent in FC 2.0. You're sacrificing carrying 2 more BVR missiles or 2 more agile WVR missiles for a missile that still needs a "tone" for it to be effective. Yes, it is fast, but is it that much more effective than the R-73? The R-73 was actually designed for use in that regimen. Better than another R-27ER? Now you have six missiles, three if you launch two at a time. What exactly makes a T so much more desirable? Am I missing something specific to multiplayer?

Yeah, isn't it called a stop watch? :smartass: OP: one of the often-referenced reasons for the stop watch on the clocks in the Russian planes is for estimating time to impact. Those stop watches are/were operational in the sim.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. - Mark Twain, (unsourced, however ;) ) Boy the times have changed huh..but where have we heard this before? It will be funny to hear the wails of agony if we ever see DCS: Eagle vs. DCS: Fulcrum.

As in it works better vs. how its real life counterpart works? Certainly. The missing link always seems to be the Russian side. In the US you can walk into a big chain bookstore and buy a book about Desert Storm that will give you a decent overview of how Eagles are operate, maybe even some very basic idea on the tactics they use without getting into the actual classified playbook. Can you say the same about the Su-27 or MiG-29? Those plane, AFAIK, has never even seen any type of air to air combat even close to the scale or tempo of Desert Storm, nor any such example where we see them actually deployed for war-fighting by the Soviet Union. Maybe its different the further you go east, but for a westerner, you have "Fulcrum" by Zuyev, a book that several here have criticized for incorrect information, or a translated MiG-29A manual -- one that states that the Fulcrum's look-down ability is "practically the same" as its look-up capability, as well as instructing the pilot to fire missiles at 12,000m -- much higher than I almost ever fly the Fulcrum in FC.

All things equal, I'm going to have to agree with this statement. I'm not complaining about it, either. It might just be a combination of all the fixes plus the specific fixes to missiles that have disproportionately affected the Aim-120 because it needed the most improvement, but something "under the hood" just seems different about it. I used to find the F-15 cumbersome, even when I was used to it. Now its the other way around. The whole package just seems so effective now. Again, not complaining. ;) Maybe its psychological. :D

"Missile range" is affected by so many factors, its just sheer oversimplication to even speak of it in terms of "range". Also, I have no idea why anyone would have a complaint about range in FC 2.0. If anything, everyone's missiles have greater range. The RMAX of the R-27ER, at proper altitude and mach 1+ is impressive. Try engaging a fighter at over 35k feet and over mach 1. The "problem" as I've always seen it, is that the way the Su-27 and MiG-29 are modeled in Lock On seems to encourage me to use very sneaky tactics. Maybe this is just me, but I'm much more prone to flying very low and trying to flank while avoiding detection. The disadvantage here is that you don't have the opportunity to launch high and fast. With the F-15, it has always been the exact opposite; fly high, radar always on, steamroll with AMRAAMS.

I think FC 2.0 has sort of a black and white view of what is fratricide. I'm not sure, but I doubt something like a mid-air collision with your wing man while in combat that causes his death would be considered a fratricide. I tend to think of fratricide as a deliberate deployment of force against a friendly combatant either knowingly or unknowingly, like you lock onto your wing man and kill him with a missile.

If you're talking about FC/BS, no, actually not on the level I'm talking about. I'm happy to say in every Eagle Dynamics product I've ever played, ships stay in the water where they belong and tanks don't drive up to each other hull to hull and shoot past each other -- all on a battalion level scale! But hey, at least all that is totally dynamic! :smartass: Missions also tend to not involve flying directly over a field of SA-10s to take out a couple of Osa class missile boats on day one of WWIII.

That's a tall order, Moa. I salute you for attempting this. What you are developing sounds like a true dynamic campaign as opposed to what Falcon has. What Falcon has is better described as a sandbox than a dynamic campaign. Games/sims that go the sandbox route tend to make you pay for the open-endedness somewhere else. The world is usually highly simplified, the AI does completely stupid and unrealistic things, and if your goals are randomly generated, they either don't make sense or are also higly simplistic.

The poll is...odd...because we have a person who is not affiliated with the software asking whether we'd pay for something that is has been free, is free, and has never even been suggested to be payware at some point in the future. That's like making a poll if we'd pay for Saitek programming software. The answer to that should be "Uh, hasn't it always been free?", or "Who the hell are you? Do you work for Saitek?" or "Huh? *scratches head*" The OP didn't provide enough details for the poll to make any sense. Does he know something we don't know about RamGen developement? Is he affiliated with the program? Etc.

Beat me to it. ;)

Call Mikoyan! Tell them we demand a patch! :lol: