wilbur81

2D or VR? What are your system specs? I play in full 4K (2D) and have better performance than ever in DCS MT... and that with an older CPU.

Absolute nonsense.

You're WAY too high... Fresnel lens system is completely out of view. Your velocity vector on the HUD has you touching down with nose wheel over the water in that screen.

Love everything about these questions, Winchester, and I'm curious about these elements as well.

The Dynamic Campaign...looks, well, very dynamic! LOTS of work I'm sure. Keep up the good work! It's going to be a remarkable achievement when complete, I'm confident.

Agreed on all points.

Yes, updates ago.

Are you talking about A/C placement or that nice 'wet-deck' surface effect?

Hey, Wags and ED Team: Late to the party here, but loving the update so far! Great stuff on the small part of Afghanistan that has been released so far as well. And my word! LOVING the new rain effect on final approach!

Toto, are you saying that the latest update introduced the haze or have you noticed this for some time?

Keep up the great work, team!

Thanks, Stackhouse. Block 50 that we have simulated in DCS.

Fellas, just to be clear: That 'peek into the vault' anecdote sent to me that was shared was courtesy of one of our DCS closed beta testers here in these forums. He's not a "Hornet-Driver-Forum" guy, but a Viper guy in DCS...according to the threads he does comment on. His story is courtesy of a friend of his in the fighter community who has classified clearance, so he's just another real world voice (take him or leave him) saying that the blk50 and lot20 aircraft are nearly identical when it comes to this very flat performance conversation. All of the Tacview tests in this thread basically support that... I tend to agree with Darkman's comments above...What's going on during crazy BFM takes us into a different realm than mere turn circles and flat rate performance (one of the points made in that Vault anecdote). Chuck Magill goes into this more dynamic exploitation of the Hornet here in this video clip on BFM in the F/A-18A (he mentions a 20+ deg turn rate in the Hornet...if flown 'right'):

Good tests... Looked at both the Tacviews (for both jets) and they seem to align well with the blk50 / lot20 real world "vault anecdote" from the earlier post. Thanks, Hulkbust.

You called? For anyone who might be interested, below is a PM conversation I had that alluded to some real world information sent to me by one of our many faithful forum buddies. (I've not included his name here as he sent this to me via private message) - Thought many might find his buddy's findings interesting. Enjoy: I wanted to tell you about a conversation I had at an unclassed level with a friend of mine in the fighter community. He went to the vault and looked at the lot 20 EM diagrams (402 engine) and compared them to the F-16CM block 50 F-16 with the engines we have in game -- his findings were pretty cool. He couldn't tell me numbers, to keep it at an unclassed level, but he said the difference was pylons. With pylons on the wing, the hornet will be out-rated by a clean viper. With pylons on the Viper and a clean hornet, the Hornet will out-rate the viper. Both Clean wing, and they are virtually the same with a slight advantage to the F-16. The caveat here is that the lot 20 is still G limited to 7.5Gs -- so it's engine and airframe are just generating that higher turn rate at a much slower speed -- I think around 380-ish. If the hornet gets above 400, it begins to arc, because it can't tighten down more than 7.5Gs, and the turn circle just gets really really big. This friend also told me that the hornet is playing from a very different set of rules than the F-16, and the F-16 employment manuals don't actually cover how to combat the hornet trickery. The USAF is all about aligning turn circles to kill, and you can do that pretty well against non-high-AOA fighters. But a high AOA fighter (and the navy in general) strive to have misaligned turn circles both offensive and defensively -- which allows them to change the plane of motion in ways that the opponent can't follow without overshooting. This is the classic hornet ditch -- but that ditch needs to be executed when there are misaligned turn circles, and the cue for that is seeing aspect angle out of synch with angle off nose or tail. I think this is stuff that's a bit over the nugget of most DCS players, and if they are operating from IFF manuals or the korean 3-3 viper manual -- it's just not covered in there. A lot of people's complains with flight models in BFM probably stem from this. Anyway -- bottom line is that the big engine hornet can in fact rate as well as a clean viper, but 99-100% of the time the navy is leaving 4 pylons on the hornet, where the viper maybe has 2 -- and so the advantage goes to the viper in BFM. Clean vs clean, and we just have a very small advantage in the F-16. Cheers

Is ED bringing back our retro-120-SINGLE-launcher-missle racks?

Indeed. Hopefully we'll get to a point with our DCS FM that our Hornet will be able to do the same.

I almost never use the rudder in the pattern. Aside from low speed, high AoA roll in a BFM engagement or airshow routine, the current DCS Hornet's rudder (the pedals, I should say, given the nature of FBW FCS) performance is next to useless for yaw in the air. Note the Blue's Slot pilot's left rudder slide into the diamond in this old video... we are hard-pressed to get our virtual Hornet to do the same at the present moment, though I'm sure we'll eventually get there:

Regarding the real world performance of the Legacy Hornet, some will discredit the flight performance of the enhanced performance engine'd (EPE) F404-402 Hornet Charlie's saying something to the tune of, "Yes, the EPE'd Charlie has more thrust, but it's also heavier, so it doesn't really outperform the A-models." For some VERY cool and interesting reading, here is the FAA's Air Show TAC Demonstration manual/guidelines for the F/A-18 Legacy demos. I'm sure many have found and read it before, but I've included a screenshot below from page three in which pilots are cautioned to take into account the extra power/thrust when flying vertical and horizontal maneuvers in an EPE -402 jet, so as not to exceed airspeeds, avoid G-locs, etc. I highlighted the EPE note in yellow in the two images below. Another cool thing that can be done with this .pdf (included for download) is to try and replicate all the maneuvers with accurate entry and exit airspeeds and altitudes within DCS. Our virtual jet is incredibly close! Get after those Double-Immelmann's and enjoy... Navy_F-18-TAC_Demo_Maneuvers-Package.pdf

I'm only slightly teasing... The Finnish F-18s have their G-limiter calibrated for 9G rather than the USN/USMC 7.5G limit. There is no real world flight, turn, energy bleed, etc. data for USN Hornet performance with the G-Limiter disengaged. I'm only slightly tired of the constant Viper-better-than-Hornet-in a dogfight nonsense. It is not better. They are different in strengths and weaknesses. The Viper has the extra power and the 9G rate-options; The Hornet is more maneuverable in the 300 kts and under regime...which is where most WVR 1v1s are flown anyhow. I challenge anyone on the internet to produce a 1v1 HUD tape (real world) video that shows 9G pulls in 1v1 WVR BFM. There are several BFM HUD videos out there, but you will likely not find a single YT HUD tape showing a Viper driver pulling 9g's for more than a few seconds (if at all). There are a fair number of YT videos of real world Vipers (HUD tape footage) performing BFM... you will find very few (I've never found one myself) where the max G exceeds 7g or the airspeed exceed 350 kts. Here's one example: Another example from Defensive BFM with telemetry data afterwards: Neither pilot breaks 7g in either engagement. That certainly doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but probably a lot less common than people assume. Oh, and the F-15C was my first love, too. Bummed that Razbam went with the Mudhen and not the Charlie.

Yeah, yeah... and the high-hour Hornet guys in the comments of Mover's video say that they never lost in the Hornet, 1v1, to the F-16N. Oh, and Cptmrcalm: Your video, "David v Goliath," is not a good representation of the Hornet as you're not flying the DCS (USN) Hornet in that fight; your flying the "Flight Controls, Flight Controls" 9+ G Finnish jet. Try it again without the paddle. It's been said over and over again, the blk 50 Viper is not better than the lot 20 Hornet in real world BFM, it's just different.

You're correct... I did not. Thanks for the info. It makes sense, though, that the radar has to have the HAFU within it's gimble limits in order to make it a L&S from the SA.

If so, then I agree with you. I've only played with it for all of 90 seconds... but was always under the impression that the radar (within gimble limits) would slave to the SA hafu?

Well, I'll be darned... indeed it does. I guess I wasn't clicking hard enough my first go around. Thanks, BarTzi!