AH_Solid_Snake

I am a huge supporter of DCS and would like very much for the product to continue and thrive, both alongside and competing with the likes of MSFS202 or BMS. I have purchased a variety of modules starting right at the beginning with black shark and the A10, but most recently the F-14 which has always been the favourite. My difficulty now is how to contribute to the ongoing development of DCS when none of the modules are of interest. This is not to say that unannounced future modules won’t change that. But for now with no interest in the F16 the only module I am anticipating is the F8 Crusader which is a long ways off. In the meantime how can I support DCS? I would argue that an optional patreon-esque model would work for me - I would be happy spending £50 a year to subscribe to the sim and feel that my money would go straight to the core development team of the product I spend many hours per week playing. I realise that I could just arbitrarily buy all ED modules whether they interest me or not but the capitalist in me says vote with my wallet to allow ED to accurately measure what airplane or terrain their customers want to drive selection of future modules. What is the community feeling on this? Is there an alternative I haven’t considered?

As far as I can tell this isn't entirely accurate, to the best of my knowledge even for a dropped track the AWG-9 will still transmit the go-active command to an in flight phoenix at T-10 seconds from expected impact. Whether the dropped target will still be within the weapons own radar seeker limits at that point depends entirely on what the target did after it was lost.

Ok that clears up how we get into a general search area reasonably well. If I understand right it’s more or less make sure you have suitable waypoints defined and then you can tell Jester to slew the pod towards a waypoint much like pressing the relevant button on the side stick. Once we are in that general area will Jester automatically point track a target based on some kind of prioritisation logic or is there a plan for pilot input in a next target last target sort of manner? I assume there would be input wheel selection for laser codes similar to manual radio frequency entry? Similarly the little quality of life selections like white hot and black hot modes? It seems like this process is a little more complicated to simulate than the AWG9 interactions because even with 2 human operators in real life the pilot was part of the process in locating targets on his repeater screen in a way that’s hard to tell an AI.

Jester is definitely still under development as there are WIP features that have been announced that aren't yet in the game. WRT the his use of the AWG-9 however, I haven't seen any specific plans to change or enhance him - there may still be a non-specific plan to improve this over time. I think RustBelt is right with the perception. Certainly in my experience learning to be the pilot along with a buddy learning to be the RIO in the early days we both knew so little that Jester was better than either of us and if i just followed his lead we'd get 4 TWS tracks and ripple off a load of AIM-54s and slap ourselves on the back As you learn / get used to having a human RIO his abilities can be limited to the point of infuriating. Mostly im thinking of IFF and what tracks he decides to hook at any given time. In busy MP servers with a mixture of friendlies / bogies / hostiles in TWS he can be very slow to IFF them and then once the AWG-9 has allocated your track priorities he can get quite fixated with hooking friendlies rather than focussing in on track #1 so you can lose awareness of altitude / exact ranging while hes futzing about. Again when you're new to it all your attention is fully taken up interpreting the mass of data on the TID repeater and just trying to get them to flash so you can shoot. Once you're more experienced and have time left over to wonder what the target is doing....then you get frustrated. All of this is not to belittle whats been accomplished with Jester - its still the very best implementation of a copilot AI I've ever seen, but there will always be shortfalls compared to a high tier human, the realities of time and cost unfortunately make it so.

I thought I'd ressurect this thread as there is an interesting question that I haven't found an answer to - what is the current plan for making Jester use the LANTIRN? Basing his behaviour on the AWG-9 you'd have things like 'lock target ahead' but that would assume that Jester would scan an area (how do define said area?) and that you'd have to press a 'lock' button as he panned over a target. If its based on F10 map / coords then that sounds more like JDAM delivery, albeit supporting the bomb post drop. Would Jester default to some kind of snowplough mode? I appreciate that this may all be some ways off in terms of implementation so I'm really asking about what the planned course of action is to meet the goal of "the backseater is the backseater"

Player feedback seems like an entirely solvable problem - you just need to animate the entire process ;p

Some searching around new missile API suggests that ED are going to take on all missile development in-house from now on? Is there any kind of global issue tracker for DCS to see the current accepted state of the world?

As the title says - has there been any recent changes to AIM-54 and/or general missile susceptibility to chaff? My evidence is largely anecdotal with a few tacviews but in the latest OB the AIM-54C has more than enough kinematic energy to reach targets it just goes after chaff at the last moment or fails to detonate - we've even watched as a phoenix apparently flew straight through the target on the tacview without causing any damage. Our running total is an average of 6 phoenix to make one hit, with launches being made between 30 and 35k at SU27s from ranges of 30-50 miles, as I said there doesnt seem to be a kinematic problem as the missile arrives at the target proximity still doing mach 2.5+ it just goes after chaff at the last moment. As I understand it the C model is the one to use for ECCM environments so i'd assumed it would also have the best countermeasure rejection of the available models. Is there a better variant to use? Has there been any changes recently?

+1 to more options to shift the TWS targets around via the jester wheel, when flying with multiple aircraft or with different aircraft I frequently would like to TWS the trailers to hit them with AIM54 range while my wingman hits the guy up front with an AIM120.

Now that the Supercarrier module is released is there any intention to model this switch? Having RTFM'd the current online manual says its not implemented. In the meantime is there a workaround to abort a take-off once you're all hooked up?

I dont think this is limited to the AIM120, I recently started running a dedicated server for my online squadron and we've seen multiple missiles desync between clients almost at random. The most egregious in our tests (i should still have both my local tacview and the server tacview) were the AIM7 and AIM54. We've had instances of AIM54s passing through AI aircraft without detonating from anyones perspective (not proximity, actually phasing through the model) and more often AIM7s that track very differently based on perspective. It seems in most instances the client state wins so if the client see's a good track followed by a splash then the server accepts this and on the server tacview you see an AIM7 miss entirely (usually going balistic off the rail) followed by an AI being destroyed seemingly at random. The only missile we've never seen desync is the AIM9 but that might be because the smaller time of flight doesnt allow for much time to desync.

I think it would be wise not to get ourselves too hung up on the 200kts figure as this is a fairly small fraction of the AIM120s top speed so although this is the simplest change to quantify it is probably the least significant change to its Pk in the update. It’s also good to give credit when it’s due, even the biggest detractors of DCS would have to acknowledge the team has their heart in the right place and have made many many positive steps in recent months to earn goodwill from the community - that is worthy of our own respect in turn. This update represents multiple things - firstly a massive step forward in modelling for air to air missiles but also and almost equally important - an explanation of the working that arrived at these performance figures. The amount of research and thought that has gone into giving us this simulation of an AMRAAM is second to none and I think given time we will see the uptick in Pk bear out. My own questions are more towards how much time and effort this research required and whether it is prohibitively expensive to expect the same level of detail across the board. I’m personally far more interested in the Aim-7, Aim-9 and Aim-54, you can guess which module I fly! The only downside to this as I see it would be if red air and non AMRAAM capable aircraft find their own armament not as competitive since it would probably drive the multiplayer community even further toward an F-16/F-18 combination and I’ve always felt the real USP of DCS was as a combined study-survey sim. The breadth of meticulously detailed aircraft can’t be found anywhere else. Even in that other sim.

To look straight backwards in VR I usually end up leaning my body to the left while looking over my right shoulder, that way you're looking down the left hand side of the ejector seat straight back over the tails. So far from impossible and, arguably, more realistic :)

I'm not sure there isn't some mixing of terms going on which might be adding confusion. The Flanker absolutely has more high alpha stability and nose authority than the F-14, if you try getting into a high alpha state and then dare put in some left or right stick movement you'll quickly drop a wing and end up in a spin in the 14. What the F-14 does have is a very slow speed + very small diameter turn circle, although its turn rate is not really much to write home about. One thing that still bites me in ACM on occasion is due to its very stable flight the F-14 can literally be dropping at 1000fpm but still have the nose pointed right where you want it so long as the AOA isn't off the scale and you don't try and combine it with roll inputs - with no HUD altimeter / rate gauge you can lose a good bit of height imperceptibly staring out the window.

Sorry if I wasn't clear my point was less - these wings spoil my game and more throwing out yet another one of the mental move / counter moves that are happening in ACM in addition to all the move / counter moves that are happening with the stick :D

Like most ACM tactics, so long as your opponent didnt expect / see it / have a counter move this works a charm against AI or humans. One thing thats unique to the F-14 and was commented on many times by AF pilots doing DACT against them is that your energy state / gameplan is broadcast as soon as they see you visually which happens quite far away for such a big jet. Those damned swing wings that give us such high speed + low speed manuverability do give the game away. What you're suggesting I think is called a Wingover so you blow through, pull hard and then at the top of the pull as the speed bleeds off you reverse direction by kicking either rudder, re-acquiring and then building up a lot of speed in the dive to get on their tail. So long as the other guy doesn't acquire you first and doesn't have a lot of high alpha nose-pointability you've got a great opportunity to cut into his horizontal circle and splash him. Long story short - mostly any ACM tactic can work so long as you manage to move your jet into a place where your opponent doesn't expect to reacquire you during / after their own turn. Equally though its not a guaranteed victory.

I think this might be related to the TWS auto feature not being implemented. Both problems seem to arise because the radar / RIO programming has not been updated to actively move the scan azimuth and elevation to keep targets inside the cone. Or indeed to aggressively move the scan zone in order to acquire them in the first place. Its a more manual process at the moment for a human RIO to pop the radar back into TWS manual and keep the scan going while you crank, and a manual process for a pilot to instruct jester to look low-middle, and left.

Yes and no, because the CAP has you enter Lat / Lng separately with commit steps in between you immediately only have to get one in at a time before its too far off, and even at a reasonable cruising speed only the last 2-3 digits are going to change with any kind of speed. Agreed its not super accurate - but it is simple and compared to most of our other options on the table it cuts a nice balance of accuracy vs complexity to do, particularly at night when visual is less an option.

One additional way that my RIO and I have taken to, and I'm not sure if its advisable nor in the book is using the LANTIRN's self contained GPS to update your position.

Just wondering if any Heatblur dev's have received advanced preview of the new stick? I'm curious to hear if all the bindings work as you'd expect, especially for things like the DLC axis or the WEP selector?

Hey all, I'm having a bit of an issue working out where the buttons or switches for these modes exist in the jet. For reference I mean the VSL Low / VSL High / PAL modes. From the bindings these are Target designate down / Target designate fwd / Target designate up and by default on my TM Warthog they are bound to a 4 way hat that doesn't exist in the F-14. I've looked around and read labels and also tried pushing the button repeatedly on my joystick to see if I noticed movement in the cockpit but I couldn't find them so far, can someone point them out to me?

The second video is much improved for my money, another comment to make them even better would be to provide more of a voice over regarding your thought process? Possibly a pre-flight brief of what sort of tactics might work better or worse. With the F-5s we can assume up front that you won't be able to turn with them horizontally but you should have a huge power advantage on them allowing you to get into the vertical, so possibly a quick analysis of relative strengths / weaknesses of the jets followed by commentary over the fight of times when you reject a horizontal fight and go vertical, or choose to spend some knots to get a positional advantage, just something to give insight to the thought process. For simple same-plane or with advantage BFM you can generally limit training to put your lift vector on the bogey and pull, in these more intermediate / advanced sessions there's a lot more thought required to get ahead of the bogey, predict where they will be and position your nose for advantage in another 10-20 seconds time, particularly when you decide to pull vertical, roll and then choose what direction to complete a loop into - its all based on knowing where the opponent is likely to be not where they are now.

While I think the idea has a fair bit of merit, I think the execution could use work. In principle we can all agree the AI is not quite a match for practicing with human opponents, but it does provide a very useful stepping tool to let you practice your own handling of the aircraft whenever you get 5 minutes for a flight. The AI is good enough at handling their plane to present some challenge to a newcomer. To make this useful as a BFM series I would suggest placing some constraints on yourself, for example getting dead 6 on the opponent rather than taking these high deflection leading shots. That would allow for a more protracted dogfight, I would also recommend starting the fight with a more side by side aspect allowing both sides to turn into their opponent or go vertical rather than the head to head that the AI will happily oblige. To me that suffers from A) Being more specifically a deflection shooting exercise rather than pulling the stick in BFM and B) takes advantage of the AI in DCS allowing for these occasional snapshots in head to heads to get them wounded and then finishing them off at your leisure. For a little objection handling, I am aware that in a full on PVP fight taking these kind of snapshots can be the difference between winning and losing, and that expending minimum time and energy per kill is also desirable, but this is presented as a BFM training exercise and under that light I think we need to establish parameters which will allow practicing the skill we want to develop.

I'm not particularly electrically minded but would it not be simpler to allow the sim to drive the indicator on the landing panel? If you think of DCS as a single source of truth state machine, then your input on the RIO ejector seat switch is completely independent of the reflection of the ejector switch in the sim to a display elsewhere. Your input to the sim is the switch which changes something in the state of the sim. Your output on the landing gear panel should be driven by the state of the sim, not the position of a physical switch.

It's not really clear what you're asking here, and I couldn't find a specific paper after doing a google search. Can you provide a direct link to a reference for this? In general terms midcourse guidance and proportional guidance and so forth are fairly general terms and while we might find similarities in approaches (there are only so many ways to skin a cat given many constraints) the two missiles are broadly similar but in detail quite different.