AH_Solid_Snake

As per the title, there used to be an outfit called Maple Flag that made some really good scripted campaigns to test and certify you on every aspect of employing the A-10C from basic flight to advanced weapons deployment. Does anyone here remember these guys? Know if they are still operating? And most important if they are, what our chances of an equivalent series for the F-14B are?

Tested during the defend the fleet mission, RHAW indications are rendered outside of the indicator / cockpit. Screenshots attached. I also saved the track but as a related already tracked issue i think all F-14 tracks are bugged due to slipping around on the deck. I've tried watching the track a few times and there are a variety of failures to playback.

Hi all, just wondering if anyone else has updated to the latest OB patch tonight (2.5.4.28841) and had issues with head tracking? Its fine on initial load and in first mission, but if i quit back to menu and refly all head tracking is backwards (up is down, left is right, etc). If I quit back to menu at that point everything is fine, but going back into a mission is inverted again. I'm using the F-14B module if that makes any difference. A workaround at the moment is to completely quit the game between missions but this is obviously less than ideal.

All the symbology on the VDIG is roughly analogous to the F-15 or F-18 which you may have seen before. The small inverted T is the steering cue, in otherwords putting this in the middle of the display means they are directly ahead. The expanding circle is the Allowable Steering Error, this will expand as range decreases and gives a representation of the initial turn any weapon fired will have to make in order to get onto an intercept path. In other words center the T and then shoot. Comparing to the other jets this is shown on the HUD or radar display, with a dot instead of a T. The long green bar is the weapon range scale with ticks on the right of the bar representing rmax and rmin for the current weapon and the tick to the left the current range to target. Again this can be seen in a very similar way on the HUD or radar display of any other teen series jet.

I think parsing the above this has been answered, but to try and summarize. The gates that must be met for hot trigger indications for both pilot and RIO are 1. Master Arm - ON 2. Master mode select - AA (pilot display panel) 3. Weapon select (pilot stick) - SP/PH (sparrow/phoenix) 4 .Radar target locked To clarify the selection of weapons - the A/A weapons are all controlled from the pilots selector switch. For A/G the mode selection is made from the pilots display panel but actual pylon and weapon select is performed via the switches on the RIOs weapon panel. Finally the bomb is released from the pickle button on the pilots stick.

Thanks! That's exactly what I needed. As a bit of an aside, does anyone know what all the extra buttons for the -D are for? By my count the A/B have a total of 14 switch positions. The D model swaps 1 switch push buttons for a new 4 way hat, transducer with a push button and an extra 4 way hat on the side, we've jumped from 14 buttons to 21 + 2 more axis. To my knowledge all the weapons / sensors etc were integrated into both the A/B and D fleet so I'm pretty intrigued to know what all these buttons are for.

Did anyone ever find a reference for the throttle HOTAS grips? diagrams / orthos / 3d model with any dimensions? Im psyched to have my own attempt at a VR oriented sim-pit so priority is really the HOTAS as most buttons / switches are not really useable / applicable in VR.

Introduction / Ground Attack Recommend swapping para 1 and 2 around so that the introduction to ground attack and its ruling out is present before it is "resurrected" "gps-guided" GPS should be capitalized. Final para "Most of the LANTIRN equipped aircraft were the ones upgraded with the programmable TID or (PTID) allowing for greater integration of the LANTIRN." should be "Most of the LANTIRN equipped aircraft were later upgraded with the programmable TID (PTID) allowing for greater integration of the LANTIRN."

Introduction / Ground Attack "with the advent of operations like operation Desert Storm" the official title is capitalized Operation, also repeated words are not great, could be "with the advent of conflicts such as Operation Desert Storm"

Introduction / Service life upgrades, 3rd para. "...visual range identifications of radar tracked targets." should be "...visual range identification of radar tracked targets." The multiple plurals are redundant. (identifications and targets)

Introduction, 3rd para, 1st sentence: sp "developement" Same sp in the introduction, last para, last sentence.

Not sure if there is a central issue tracker for updates to the manual but here goes from first pass of first section. Introduction, 2nd para The Navy was directed, by then, defense secretary Robert McNamara to join the Tactical Fighter Experimental... Should be The Navy was directed by, then defense secretary, Robert McNamara to join the Tactical Fighter Experimental... or The Navy was directed by, then, defense secretary Robert McNamara to join the Tactical Fighter Experimental... In this case the commas are used effectively as brackets () so an easy check is whether the sentence makes sense if you remove the words contained within. The original version doesnt pass this test The Navy was directed defense secretary Robert McNamara.... Will keep reading :)

For a furball type server, depending on the weight / drag of the Phoenix rail adapters the 4 x AIM-7 / 2 x AIM-9 and 2 x AIM-54 may still be worth it if you have a reasonable certainty of lobbing those 54's at long range into a furball. It gives you a couple of nice big sticks to throw people off balance while you burn through your external tanks in a draggy state before dropping them when the 54's are gone to end up with a still reasonably fully loaded clean jet for the merge.

I think this misses the point a little, with software you're right we are notoriously bad at estimating how long something will take - since usually if you are building it its because it does not presently exist and you effectively are rolling R&D / Production into one big batch. What you can control however is scope and feature creep. I can't give you a reliable estimate of how long it will take to build for example the simulation of the engine, or mach sweep programmer. What i can do is decide how much content is necessary on day one and limit development to that. Another thing that's well understood is that feature development and polishing and bugfixing do not generally go hand in hand. The more someone adds surface area at one end the less polished the overall package is. It's just another form of scope creep. Heatblur have done exactly this, to a point. The complete module as I understand it includes F-14A F-14B Carrier F-14A Campaign F-14B Campaign A6E AI So for the minimum product required to launch they identified the F-14B, which does not require any of the other items in the list to be complete. Based on the updates we have received in the lead-up to Christmas is where the feature creep starts, the initial target and expectation seemed to be a complete aircraft, lacking the LANTIRN integration and self designation for LGBs. As the goal neared we got a fairly standard software response (don't get me wrong, I'm not above this and have used it many times myself) .... no we haven't finished what we said we would on time, but to try and make up for it here's a drawer of puppies. Or in other words, no we will miss christmas, but now when we launch we will have full LANTIRN integration. As I've said before I would have been more aggressive with cutting content from the early access release, and would have gone as far as sticking to the Jester AI / A2A only F-14B, any work going into features beyond that is work that isn't getting the initial release out the door. Please don't interpret any of this as getting at Heatblur, they have been very professional and showing incredible skill at developing the F-14 this far. I simply have a different opinion on how to manage timescales / scope and expectations.

As a first comment I would say that the thread title is a little bit inflammatory - but I do think there is a legitimate concern / query regarding how release / early access etc is handled. I would second the query to try and understand what exactly the terms mean at this point, as clearly this is not a hard and fast rule set by ED and is left more to discretion. Putting aside past target release dates and just going with the current "Winter 2019" there is still a question of what this means when clearly there are content creators on YouTube and apparently entire online squadrons who have either been gifted or have paid for early access to the F-14 and have already received it. Clearly there is some form of gating process to the release and we could argue that perhaps these users are in some form of alpha test, where the general consumer paying for "Early Access" is only included at the point of beta testing, but again, this has not been clearly stated by Heatblur. There is also a second debate over companies abusing the "early access" moniker to simply release broken software. Based on what we are seeing in the various youtube videos it would seem the module is already far past that point. My own "Early Access" criteria falls somewhere between EDs F-18 and the current F-14 strategy, I was not necessarily expecting feature complete, both cockpits, AA, AG LANTIRN etc. At the point where without any showstopping bugs you can fly the F-14 with jester, even with limited weapons options (AA only for example) I would consider that ready for "Early Access". I do understand the need for polish and the desire to not have any major issues post release but that is simply not feasible with software going to potentially thousands of end users - the module could be polished for another 6 months and still find that there are some BSOD type issues with certain hardware / software / input combinations - and again - this is where my own definition of "Early Access" comes into play. Based on my own experience I would rather have a more feature limited release (MVP in my own domain speak) that is in the wild and in use by a broad user base to build new features on top of, than have one huge big bang release with every single feature being tested and broken at once. I would rather make sure my MVP is solid and that we were not developing more and more features on quick-sand. Again all of this is my opinion and interpretation, but my underlying question is can we tease out exactly what Heatblur interprets all of this as. I think experience to date is showing that with such a small dedicated team we are clearly getting a dream module, built to entirely new and excitingly high standards but without the resources to down tools and properly communicate the planned direction of travel along with the current status of delivery to a very passionate and excited group of stakeholders.

Would the simplest way to get the copy checked by a broader audience not be to soft-release the manual without a marketing push, allow anyone to read it and have some form of issue tracker for posting tweaks / mistakes? Without saying one size fits all with every software company I've worked the easiest way to get a really good acceptance test from our end users was to launch it to a broad chunk of our existing userbase, those that were interested tried the new feature in beta and posted feedback. Others tried and didn't bother with feedback, others didn't even try it. But inevitably we found many more minor (and the odd major :D) bugs as soon as we increased the number of brains and eyes on the problem, in a shorter period, which let us get finished.

Yes and no, they were absolutely correct from a purely aerodynamic perspective - that didn't change. What did change was the perceived value of those effects. In practice the extra weight of the slabs in addition to the actuators, let's remember it's a hydraulic system so we have pipes and ducts and values to make this little slab of wing actually move, coupled with the extra effort in maintaining that system outweighs the extra pitch available at high speeds. In addition as I think you're alluding to - they discovered that in practice you don't spend a great deal of time maneuvering hard at those speeds, a true turning fight will get slower and the wings will come forward, and a quick correction at high speed without bleeding off the speed you're trying to maintain doesn't require that much of a pitching moment.

Very impressive work! Some questions 1) How did you handle the DLC rotary? Is this effectively mapped to button pushes? 2) Do you have any plans to eventually share the stick via shapeways or something so the rest of us can have a go?

Very much this, especially when those other attack squadrons would be A7 or F-18s which are more than capable of the Shrike employment while being cheaper if they suffer losses. At the same time you are wasting an F-14 and its unique FAD / AA capabilities that could be better spent on CAP.

I think there is some apples and oranges comparing an F-15E to a proposed QuickStrike F-14 in the same way there is comparing an F-15C to an F-14A/B/D. Regardless of whether the F-15E is the same, better or worse the F-14 does one thing it can't - land on a carrier deck. In that case we are really asking whether having a strike capability analogous to the land based F-15E on an aircraft carrier, (F-14 or not) is necessary or required - which so far is beyond the scope of this argument. For my own position I think the QuickStrike F-14 was a huge wasted opportunity, but as others have noted already - it was an opportunity that was wasted long before the retirement of the aircraft. Having allowed the jet to develop a reputation for being unreliable and/or expensive to maintain going back to congress and saying we would rather more of these instead of the Super Hornet would require a lot of backtracking to unwind that reputation. And incase it wasn't clear from the above - to answer my own question - with the right aircraft I would argue the aircraft carrier still offers immediate response worldwide capabilities that aircraft from the airforce simply can't. I would say this was proven in almost every conflict since 1991 where negotiations for basing and the buildup of forces from the AF eventually exceeded the Navy commitment, but critically took longer, the Navy and their Carrier Air Wings are still unbeatable in terms of getting hundreds of aircraft into an area of operations in very very short order.

That's more of a political than practical question. Both the TFX and VFX programs were developed in a climate where the prior generation of fighters had been for a variety of reasons crippled by multi role thinking - using the technology of the late 1950s it was not possible to make a fighter jet also a capable bomber without seriously infringing on its primary role. In these circumstances both the air force and the navy went for (at the time) an uncomfortably long period without upgrading their front line fighter, both retaining the F4 Phantom for longer than was desirable to the services. As a result both services pushed for a new fighter tailored to their specific requirements, which would emerge as the F-14 and F-15. Both of these jets had a notional strike capability built in from the get-go at least in the form of software support and payload capacity. Politically for the services however there could be no doubt that the fighter capability was being watered down again, as a result neither service qualified their respective aircraft for bomb carriage and any form of advanced targeting was quietly dropped or ignored. For the first 20 years or so of the F-14, and for the entirety of the F-15A/C series the nascent strike capability was ignored as in the words of the services, something would have to have gone seriously wrong for either aircraft to find its only role dropping 10k lbs of dumb bombs on a target. The Air Force only took strike seriously with the F-15 in the very late 1980s and the jets were only just operational with 1 fighter wing for deployment to the 1991 Gulf War, this was also developed and built as a different submodel of aircraft and was considered less an evolution of the F-15C, and more a replacement for the F-111. For the Navy and the F-14 the demise of the A6 intruder combined with budget cuts in the late 1990s and competition for deck space, multi role became critical for the jet to survive. In a similar move as in the 1980s with the demise of the RA5C and its photo recon role, with the F-14 having a podded solution bolted on. With the A6 came the bolt on LANTIRN pod and the finding that with no serious air to air threat to compete with, the F14 was still superlative as a strike aircraft for PGMs. For similar reasons, high risk delivery of Shrike or later HARM ARM missiles would be seen as a poor use of resources while the F-14 was a premier A-A fighter when other less capable (cheaper) platforms could perform the role. By the time the F-14 community were casting around for additional roles the ARM mission was solidly taken by the Hornet, and upgrading / rewiring the F-14 for HARM would have been financially unviable.

Out of curiosity - I wonder how the art assets for the selected B model we are getting were found, as I understand it we are getting a 1993 circa F-14B which is basically the original A+ configuration of +F110s and +RWR but nothing else. The various Tomcats in museums are usually A models which were gifted during the service life of the Tomcat and as such were the oldest airframes, since the B (new) and B (upgrades) were all done on the younger airframes. or they were gifted after the jet was retired and are mixed A/B/D models in their final configurations from 2003+ So either Heatblur located a B model which set the standard for the period that would be modelled or they have managed to hodgepodge various sources, for example using an older A cockpit as the primary source then swapping in the changes?

I voted no for twist - and +1 for skipping the warthog attachment, especially if it wouldn't support all the axis.

sLYFa is right - with the 1993 circa F-14B (more of an F-14A+) the only differences would be the engines and RWR. All the additional features of the B such as sparrowhawk / GPS / DFCS were added in future upgrades. My understanding of the A model is that it will be a mid 80s version which would mean minor details such as the gun gas port could be different.

Just out of interest - my understanding of the weapon selection switch to the top left was a rotary + push button? Is this correct / how it is implemented for the stick? To expand on this - and I would need to go back to my books to see if I can corroborate it - the selector was rotated to the desired weapon then pushed to select it, so that moving from OFF to sparrow / phoenix wouldn't select each weapon in sequence from guns upward.