AH_Solid_Snake

I'll just drop in briefly to say hang in there @Frost- both with AAR that, yeah, can be one of the harder nuts to crack and with interactions on the forums. For the refuelling - in my experience the thing that made it click for me was figuring out trimming the F-14 and VR, somewhere between those 2 things let me get my first hookup and once you've got past that mental barrier of achieving something for the first time I find that helps a lot with frustration. In the before-times when I just couldn't seem to get the basket after 30 minutes or so I'd be switching to guns and pew pew For the forums, despite the average age around here being 30+ always remember the Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory. You'll get a lot of answers from armchair instructors who will repeat much of the same stuff on a loop then expect you to take that advice, practice, git gud, and repeat. The trick is finding the nuggets of wisdom in there, or as others might say, find the peanuts in the <profanity> while keeping a thick skin and not resorting to returning fire.

You know you can click on it right?

I can only agree with LASooner. I bought the previous version for ~800 USD in 2019. Its perfectly fine as a hobby level controller, mine was all laser cut acrylic for the casing and a resin grip. My version didn't have the markings around the HAT switches I've seen in the later pictures and the push buttons on the front of the grips were very mushy. The wing sweep lever is an axis with a couple of microswitches to track the open / closed state. In more detail I found - The afterburner / idle gates are quite small (2-3mm thick) so it was quite easy to push through them in the heat of the moment rather than having to move them outboard and around it. - The push buttons and hat switches were quite mushy, the push buttons in particular would flicker on and off while pressing them until they were fully depressed. - The throttle grips themselves are approx 20% undersize and don't have some features such as the cutout on the left grip for the flap lever. - The pots for the throttle levers were quite spikey particularly in the middle range where i found myself during AAR For all those reasons I ended up spending the past 18 months essentially rebuilding the entire thing from scratch with larger grips, OTTO switches, hall effect pots and a revised lever / gate setup so that there is a more positive 10mm gate that you really do have to move around rather than through.

As far as I know this "airframe specific" callsigns is a DCS-sim. For navy jets talking to civilian ATC I think its squadron code + modex, so keeping an example using VF-154 that would be NL108 as an example. For talking to the ship or within own airwing you've got a squadron callsign that usually but not always makes sense compared to the squadron name, for this same jet that would be KNIGHT 108. For talking to everyone else (air force, awacs, international partners) the callsign is almost entirely random and non-sensical and changes day to day in the ATO. You could be Frizbee 1-1 on monday and Wheaties 2-3 on tuesday.

Has anyone managed to source appropriately sized piano switches for the PDCP? I’ve bought a few from hong kong with hard to interpret descriptions but they are roughly 50% undersized for the panel.

They did release a 3D model of the cockpit, its one of the earliest posts in this very thread?

Really impressive work, I like the thought to replicating feel and forces as well as the visuals. I’ve seen a few mods to add linear dampening to the virpil stick as well which might also improve the feel of interacting with a hydro mechanical system

So thats an extension that some one sells for the thrustmaster/virpil standard screw mount and cable? Do you remember where you picked it up?

Is that a modified Virpil VFX setup for the stick? How did you replicate the shape / diameter of the control column? I assume it doesn't twist at the top of the vertical extension and still functions as a joystick?

I recently got a chance to start playing through Reflected Sim’s Zone 5 campaign (great btw) and was finding at Nellis in order to start the left engine using the right engine as the air source took significant throttle movement. Firstly is this normal? The right engine has completely started and air source is R Eng, external air and power off. In this state the tapes for RPM on the left engine do not move at all in Idle and it takes a little over MIL notch on the throttle quadrant to get it started. This presents the second question - at this power setting to avoid rolling I have to hold in the toe brakes, but my understanding of the brakes is that the parking brake is the same braking system, just “held on” so why is one more able to hold me stationary over the other?

I think this topic is always going to have a divide between reality of real life and reality of single player simulator. For what its supposed to do Jester is far and away the best AI companion, but I don’t think it will ever be able to direct the mission from the back seat. Half of players would ignore his directives or blame the AI if the intercept went poorly. Right now most of the Jester function is to give some limited directions to the TWS auto algorithm, and in some ways thats really all we can expect out of him. An AI that really could be presented with a PVP scenario and direct an engagement following some kind of gameplan / tactics manual is well out of scope.

I wasn't asking for help with alignment just noticed a difference that wasn’t in the changelog that i recall. The older behaviour makes more sense to me.

Not sure if this is a bug but previously during cold starts the VDI would start in an inactive state while the alignment was running. When it finished and started showing the cow pats coming towards me it was a good visual cue that we’d switched over to nav. Now the VDI is in that animated state from the moment I switch it on?

Entirely realistic, but only if you're fitted up with the expanded chaff adapter, which means taking along a Phoenix pallet but using it for more countermeasures rather than a GBU or AIM-54. To the best of my knowledge only used for TARPS missions, more here: http://www.anft.net/f-14/f14-detail-eca.htm

Jester doesn't really move the antenna around, you'll notice without some pointers he'll just leave the antenna pointed straight ahead. Once a target gets into 25 mile range you really need to start tilting the antenna up in order to move them back inside the cone, the closer the target the narrower your min and max altitude band will be. If you let someone get that close without having them tracked then your options are a) turn tail b) use PAL c) point the nose up in order to move your cone manually or d) start fiddling in the Jester menu.

I can only suggest videos or tracks at this point. Completely anecdotally the AP works perfectly for me.

I really don't see anything to argue over here, everything they said is consistent with the materials I have available and have read, and also tallies with DCS. The comments about 24 aggressive fighters being a problem was relating to the TWS implementation, which IRL and in the sim will indeed have trouble maintaining and re-correlating the tracks, the whole multi-shot TWS capability in the F-14 is designed to meet the soviet bomber threat. The thing that perhaps everyone forgets it the F-14 is old at this point, hell its been retired IRL for coming up 15 years. When it was brand new and for a good decade or more after, no other platform could match that 6 shot, nor the range. All that is not to say that the F-14 was solely designed for that role, nor that you expect the gameplan for bombers to work against fighters. Separately, the Phoenix as an anti-fighter weapon...using an STT lock then hell yes, you are losing a bit in terms of multishot, but another thing DCS pilots tend to forget is that real F-14s aren't going up as a 1 vs many expecting to take on all comers and laser accurate nail them at 90nm. The AIM54 is giving you a nice big range advantage in that scenario, but its your wingman and teamwork that are making up the rest.

I'm in the middle boat - I'm a lot more impressed with Jester's LANTIRN capability than I perhaps thought I would be, it does look pretty comprehensive and covers the 99% of situations in a pretty good "there's a second guy in the backseat" way when there isn't. But I also am kinda left surprised after all the back and forth about realism that we still can't just accept reality and allow the pilot to bind up some of the radar / LANTIRN controls for those moments where you're just getting frustrated trying to tell Jester what you need. We can talk about how the direct head control is only 25% of normal speed, and I can counter with magic Jester IFF where one of the biggest challenges that I and my human RIOs (when available) have had is identifying targets with the available LANTIRN resolution. Where one person draws the line on realism vs game is unique per individual. But for me personally, the LANTIRN mod and binding a spare axis to antenna elevation for the radar changed single player for me from a mostly good with occasional bouts of frustration fighting with Jester, to a oh he's not quite got it this time ... (manual intervention) ... sorted. While I'm definitely going to make use of all the features I just saw in the video, and still don't find many problems with the Jester menus 99% of the time, this attitude of locking stuff out over time really makes no sense to me. You're basically taking a huge searchlight and pointing it right at those 1% moments where Jester just isn't a substitute, which is doing him and players a disservice.

This might be driven by a mismatch between expectations and reality. The F-14 autopilot isn't a digital system coupled to a FBW like the F-18 for example. Fundamentally its an extension of the analog stab aug system that can use very small trim adjustments to null rates, detected by accelerometers. There isnt a digital input of altitude to compare against a set desired altitude and drive the aircraft to it, there's a gyroscope somewhere detecting a trend upwards, and a trim tab responding to it, its a reactive system not a pro-active control system. For all those reasons the autopilot shouldn't be used as a poor mans FBW to fly the aircraft, it can be very helpful at night, or orbiting in the stack twiddling your thumbs while all the F-18s take 10 passes to get on deck. But it absolutely isn't a substitute for manual trim and flying the aircraft.

I found his comment around TWS settling after a turn and correlating the extrapolated tracks back the most interesting. In all my time in the F-14 module up to now I’ve found the X track to be death for that launch, even if I get a new 2nd track right next to it. What I don’t know is if that’s by design and there is simply no correlation modelled or if there are just very specific criteria for correlation to occur.

Is there a new public domain source that you can share for this? Getting any documentation going into these types of specifics is a rare treasure trove at this point, particularly for the AWG-9 or AIM-54

I'd probably tackle Zone 5 before Fear the bones, as it follows a neat kind of training to "real thing" process. There isn't really one campaign any harder than any others, and most are pretty good at giving variety. I usually only groan a little bit when we are throwing 38 million dollar F-14s into a contested environment to do unguided daylight bombing....it feels a little wasteful when there are good F-18s on deck. But it does break up the CAP and Sweeps.

I'd maybe say more accurately that you should generally be trimming for stable flight, but that it's completely unrelated to BFM. Trim is setting up a neutral stick force, for a given airspeed/configuration. So you can be comfortably trimmed for 300kts cruise with the wings manually swept full back and thats great, but once you enter BFM theres not really enough time to bother adjusting trim because its relatively slow compared to just moving the stick (and you shouldn't really try to fly with trim) and your speed will start to fluctuate rapidly, as will your wing position if left in auto. You throw on the burners and pull into a fast loop, then you slow right down and go into scissors etc. So once in BFM its going to just be all about adjusting your pull for the desired result, either maintaining corner speed or taking energy excursions, or whatever tactic you're going for. Theres also the fact that unless you've got a really high end FFB stick then there aren't really any forces to neutralise which I think adds to the tendency for us virtual pilots to start flying with the trim button.

So much so that Bio co-created the Zone 5 campaign for DCS with Reflected.

Its kinda the equivalent of the white lab coat for the YouTube context. Simply wearing one makes the audience being targeted treat you more as an authority figure on the topic. An 80s iron man moustache probably would have a 500% uptick for same.