AH_Solid_Snake

Flying_Isoko's VF-32 skins are works of art, in that the change to the TPS scheme always looks much more blue grey to me in photos in the same way as his skin packs look. All the default skins and many of the user skins seem much too flat gray.

The magic of editing, they dont show us the avionics tech hanging on the RIO ladder holding the N64 with a very long cable going into the nose....

Im not sure issue #2 is a problem and not expected behavior. The TWS cells for the AWG-9 are fairly broad (5nm 4deg?) so at extended range the azimuth delta for targets in formation will go below that threshold. There is not actually a "initial RWS phase" for TWS, in that it wont ever show you the original radar return and it will wait a minimum of two (or three?) sweeps to present anything on the TID, once you're in TWS the stuff on the TID are track files not returns, in this way TWS even on its first pass is more limited than RWS given that so long as you can visually pick out a distinct target on the display, and the displays are actually pretty precise instruments it doesn't seem crazy to me that RWS is better in that regard.

It doesn't seem that outlandish that the PTID would have a video input? How else would it get a feed from the TCS or the LANTIRN? Or for that matter just rendering the regular TID displays.

I think the same may have occurred with Jester. My experience has been the same up to now that during startup I could fire a list of requests and he would do them in order. The past couple of times asking him to change radio freq stopped him from entering a waypoint from the map. At the time I shrugged and asked again, but this does sound familiar.

To the best of my knowledge this isn't an option because the RAF won't share the information that Germany has, so as close as you'll likely get is slapping some roundels onto the German variant.

Did the D or the B(U) ever recieve Link-16?

From what I’ve gathered, no. The A models never received the upgraded AWG-15 nor the extra data bus, so remained more or less analog to the end less the DFCS.

Agree and disagree. 4th gen is very much software driven and has more to do with little black boxes than it does the airframe over the longer term. So in that way I would say the F-14 remains a 3rd generation fighter for much of its life since the TF-30 hung around instead of being upgraded, as did the AWG-9, again without much in the way of upgrades. The F-15A and F-16A for sure are very close to the F-14A but those fleets received far more substancial upgrades internally while for a good long time until the very late 80s the only thing keeping the F-14 in-pace with the rest of the teen series was the simple fact it had unique capabilities at the beginning, the Navy had a very hard time finding money to get the B and later D models and never did get as many as they wanted. A lot of this is just down to happenstance and timeframes. The Navy had a few mis-starts to replace the F4 and when they were talking about F-14 they not only really really wanted that fighter specifically, they were desperate for a replacement for the F4 which had been in service for far too long at that point. Thus they were unwilling to play the Air Force game and wait for avionics and engines to catch up with what Grumman and MacAir were talking about with their next generation airframes. There was also a political aspect of having been strong armed to accept a USAF fighter and "navalize" it by people who didn't understand what the term meant resulting in the F-111B fiasco they knew if they held off from the F-14 it might happen again and they would go without a new fighter even longer until they proved you can't just "navalize" the F-15 without rebuilding it. The original plan for the B and C model Tomcats was to very quickly get good engines and avionics in there, but the F-14 is a victim of budgets and its own success. As the A+ showed the F-14 had huge amounts of untapped potential, but theres a cost associated with it, and even with the TF-30 it was very capable, so why pay it in a period of budget cuts. The USAF played the opposite game and used a brand new radar / HUD / HOTAS concept and also threw in the P&W F100 which had its own set of teething problems, and they still got a fighter after all that risk that was more or less equal to the Tomcat. It was only as the F100 matured into a reliable engine and the APG-63 got software upgrades that the AWG-9 was incapable of that it caught up and arguably surpassed it on some metrics.

Feature - the word you’re looking for as magnetic variance due to the large metal island you’re floating around the ocean on.

The trouble is we're still in our little echo chamber - nobody has replied so far to the contrary except me as a poor man devil advocate. To handle this particular case, the numbers are fairly convincing. But the naysayers will be quick to point out that they were making hay while the going was good, most of their targets didn't have RHAW gear that could let them know the F-14 had fired on them in a TWS mode so the first they knew of a Phoenix on the way was when their buddies exploded, thats a very permissive target on the level of a target drone. As they say in all these discussions, due to the extended flight time of the missile and the limitations of the AWG-9, someone thats awake will spoil your TWS shot long before it goes active, or they'll bleed the thing dry unless you waited till you were very close. Its just never as black and white as these kind of discussions and assumptions make it. I can throw in another 100% correct statistic that USN F-14s shot 3 phoenix in anger and none hit anything. All of it depends heavily on how you skew your stats and what your initial assumption / position was.

Absolutely, to give you and the team credit I think the entire radar implementation of the F-14s AWG-9 is the best in class for DCS, warts and all. If other modules didnt have magic multi STT instead of a real TWS implementation then we might not be where we are today, but thats beside my point of congratulating you all once again.

That runs the risk of the echo chamber effect unfortunately, to put my foot down in the right camp... I do think the Phoenix can be effective against fighter sized targets. That said, if you listen to that podcast while they DO say that it direct hit an F4 target drone without a warhead (evidence for) I think the naysayers will focus instead on the later segment about how "against aggressors that knew all about the radar and the Phoenix you'd have a harder time....and be better using a Sparrow" [sic]. Now I can hear that and still think, yes any missile is effective if the target is either asleep at long range, or is inside the no escape zone, which is bigger for a AIM-54... its all about selectively choosing the parts to quote and you can flip this thing around. Hence neither side changes their mind. Reality is the missile performance is the least of your worries and holding a TWS or even PD STT lock for the kind of time in flight that a phoenix has will drive most hits / misses, not the size of the target or the kinematic performance of the weapon.

While I appreciate that this is presented as evidence to the contrary....did we need to go around this particular barrel again?

I think as Naquaii has pointed out a few times, the F-14 is a 3rd generation fighter with 4th gen performance. If you think back to crews transitioning from jets like the F4, (did any transition straight from F8s?) then the HUD is a step up, there are many more cues for visual range weapon release, which was the entire requirement. The additional expectations of things like FPM, pitch ladders etc come from later 4th gen fighters with full on 4th gen avionics, so you will be fighting a huge amount of cognitive dissonance if you persist in thinking of the F-14A / A+ that we have in that regard. The HUD is not a primary flight instrument, and yet, you'll find all the instruments you need are there, they just arent the same as later jets. They are even organised pretty well considering that the official field of ergonomics was sort of made up by a designer of the F-18, that cluster of stuff on your left shows you height, vertical speed, speed.... that thing in front of you shows your pitch ladder and optionally the ILS indications and does so in a much smoother way than the old school HUD. For the break turn, even in case 1 visual conditions to fly the approach right on the numbers you are essentially on an instrument approach until you transition to visual at the end of the final turn, up to that point as many have pointed out - if you want that perfectly level turn at bang on 800 feet refer to your instruments and dont worry too much about whats going on out the window. Thats not to say with a bit of skill you can get used to watching the horizon and maintain a level turn visually, but it was perfectly natural from crews transitioning to the jet in the early 70s in a way thats pretty much anathema to sim pilots in the 2020s, theres just so much expectation that whats very much a dirty analog process subject to all kinds of real world interactions to be a binary, digital, works or not process.

From memory the FPM we have is a little more accurate than the real world one too, so even using it in the recovery context is a DCSism, multiple sources including @Victory205 have stated that turning the HUD off entirely was common practice. I’m not sure if the FPM is finalised or if that’s going to be subject to a “downgrade” during early access.

Not likely, the AWG-9 is really 1960s tech that was designed starting in the late 50s. So in order to get range gates and speed gates and all the "electronic" logic it actually requires a physical logic gate, its not handled in software. The reason jets of the F-14 or F-4 vintage don't have clever things like MPRF and very narrow gates is simply due to physical space limitations to fit all the permutations.

Structurally in terms of overall shape and G limits etc from what I can tell the A/B/D are identical. Earlier jets will have had the glove vanes welded shut while later ones will just have never had them to begin with. Fuel load and overall fuel cells configuration seems to be unchanged too. There is an obvious empty weight creep which is probably accounted for with the changes in little black boxes.

From what I know however by at least 2004 the B also had JDAM support? So there were some limited upgrades going on. So yes I appreciate they retain different designations for a reason, I’m just trying to figure out what the differences looked like.

Since we've got a reasonable number of F-14 aficionados here I thought i'd mine for someone that knows more than me. Were the late B models (basically at the point of retirement in 2004+) essentially D models less the APG-71 and IRST pod, or were there remaining detail differences in capability? For that matter, were the A models similar? I've seen that all models going back to the A's that were still in service were fitted up with the DFCS for example, so they seem to be comparable in capability to the D / B except for, in addition, the engine and HUD? Are there any good sources out there that lay out clearly all the various capability modifications with a little Y / N for whether a given model received it?

For the purposes of the Vc / target aspect switch you're of course correct. I just have a somewhat ingrained reaction to the TWS unless otherwise attitude in flight sims when the reality that I'm aware of is fairly well the opposite, STT unless otherwise needed. For the 100nm test if we are recalling the same one correctly then they spent time augmenting the radar signature of the drone and the test criteria was more around the Phoenix reaching that point and completing the intercept rather than the AWG-9 (I appreciate the two are linked), kind of proving that with some advances in electronics the system has some growth potential yet. In such a test with such a high closure single target I'd much rather put trust in STT to hold it than the (correctly modelled) reliability of TWS. Can you imagine getting half way through the intercept and having the little X appear and then the AWG-9 guestimating when to send the active signal for that run

Something relevant for this test shot is I would assume STT tracking unless otherwise specified and that the 1800 limit is irrelevant, the RIO has a lot more radar options than we do sitting in the front seat locked in TWS Auto.

I think there are a few misconceptions baked into some of this discussion, and while I'm by no means the final SME on the F-14, nor a math wizard I can offer the following points. The F-14 is indeed designed to go high, and fast, and to kill other things that are also doing the same, but not necessarily all at the same time. Geometry to manage closure is a huge part of running intercepts whether its a peace time stern conversion or a wartime weapons free, theres a reason when you see video of the F-14 doing TWS tests, or Phoenix tests in general that the wings are either full forward or in an intermediate (but still mostly forward) position - so long as you're high and pointed the right way the Phoenix will make up a lot of the range such that adding a few extra knots or breaking the mach prior to launch against a large number of targets just means you're going to end up ruining your TWS solution by the time you're getting to the 4th (or even 6th!) launch. Remember that your TWS scan volume is either wide or tall, again not both at the same time. Excess closure for this kind of shot means you're going to force some of the targets outside your allowable volume before going active simply by pushing that cone closer to them. For single shots against the MiG-25/31 example these intercepts are incredibly geometry intense since you usually can't expect to be conveniently lined up right in front of them with a big rate of closure, and in this scenario we're going to be burning the Phoenix motor in order to catch them at all. F-15s with AIM-7 have even narrower margins for this type of intercept. In these kinds of cases you're going to be going STT for a single shot, because against a target moving that fast a TWS scan is just not reliable enough to guide your weapon with much of a chance of hitting them. TWS is more like guidelines than guidance for your missile. The best it can do is give your missile a box (usually referred to as cell) that the target is within, for the F-14, from memory these are 5 degrees wide and 5nm long...thats a lot of CEP for your Phoenix when both it and the target are doing mach 2+ in the terminal phase. Secondly even with its big motor then depending on...that word again...the geometry of the intercept you are burning a lot of the missiles energy just maintaining a Pn lead pursuit course, if you were already on CAP the enemy is unlikely to just go CBDR right at your 12 oclock allowing for the perfect straight line course. And if you were scrambled to meet the threat your missile is also doing significant uphill work to meet them from a lower starting altitude. In these cases you've got to manage 2 things with your geometry as usual. Range and angle off. Tracking 90 degrees or 180 degrees against a M2+ bandit will make even a Phoenix struggle, making your WEZ much smaller than the 100nm on paper. Tracking nose on from below requires you to get as much height as you feasibly can before the enemy gets so close that your missile (and radar guidance) would have to do an immelman turn to maintain tracking, so you'll get whatever height you can, then get as fast as possible, then zoom climb so that at the optimum moment you are high / fast enough to catch them, followed by leveling off again before you stall out and again lose the STT guidance for the weapon. All this was suffice to say that theres a hell of a lot of geometry involved and thank god there are RIOs for that

It’s quite possible the 120 doesn’t show desync because it’s no as fast / long ranged so it simply doesn’t have time to diverge as much. We have no insight into the exact setup of the missile API provided by ED, but based on what has been said in reply to various queries it would seem third parties can: 1) define a flight model within some limits, HB have done this and have never mentioned changes to the core setup. It was based on fairly convincing CFD research so we could assume it’s pretty solid. Probably a combination of thrust / drag / motor timeout time 2) tell the engine that their aircraft at pos x,y,z has fired a weapon, in this case an AIM54, probably along with the current x,y,z of the target object. The newer API is known to let HB set whether the weapon can go active on its own based on distance from target, this is false for almost all Phoenix modes. Control is now entirely in the hands of ED and their missile code. The 54 is still on an older version as it still exhibits the big oscillations when it completes its loft. From the module code within HB’s hands there are likely only 2 things they can do at this point. a) tell the missile a new target coordinate b) tell the missile to go active both of these things are still processed and handled in ED code to determine if the missile will turn, and whether according to its flight model how much speed it will bleed etc. what is there within these options that HB are failing to do? What is going unacknowledged on their part? I’m not really sure what has happened in the past few weeks that everyone has decided to crap on HB and their efforts on this module? One thread after another of unsubstantiated claims and ignoring any attempt to clarify or discuss reasonably what the issue apparently is. guess it’s just HB’s turn in the barrel.

Nope, important part: "ED are the only ones who can make this right." The moment the Phoenix leaves the rail and becomes a little flying object control, by design, reverts to ED. There is literally nothing HB need to do here, not even liase with ED. The best place to get attention to this issue and work it up the priority list would be the Weapon Bugs section. However since this is probably heavily entangled with the already janky netcode this is likely why ED haven't done anything to fix it yet, there is probably no cheap fix.