AH_Solid_Snake

I'd certainly count myself in the group that would like to see a Sparrowhawk option for the B. I know its a small number of the total, but keeping to that line of argument only something like 12% of Tomcats built were B models to begin with, so agreed its pretty niche. For me its definitely about weapon symbology - coupled to a fair bit of flying with Jester. Once you've gone into A/A mode its just nice to have more info right in front of you regarding the WEZ and simple stuff like speed / heading / height. I know all of that is on the VDIG right underneath and you can glance at it, but I also like to have that set for the TCS repeater. There's probably just an age boundary where we start from thinking of all the HUD toys as standard, and not having them feeling pared back, rather than being brought up with steam gauges always being the primary instruments.

I should maybe clarify this wasn’t meant as a “can I haz the D” type post, more of a how to work with what we have and wondering how it worked out real world. Your only point that I can’t line up with what I’ve read along with experience in DCS is the launch and leave aspect against fulcrums etc, I can follow the logic except that with the AWG-9 as presented there just isn’t a launch and leave, in that if you throw a Phoenix and then turn around it will never get that critical “go active” command. In the best case you you do outrange them, and the Phoenix will close the gap very fast at Mach 4, but while it’s doing it you have to accept closing range and likely not even being able to F pole if you want to hold the track, this also doesn’t account for the enemy making any movements to trash your shots. given enough F14s and enough AIM54 you could get them all without them touching you - but limiting the numbers of either sounds like we risk ending up in a merge or going for a late STT + sparrow shot for any stragglers as the Pk I’d expect out of the 54 in this scenario is not that great?

Based on recent experience with the DCS module I started wondering if there were any real world improvements made to the APG-71 in terms of the TWS / track correlation. YMMV but with all the recent updates my general feel for the Phoenix has switched from an AMRAAM analog with a much bigger motor, to more of a Super-Sparrow. With the previous modelling holding the TWS lock all the way to active would certainly help the missile but wasn't absolutely required. My current tactics are far more 1980s era head on sparrow shots...just with the option of more than one in flight at a time. The biggest item trashing my shots is not the kinematic or even tracking performance on the missile end, but with TWS auto supporting them on the flyout, the track correlation of the early (mostly analog?) AWG-9 leaves a lot to be desired so with a multishot (usually 2 at a time) I would say its averaging out to a little above 50% success rate. Some of this is down to still relearning all the available modes but from my understanding the closest to a "modern" (AIM120) idea of Fox3 that we have, ignoring active off the rail due to the range limitation is SARH/DL all the way to active. My experience with the AWG-9 shows that even in that mode if you lose a track or a target manoeuvres into your range gate or into the notch even momentarily the missile will be trash, the AWG-9 will not provide any further updates to the missile in flight even if you re-acquire because its considered a new track, and the missile will be commanded to go active when near the old position which usually results in the missile comfortably cruising over the targets head at mach 2.5 Theres 2 parts to my questions, firstly any in game advice / experience for trying to complete and keep pace (even in PVE) with mid 2000s era fighters like the F-16 and 18 that don't involve ending up in a F-pole / sparrow joust Secondly, in the real world we know that the Navy had to choose between LANTIRN and AMRAAM, and as was proven correct the LANTIRN was by far more important to keeping the jet relevant. - What was the plan for a high-end fight from say the mid-late 90s into the early 2000s? - Did the F-14D / APG-71 have improved TWS capability due to the parts lifted from the APG-70? - Did the F-14D have even a notional AIM120 compatibility for the same reason? - Since it predates the AIM120 by at least 20 years is the AWG-9 even capable of being upgraded to support the missile without basically rebuilding it into an APG-71? I know that possibly starting in the late 80s / mid 90s timeframe the Phoenix was starting to be considered for more than just fleet defense missions as a reaction to higher end russian fighters like the SU27 / Mig29 although I suspect this was more due to the range and less for multi-shot /fox3 capability since the Russians in that timeframe also didn't have a good system for allowing this, so until it was retired was the basic doctrine for air superiority in the F-14 effectively unchanged from the late 80s in terms of having a good STT intercept supporting a head-on Sparrow shot?

Just as a random aside, was there a specific reason for this campaign using the A model? Im assuming as complicated as this sounds it has been in development for a while, so was likely having to use the B model to fill in? Why not stick with it?

I have to agree here, our B model, beauty though it is, is a bizzare bird that only exists as a historical oddity due to what documentation was available and what was deemed possible. The likelyhood of an A+ making it all the way to the late 90s with none of the updates, but also being fitted with an anachronistic LANTIRN laser that works above 25k MSL seems highly remote. For that reason I can very much see the argument that the F-14A will be much more 'realistic' from a milsim perspective, and from a gameplay perspective if we're allowed to dream, it would give more variety if you had the A model (and all the variants we are getting), plus a more late model B or (im gonna say it) a D model to give those very different platforms and takes on whats fundamentally the same airframe.

I'd be wary of disregarding this as just "bad scan", the exact problem has occured in both IMC and night flying too many times to just dismiss it as a problem. All the training in the world can start to fall to the wayside if your little pink brain starts getting tired or the instinctual parts begin to take over, its why we call it disorientation. Recognising it and correcting it is possible sure, but the best trained person in the world isnt immune to it - I guess there's similarity there to high altitude hypoxia training.

The idea of listing it presents some interesting questions - its not a Heatblur, or even DCS level problem that at some point you hit a wall of diminishing returns in terms of simulating tiniest of nuances, and also documenting each nuance to the degree that you would find in engineering documents of the real deal. Obviously the real item works a particular way at a particular time...because it just kind of does, it exists. And due to the amounts of money involved and the need to train operators to a pretty high standard in order to operate and maintain it you get incredibly deep silos of information on every system at every change. (Only some of which is easily accessible to a motivated and interested, but still general audience like ourselves). I was going to suggest a mission statement might help similarly to how the team way back in Fleet Defender prefaced their manual explaining that for their purposes all F-14s are B's, even in the 70s. But I realised there already is one and it was "to make the best F-14 simulation feasible within DCS and current hardware constraints". Its just really hard to find some kind of middle ground that defines all of the intricacies of what is now being simulated to a waaaay deeper level than it was 20 years ago, while not just making some exhaustive bullet point list that you can't begin to decipher without reading volume after volume of supporting material.

I'm not trying to stitch you up, but that sounds like even more reason to have a sticky specifying what is in / out? I agree that there are multiple degrees of scope that need to be taken into account when building a simulator but apart from the usual requests for Sparrowhawk or the DFCS etc there does seem to be a general lack of awareness of what features we read about in a NATOPS etc are considered in scope or not. To be clear, this isn't me making a pitch for adding scope or features that have limited benefits, just asking for clarification on what it is in.

I think we could use a sticky for referencing exactly what year / fit our F-14B is and the A will be, also working from memory I think our B model is pre-1999 as we don't have the upgrades from OFP320 or 321. The jets from the book Black Aces High are also A models so the timeframes/specific fit might be slightly different but I'd expect that the A/B LANTIRN fit for that timeframe was largely identical. As a result I would expect our airplane to be subject to all of the limitations mentioned in the book / first post.

He is probably onto something though. Our F-14 is a very early LANTIRN fit prior to PTID/Sparrowhawk and the book is regarding Op Allied Force in 1999 so probably very much the same time frame.

On the range argument I think what folks are trying to point out is you rarely get to fly a straight line to the target, drop and leave, so taking maximum theoretical ranges and then adding on a weapons range is probably not feasible in a real world drop. As ever more fuel means more options. I think its really worth remembering that we're not playing top trumps and trying to claim the F-14 is better in all regards than anything before or since, but that every airframe is a compromise. I'm an engineer, albeit not an aeronautical one, so I'm very familiar with the iron triangle. You can trade capability, time to develop, and cost. But extending any one axis will shorten the others. The F-14 in its day was no compromise for performance and it was deep in cold war territory so money was much less of a concern than it is now, particularly with unit costs inflating in line with the F-series number. That no compromise allowed it to stay competitive for longer than it otherwise might have, but nowadays it would still be completely trounced by an F-22 in many respects. One thing the F-14 never lost however was its extreme fuel capacity coupled with a very long loiter time once you have the wings in Cessna mode, its an option any of the variants of the F-18 just don't have. We can debate how useful this is in any given scenario but all the best answers about most topics start with, it depends, and what is the situation.

The general circle pattern was in use since at least the F-8 Crusader that I've read the NATOPS for, I would suspect all jets since at least the angled deck and optical landing system were introduced, that would be 1955 onward to the best of my knowledge and could have been earlier. The idea is to make the landing safe and repeatable both for the pilot and for people observing on the LSO platform, large deviations are easier to spot the tighter the tolerances are. For the pilot it effectively isolates the workflow into a series of gates that sets up the aircraft a particular way so that you can focus more on the next stage, for example the tailhook is put down very early because it indicates your intentions and affects your handling very little, so once its set and out of the way we can forget about it. Getting onto (roughly) the 800ft / 350kts part of the approach starts to get you trimmed up for the landing while keeping you above anyone launching off the bow cats (unusual AFAIK as its preferable to do one evolution at a time). Turning onto your reciprocal gets the gear and flaps and any other configuration changes locked in, now we can more or less forget about taking our hand off the throttle and stick. Getting trimmed out means we can start ignoring the pitch axis and focus in on the power and getting a good rate of descent locked in. Turning out behind the boat off a good approach passing through all the gates puts you in great shape to see the ball, make minor adjustments and mostly be using your throttle to control that final rate of descent. The approach has also ensured good clearance above the fantail so that there's no staring at the potato locker at the stern. All of that is just for the pilots own benefit, not mentioning the increased safety for everyone else and the speed (time not knots) that this allows aircraft to recover, if it wasn't the best way to do it the Navy wouldn't have kept it up this long. (Probably ;) )

The 120D or Meteor would seem to be replacements in that regard, although it did take a long time for them to come along?

I guess there's an awful lot of cutting cloth going on. In some ways after such a surge of A/G operations over a ten year period against little to no air opposition in order to sustain your current tempo you have to accept a reduction in capability to keep it up. Against this backdrop the Super Hornet was pitched as the low cost evolution of an already low cost aircraft - hence the F-18E designation for what could have been argued to be a new aircraft once development finished - its a much easier sell to pitch an "upgrade" than another brand new project after a couple of high profile fizzles. For the current budget conscious navy the all Rhino air wing offers a lot of benefits in terms of spare parts commonality, low cost per flight hour, relatively young airframes with low hours with a huge overlap in terms of training ex legacy hornet crews. As Victory alluded to this only becomes a problem if your next opponent looks like Russia again or China, for which you could make an argument for the all grumman airwing of the 80s being a better match for long range penetrations without support, but those airplanes all timed out years ago.

That's totally fair, I imagine at some point rehashing old arguments with neophytes at best gets old. As a Brit, Planespotter TM, bookworm and simjockey I'll take all of those on the chin :megalol: I'll bite.....experience very low, MTBF very high? This seems like a bit of a potential book in and of itself. From what I can put together the F-14 kind of missed the sweet spot in terms of the 1991 Gulf War. In the 70s and through the 80s with a TV system and doctrine built around integration with the E2 and aircraft organic to its own air wing the F-14 would have been absolute top dog. By the time you get to 1991 due to the build up of forces prior to the air war commencing the USAF is running the show in terms of AWACS and has had plenty of time to bring dozens of F-15s with new NCTR in country, both of which elbow the F-14 off to the side while the Eagle is earning its stripes. Some of that was almost certainly rivalry and wanting to make sure their service came out looking good, but at least some of it can be justified with the ROE remaining very strict and the F-14 not having been fitted with any new electronic gear to help meet them. Its a shame the APG-71 wasn't a retrofit upgrade, but as has been mentioned it doesn't happen in a vacuum and NAVAIR doesn't exist to procure upgrades to keep 1 aircraft in the fleet indefinitely - things could have been very different. They just weren't.

Based on the timeframe do you mean the Royal Navy Sea Harriers? If you've got any stories in that regard I'd love to hear them, one of the more..... outspoken... pilots from that era of the RN, Sharkey Ward has written books and given multiple interviews regarding the little Sea Jet. While he doesnt specifically list the F-14 in their DACT he does claim the F-15s were found to be easy prey, even when they were allowed to use their AIM7s.

Some handy responses with good info, thanks guys. Its a shame the F-14 hasnt had the book renaissance the SR-71 has had recently, there are some healthy sized tomes such as https://www.amazon.com/Lockheed-Blackbird-Missions-Revised-Aviation/dp/1472815238/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=sr71+book&qid=1597850926&sr=8-2 almost 500 pages covering almost every aspect in a decent amount of detail. I've no problem reading multiple sources but as I and others noted its such a broad timeline that you lose out on context. Its brillant in 1970 vs its a dog in 2002 with no further information just leaves dangling questions whereas having a better timeline showing upgrade DIDNT happen here, budget cut DID happen here can help fill over those gaps. Its funny though that in the space of 5 responses we've got a AV8 guy saying F-14s were like clubbing seals and a steely eyed F-14 aviator calling bull :D that feels like my research in a nutshell. I think at the least USAF people write off the F-14 prematurely because they are probably also lacking that same context, they're not Navy guys, they're not F-14 guys they just know I turned up and fought someone somewhere and won. Without jumping into another 14 vs 15 debate its interesting how metrics like "still in production" and "100 to 0" get thrown in very fast with pretty much zero qualification, the F-15s being built post 2000 are nothing like the F-15s being built circa 1990 when the last of the F-14Ds came off the production line and the 100 nil scoreboard doesnt really take into account that most of the 100 kills really were clubbing seals. None of this changes history or makes anyones jet something its not, not everything is a game of top trumps. And yes, since the F-14 was released for DCS its hard to even turn an eye to any other module - theres just so much personality and raw performance under the skin of the Tomcat that it makes all the electric jets pale in comparison.

I've been wondering if anyone has any good resources for trying to understand the F-14 in context. As with most polarizing topics you can find examples of extremes at both ends but you don't get much data on probabilities, occurences etc. As a few examples: Many videos from the mid 1970s when the F-14 was new talk about just how maintainable it is/was. Later it was retired due to being prohibitively expensive to maintain. This could just be expectations changing over time, the F-14 has a lot more in common with the F-4 than it does with the F-18 and despite being the same generation their internals are lightyears apart. At the same time I've seen references that the final cruises for even the old F-14A squadrons they had a pretty good maintenance story because for once they were given an abundance of spare parts because its the last cruise, if its broken, just pull it. A third datapoint suggests that the swing-wing was a big problem and seen as overcomplicated and expensive. At the same time the wing glove box seems like it was probably the single strongest part of the airframe and highly unlikely to break, the list goes on. This happens also for how deadly the F-14 was in air to air combat, on the one side routinely during interviews with USAF F-15/F-16 pilots they will claim to eat the Tomcats for breakfast without breaking a sweat. On the other hand the AIMVAL/ACEVAL evaluations from the 1970s showed the F-14 being incredibly competitive, especially up against very early F-15s with early APG-63s and AIM7 only, although my understanding of doctrine at the time was for fighter to fighter combat the F-14 would use the AIM7 also, with the Phoenix being reserved for the big expensive targets, and this would only change later due to the SU27/MiG29 and the need to stay competitive with AIM120 equipped aircraft. I wonder how much of this can be explained away due to lack of ongoing investment, comparatively to the F-14 the F-15 received a great deal of ongoing upgrades both early in life and later. A final example would be the notorious TF-30, we've seen even on these forums good firsthand sources like Victory 205 saying that the problems are way overexcaggerated, but it does come up again and again with quotes to the effect of "those motors cost lives" - this could again be a small number of very bad incidents (loss of life) are remembered over the more average experience of very few low impact incidents. This goes on and on with each aspect of the F-14 (and probably any other aircraft with its fans and its detractors) - does anyone have any good insights or sources for trying to get a broader context to place the F-14 into?

Jeez that was a painful few seconds of staring at the fantail. But fairs fair, you got it on the deck. Now its time to go read how to do it safely :smilewink:

Although there are definitely blind spots and patchy mapping of a signal to a displayed clock position (especially if you are manuvering) I’m not sure how much the straight up and straight down blind spot we’ve seen referred to for the F16/18 implementations apply to the F14. I seem to recall a developer diary from a couple of years ago going into how the F14 would model RWR and it’s blind spots somewhat better than the average DCS implementation?

Reading this past weeks ED Newsletter they mentioned having got a lot of detailed liveries for the F-16 through cooperation with the community skin makers, this got me thinking of skins such as the VF-103 and VF-32 packs by flying_isoko available in the user files - they set a standard for well researched liveries with meticulous weathering. Is this kind of cooperation something Heatblur has / would consider trying to setup?

Check the little letter in the middle of your RWR display, if set to N then it won't show friendly emissions but will show them if they lock onto you. Either ask your RIO to switch to show friendlies or jester can set the same mode from the wheel.

Lots of fair advice so far - I’m not really a content creator type, but I have encouraged several friends to dip their toe and try DCS with mostly positive responses. Lots of people with not much sim experience can still get a lot of fun jumping into the F-18. It just seemed odd to me considering how many hours I’ve had out of DCS since my last full module - I’ve never played a free to play game that didn’t have some form of freemium tier.

I don't own the Viggen so the only thing I could do to try and figure this out was read through Chuck's guide. Are you referring to the data cartridge import from the F10 map? This again feels more like a JDAM delivery to me and even assuming the kneeboard can present that kind of dynamically generated target list + selection options.....why use it? The jester wheel already exists. Do we expect something like Jester Menu- A/G -> LANTIRN -> Select waypoint -> 1 [fly over target area] [wait] Jester Menu (preselect A/G LANTIRN) - Wheel of found targets within the general area -> select target [fly delivery]

Yes I wasn't explicitly saying the game should go subscription - I was just trying to think of ways to support the game other than buying modules that I'm not interested in. To be clear without listing them all out I have bought more than 10 modules from ED over the years, and have enjoyed all of them to varying degrees. I'm not boycotting the F-16 out of a problem with EA airplanes or suchlike - its simply not an airframe that interests me. I'm sure everyone could come up with a list of yearly module releases that would keep them individually happy, some might even overlap. I would also jump all over an F-4, navy or air force. My patreon idea was just to give those of us that aren't that interested in a currently announced module to still contribute towards features that benefit all of us. If ED never released another aircraft I'd be happy flying the F-14 till doomsday, but I'd still like to support features that benefit me, like Supercarrier, or core engine, or maps, you name it. Maybe something more like a Kickstarter process could help inform ED (or other interested parties) what modules would prove popular and drive sales? Then again perhaps something that would benefit all of us is a study-level modern competitive red air jet - its another thing that under the current model I probably wouldn't purchase for myself, but would be happy to contribute toward under some kind of patreon scheme for the general benefit of the sim. I just wanted to see other opinions ideas and to see if we could get some healthy debate going.