LastRifleRound

But then you have to explain why it can see map structures and vehicles

I appreciate the insight hilmerby. However, this is a bug report, it is simply a recognition that things are not likely working as the developer intended. Whether or not you think the developer should intend them is a topic for a different thread. As a non pilot, I can't speak to any of that and that is not the point of this thread. Getting continuity for sensor recognized objects accross modules is an important task, regardless of how useful you may or may not find it in a particular module. The developers intent is likely to be able to show large structures. Reasoning is it can currently show something as small as a BTR and can show certain large in map structures. This is illogical. Either BTRs (and other similarly sized objects) and large map structures shouldn't show or large structures of most kinds should. There is no reason at the 15km scale I can see a house in a village but not a giant metal aircraft hangar. Those two things can't be true at the same time.

Hey Mike, the latest update now shows static buildings for the Hornet's AG radar. Virtually all placeable structures are now visible. The Viggen, however, can still only see vehicles. (Ironically, there's a bug in the Hornet now where vehicles don't show anymore, but it's been reported an they're working on it). The Viggen needs to be updated to show these objects now.

The Ammo Depot object in particular is rendered well in my testing. Can't wait for FTT! Definitely some scenarios I can make using this now. Seeing the same thing on other objects. Great work on this write up! Placeable buildings now show up quite well, but in-map objects that are just as large and reflective or larger do not show. BTR60's showed up before, and now don't. Also, hangars and the like should have a much brighter return.

You're not going crazy, the latest update, while rendering several new objects, accidentally eliminated others. Check out this thread, it's WIP with ED: https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=284442

The HOTAS functions aren't all currently implemented. There are many great commands available and ED is waiting to have all the pages and modes done before they implement (Like AZ/EL page, which many HOTAS commands interact with). It's not as intuitive in my opinion as the A10, but the A10 is the newest of the modeled HOTAS implementations and the one I have the most experience with by far. I remember on Jello's podcast an interviewed A10 pilot said they took feedback from Viper and Hornet pilots to see what they liked and didn't like with their HOTAS and made modifications. As for the MAVF FOV, it's a little clumsy, but Hornets rarely employ MAVF and the MAVE implementation is outstanding. It's so easy to engage with laser guided munitions in the Hornet. The MAVF workflow, being able to initiate track without having to change SOI is pretty great. You can still use the digital zoom if needed on the FLIR page. In my opinion, the Hornet and Harrier HOTAS make more assumptions of what you want to do with certain pages open, whereas the Viper/A10 went with a more universal workflow. I find the Hornet implementation is great for the most often used processes, with less bouncing SOI around to do what you need to get done.

This is true. I think the issue isn't how blobby the returns are, rather how resolution seems to drop when moving to EXP3. This doesn't fit the descriptions offered in how the system should work. The returns in EXP3 seem like the pixels just "blow out", making the returns fainter than they probably should be. The resolution should still be crappy, but I don't think it's supposed to drop Kind of like digital zoom vs an actual telephoto, if that makes sense. Again, maybe a big deal in the Hornet maybe not, but definitely a big deal in the mudhen.

Pp are stored as waypoints 36-39, so just change your waypoint to waypoint 37 for pp2 and so on. As for EWR targets, you cannot set a SPI on the HSD so you cannot do this.

I think until they simulaye some of the limitations of the litening, none of this matters. There's no reason to use any track mode except the occassional fsst ground mover. The slewable INR mode stays right where you aim it, and you get no loss in image quality at max zoom. The track modes as implemented are an annoyance best avoided.

This is the post Kate made about FTT that clued me in that the terrain needs some work still with respect to the radar. I referenced it earlier but couldn't remember where I saw it. Whether this translates to any changes in the image itself, I have no idea whether it will or if the image itself should change. From real pilot input, their descriptions ("blobby" and "impossible to VID") align with the imagery I'm seeing. The scant few images publicly available on the APG73 look similar, if not a bit more "zoomed in" and less pixelated (but that could be because the display output is better than the one in the Hornet). Anyway, for what it's worth here it is: https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=4337181&postcount=186

Besides, if you're at an altitude where you can 3 point park a Viggen, you're way too high

Their discord is pretty active, they're posting stuff they're working on and interacting with people there so yeah, stuff is getting done

I'm pretty sure it doesn't. If it's the same as the Harrier implementation, the documentation states that you can't slew it without holding TDC depress. This way it isn't ambiguous when you want the system to attempt a track. Also, the laser should follow the offset cursor and it does not. Finally, the offset cursor should be ground stabilized on TDC depress and isn't. Again, this is according to Harrier documentation. No idea if it's the same in the Hornet, but that set up does seem more intuitive and the Harrier and Hornet share a lot of symbology and functions. Note there's a whole slew of versions of LITENING. The new ones can carry their own SAR radar and have color cameras!

I really think this needs another look, based on your responses Newy. You say the offset should be ground stabilized when TDC is depressed in post # 2. Then in post # 6 you say it needs to be in a track mode to ground stabilize. This means you are acknowledging that the pod should ground stabilize the offset cursor. Flagrum has followed the procedure you have outlined and not gotten the expected, indicated result. I can also provide a track of such behavior. The offset cursor will not ground stabilize under any circumstance whatsoever.

I think this is OT at this point. You're talking about tactics. OP was asking whether ED believes the image quality is WIP or finished. It's a legit question, since none of us seems to really know what it should look like. This thread should stay on that discussion, with the further sharing of official documentation and imagery. Discussions for tactics should happen in a different thread for that purpose. As someone who likes to fix bugs in DCS, it's difficult helping out without any official insight into what we should be seeing. I'm seeing returns in EXP2 at 20nm that don't show on EXP3 for example. EXP3 map size seems to vary, and sometimes during the same weather and altitude/airspeeds the map is good enough to pick out individual houses in a village, and other times everything isn't even a blob, it's just a tiny dot, same village. I don't know what to do with this. Is it a bug? Is it WIP? Is it really that way? I don't know and I need to in order to help ED beta test the feature. Whether or not real pilots used it, use it, or even like it doesn't matter to me. Whether certain conflicts would have warranted it, or certain air forces train it or not is irrelevant. We're just figuring out what it should look like so we can make sure it gets to that state and move on. Don't forget, this is an API. Every aircraft, including the F15E and Eurofighter (whichever ones you end up with), will be using it. It's worth getting right.

Did you wait 8 minutes for the alignment or use the "STD HEADING" option?

Did you cold start? There are new INS alignment procedures you must follow if you did.

This is why I was asking GB and Lex, because I have no idea whether spending the time resolving a real SAR map would be worth the resources if the difference can't be noticed enough. From the descriptions from sources around here, what ED did seems to line up and be an accurate representation of what's been described, whether or not it's phase 1/phase 2 or the nature of SAR is actually being represented. What kind of practical improvements were we to observe in DCS if EXP3 is just a zoomed in EXP2 and they then made it actual SAR? You seem to know a lot more about this than I do but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around what you're saying the practical difference would be. Image processing isn't my thing. G B/Lex - My apologies. The last thing I want to do is get anyone in trouble over a hobby discussion. I know why you say it's not worth it. We're just having fun chatting around the water cooler here, anything that could even remotely get someone in even a little heat I totally understand you wouldn't want to discuss. I don't know the rules, so any time I think I can get an expert opinion I try to but don't always know what's off limits. Also, just want to point out cloud sync isn't asked for a whole lot because according to ED 80% of us don't go online, so we wouldn't know it's an issue in the first place to ask for it.

It does make sense and thanks

So we've established the Lot 20 most likely had the phase 2 radar. Lex, did you fly Lot 20's or later? Are you familiar with the upgraded map? Sorry I don't know much about your experience other than you and GB flew legacy Hornets.

Think this is what Lex meant by theory-crafting. Any answer to these questions is purely conjecture. The feature is here, see what you can use it for. I can tell you, with a set of coordinates and a TPOD, as you know, there is no reason at all to use it. Now throw some fog on the deck, give yourself some crappy weather, don't give yourself coordinates when you pick a target and try to find it. Unless you have a pre-briefed map, you're going to have a hard time finding what you're looking for. You can't really use radar for TOO, you need to know what you're looking for. I find looking at Sat view in ME, and sketching a rough map on my phone at the scales I plan to view the image at various zoom levels in the ME really helps me hone in rather quickly on what I'm looking for as long as I have a waypoint within 10nm or so. Testing myself I can target the right structure 9 out of 10 times. The Caucuses map seems to be the hardest one to read, maybe because of the tress. Mind you, I'm deliberately making things harder on myself. I don't know if this procedure was ever used in real life, but it seems logical and it seems to work in DCS. If you want to simulate what you're talking about, when the INS is done and drift enabled, set up a scenario pre-GPS, give yourself a deep strike and no TPOD. You can definitely get it done in a Hornet, it's radar is better than all of those older model aircraft by virtue of its better processing power. But all those aircraft had TWO people in it, because searching through those blobs takes a lot of time away from flying. So who knows? At 30nm out I'm guessing you don't have all day to get that radar targeting right, and without a TPOD to confirm you've actually FTT'd what you think you did, I think things could get hairy. I find I always drop a stick of bombs when using the radar. Without FTT, I think it's probably more accurate than it should be, but that could be a stop-gap from ED until they get FTT working, or maybe I'm wrong and the INS interpretation is that good in the real thing. Now, this is just from my experience in DCS. The radar is really fun to use. In some cases I prefer it as I get better at it. But if someone put a gun to my head and said I had to hit a target, I'd use: 1. TPOD 2. Coordinates/INS 3. Visual/CCIP 4. Visual/AUTO 5. Radar In that order. Now terrible weather (again, just talking about DCS, so I don't need to rely on theory, we can go in sim and test) leaves 2 and 5 on the table. We need to envision a scenario where you don't have 2 and then sure, you're left with 5. Would that happen in the real world? Who knows. What we do know is that it hasn't. And if it happens in DCS, you HAVE to use the ground radar, because for whatever reason you find yourself in this situation, it's the only tool DCS is going to give you. TL:DR; I think we're talking past each other here. You could be right that AG Radar COULD have been useful, what Lex is saying is that it WASN'T. That's not dispositive. Your theory could be valid at the same time his statement of fact is. So, let's model some of these scenarios and see what DCS does to us. Alternate histories are some of the most engaging things you can do in sim precisely because that's the only place they can ever happen, but let's not demand people agree that air to ground radar is or would have been completely necessary. There's just no way to know that and the real world hasn't borne that out for sure. The original debate was that ED shouldn't model it because it's not useful. I don't agree with that. One of the coolest things about ED is they model as close to 100% of what they can, convenience, ease and usefulness be damned. Most of us love them for that. But that doesn't mean the guys saying it's not that useful in real life were wrong.

Happens with BRMs too. This might because of using the beam riding logic or what, but it shouldn't happen With the GBU I can tell you it will miss with almost every aircraft unless you lase early, for a lot of the reasons Fri mentioned. I forget how to manually lase in the JF17, but when I'm flying the hornet and I need to hit a moving target with a GBU, I make sure I activate the "Trigger" mode and lase almost as soon as the bomb comes off the jet. I almost always hit a full speed tank using this technique. It's actually taught in one of the A10 training missions. If you're lasing in the A10, I make sure the bomb fall is optimized for the laser "basket" in the DSMS, then again, I lase almost immediately. You can try this in the JF17 and see if it works for GBU. For BRMs, I have no idea why they do it or how to fix it. I'm guessing it's a bug there.

Is there an optimal offset and altitude we should keep in mind?

Your designation isn't really a radar designation, it's an INS designation of the spot on the radar map you chose. When you turn in and lose imagery, it doesn't effect you at all since the computer is using INS data at that point. To actually track the spot with radar, you would S2 up after designating, then the radar would attempt Fixed Target Track (FTT). If successful, you can turn in on the target, as the radar is "painting" the target at that point providing slant range data. The display imagery would blank out and I believe (don't quote me here) you would just see an X on the display where the FTT is.

This has been exactly my experience as well.