Victory205

The "confusing" part is only that the nozzle indicators, which read from 0 to 5, don't correlate to the actual stage of burner in use. That is faithful to the way the aircraft worked. In practice, it is of little consequence, you really don't care what zone you are in, but you do need to know whether you are in full burner, which is easy to tell since the throttles are full forward, or mil. The use of after burner is otherwise natural, and you just move the throttles as necessary, as you already to in the B. Because the thrust is sort of surging and waning due to the stage phenomenon, flying formation while in the AB range didn't work well in the A. IT could be done, but required a higher workload than what you see with the GE engines. Hope this helps. The A is going to be a lot of fun.

Spiceman is correct, no feedback on the throttles for afterburner. However, the nozzle position indicators don’t correlate directly or proportionally with the gauge markings- A pointer at 1 doesn’t mean that the AB is at Zone One, instead, Zone One is actually between 1 and 2 on the indicator. Zone 2 occurs between 2 and 3 on the indicator, and as you increase throttle in the afterburner range, the indicators or the actual burner zones don’t advance linearly with throttle movement, nor do the engines stage together. They stage slightly differently, and there are little yaw bobbles as a result of the yaw differential. Heatblur has modeled this accurately. While you could feel and hear the differences in the Realjet™, in the sim, it may be confusing for awhile. The good news is that to avoid engine stalls, you’ll either be in Zone 5 or Mil when maneuvering anyway. All part of the charm of the F14A. ;)

We didn’t preflight the stabs, they were twenty feet past the edge of the deck with a sixty foot drop into the water. Just walked to the scupper, peered out there and said “yep, looks like they’re still there...” If you were a fighter pilot, then you should be used to taking abuse for being pedantic.

Trust me, no one who flew the aircraft cared about such minutia. We were too busy working to find the best tactics to fight the aircraft and facility the airwing and battle group put ordnance on target. Brits are different. They tend to worship aircraft, collect Bureau Numbers and worry about setting up fly-by's and ceremonial events (the French were almost as bad). We had a crew do a static display during cruise and they said the airshow patrons would come up and asks questions, like, "do you have the TF30-P414A mod three mark zero with the dash 6178943771 blades in the fourth stage compressor section yet? Charming, but WTF? ;) Guess what, we called the AN/ARC−159A "The Radio" and the AN/ARN−84 "The TACAN". Anyone who corrected the person using the latter terms was stuffed into the nearest shit-can... ;) There were a lot of esoteric aspects to the weapons system that I didn't want to know too much about in terms of how it functioned. Go torture the RIO, he knows more than me sort of thing...

I can't wait for the response when the LSO on Supercarrier waves off Tomcat pilots who are flying with a full fast indication. The wailing will be epic... ;)

LOL, I don't get involved in other people's fetishes... ;) When I look at the stabs, they sometimes look like they have anhedral, sometimes dihedral, sometimes they look perfectly neutral, all depending upon what orientation they are in. TED looks like the former, TEU looks like the latter. The cockpit looks great, so I can't say that I've noticed in the module, or thought about it while flying the airplane. I do know this, the tug drivers on the ship hated the F14 stabs, when they were level, before the hydraulic pressure bleed off, the TE's were at the perfect height for cutting off the driver's head... Every swept wing jet that I've flown behaves as you described at high alpha. Roll with rudder, the F14 rolls opposite stick, which wasn't that apparent in the A4 or F5. The 757 by the way, blanked the rudder at extreme alpha, and didn't respond to rudder at all. It retained roll via aileron, to a small degree. I did this in the sim, not with a plane load of paying passengers... ;)

It’s the same process, the exception is that the controllers spring forces are much lighter and the stick doesn’t move.

What do you see with the stabilators? Only aspect that I see are due to the limitations of the DCS engine that has already been discussed at length like ground friction due to carrier flight deck limitations, catapult shots are slight different, but there is nothing that HB can do about those, plus the ship's flow modeling, etc. We're always trying to get the last few percent of the flight model correct, and while the Tomcat's aerodynamics are complex (a lot of unconventional moving parts), it is in my opinion, the best flight model of anything that I've tried in DCS by far. For example, a lot of DCS aircraft suffer from poor directional stability, especially in the landing configuration that isn't present in real life. As far as fighting in the A, it's very similar to the B, you just need to be a little more deft in your energy management. It doesn't get out of the hole if you piss it all away, but you can still use the vertical and it's performance down low is exemplary. You're still gonna be up against the G limit on the deck. This may surprise you, but I've never pulled the wings off of any aircraft in the sim. It may come from a sense of what an airplane can do, knowing from experience how to limit the pull at high speeds. In a real aircraft, that comes from stick force and G, in a sim, it's all based on stick displacement. You really need to pay attention to buffet, and listen to the wind rush for velocity if you can't look at the ASI for some reason.

One thing that probably will be surprising given the misconceptions I see online. The engines don't stall very often. I canvassed F14 crews from several decades, and the average time between compressor stalls was ~1600 hours. All of these pilots knew the best practices, which were easy to apply. I truly was astonished at how close the Heatblur F14A was in performance, right out of the box. I have a handful of known data points that I check, and they were all spot on, requiring minor tweaking at most. The team is dedicated to getting it right. Be patient and apply reasonable logic with respect to dates and features. Getting it right is difficult. The module is work of art. I enjoy just looking at it.

Every aircraft I flew from 1984 to 1992 had working glove vanes. The glove vanes did help with supersonic turn performance, they worked fine and I don't recall them ever failing or causing difficulty. However, the flight regime where they aided in turn performance was almost never encountered in real world operation. There just wasn't a need for turning at high mach numbers. There is no need for Heatblur, given the underlying engine, to model them...

The Nozzle Detail is nothing short of magnificent. A labor of love by the geniuses...

You A drivers are in trouble. I just bought the Mig21 on the fall sale. Might actually find my way to an online server with the wiley Fishbed. Check six boys...

The paddle switch disconnected the Pitch and Roll solenoids which was reflected by the physical switches moving to off. The Yaw switch was gated and stayed engaged. To disengage Yaw SAS, the pilot had to lift the switch to move it to the off position.

Several of us purchased that book and used it as a sleep aid while on cruise. It's sitting on my shelf as we speak. It helped me understand radar, even later using the weather radar in the airliners. I used to paint other aircraft from time to time, which was fun to correlate against TCAS when that system came on line. ;) A proficient RIO with good technique made it difficult to escape the AWG9, even overland. The aspect that no one considers is that ability to use manual inputs in the presence of jamming is what made the AWG9 effective in the realm for which it was designed, The Apocalypse of all out War between two super power nations. If you only knew...

Delta wings have a very flat lift curve, because they both tend to be low aspect ratio, and suffer from vortices rolling over and causing more induced drag at high alpha. They generate a lot of lift, but also a lot of drag at high lift. Delta wings have a tendency to generate a "bat turn", and then be dead in the water, unless they have a massive amount of thrust. The old Mirage III's a V's were renown for this, even the 2000 would tend to get caught in a hole after a couple of turns. Since the lift curve is flat, Delta wings require significant AOA to generate a given amount of lift, so you will typically see aircraft with a Delta planform fly significantly nose up on approach. Concorde, F102/106, Mirage, etc, are all stark examples. Concorde needed a droop nose as a result, so the pilots could see to land. The obvious benefit is reduced trans and supersonic drag, keeping the wing tips inside the shock at supersonic speeds, and the ability to retain control authority as the shock moves on the wing. You can sample this in the F14 mod by setting up a given speed, then manually sweeping the wings, and noticing the pitch attitude (AOA) to maintain the same speed and altitude. Try it at 220-230 KIAS for fun. It will take a lot more power with the wings aft to offset the increased induced drag. You are reducing the wing area on the F14 as well, which exacerbates the aforementioned phenomenon. Making the aircraft smaller makes it accelerate faster. Suddenly, the thrust to weight value's effect on acceleration applies differently doesn't it? There were instances where we came into the overhead with the wings in auto. Usually due to low visibility, low fuel, or strict airfield restrictions, or obstacles off of the end of the runway, with the break executed as slow a 250 KIAS. I've come in at max conserve, because I was at a very low fuel state.

Trimming seems to have an inordinate amount of drama amongst DCS users. Since controller forces are so much lower, trim is far easier than IRL, trimming isn't critical in the sim, because it is easy to hold the required pressure to maintain pitch as required. That said, you should be constantly trimming. That's a constant activity in most aircraft flying today, other than the FBW jets and airliners. It's done without thought, and shouldn't be an obstacle at all. Trim, remove the pressure from the stick to check, a lot of folks will take their hands completely off of the stick to check, and trim some more if necessary. It's normal, and your attitude should be to "own it", rather than to dread it, or couch it as being arduous.

Trim is a non factors gents. I'm not sure as to why trimming seems to be a massive obstacle across the DCS community. Every pilot that flew the F14, and the Hornet and F16, F15 etc, learned to trim while flying every aircraft that they flew prior. A lot of primary trainers have a manual trim wheel. It's really not a big deal, and has zero bearing on wing sweep into the break. Why is trimming, clicking a little button, viewed a such a difficult task? Controller limitations?

Probably the most common issue on the F14 was torque tubes breaking. The only place I ever used full flaps was in a flat scissors, below 120 kias, and at a G to a G and a half. A flat scissors is a bad place to be, and was a facet of dinking around in a known 1v1. Getting the flaps stuck, and by definition, also the wing sweep when you need to bug out is another factor. AT 300 KIAS and 5-6G's, you'd be breaking more than the torque tubes. Losing flap panels, hinges, actuators and dancing in front of a FNAB board comprised of your superiors.

Yes.

Most common/critical use would be to dump the autopilot in an emergency (like a Mode I gone divergent) or a throttle runaway on deck.

So, are you gents saying that Delta wing planforms have different lift and drag characteristics than rectangular profiles? Can you explain the differences?

Only because I'm a hardworking, tedious report writing, SME. It isn't what I'd call "fun". Actually, it is pretty enjoyable, in fact, it's a hoot! The A module is so good, that I'm having flashbacks at night. ;) Stay tuned...

I cannot believe that the developers at Heatblur had the F14A performance right on the money, right out of the box. There is a reason I refer to them as "The Geniuses". I'm still sitting here gobsmacked...

The Bolter pattern is flown at 150 KIAS with gear and flaps down. As you turn final, extend speedbrakes, engage DLC, slow to on speed and complete the landing checklist.

The flat center pane windscreen was about distortion free visibility for carrier landings.