Bad Idea Hat

There are a billion arguments on this, boiling down to who is telling the truth about their missiles' capabilities, and in which direction are they lying. I think you're right, though.

I think the end result is that the slight advantage of the MiG-29 in turning is more than offset by its lack of range, deficiency in armament, and lower quality avionics when compared to the F-16. The benefits of the -29 seem to be that it could pop up out of damn near anywhere due to its rough field abilities, and it is at around parity when it comes to BVR combat (which can be argued higher or lower).

Sorry, a couple degrees a second over the F-16.

I thought I read somewhere that the -29 was more maneuverable by a couple degrees per second. The glaring problem I can think of when fighting it is that you could just simply drag it from its base, and let it run out of fuel.

I'm having trouble holding out. The only thing stopping me is that, when I switch between jets in MP, I tend to be out of sorts for a sortie. I want to be able to stick to one jet, especially when it's a jet that I've grown up loving.

MiG-21, upcoming MiG-19, upcoming F-4, community A-4 and A-1, farther out A-6, and maybe someone could make the F-105. That would be a lot of fun, but we'd be looking at a 5 year plus timetable for a decent, all encompassing Vietnam War scenario. As for the map, Caucasus is around 400x200 nautical miles (740x370 kilometers), and Nevada is around 250x200 nautical miles (460x370 kilometers). To fully encompass the air war over Vietnam, the map would need to be 500x500 nautical miles, and would really only cover the northern part of South Vietnam, all of North Vietnam, and enough of Thailand as to cover the airfields used. I think. I'm really going by memory as to airfield locations. This puts it into the "largest map yet made" territory, and by over double. I know ED isn't going to release mapping tools to the public, but I know there are a lot of great mappers out there who would be happy to contribute to a Vietnam map. Crowsourcing then? Vietnam would be a ton of work.

A cargo C-130 would actually be immensely useful for the dynamic, theater-wide war servers where you have to capture bases. As of now, the two aircraft types that can transport troops to capture bases are helos and the TF-51, neither of which are very fast. A C-130 would turn base capping/supply/repair into less of a crapshoot, and more of an art. I know I'd prefer to fly an F-14 or Viggen around, but C-130 would give a real player controlled, high value aircraft with which to base operations around.

I kind of get the impression that I'm going to be alone on some servers, and am going to have to team up with non-Tomcat pilots.

That was just a sample altitude. I don't care how high you're flying. I'm also expecting flying single in the Tomcat with a backseater because, from experience with the Viggen, I seem to be on servers as the only Viggen pilot a lot. Is there anything else you'd like to be pedantic about today? You seem to do that a lot.

I'm talking about someone coming from a canyon, low and out of the radar coverage. Flying at 20,000 feet, that's the first thing I can think of being a danger to the Tomcat. It sounds weird for a fighter to need an escort, but if teams want to utilize an F-14's radar, the smart move will be to give it an escort to keep it in the fight as long as possible.

The only concern is if you get beamed by a low altitude opponent, then you're carrying a bunch of half ton cylinders. Once again, the mother hen scenario is going to give the Tomcat an advantage as a shepherd fighter for other jets. Let the kids protect low and to the side, the Tomcat calls out targets and launches to force defensive.

What do we want? Tomcat! When? Real soon!

Can you just see the look on six pilots' faces as, almost simultaneously, all of them get a radar warning and go defensive. Honestly, if you're in one Tomcat and you have 3-6 friendly pilots working in conjunction with you, it's a valid DCS tactic. Real life, not so much (someone's going to have difficult questions about why you just shot $6 million downrange). Make the opponents go defensive while your guys move in for the kill, playing mother hen the whole time.

That's my basic strategy, with an occasional "lob six phoenixes for giggles" sortie.

I set out to give them a fight and teach them to win.

Maybe I'm weird, but I want to give away my Tomcat's advantages. I want to fight a MiG on their terms. I want to do all this, because I want to prove that the Tomcat is not some unbeatable pox upon multiplayer. Hell, a good MiG pilot should, barring the odd incident or two where they get killed by a freak shot, return from engagements with Tomcats. Granted, they should be using every trick in the book to engage, but a smart pilot will realize they're out of options, low on fuel, and it's time to go home and keep their life.

The F-14 is going to have the advantage just by having two seats. With the addition of the powerful radar and Phoenix missiles, it's going to be a beast in theory. I know that, on day one, someone in a MiG-21 is going to pop out of the mountains and knock one out of the sky. It's a challenge that's going to need to be overcome. Anyone can kill anyone in this game, as long as you keep to your strength and their weaknesses. The F-14 has weak spots that could easily be exploited by an "inferior" aircraft. Even the banning of active radar missiles is going to leave the F-14 at an advantage. I'm planning on buying the Tomcat, so I'm going to take a dim view on servers that ban it, but there will be some. A good counterpoint is the advantage that Hornet pilots are going to have. Say you're loaded up for CAP, but cruise along towards the ground targets to provide cover for the A2G folks; someone is going to pounce on you and get a nasty surprise. Heck, really any jet could do that. Banning aircraft for being overpowered just makes the game less diverse, in my opinion. I'm going to be happy for the -21 pilot (or even better, MiG-15) who knocks the first F-14 down.

What's funny is that, with the lack of worry about tossing a million dollars downrange with every Phoenix shot, I think the smart player isn't going to be worried about hitting someone with their shots. Give the enemy something to think about, close behind the shot, and fire off a Sparrow. Hell, you could load up six Phoenixes and just launch them at rMax. Watch the comedy as your targets panic when the missiles go active, even if they can defeat them with a quick 90 degree turn.

I was replying to the person I quoted. My point was that the Phoenix will probably be extremely easy to defeat at max range, but damn near impossible at AMRAAM range. Not actual, real behavior.

Unscientifically, I feel like the Heatblur Phoenix will perform like the R-33 at max range, and the DCS Phoenix at 10-20nm.

I'm going to assume that ED wouldn't integrate any planned IFF into the FC3 modules, so there's one problem; how to include the FC3 aircraft. Second, how would it be handled operating IFF across multiple third party designers. Everyone would have to adjust to different ways of implementation. That could be solved by a direct edict from ED saying that IFF is to be handled a specific way, so at least there's that. My point about it not needing to be simulated fully is that the simple complexity of the entire thing is probably beyond the returns on what it will provide. Now, granted, one of my first steps in powering on the Viggen is reaching over and switching IFF on, the modes on, and hitting ident twice just to be sure. It's just a thing I do out of habit. My problem isn't the attention span issue (even though that would be a problem, hopefully easily resolved, but would lead to a lot of unfair bans for people who did follow procedure, killing those that did not). To answer both of you, my concern is that a handful of players would use the ability to switch sides (or look at a shared briefing, even better) to grab the opposing IFF code, and give themselves a few seconds advantage in every fight as their opponent considers whether the person facing them is buddy spiking them, or if it's a true case of spoofing IFF. My belief is that, given the difficulties and pitfalls, ED decided to force game-centric simulation of IFF, and not module-centric, full implementation. I can agree, unless someone comes up with answers to all the difficulties. Finally, is your edit directed at me? I'm not on here to fight about this, I'm on here pointing out the issues surrounding doing IFF simulation in this game. If that makes your head hurt, take some headache medicine. Don't come on here complaining when someone has a difference of opinion. I'm not faulting anyone for wanting IFF simulation, I just want to point out that we need to get around some issues before it would be okay to implement.

I was thinking last night that, in addition to being the best airborne mobile SAM site in DCS, it's also going to be able to fill in for the AWACS in the case that someone starts knocking E-3/A-50s out of the sky.

The problem is that getting everyone to use the same IFF code is troublesome, the simple mechanics of it would open up the game world to griefing, and it's really just something that doesn't really need to be fully simulated.

I didn't want to say all, because I assumed that they had to have kept something. So yeah, I feel like they're ahead of schedule at this point.

They scrapped a lot of their visuals thanks to laser scanning (stupid laser, what has it ever done for us). So I think that set them back on an order of months, plus the crowded release schedule, plus Jester and its improvements, plus getting the flight model right. There's a lot of places where the delays look to have piled up, but at least it looks like we're getting closer to a finished product than pure early-access.