bfr

Welcome on board! (managed it at 2nd attempt. although the pilot blacked out briefly on touchdown). For reference I started about 10 miles off the boat with 10% fuel at about 5000ft. And onto Part 2 of my 'can you land a non-naval jet on a carrier' challenge which was getting back off the deck and recovering to terra firma. Got back off the deck with a full length run-up (refuelled to 20%) without much drama but it turned out I had broke something in the landing when I tried retracting gear. So a leisurely (< 280kts) recovery to Dubai and extra-gentle on touchdown.

So is consensus that this is a bit broken at the moment? I only tried it for the first time yesterday but was a complete bust. I tried tracking a moving tank i'd set up on one of the target range 'lily pads' on the Nevada map and it was hard work just picking it out on the TPOD, never mind getting it to track. I got the highlighted MPD button text to suggest it was sort-of working but no matter what I did it wouldn't then track and follow the target. Admittedly this was in daylight conditions so that might not help with contrast, so I might try again in twilight/night and see if that does any better.

As an enhancement they could a lot worse than tweak it so it does trigger a capture just as a weapon you launched impacts. As I found out in my own little experiment, its blind luck whether the capture cycle coincides with your weapon's time of impact. Its definitely a feature with potential though.

To be fair, it is far from well documented in the SE manual currently (one mention for 1 MFD page and no implementation details added).

Try a flight with a low sun at your rear and those smudges pretty much render the MFD unreadable. I agree a factory-fresh clean cockpit looks weird and I like that they usually looked a bit 'lived in' but maybe they could tone it down a little. Although i'm kind of curious how they get there that bad in real life as don't the pilots tend to wear gloves? And its not like the screens are touchscreens so surely you'd only put your fingers on the screen itself by accident? The ones in the SE look worse than my 6yo son's tablet screen.

I just tried myself and it does seem to work, but there are oddities. I set up a mission with me started hot on the ground. Made left MFD active (default A/A Radar) and hit RCD, it started writing a file every 10s. Hit RCD again a minute or so later, it stopped. Hit RCD on the right MFD (default HSI) and it started writing a file every 5s. Repeated with MPCD (default ADI), also every 5s. Starting RCD on one display starts recording of that screen, and then hitting RCD on any of them stops the one that was recording. You also don't appear to be able to record >1 display at once. Not figured out what the significance of the counter that comes up for a bit after hitting RCD is yet though unless its literally how long it has been recording for. You'll probably also note the filename denotes the screen captured (left MFD all start mfd_fcl, right MFD start mfd_fcr and the MPCD starts mfd_fcc). EDIT: figured out the discrepancy I think with the A/A RDR writing a file every 10s and it must be per full completed radar sweep/full redraw of the display. If I change the radar settings to a very narrow search area it'll suddenly write 1 file pretty much every second. EDIT2: More playing and I thought it'd pretty sweet to see if you could capture the TPOD and it seems you indeed can. Only downside if you're planning on getting some shots of hits is it seems to be stuck to a rigid 5s capture cycle so if you'll need luck to get a bomb hit on cam captured. Hah, and at the 2nd time of asking I actually did get lucky and it screenshot at about the B of Bang.

There is a RCD button on some of the MFD pages. Perhaps its that. EDIT: yes, there is reference to it on page 174 of the manual

Probably important to also not assume that because E can be configured to perform roughly the same role as C (which by the sound of it is mostly just air patrol/interception work) that E must be at least the equal of C in all aspects. Sure, it can probably do a perfectly adequate job of the task in hand but even the article suggests they are being pressed into this role because the C has too many miles on the clock rather than because the E is 'better'.

Yeah. I think I just found what was possible a bit confusing. I'd initially set up 3 push buttons (one each for MRM, SRM and GUN) and didn't realise you had to step through them. I'll probably change it to either two buttons with Forward/Aft or 1 button to loop through as you suggest. Part of the battle working through available bindings on new modules is knowing what you can do and how the different options behave, so thanks for that bit of education.

Agreed and having the discussed 'b can only be selected after a or c' constraint seems unnecessary if you did actually have a 3 way switch to map to. And its not like offering alternative ways to map things and/or change behaviours hasn't happened in other modules.

Flying back to base pondering how popular i'll be with the ground crew when they see this

Yeah, fair to say 'few' is probably understating it a bit but its definitely a minority (Google seems to suggest 35% of the world drives on the left side of the road based on national populations)

Unless they mean the driver sits on the right. You're correct though, Cyprus is one of only a few countries on which cars drive on the left side of the road.

Agreed. Seems silly to not have an alternative way of operation when 3 way switches aren't exactly common on PC controllers.

I noticed something similar that going to AA mode and then trying to select SRM never seems to respond first time and I ended up pushing all the MRM/SRM/Gun buttons before it finally worked. Wasn't sure if there was some lag with the SRM becoming active or an actual bug.

Is there any documentation or other sources available though that shows how HARM would work if carried by an F-15E though? Its one thing enabling the plane to carry them, another to integrate them realistically.

Thanks, I must've done my search really badly.

I'd set up a mission with only me and a single AI fighter added to the map for some A/A practice. The enemy fighter presumably pinged me with radar when it got behind me briefly and I got an AI light, all fine so far. Eventually I won the fight. The problem was the AI light remained lit and continued to ping long after i'd got on the fighter's six and continued to be lit (and ping an audible warning) after it'd been hit and even long after it'd hit the ground and blown up.

Interesting, might try that next time I stuff it up. Although surely its not unreasonable to expect that turning it off and then back to GC Align should do what I want? (I think that 1993 flight manual that was doing the rounds suggests you can restart an alignment by turning it off for >5 seconds and then retrying). EDIT: Just retried it in light of the stuff from the flight manual and leaving it at OFF for a while (5s possibly not enough, left it for about 10s) does seem to work in terms of restarting alignment.

My experience to date is get everything else spun up first, make sure the plane can't move itself (chocks and/or PB) and then don't touch a damn thing once its aligning. The annoyance though is that there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to restart the alignment process (other than restarting the mission) if you do upset it and it drops into the GC Hold state?

Yeah it was an AI jet on 'Veteran' and i'm aware that also means 'superhuman'. I could more or less stay with it (hence a lot of the time it ended up as a stalemate) but not out-turn it enough to get a decent enough aspect for a kill. The only times I actually lost I usually screwed up something to give them a chance to get on my six. And yes, I might repeat the same scenario with less fuel again (first pass I forgot to reduce fuel and with 100% gas then things went REALLY badly). Either way, the assertion that the F-15E isn't great in a turning fight seems reasonable based on experiences to date.

Having had my first play at dogfighting last night then that seems pretty accurate. Set up a scenario with 40% fuel and AA weapons only against a competent Mig-21, ran it a few times and if I didn't nail them in the first minute or so then it was going to end as a stalemate/who had most gas left at best. Once you'd bled speed down to around 200kts it was very hard to get energy back without basically exiting the fight and then coming back in. It actually felt better trying to fight in the vertical than a turning fight. One other thing with having being spoilt a bit with the Hornet and Viper is I also forgot just how bad AIM-9Ms are in terms of countermeasure resistance in comparison to the AIM-9X.

For the sake of consistency, can we have it the same as most of the other modules where a mission that starts already airborne has Master Arm already set to Arm rather than the current state of affairs where it is always set to Safe irrespective of whether you start on the ground or airborne?

I'm assuming that will only be the A version though for historical accuracy purposes? (IIRC only the Navy ever bought the C?)

Yeah i'd agree that it'd help if they gave some ballpark 'if you have this many available then we suggest you set it to this' guidance. Ideally some kind of benchmarking capability. I think I bumped the setting up 1 from the default for now and it seems OK (i7-12700K, so 8P+4E cores and 20 threads available) performance-wise but i'm still very much trying to figure out how to use the AG radar.