bfr

The discount plus free shipping and it actually being in stock finally tipped me over the edge to finally buy one. I can now finally retire my last bit of CH kit! (CH stick got ditched for a VKB a while back)

And in an aircraft context then no ABS is going to mean a locked wheel at landing speed is going to be a wrecked tyre from flat-spotting or possibly an exploded one.

Better late than never! Yes, i've done it a few times as I quite enjoy low level. I've screwed up and overshot with the bombs a few times but never recall having been shot down and rarely even taken fire. I did tend to leave the pop-up phase of the attack as late as I can get away with. I also come in very (like would impress a seasoned Viggen driver) low for the last few miles, so radars have taken little to no interest in me prior to pop-up. Sweeping turn post-release and then return to low altitude and hammer it away from the scene of the crime.

Syria was made available for pre-order in late July 2020 and landed in OB about a month later. PG went to pre-order mid April 2018, released late May. Nevada was on pre-order for quite a while from memory (happy to be corrected). South Atlantic might've been an exception and gone straight into OB. So usually, yes.

Practice, practice, practice. If you're feeling a little tense/demoralised about it then usually smoking the tanker in rage helps a little.

Sinai doesn't look a million miles off, although if it was really close then surely a pre-order would be being at least mentioned? If the F-4E was remotely close i'd expect to see a lot more teasers, early instructional material etc (which has been slowly ramping up for the F-15 and very recently for Sinai). I'd say SE first, then Sinai and then F-4 with a couple of months gap between.

The Typhoon is an interesting case of needs changing with the times. As you alluded to, it started out on the drawing board as a fighter and the multi/swing-role capability was redesigned into it during initial development as the Cold War came to an end and requirements shifted (and is partly why it took so long to gestate from proposal to production). Another repurposing of a specialised role platform (albeit not as spread out over time as the Eagle) was the Tornado IDS spawning the ADV variant. Although you can argue the latter wasn't all that great an aircraft, and there was pretty much zero crossover in capabilities of the two (the IDS could only ever carry IR AAMs for self defence and seldom even bothered, the ADV couldn't even begin to do a strike mission).

Do you mean when Australia bought the legacy Hornet or the Super Hornets bought to fill the gap post-F111 retirement/F-35 availability? I don't think the F-15E had even had its first test flight when purchase of the former was decided upon. Also, I don't think the RAAF operated any boom-equipped tankers at that time despite the F-111 still being very much in service, so that would've potentially added to the bill.

I should imagine for most multi-role operators then its a question of simple economics. As has already been said, operating multiple types can bring additional expense in a few areas (training for air & ground crews, parts inventory, integration etc) so if one type can do both jobs to a satisfactory level then great. There's also a decent correlation between the Cold War ending and the greater proliferation of multi-role platforms in a lot of air forces. This would be partly economic with less defence spend knocking around, and i'd also suggest its partly the kind of conflicts they expect to find themselves fighting in (which have been strike-heavy with any question about air superiority being more about the threat from enemy SAMs than opposing fighter jets).

Oooo nice, I had no idea there was such a failover capability modelled and i've ended up in the same position as the OP before. I'll have to go and get shot up a bit to try it out!

Is the problem you're describing that the RALT-Home/RSHIFT-Home isn't moving the throttles in-game out of the 'off' position? Or do you mean you can use that to get to idle (you should see the in-game throttles move when you do this) but that your throttle then isn't moving the rest of the range? If its the latter then check that something else (i.e. another controller) isn't mapped to the throttle axis too. I've seen some screwy defaults and duplicate mappings of functions when adding new controllers (e.g. my old CH kit would default map both the throttle controller and the on-stick throttle slider to the game's throttle axis and the 8 way on both devices would get mapped to the POV axes). Unless you had a throttle with a physical idle detent then would you even want to map it to the throttle? Would be bad news throttling back a bit too far and killing both engines!

Yes you'll get some who'll see how it is after launch and just get a 20% cut. You'll also get a fair few currently on the fence who'll be swayed to cash in at 30% when they know with reasonable certainty it'll be in their hands within a week or two.

"Don't miss out, sale ends tonight!" is also a well used marketing ploy. And the person who misses pre-sale price might then be the person who waits until the next sale cycle rather than pay the price immediately post-release, or never gets around to buying it at all. And its not like DCS sales aren't frequent anyway so I expect they are a little stuck in the trap that a decent chunk of people just hang on until the next sale (like I pretty much never buy anything directly on Steam now outside of a sale).

I'll take your word for it. I've never really been into the old warbirds on DCS so i'm mostly speaking from experience of the bigger jet modules going out and I can't think of one where the first anyone knew of release was in the patch notes. There's always a first time of course, but it'd seem out of character.

I'd be surprised if zero warning is given. At a minimum DCS tend to give a week or two's notice if a new module has been added to a given forthcoming beta build. And probably as much to do a 'buy now or miss out on the discount' final push on the pre-order deal (which usually remains until the second the release happens) as it is to forewarn/inform. DCS are usually the final arbiter (rather than the 3rd party dev) of when a product is released though, and I vaguely recall some modules (or certainly major updates to existing ones) being held back a couple of weeks due to last minute issues being spotted.

Its worth noting though that some missions disable being able to see those kinds of views as they can be used as a kind of cheat for locating targets etc.

Yes, i'd put it above the Phantom too on my wish list because its just an absolute bomb truck. I'd also dearly love to see a properly done A-6E (not a plane I ever remember being done much in any level of sim).

Isn't there already a mechanism to limit available weapons according to a given time frame in the mission editor? All this is doing is extending that to avionics.

Only really an issue if you adjust to zero in HSI/DATA mid-mission. Setting a WP altitude to 0 ASL in the mission editor overrides it to the equivalent of 0 AGL automatically if I remember rightly from setting up my own training/quick & dirty missions.

Yes, your account of the Typhoon incident is pretty accurate. Absolutely nil chance of it not being filmed as Cad is about the most accessible and popular spot on the Loop for photographers and sightseers (I assume the video is still out there somewhere). So not just breaking regs by exiting in that manner, but probably also interpreted as someone doing it to show off. And since then (and its a while ago now) the only frontline stuff you tend to see through LFA7 is USAF out of Lakenheath.

The LFA route through the Lake District is quite good fun in MSFS too (and probably more realistic these days with RAF frontline rarely going through the Mach Loop much since that Typhoon power climb incident through Cad a few years ago)

Yes, it's still a very busy base for helos but hasn't been a base for fixed wing aircraft for a great many years.

Yeah, that's fair. I vaguely remember the old Jane's ATF series had a channel region map that was fun for hypothetical Cold War meets BoB 2.0 scenarios, so I can see the appeal to the OP. Although with the DCS map it'd be hard to get immersion even with adding modern bases when the rest of the map is still very much 1940s era.

Both Manston & Biggin Hill were pretty much non-military by 1960. Odiham I don't think has hosted fighters since about then either. Northolt I'm not sure has since the war, bar temporary QRA deployments.

Ah, glad it wasn't just me struggling. First attempt the Igla missed, but I screwed up a strafing run (suspect i'd left the weapons master switch in Safe) once I was weapons free and then got Igla'ed again after the pass. Next attempt I ate an Igla head-on at very close quarters with no chance to evade. Third attempt I made a nav error which meant I was late on the scene and was told to RTB. Might have another go now just to tick the box.