Jenrick

Umm when did we get NVG's in the Mirage? I'm on 2.5.5.33184 and not seeing any options/control bindings/etc regardings NVG's on the mirage. Is it an open beta thing?

One method I've used that's been reasonably successful for me on landing is to treat landing like a VERY low airshow pass. Is this realistic, probably not, but it works. I stabilize a meter or two off the ground, preferably right as I pass the runway threshold. Then I simply roll the throttle back, aiming to keep the nose level, or slightly (a degree or two) up. The mains will touch down, followed by the nose wheel, with little violence. Speed will still be high, but that's what the drag chute and brakes are for. This technique is not for short field landings, or for when you're coming in long. You will end up rolling out most of the runway.

Just in case anyone find this threads, here is what I found out. Currently there is no way to load a "dry" external tank. Most AC however will siphon the tank into the internals. For a mission I built with the F-5, you start with approximately 25% internal fuel. Over the course of the next 5 mins or so the externals are siphoned into the internals, filling them up. I'd recommend checking this occurs with the AC you have in mind for this. So if you don't need the player to roll into action the second the scenario starts, you can effectively cause the same results in a few minutes of flight time.

Yep they are the aperture setting. The lower the number the more light, the higher the number less light. No clue what film speed you'd run in a gun camera, but for most daylight work f/16 and forget about.

I have them on the keyboard, but I fly on a laptop without a HOSAT. Work just fine for me that way.

I find if you spend a lot of time over water, particularly moving fast, you'll be a bit off on your nav when you get back over land. Having a good radar fix or landmark for your nav fix on return is handy.

It's odd that the devs have conflicting default key binds. However doing something as simple as defining "M" as missile uncage, and assigning to via the Saitek utility will solve your problem while keeping all your binds in one place.

Radar bombing evolved over the years from WW2. It started out as a backup from when visual bombing wasn't an option, and you were aiming for factory complexes. Precision wasn't great, but it wasn't needed as much either. Then there was the transition to the bombing mission using weapons who's blast radius made a couple hundred meters of error a non-issue. After a period of time, it was realized that conventional bombing was still a thing, and needed to be much more precise than when using nukes. A cold war era bomber, usually used a combination of old school bombardier skills and knowledge combined with some high tech help. The F-4 for a lot of it's cold war career, used the radar for bombing as a real time moving map just like it was in WW2 and Korea. Use your altitude and air speed to figure out your release distance (or fly a planned delivery profile), find the target area based on the radar return, and using a combination of scope markings, calibrated eyeball, and maybe stopwatch, hit the pickle button. For dedicated bombers, radar bombing during that era, was based on using radar fixes to get a pretty good idea of where your own A/C was to be able to accurately figure your bombing solution. The radar was also used to figure out a best guess of where the target was. Dedicated bombers like the B-52 had a lot of automation and sophistication compared to lighter strike AC. With more sophisticated radar options and fixed targets, you'd fly your delivery profile, and use the radar to generate your position fixes to determine that when you're X degrees and NM away from point Y you drop. Even better was using 2 or three simultaneous nav fixes to be REALLY sure you were where you thought you were. We can all imagine what a target that's not where it's supposed to be does to this approach. A little later you could start to punch in where you where, and where you wanted to drop the bombs into the bombing computer and it would spit out a best guess bombing solution, that was then tweaked by the crew. Overall the radar basically served as a navigation instrument, and the bombing part was still on the crew to know when to pickle. The next big change was allowing the radar to talk to the INS to start automating a lot of the work of figuring out where your A/C was, and where the target was. Now we're moving into the A-6 and F-111. You would have specific radar offset points that you'd find and mark with the radar to update where it thought it was (does this start to sound familiar?), and you'd have a target area you're looking for that you'd mark the specific intended point of aim. The computer would do the work for you on calculating the bombing solution, now all you had to do was fly to the right point on the right flight path. Again radar resolution, cursor resolution, etc all contributed to inaccuracy, not even counting things like real bombs don't separate perfectly cleanly, aren't perfectly cylindrical, fins aren't mounted perfectly straight, wind gusts, etc. In the later days of the cold war radar bombing (in no vis conditions) by a dedicate strike AC, was in general about as accurate on a fixed target as visual level bombing was by the same AC. So 50-100m CEP was a good day. Later systems like the Angle Rate Bombing System, shrunk this figure down a lot for visual bombing, and improvements in radar imagery and automation kept pace on the radar bombing side as well. In the Viggen Nav mode bombing with an update to the target waypoint is closer to how most US radar bombing worked. The computer wants to know: where am I and where am I trying to drop bombs. Give it those to pieces and it works reasonably well. The RR mode is more like early Vietnam where the ground radar was used along with a stop watch, calibrated eyeball, and a chart to figure out when to drop. The RR mode automates a lot of the things the F-4 crew would be doing, but it's still going to have some fundamental inaccuracies, you just have to accept when you don't have anything better.

Radar bombing is as precise as you can lock in your offset point. In the Viggen that's governed by the resolution of the radar display and the size of the radar cursor (and that's not even getting into any systems limitations). So at 5km, whatever the combined error between those two is going to be minimum you can hope for, assuming everything is perfect.

Engaging the radar, allows for you to have the range lines at the bottom of the HUD to cue you on when you are in range. Otherwise you are using the range gate in the hug, the targets wingspan, and your best guess on when the target is in range. Obviously radar ranging is more accurate. I haven't flown A2A in the Viggen in a while, IIRC you hold T1 to keep the radar fixed on the current target. Releasing it, going to T2 (or is that TV where it's released, it's been a while), gets you back to normal symbology. So you questions in order: 2) Setting the wingspan allows you to visually estimate the targets range without needing to use the radar. So if you can't get a radar contact on the target the only thing you have to estimate the target being in range is the gate on the HUD. 4) A1 is the PPI radar view, A2 is the b-scope. If you knew for a fact that your target was supposed to be in a certain area, that you had a nav point over going A2 would theoretically give you more resolution to try and find them. 5) When you press T1, you can slew your radar cursor over a target, you should then get the range lines on the bottom of the HUD. You aren't locking it in the sense you would a in the F-15, rather you are using the radar to generate a distance. You have to move the radar cursor to stay with the target. It's mainly useful for large AC you are chasing down, or set it so you can look at your radar screen to see when you're in range. If the target is in sight, put the wing span marker on the target, and pull and hold T1, it will range the target continually for you so long as you have it under the marker. 8) The distance line indicates when you're in range. if it's wider than the two hash marks you are too far away. If you are between the hash marks the missile can fly to that distance and hit a non-manuevering target. If the line is flashing you are too close to launch (the missile wont be able to track). The first HUD is going to IR mod or hitting the fast missile button. The gate in the middle of the screen is set with the targets wingspan (you have to do this) to help you estimate the targets range. The second HUD is when you use the radar and hold to T1 to generate a range. Letting go of T1 will go back to the first one. The number on the HUD on the left is your altitude in meters.

Thanks, gives me some idea. Again it looks awesome!

You're plain old regular hand flying trim is "Flight Control" trim. Autopilot trim only works when the plane is in one of the AP modes. Not sure when you'd use emergency trim.

So radar bombing in the Viggen is a bit of black art. A couple things that can be issues: 1) The radar refresh/raster sweep rate leads to having to guess when the target is "exactly" under the radar bombing cross. The higher or faster you're moving the more this will effect your final bomb strike location. 2) Radar resolution, it's not super high like you might find in say the F-15E or the F-18, you are trying to put the terrain feature or the target blob under the center of the radar bombing cross. Radar bombing is only as accurate as the radar can generate a location or offset. 3) Wind this may or may not be an issue in your mission, but it certainly is one real world. So I found through trial and error, you are having to basically guess when to release due to the sweep rate; the higher and faster, the bigger the chance of error. I've gotten to where I can hit most terrain features with a stick of bombs, or a building complex. I can USUALLY managed to get a hit on a stationary ship, but that's in good weather. In the Viggen as well as a lot of it's contemporary AC, true radar bombing was the last ditch way to get the bombs off the AC if the weather was bad. Using the radar to locate a recognizable terrain feature, calculate your offset, run in, time to release, etc, was your backseater/side-seaters job. In a single man AC you'd need to be Sierra Hotel to pull that off in real time I'd imagine. Radar offset bombing could be pretty dang accurate if well planned and the profile flown correctly. In the Viggen the equivalent is Nav bombing and using obvious terrain features for checkpoints to keep everything from drifting.

Looks great! What are you using as a frame, looks almost like the legs off a folding chair?

Are you on open beta or release? I updated the release client last night and tried it, missiles came off the rail just fine in my DACM mission. Are you doing a cold start, hot start, on the ramp, parking, runway, etc? Just trying to narrow things down.

Can you put up a track? From your description nothing is jumping to mind.

My major gripe for non-combat operations is the the lack of nav aides in place. When I've got 6 TACAN's and a handful of NDB's to fly with, I'm much less motivated to go fly cross country or shoot approaches. Yes I can do pattern work and all, but it certainly seems "sterile" comparatively.

On a separate note, is that an english cockpit?

If you did a cold and dark start, make sure to turn your radio's on. I've forgotten that step before.

There is very little splash damage to rockets compared to bombs, which mitigates any shrapnel effects you'd see real world. However real world HEAT rockets actually don't have much blast damage (for a rocket), and unless you add a fragmentation sleeve not much shrapnel either. The warhead is designed to put all it's energy into a very concentrated spot. So you would need a direct hit most likely, you might check the events listing and see if you are getting hits.

I agree, pretty much any low level strike craft doesn't do well with the AI. Also nice flying!

If the QFE for the area you're dropping in is radically different than where it's set for I can see issues with the symbology appearing. Beyond that if you are in parameters for dropping it should appear.

Thanks for the fast response! Interesting to hear how it all works. I have zero knowledge regarding actual frequencies and ranges, but I will certainly be happy to look into it and let you know.

IIRC in CCIP mode, whenever you unsafe the trigger you'll get the symbology and can drop.

A couple of questions: 1) There are some oddities when trying to identify radars such as the search radar for the SA-11 and the track radar for the SA-3 being identical across all the identifiers (band, freq, etc) we have to work with. A cursory google search, indicates at least this pair probably shouldn't be identical. Are these intentional, or just accidental? 2) Also the data doesn’t match up to any of the info in the DCS encyclopedia regarding Band and Freq (I haven’t seen an entry for timing but I haven’t bothered to scroll all the way through). Would it be possible to have either the encyclopedia changed, or the emitter data changed so that they match each other? This way there would at least be internal consistency in DCS. Thanks!