TLTeo

Yea fine,it is not possible to have a conversation with someone claiming that the F-104 of all aircraft can either carry weapons or fuel tanks, but not both.

I'm going to try one last time, and I'm going to try to address your points explicitely. Not relevant to deep strike. You do one high speed pass and then leave - think the way the Viggen flies in DCS. You do not, ever, ever want to be maneuvering slowly at low AoA over a strategic target because AA will blow you up in seconds. You're not loitering over a target like an A-10 does. You run in as fast as you possibly can and deliver your weapons at 400+ knots. At high speeds high wing loading is an advantage because it makes for a more stable weapons platform, which again is why so many strike aircraft of the era are very, very highly wing loaded (more than the 104 in fact - look up the Jaguar for instance). F-105: the 104 *is* more agile. If you look at its EM diagram it can hold up to a Mig21bis in a rate fight (meaning it will also outrate all the older, less powerful variants). Meanwhile, per Feather Duster/Constant Peg, the F-105 had no choice but to run against *any* Soviet fighter. The 104 will lose the angles fight for sure, but that's not different than, say, a fight between a Viper and Su-27. It also carries the same avionics (which, per the discussion above, are extremely important to the strike mission) as the F-105D while costing a fraction of the money, which is extremely important for a lightweight export jet. A-6/A-7: please argue in good faith, those aircraft are subsonic and the F-104 is one of the fastest aircraft ever built, its top speed at sea level is 750 knots. It is also not a naval aircraft which makes it more appealing to export customers since it didn't demand a bunch of compromises in its design in order to land on a carrier. And finally, it's much cheaper and more versatile than either because good luck using an A-6 or A-7 as an interceptor. The payload does not matter when the primary wartime loadout is as many fuel tanks as you can carry and a nuke. In that configuration, the 104 actually has the same range as a Phantom. A ~1000-2000lb payload is also in the ballpark of (or equal to) many lightweight fighters that flew into the late 90s per my post above. It also does not make a difference in naval strike (because whether you're carrying Exocets, RB-04s or Kormorans most aircraft only bring two missiles) or in photo recce (because all you need is the recce pod). If you really want a DCS comparison, the capabilities you should expect from the F-104 in the strike mission are an older, slightly less capable mix of the Mirage F1 and Viggen. Flight performance will be similar-ish (all 3 are really, really fast at low level and turn well enough), avionics and payload will be somewhat worse. It will also be one of the best Cold War interceptors in the game (if not the best). Not bad for something 15-20 years older than those two aircraft. edit: added a bit extra info/reworded bits.

Also check that you didn't turn off the luminosity of the gunsight reticle

it is known that strike aircraft that flew mission similar to the F-104 should be slow, low wing-loaded jets, like the F-105, F-111 and Tornado. Wait a second....

I just checked in the Viper very quickly (using the landing missions in that module, so different airfields), didn't have any issues

I only tested the F1 so far. I can try a couple more tomorrow.

Alright I did some more testing: 1) I re-opened the track I attached, in which I swear to god the ILS needles didn't show up while I was playing. This time they did, in agreement with Kotiuka's post. Yay for me not going insane. 2) I then re-launched the same mission, ILS needles showed up again. 3) I tried the landing mission in Syria instead (at Ramat David), ILS needles didn't show up. 4) I re-started DCS and tried the Syria mission again (without loading the Nevada one first), the ILS needles now did show up. So at this point, either loading a new map or tuning into a new station causes the ILS needles to not show up. 5) I then re-started DCS once again and tried a quick mission where I spawned at Akrotiri near final, turned on active pause, tuned into the ILS, then flew over to Paphos and tried the same. The ILS needles showed up both times. So it looks as if the ILS beacons are not being recognized if you fly on multiple maps, only the ones in the first map you load are "found". This is also consistent with why I made this post in the first place - I completely botched an ILS approach on one of my own missions in Syria, and decided to practice in the Nevada landing missions.

That's really weird. I didn't unpause because to me, the ILS needles didn't move/show up at all (and I had tried a bunch of times with the same result). I will do more tests after work later today.

I can't get the ILS to actually tune into stations to save my life. Track attached from the Nevada landing mission - I can place the aircraft at 3000ft of altitude a few miles away from the runway, where I would expect to get an ILS signal. Instead, the ILS needles do not move despite setting the runway heading per the briefing on the omnibearing indicator and setting ILS as the navigation source. ILS.trk

Spain also operated first gen Harriers. Which would also be a really really cool module.

It's also worth mentioning that ~1000-2000lbs worth of payload is in line with loadouts used by plenty of other aircraft - e.g. during Desert Storm the A-4, A-7, AV-8B, Mirage F1, Jaguar, A-4, F-16, F-18 and Tornado IDS all carried loadouts in that range (e.g. 4x Mk 82s, or a single LGB, or 4x rockeyes). The F-104 was slightly on the lower end for sure, but it was in no way, shape or form crippling.

In that mode the tape is not a compass, it's the distance to your locked target.

This is survivor bias at its best. The Tornado contingents were tasked with some of the most dangerous missions of the war into the thickest air defenses. The A-10 was not. And yet only one of the airframes was forced to fly into zones with effectively no air defenses, despite "making it back to base with epic amounts of battle damage". Bro is really ignoring the fact that the TAC had 70 F-104Cs vs hundreds of F-100s and F-105s. And also, funnily enough, that the F-100 barely flew North because its performance and avionics weren't up to the deep strike mission (guess what the F-104G has in spades compared to the Super Sabre...). edit: literally nobody flew the F-104 this way, that mission was mostly taken up by the G-91/F-84F/F-5/Hunter depending on the operator. The main tasking of a2g F-104s was to make small suns in Eastern Europe, not to plink tanks like it's a War Thunder match. Its secondary a2g missions were recce/interdiction/deep conventional strike/anti shipping. CAS (which people think is the only a2g mission for whatever reason) was much farther down the priority list. And on a related note, all the above (and interception) are missions that the F-5 is thoroughly mediocre at.

I was wondering what everyone's experience with the INS drifting is. After having flown a few sorties, it seems to me that the INS does not drift at all even over ~1 hour of flight (while pulling a decent amount of Gs) or so.

Also, the A-10 had the highest loss rate out of all types deployed in Desert Storm, to the point where it was very very heavily restricted in where it operated, so I wouldn't exactly call it survivable. edit: oh and of course, the Viggen had an extremely capable nav/attack system. In fact basically anything from that era tasked with all weather strike used onboard avionics to actually navigate to their target.

Yeah fair. Still an extremely weird definition though.

By this definition, no NATO country ever used the F-104 in the ground attack role.

Those appear to be live rounds too!

As far as I know only the USAF -Cs used refueling probes. Italy also trialed them and concluded it wasn't worth it for the types of missions the 104 flew here (including a/a, a/g, and recce).

I think technically all Gs could have six missiles, no? Other than the preference of each user, there is nothing to prevent it afaik. The wingtip pylons are kind of similar - they were the default for the early A/C, but also there are quite a lot of pictures of Italian S models flying with AIM-9s on the wintips, Aspide/AIM-7 on the outboard stations, and sometimes tanks on the inboards.

That seems to have worked, thanks!

Happens every single time I try to load a mission with both the regular and MT executables, I can no longer fly in DCS at all. Logs attached. Deleting fxo/metashaders, full repair, full re-install all did nothing. dcs.log-20250103-141725.zip dcs.log-20250103-142348.zip

Besides, the notion that the F-104G is a bad ground attack aircraft compared to its peers is also wrong.

The interceptor only thing is a myth. There are pictures of Spanish F-104s training for a2g on this very forum.

Consortium still doesn't tell us whether it's an interceptor or fighter bomber jet. My personal uninformed feeling is on the former given that it's a bit more applicable to DCS (e.g. I think it the interceptor jets have some sort of radar boresight acquisition mode), a lot of the fighter bomber functionality (like offset bombing modes) were mainly for nuclear delivery which we don't really have.