TLTeo

Eh, out of all games that are played as esports only a fraction are designed from the ground up to be one. Most of them are just born from the community building the competitive scene and handling the balance themselves. DCS is no different - it's obviously up to the competitive players to build a scene if they choose so, and developers have no obligation of trying to meet that scene's perceived needs.

I thought that's what the dampen mode of the autopilot (which is missing in the -19) acts as?

Eh, I think that's jumping to conclusions. Just seeing the radar work being started on the F8U (whose model and cockpit are clearly not complete either) clearly shows that M3's workflow is different from e.g. Razbam, who always claim that for them, the art needs to be fully completed before moving on to coding.

Yep, that's a known issue of the DCS engine. You can't do that with other modules either as far as I know.

Eh yes but no. Yes because indeed the F-15C and E indeed do not have a true FBW system, no because they have additional flight control stability stuff in there that the Farmer does not. I also don't know whether the pitch gearing systems in the Farmer and Fishbed do the "G for stick amount of movement" exactly, if that makes sense.

Honestly it's easy to come up with reasonable estimates. 274 AIM-54s were delivered before the 1979 revolution. Assuming all were shot (which is wrong seeing as they still have them today) for a total of ~80 kills, one can estimate a lower limit to the Pk of ~30%. Supposedly there were 50 AIM-54s "operational" in 1987, but from what I can find that does not includes missiles that were not fired, but were not in combat conditions due to lack of supplies etc. If we assume they fired 174 rounds, had 50 operational left, and 50 non-operational left, the Pk goes up to ~45%. Obviously one can play this game and get even higher Pks, but let's take 45% as the highest sensible number. From what I can find on Google, the AIM-7 Pk in 1982 in BVR (for a very small sample size of 5 shots and 1 kill) was ~20%. I can't find good numbers for Desert Storm but I have seen claims that it was similar to Bekaa Valley - let's assume that instead, it went up to 30%. Also from what I can tell from Wikipedia, the AMRAAM all in all has a Pk of 63%. The fighters the Sparrow, Phoenix and AMRAAM were fired against also do not differ significantly in their capability (ie, they were all cheapy export models with mediocre ECM gear, save perhaps the Iraqi Mirage F1-EQs). Let's assume all these estimates are off by a factor of about 15% each. That is still enough to conclude that at worst, the -A model Phoenix was as effective as late model Sparrows -or the Skyflash carried by the F3- in terms of Pk (plus bringing a bunch of tactical advantages, obviously). At best, it was considerably better, but still not as good as the AMRAAM. Financial reasons aside, I think that qualifies it as an effective anti-fighter weapon for its time. edit: I'll add that the statement of "the Tornado pilot thought the Phoenix was a non factor" is misunderstood imo. You can interpret his statements as simply not simulating Phoenix shots because those were the RoEs. I mean, the had the guy go up with ferry tanks that limited his jet to 2-3g after all, that's infinitely more restrictive than limiting Phoenix shots anyway.

I vaguely remember reading that the worry/idea was simply that Soviet naval aviation would have been able to have such large bomber groups that a fair number of them were almost guaranteed to get a missile launch off (even assuming they would go up against every Tomcat on the boat, each carrying 6 AIM-54s), hence the need to shoot down both bombers and ASMs. I don't have a source so I could easily be completely wrong though

LOL Wikipedia. Wow.

His original title literally had "turn rate" in the title though. Besides, more available g (for a given airspeed) equals higher turn rate and all that...

> complains about sustained turn rate > does not know what an excess power chart is Peak DCS forum right there.

This would greatly amuse me, and it would make for an excellent social experiment too

Do you have any proof of that? The RWR is supposed to talk to the HARM in SP/PB mode (which indeed is missing in the Viper), not in TOO. That's supposed to be exclusively the HARM seeker head afaik.

I kind of agree that they are more of the same, but also, the other 4th gen jets have a2g capability so they are arguably less "same-y", the French -5F does not

Maybe they adjusted the TOO scan time to be more in line with the Viper's HAS mode (ie, much worse)?

RCS is a single value hard-coded in DCS .lua files, no more, no less. Afaik the radars in the game all take it into account in the same consistent manner through the radar equation Harlikwin posted in that thread, so you're basically claiming that every radar in DCS is wrong. Personally, I'm very skeptical of that claim. As the radar equation shows, detection range scales roughly as the fourth root of the RCS (ie, it's not as sensitive to it as you would imagine - that is why stealth aircraft need extremely low RCS to be effective for instance), meaning that if you change your RCS from 5.5 to 80 detection range will increase by a factor (80/5.5)^(1/4) = 1.95, given identical conditions otherwise. Knowing how far we can detect a Flanker, and assuming equal closure rate (which is not great - I would imagine in your case it was less than the 970 knots, reducing detection range somewhat), the detection range of your A-380 should be 48*1.95 = 93 nm for HPRF, 26*1.95 = 50.7 for MPRF. I would expect interleaved to be in between those two, which is exactly what you are finding. Per the same data I posted, in previous versions, in RWS on a 20 bar scan, you would find 97*1.95 = 189nm in HPRF, 34*1.95 = 66 nm in MPRF, and somewhere in between in interleaved, which is what you're claiming should happen, more or less. Again, considering that the Hornet's radar in 2.5.6 was known to over-perform grossly, and that now it's where we would expect it to be, it is highly, highly unlikely that there is any bug for higher RCS targets. If you want to test it more thoroughly, I suggest you a) get your closure up to 970 knots at the point when you detect the target and b) use HPRF only.

Alright I'm just confused now. We really, really need to start comparing apples to apples, which we clearly are not doing.

That would still make the -68 considerably better than the -73 and RDI though, which is every bit as suspicious.

I also doubt that the module most DCS player want is an upgraded version of an airframe that is already in the game. I suspect the return on investment on, say, the Strike Eagle, will be way way higher than a new Mirage 2000, even factoring in re-using the external model and FM.

Medium PRF hasn't really changed going into 2.7, so I doubt that's the case (assuming the change tflash mentioned is real, and not a weird placebo effect). Also, I forgot to reply to this: Sure, but range scales as ~fourth root of power, so increasing power by a factor 4 should increase your range by ~35% if I did the math right. That is not nearly enough to account for the current performance of the APG-68 compared to the APG-73.

The JA-37 also had a fighter to fighter datalink a few years before the Flanker was introduced iirc. And obviously, GCI to fighter datlinks had been around since the late 50s/early 60s on both sides.

It's not a bug. The APG-73 was grossly over-performing before 2.7, and is now more in line with what one would expect (at least in high PRF - it's pretty bad in medium PRF) from a radar in its class, e.g.

That's like asking if the Viggen can somehow be turned into a Draken. They are completely different aircraft, and if they ever come to DCS, it will be as a wholly separate module.

That's included in that equation in the S/N and T_s terms.

Yea my point was for the test to be as model-independent as possible. Obviously that comes with more caveats, but I figured I would leave the details of how radars work to those who know more than me

Disclaimer: this post is written as if it was a dry and boring scientific article. If you can't be bothered to read it all, I put a TLDR at the end. I suggest you look at the plots though. A lot of discussion has gone into radar performance recently, whether that be because the Hornet A/A radar was made worse, the Viper has very long detection ranges, or your odd complaint about the Jeff's radar. The simplest arguments possible are "the antenna size is the most important factor in determining radar performance", and "radar X is more modern than radar Y, therefore it should perform better". Recently, someone on Reddit tested the performance of all a/a radars in the game, with the basic picture being that the pre 2.7 Hornet and Viper are grossly outperforming, the Jeff being a bit on the edge, and the FC3 modules under-performing (as one would expect from a non-FF module, really): In this post I thought I would try to chip in the argument, by comparing the data provided in that graph as a function of radar year of introduction and reported antenna size. There are a few caveats here. First, I couldn't find the Jeff's KLJ-7 antenna size anywhere, so I estimated it to be identical to the Viper's, and the Mig 21's, for which I took the F-5E's. Assume some ~10% uncertainty on that data. Second, for the entry in service I took the date when the specific block of the aircraft we have in DCS was first delivered, rather than when the very first variant of the aircraft was delivered, with the exception of the Viper, where I chose the delivery of the first MSIP Block 50 as reported by Wikipedia. This puts the Mirage, Hornet and Viper all between the end of the 80s and the start of the 90s. I disregarded FC3 radar performance because we know it's borked anyway. Finally, I included the Hornet both pre and post 2.7, to estimate whether the change to its radar performance may have been too harsh or not. I plotted detection range, as reported in the plot above, against both year of introduction and antenna size, with the goal of estimating which one is the most important factor in radar performance. I also only considered RWS radar modes, and divided the sample in a high-PRF sample (consisting of the F-14, F-18, Mirage and JF-17) and mid/low-PRF sample (consisting of the F-18, JF-17 in medium and interleaved modes, F-16, Mig-21 and F-5). First, let's consider the case of high PRF radars. The data is as follows: Antenna size correlates very strongly with performance, year of introduction does not. This strongly supports the argument that a more modern radar may have better e.g. ECCM, or trackfile-buliding algorithms, but these things are not represented very well in DCS, while raw range performance (which is what does matter in our simplified world) is mainly set by the size of the antenna. The JF-17 is somewhat an outlier in this picture, but it's not too far from the trend in the rest of the data. As a side note, this also shows why the premier air dominance platforms of their time like the Tomcat, Eagle, Flanker, F-22 et al, all carry huge radars. Second, let's consider the medium and low PRF radars/modes: [ The same general picture applies here, with two caveats. First, the APG-68 is way, way better than every other radar. To some extent it makes sense given that's how the radar is designed in the first place, but I find it strongly suspicious that it could be *that* much better than anything else. Second, the APG-73 in medium PRF looks pretty mediocre both pre and post nerf. Finally, let's remove the two radars that we know to be performing too well: the 2.5.6. era APG-73, and the APG-68, and check the data again: This further strengthens how mediocre the medium-PRF APG-73 currently is. Additionally, there does seem to be some trend of improving performance over time, but it's kind of a circular argument. If you believe the Jeff is not over-performing, then you can justify its detection ranges by saying it's a more modern radar, and that will show up in the data. If instead you believe that age has nothing to do nothing to do with radar performance, declare the KLJ-7 to be over-performing like the APG-68 and pre 2.7 APG-73, and remove it from the sample, then the data will confirm your hypothesis. This basically means we don't have enough modern radars for comparison to really tell which scenario is correct. I feel like the only way to really tell in the intermediate future will be whenever we get the Typhoon. TLDR: I compared the detection range data for all full fidelity modules in DCS. The main trends that appear are 1) the Viper's radar is grossly over-performing, 2) the Hornet's radar performance seems fine in high PRF, but seems to under-perform in low PRF, and always has, and 3) it's hard to tell whether the JF-17's radar is over-performing or not.