TLTeo

I could swear I remember the C2 seat also being converted to be upward firing fairly early on, am I wrong?

I find statements like this to be extremely disappointing, and a large reason why I have stopped buying DCS and especially ED products. Your newsletter stated, I quote, "Fully modelled weapons and sensor systems. ", "Both the DCS: F-5E Remaster and the existing DCS: F-5E will receive many improvements and fixes including certain corrections to radar operation....and more", "Numerous bug fixes and tunings such as damage modelling, sensors, and avionics". It may not be an outright statement that you would bring the radar up from the standards of 10+ years ago but surely you can see why users would have that expectation upon reading that announcement no?

Uh, I stand corrected. Pretty interesting because that's an interceptor jet (no gun, and the 53st wing that flew always had that role) but once the ASA upgrade rolled in, the buttons for the ventral rails weren't even present on the armament panel. edit: also yeah, all of the 6 RF-104Gs that deployed during Ace Guard (which was essentially supporting Desert Storm) had the CM/ECM gear fitted.

Yes, my claim was that their use in Italy was very rare, not among all operators. If you look closely you'll also notice that the S model jets have the older and more draggy mount.

Yea that's a relatively early S and it's also an airshow/demonstration picture basically. As far as I know, it is the only picture (at least, the only easily found picture) of an Italian F-104 of any variant using the ventral pylons for missiles. edit: adding to what Yewls posted, Norway and Japan weren't the only countries to use the ventral pylons. There are plenty of photos of Taiwanese, Danish and Dutch aircraft doing the same.

This is incorrect. The -S had two weapon stations under each wing, and for the most part never used the under belly stations. In fact, with the ASA/ASAM updates they were not even on the weapon selector panel.

Yes, this is a recent post from Notso, RB's Strike Eagle SME. Because clearly going public worked so well for everyone involved the first time around. I'm not even taking anyone's side, I just can't fathom how both parties involved are handing this so badly.

Could you comment on other RB modules? I own the Mirage and Farmer, and would not like to see those purchases end up being completely wasted either.

Just a few thoughts: First, I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding between what the community is saying, and what ED is hearing. Nobody is questioning the quality of DCS flight models, or the implementation of (most) systems, or what have you. I'm sure all those things will be amazing in the Chinhook. What many in the community are trying to say is that our enjoyment of those systems is inextricably tied to the quality of the environment they are put in. You can imagine a sim with even more numerous and realistic modules than DCS, amazing weather and ATC, but no combat - that environment would immediately not be of interest to many of us, despite the presence of better modules. You can not give feedback on a module without talking about the environment it's flown in. Second, I think the reasoning of "if EA is not for you then don't buy the module" is very flawed. The entirety of DCS is in EA in some way or form, to the point where we have given up the pretense of having a Stable and Beta branch, it's just Beta now. What you are essentially telling many of us when you say "EA may not be for you and that's fine" is really "our product is not for you", which I think is very silly given ED has a near monopoly on the high fidelity combat sim market. Finally, and this is the most frustrating thing to say, I feel like the misunderstanding or breakdown between the community and ED is so deep that I no longer believe giving feedback will actually improve the product. I'm writing this post because I need to get some frustration off my chest, not because I think it will in any way help DCS achieve some of its potential. edit: I also want to add, I realize the points I made are not something Nineline or Bignewey are expected to address. I wish I felt like they were being relayed to whoever makes decisions at ED though.

It's not remotely close by any standards of software development.

There's a threshold for bugs/missing features that are acceptable. "10% of users can't even run the software" is well below that threshold. I can't believe this is even up for debate.

The alternative is releasing modules without any mass testing that can catch game-breaking bugs. I'm sure that would go down splendidly with the community.

Yea this really mischaracterizes what happened. Assuming that the actual number of systems affected is 10%, and that the number of HB employees testing stuff is low enough that the chance of having the right system follows a Poissonian distribution (which should make sense for a small company), the chance of missing that issue before mass testing is on the order of ~13% if I have the math right (assuming we have ~20 employees, we expect ~2 to catch that issue, and we need to never have the issue show up, so in this case lambda=2 and k=0). TLDR if you have a small team catching something that happens 10% or less of the time is very unlikely. edit: fixed the math

Check the campaign standard operating procedures pdf

Post VEAO ED are supposed to everyone's source code, so tbh my expectations is they will keep modules reasonably sort of kind of functional but not really develop or update them. Same deal as e.g. the F-86, F-5 et al.

From RB devs. Whatever the two sides are it's clear one of them is completely off in this.

They will just as soon as Nick Grey gets back from flying around in his Hellcat (/s obviously)

More importantly, why is RB so unhappy with ED that they feel like they need to take such drastic steps?

The centerline stations thing is weird because plenty of operators actually used a fair amount and you can easily find pictures of Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Japanese, Taiwanese and German jets carrying them (often without tanks actually). I remember reading that they were draggier below Mach 1, but actually less draggy above Mach 1 than the underwing ones. I've also seen claims that it wasn't used in Italy (except that one airshow picture with a meme loadout on an F-104S) not because of smoke ingestion, but because the missile seekers were low enough to the ground that they risked getting damaged during takeoff and landing. Regarding the comparison with the F-5, beyond the performance, the F-104A and C are probably similar indeed, but the F-104G has a bunch of cool strike avionics (INS/nav system with 12 waypoints, a bomb delivery timer like the F-4, decent air to ground radar, decent autopilot) that are closer to the F-4 or even Viggen (with some optimism...) so it's far more capable in that sense.

I don't know about the Maverick, but for the Walleye this is definitely the case. The range at which you can lock things is a very strong function of time of day - as in, can't lock anything at ~6-7am, works perfectly well one hour later in identical lighting conditions.

Yeah to say the 104 would be competitive today is the overstatement of the century. It is fair to say that back in its day it was a competent air to air fighter though.

Also ordered day 1, no vinyl, just a Phantom shirt, nothing in sight yet (Netherlands).

There is no such thing as an AIM-7L - I guess you meant 7F?

That's only assuming your limit is kinematics, which need not be the case. Maybe the Tomcat's radar just needs a huge return to persuade the Hawk to look in the right direction. This stuff is why proper documentation is needed.

No IRST Navy jets, although for some reason I also have a soft spot for the RF-4.