Naquaii

The AIM-54A had an INS as well, just an older variant. A newer "strap-down" INS like mentioned there for the AIM-54C is likely much more accurate and while we can make educated guesses from that it doesn't really help us model the AIM-54C in any other way even if we could.

Yeah, makes sense even if we can't find it in writing as we do know that it was in the hands of the IRIAF after the revolution. And yeah, it might've worked differently from the -A in regards to how the seeker went active but unless we find data on that that's just gonna be speculation.

There's likely to have been quite a lot of differences but that's only educated guesses. Iirc the -C was more digital than the -A but it's not something that can currently be modelled in DCS.

Only what's available to change in luas like chaff resistance, we have little to no control over that aspect of the missile.

As it is now the missile continues to fly at the lost track and when at TTI we check if the correct track is still close enough that the missile would find it when going active. If it is the missile goes active and starts homing and if it is not it will stay dead. This is due to the fact that the current missile modelling does not allow us to point the missile at a point in space and just activate the seeker to find whatever it is in front of it. This way at least the missile functions closer to reality in that it will still need the AWG-9 to tell it to go active making it less of a fire and forget missile. The alternative would be to leave it functioning as other ARH missiles in DCS in that it would go active on its own which it couldn't do IRL.

I agree with you guys and I do think the best solution would have a standard mode that allows aircraft for the correct countries and times but one which you could override. The current one only overrides service time but it would be nice to have it be the same for countries as well. That way you have help designing more historical missions but can choose not to. A tip is that you can edit an aircrafts country in it's entry.lua to add an aircraft to a specific country for a mission in the ME and then change the lua back. The mission will still be the same. Afaik at least.

It wasn't a change in policy, we just didn't think of it. We added the F-14 to the countries that flew it historically. But as it's an easy thing to change we are going to as most other aircraft is set up that way anyway. It would in my personal opinion be nice if this was added as an additional functionality of the ability to restrict aircraft to their real service dates. As it currently is almost all aircraft are added to all countries anyway, and having the option to have them restricted to realistic countries would solve a lot. I'm not promising when it'll change but I wouldn't be suprised if it did next patch. That said this has nothing to do with maps etc and I'm having a hard time how we could've been cheating anyone by adding an aircraft to the countries that actually flew it. I don't seem to remember promising an Argentinian F-14!

The files in the F-14 mods folder in the main DCS installation folder are presets for the various devices. Without them nothing would be bound or you would have pitch and roll bound to toe-brakes or something like that. But it could be that there's something strange with those from when we updated the keybinds to work for the F-14A as well, I'll have a talk with the guy who did that. Not saying it is that but we'll have a look.

Not a bug, the current F-14s are available to the US, USAF aggressors and coalition factions. The current F-14A is also available to Iran until the correct F-14A is added.

We are not modelling it exactly as it was in real life, that is just not possible. While I still believe that latency is a factor it is not the majority issue here, you have to have quite large latency issues to have it break the radar, almost to the point where you could argue if you should even play on that server. The simple fact is that, like it or not, the majority of the bug reports we get seem to be people misunderstanding how the radar works simply because of the fact that we've modelled it correctly in regards to how it build tracks and updates and correlates them. Using TWS in the F-14 against fighters that are aware of the threat and actively maneuvering to avoid it is not what it was constructed for. That's not to say that it isn't possible but it shouldn't come as a surprise if you have lost tracks against those kinds of targets.

STT should be solid, all I've heard from SMEs is that it should be really hard to shake once it's on you. It still have limitations in PD-STT ofc due to the filters but it's a whole other thing than TWS. The only thing you can really do wrong as a RIO in STT is to be in pulse doppler when the target approaches the notch or zero doppler.

The TWS in the F-14 will never be as good as the Hornet or Viper ofc and this is something that I'll have to add in more detail to the manual before EA is over. We have had our fair share of bugs as our TWS is simulated from the ground up under the hood but in general it should be quite ok at the moment and a real TWS will loose tracks that start to maneuver, older ones even more so. But we will continue to finetune and look at it, the biggest worry atm is higher latency mp sessions with a lot of rubberbanding aircraft, it's hard to make sense of tracks doing that. As for tactics the F-14, at least before the -D and the APG-71, you couldn't really maneuver too much yourself either. That tactic your describing of diving after launch might actually not have been a good idea IRL and not a valid tactic as you were kinda warned against maneuvering your Tomcat too much if you were trying to keep your TWS functioning. The WCS just wasn't good enough to keep tabs of everything with the Tomcat maneuvering. That's not to say that you can't do it, but you shouldn't expect it to work flawlessly if you do.

Ok, not sure what the next step would be. Can you please make a bug report in the DCS World bug forum? Edit: The last thing I can think of is to do a repair of dcs using "dcs_updater repair" and to make uninstall any other mods that can affect keybinds like VAICOM etc (if you have any).

Try removing the one under DCS\Mods\aircraft\F14\Input\F-14B-Pilot\joystick in your main installation as well, those are the ones controlling default binds before a player sets it up themselves, maybe there's something wrong there as well.

Like I said, this is not due to us modelling our system wrong, that's due to the standard DCS AI behavior defending before they should know that a missile is incoming. Not much we can do about that unfortunately.

@gaz2644 In the saved games/dcs.XXX/config/input/ you should have an F-14 and F-14_RIO folder, if you have F-14B folders as well those are old ones from before the F-14A. If you're on stable you might still have those. For you both: In your main DCS World install folder there's also files under /Mods/aircraft/F14/Input, there it has three folders but those only contain default files used until you yourself adds bindings which will then be put in the saved games/dsc.xxx/config/input folder. For you guys having problems with your pedals I'd suggest removing the filed named as your device under Saved Games\DCS.XXX\Config\Input\F-14\joystick\ and rebind and if that doesn't work remove that one and the one named as your device under DCS\Mods\aircraft\F14\Input\F-14B-Pilot\joystick (your main installation folder) and try rebinding again. It sounds like you guys might be having missmatch between those two files and it's easier to just remove them and rebind as pedals have few binds anyway. Hope that helps! If it doesn't it's likely some DCS bug that we need to report to ED.

Unfortunately DCS AI behavior is completely out of our hands, we're certainly not giving them any sort of warning in our code.

The only thing the Track Hold really does is change the time from last return to dropping the track. If a new hit occurs that could correlate it should work as it does without track hold. The problem is that the new radar track/return has to be within a certain range and speed gate of the current trackfile to correlate and which each cycle that likelyhood becomes less and less. Against a maneuvering target like a fighter this is quite unlikely because if the track has changed direction it is likely to be outside of those parameters.

It is but for it to correlate back to the same track the target has to have basically flown more or less as how the WCS calculates the target to fly, otherwise it will be outside the parameters for the correlation and those are modelled to the best of our ability from real data. Realistically it will only happen after a few missed hits (like 1-3) and far from everytime. Like mentioned before this TWS is quite old and not really close to a more modern one like the one in the Viper or Hornet.

There's really not much Jester can do other than the MLC being in AUTO which disables it when looking up more than three degress. That said, using TWS against small fighters that are actively trying to defend should be regarded as somewhat of a hail mary, it might work but it's really not a surprise if it doesn't. In some cases it's simple better to use STT. The advantage of launching at long ranges though can be that the target isn't expecting it and thus not maneuvering, which makes it vulnerable to TWS even if a small target. All this is representative of a system as old as the AN/AWG-9 and learning to work around those limitations isn't trivial and also something that is quite fun imho. Glad that you like the module!

The current implementation that we have and believe is correct from our docs is that it marks a track as lost after 3 missed frames and drops it after 7. During that time it can still be correlated if it gets new radar returns fitting the parameters. We have seem evidence that this might be affected if playing with high latency as dcs aircraft tend to rubberband a lot unfortunately and have yet to figure out a good way to counteract that. In regards to the missile guidance the only thing we have control over in DCS is wether we tell the missile that we're tracking it's target or not and the last few patches we added the ability to control seeker state and lofting when that was implemented. So we can't really tell the missile to fly out to a specific location, that's why the best solution we can do atm is to check wether the real location of the target related to a held track is close enough to the missile for it to be able to see it and then if so activate the seeker.

I can't talk for ED in these matters and have no insights into their plans. What we asked for and eventually received was the ability to control seeker state and loft allowing us to at least make the seeker behavior in regards to active/passive correct and also make it loft when it should and shouldn't. There is currently a bug that seems to sometime allow the missile to reaquire even if the track is deleted, we're working on that one. If the track is reaquired or the target remains inside/near where the WCS extrapolates it to be it should go active as long as it's within the AWG-9 scan zone (i.e. can see the commands). That is how it should be.

You have to keep in mind that the TWS implementation in the AN/AWG-9 is one of the absolutely oldest TWS implementations in existence. It simply didn't have the update rate and processing power to keep up with targets maneuvering a lot, and it wasn't designed with that in mind either. Added to that the AWG-9 also has large blind doppler areas because of it's age making the notch and zero doppler filters large. That said we're continually looking at improving it and have removed hard to find bugs in the past. But that it looses track of small targets trying to evade you is realistic. Like I've said in another thread, this is the weaker link of the AWG-9 and the AIM-54 against fighters, not the missile itself. The lofting behaving strangely when loosing the trackfile is likely a dcs-ism due to not having anything guiding it yet, the missile behavior on EDs side isn't completely transparent to us.

No, we have no evidence of the WCS being able to correlate new tracks to old tracks so it must be the same track. If it is lost it's lost and goes for the held track. This is the major weakness against fighters afaik, the missile itself does absolutely fine against them as long as it finds the target. I've yet to find any evidence of the missile itself being particularly bad against fighters even if that is an opinion held by some. The evidence I've seen points towards the AN/AWG-9 being the weaker link of the two against small maneuvering targets.

This is the mach lever in operation, it keeps the throttle at max dry until at a safe speed.