Eddie

Still haven't had chance to test this yet, is UHF Guard monitoring implemented for aircraft with a dedicated guard receiver?

Yep. The main thing to remember is that ECM and other countermeasures don't, and aren't intended, to make you invunerable to any given threat or to make a threat system useless, that's impractical. What they are there to do, when combined with relevant tactics, techniques, and procedures, is give you enough time and/or space to get in, employ weapons, and get out. That time could be minutes, it could be seconds. And distance wise it could shrink a SAM WEZ just enough to allow you to slip through a small gap between two systems. This gives you the chance to get in and do your job before the threat operators can take a shot against you.

Oh those systems are absolutely employed heavily in just about every modern communication system and RADAR. But again, the defensive countermeasures are also designed to counter those counters as well. When you start looking at frequency agile systems things do get difficult, but certainly not impossible. It all depends if you know how the system you're trying to counter does its frequency hopping etc., if you do then you can identify/counter it. If you don't you can employ brute force broad spectrum jamming, chaff corridors, and others to help mitigate the threat. No countermeasure is 100% effective, just as no weapon is 100% effective. Nothing is black and white, it's all various shades of grey on an always changing scale.

Absolutely, the most effective countermeasure is always to not give the enemy a chance to fire upon you in the first place. A large element of ECM is designed to do exactly that.

Yes, however the optical system requires being able to see the target, moving unpredictably at speed, and maintain contact with it through a very small aperture. Significantly less effective than automatic tracking. Not to mention the fact that without range data you can't compute a lead pursuit course and have to rely instead on flying pure pursuit, costing energy and therefore range. You can see this clearly with the SA-19. Being a SACLOS system it flies pure pursuit, and if you have the SA-19 on the beam with any more than 250 knots of ground speed your line of sight rate is too high for the missile to deal with an it'll fly harmlessly behind you. No chaff, no flare, no ECM, no manoeuvring required (try it in DCS yourself). Of course you're not jamming the "missile", you're jamming the tracking system itself. And no, these things are not at all represented in DCS, or any sim. Hint: if you can easily shut off GPS/Voice Comms/Mobile Phone Coverage/You name it with ECM, what makes you think that jamming a guidance radio signal to a missile would be impossible (not saying it's easy though of course). If it doesn't work, we're wasting an awful lot of money and effort on this stuff and a lot of people I work with go to the office everyday for no reason. ;)

Every SAM, AAM, Acquisition, and Tracking RADAR is built to "defeat" ECM. Equally every ECM system (be they SPJs, Chaff, towed decoys, aircraft EW systems, or others) is built to defeat the hardware and software those threat systems employ to counter the counter. The electronic battlefield is an endless arms race between threat and defence that is never ending. The SA-15 is indeed resistant to both chaff and other ECM systems, but not invulnerable, especially to modern systems backed up by modern software and threat data. There is a reasons that most Russian system have an optical backup guidance option in addition to their primary RADAR/Radio Command system. In reality there is a lot of aspects of the electronic battlefield not covered in DCS or any other sim. Even something as simple as a chaff corridor used since WWII canremove a modern RADAR based system's ability to engage aircraft protected by that corridor. Have a read: (best public doc I know of on the subject, apart from buying a text book or three). [ame]http://falcon.blu3wolf.com/Docs/Electronic-Warfare-Fundamentals.pdf[/ame]

You can't in reality (not an optically tracked one at least), or in DCS. The post you reference is about the SA-15 which is Radio Command, not the SA-19 which is SACLOS. Chaff/ECM will of course work against a Radio Comand system such as the SA-15.

There isn't, only the relevant gen captions on the warning panel.

Good to hear; thanks for feeding back.

No it doesn't (apart from KC-135) player/client only in MP. Two aircraft must set a TACAN 63 channels apart from each other (eg 01Y for lead & 64Y for wing). There's no option to set this for the AI.

Any two TACAN equipped aircraft can obtain distance from each other, this is known as TACAN Yardstick as is used for formation keeping and rejoins etc. If this isn't modelled it will be a big omission, especially as it's the only tool to assist with formation work in the F-5E. It is indeed modelled in the A-10C, not sure about other TACAN equipped modules though. As far as bearing, very few aircraft can provide that in reality (the KC-135 can't).

It'll be (subject to test & eval) the 476th's formal Aggressor jet operated by the 65th vAGRS, and possibly we'll also use it as a basic trainer again depending on test & eval results and practicality.

The flight director bars incorrectly displaying raw ILS data was fixed, the need to set the heading via the HSI course knob which was discussed at length in that thread was not changed, and won't be.

Have a read if this thread. http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=115053 In short, yes it's wrong, but it's never going to change.

The A-10A -1 is available and always has been. We will not be uploading the A-10C -1 as it is a protected document.

It's in the A-10A -1 that's available on the 476th website. That's the best you'll get, for now at least.

Snoopy will be able to give a definitive A-10 specific answer, but. Generally for anything beyond a basic before/after flight turnaround service you'll need to dearm any aircraft. For pods and tanks it'll depend on what maintenance you're doing, you'll keep things on if you can. If you need access then thing will come off. If a jet is gong into maintenance (servicing) then normally everything comes off.

200 KIAS minus 1 knot per 1000 feet of altitude above MSL. So at 10K ft it's 190 KIAS and so on.

Indeed they can, it is an aircraft systems function rather than a weapon function though and only allows a max of two missiles to be targetted at once (one per station, even if LAU-88s are being used). I don't believe the A-10C supports multi missile handoff. Although I will say I'm not 100% sure on that.

Yes but not in the short term working on our threat guide and NTTR stuff primarily at the moment. If you do print it out then you can always just replace individual pages as we add the few remaining images over time.

While DCS doesn't simulate the specific reasons why the A-10C can't take out a major hardened structure, it does replicate the end result pretty well. As others have pointed out, a GBU-31v1B as is carried by the A-10C is not a hardened target penetrator. This is further compounded by the fact that, in DCS, every weapon used by the A-10C has zero delay impact fusing. Without a delay fuse it doesn't matter how much explosive is in the bombs you throw at a hardened structure, and it doesn't matter how many bombs to keep throwing at that target either. Each and every weapon will explode on the surface of the bunker allowing all it's energy to dissipate into the air without causing any significant damage. Delay fusing however allows the weapon to punch in to the concrete/earth of the structure and explode within giving a significantly higher effect for the same amount of explosive. Think of the old fire cracker in the palm of your hand example. Open palm leads to a bit of a skin surface burn, closed palm leads to no more hand. This is why weapon fusing is so important in reality, it dramatically affects the characteristics and capability of the weapon. Hard target penetrator weapons such as the GBU-31v3B have different warheads entirely than their non penetrator counterparts. While the designation of the weapon might make them sound like the same weapon, they are not, only the guidance kit is the same (mostly). The GBU-31v3B uses a BLU-109 warhead rather than a MK-84, which has a much thicker steel case allowing it to punch through a lot of concrete/earth with nothing more than it's kinetic energy, before the delay fuse detonates the explosive within. While there is truth in the statement that fast jets can deliver weapons with more energy, this isn't the main reason for them having more effect on hardened targets. The main reason is the weapons themselves. The A-10C simply isn't equipped to engage such targets in DCS, in reality some specialist weapons have been used on the A-10C in recent ops none of those weapons are present in DCS, and likely won't be as they were weapons produced in small numbers for specialist operational requirements.

In addition to these points, all INS/GPS equipped aircraft can operate on INS alone using the same manual INS update procedures as pre GPS systems in cases where GPS is not available (jamming etc.). While INS/GPS systems don't usually require manual INS updates, in some situations they may. The same is true of JDAM and other "GPS" weapons. Really looking forward to seeing this stuff implemented in a sim.

Oh yes, it's proving quite useful. Always happy to help.

Varies for each aircraft type. Generally somewhere in the 20 - 30 knot region Who's going to know, other than the pilot themselves? Like everything else, it's something that pilots themselves monitor. Varies for each aircraft type and operator nation. Often lead will position on the downwind side for a flight lineup, otherwise for single aircraft it'd be centreline. Varies for each aircraft type and operator nation, and by time of day etc. Althought generally in the 150-500 feet region.

Yeah phosphorus based incendiary weapon. Possibly ZAB-100.