Callsign JoNay

I know how the Cat's AP works. Have you tried the F-18's?

The AP has always felt off to me in the Cat. For example if you have it engaged with ALT switch up, it should be holding your altitude and your roll attitude, but you should also be able to use stick to make adjustments to the roll as desired, etc. But the roll axis feels super janky. If you start rolling and come off the side pressure too much the aircraft stops rolling very suddenly as if it bumped into something solid in the air. It doesn't feel natural to me like an aircraft with mass and inertia. The ED Hornet AP feels more realistic IMO.

Apologies for resurrecting such an old topic, but are we sure the slip indicator is working properly? It seems to work well in straight and level flight, but when rolling the aircraft it behaves in the opposite way I expect it to based on what I'm seeing out of the window. In the unlisted video above I put the wings symbol on a mountain peak and roll back and fourth left and right without rudder. You can see that adverse yaw/slip is affecting the nose, but the indicator moves to the same direction indicating proverse/skid. Is this realistic behavior? It's probably one of the reasons why there is so much confusion for how to coordinate the Cat.

Anybody know why the save button is grayed out when I try to save my edited 3in1 DDS file with the Nvidia photoshop plug in? I don't have any problems saving the other DDS textures. When I try to save the 3in1 it first gives me a message about it not being a 2:1 aspect ratio, so I have to save it as image only, but all the combinations of checkboxes I've tried leave the save button grayed out.

Anybody know where the RIO helmet goes in the 3in1 LOD DDS file? I see the pilot helmet in the 2nd row 4th column, but I don't see the RIO's.

Angle fighter IMO. EDIT: It depends on your philosophy. If you come from the Snodgrass school of thought where the Cat is a 13G fighter, then you can energy fight with it. If you are the type of person who tries to keep it below 7G, then you need to angle fight with tighter radius.

I see. Well I imagine chaff slows down to within clutter filter params pretty darn quick, so any effect it has should be very brief. It's unfortunate that the current modeling of chaff attracts missile locks even when being deployed from an aircraft that is already notching in the first place. That's what bothers me the most. There's no way chaff can have a radial velocity fast enough to be detected by a PD radar if it's velocity vector is nearly perpendicular to it at the time it's deployed. (That's an ED problem, I guess). I just hope people who can implement change are paying attention to this.

Can you elaborate on why it would be a cheat? The goal is simulation, and not game balance, isn't it? The AWG-9's MLC filter is +/- 133kts of 0 ground speed. I don't know what the MLC filter of the AIM-54 missile's RADAR is, but I would assume it would be in the ballpark, no? You'd need some pretty gnarly winds to move strips of tinfoil fast enough to be outside of a clutter notch.

OK, good to know. Do you have a link/source for this? Not that I don't believe you, I'd just love to read it for myself because I don't remember any official reps of DCS/ED or HB mentioning this. Here's hoping it will be fixed in 2.7.

You're saying even if HB set the CM resistance to 0.0 the 54s would still lock on chaff? I haven't seen this mentioned before.

How is it a DCS issue? HB has control of the CM resistance settings for the 54s.

I think the missile still has issues. Why is it going for chaff at all? I brought up this question on page 1 and still haven't seen it addressed. Either a radar is vulnerable to chaff, but immune to notching. Or it's vulnerable to notching, but immune to chaff. It shouldn't be both ways, but that's the way the 54s are in the sim.

I think everyone here knows that, but most virtual squadrons use the tail numbers and name plates as a way to personalize their aircraft. You can of course make custom textures for this, but it gets bloated with the F-14. Imagine being in a squadron where you have a dozen guys who alternate between the RIO and pilot seat. You need 12x11 unique textures to accomplish this, every texture many MBs in size. And you have to constantly update them as people are promoted through the ranks. It would just be a nice quality of life feature to have. For those squadrons who want exact fonts, placements, or who simulate flying the available aircraft for the fragged mission, they can continue to customize their own unique textures.

Too bad about #2. Seems like it would be easy enough to do. Or even better would be to put text fields in the re-arm re-fuel loadout window to enter any... Rank First name Callsign Last name I don't think you'd need to worry about fonts or placement as much as nose/tail numbers.

That's true. But it is an indication that someone out there who is involved in the sim at one point coded an AIM-54 (not necessarily HB's 54) to have a CM resistance of 1.0. I guess I'm wondering if it's possible that somewhere in the spaghetti there exists a fragment of that old 1.0 CM resistance setting that is still affecting things even for HB's AIM-54. Because as I demonstrated above, this current version of the 54 is highly susceptible to chaff.

Active off the rail at long ranges is not a good idea, because the missile's radar is not as powerful as the AWG-9. So if you shoot a missile from beyond it's radar range it will receive initial guidance from the AWG-9 off the rail, but basically fly blind to where that target last was, and go active on the first thing it sees when it gets to that area. The problem is targets are usually moving and may not necessarily be at the same point in space when you shot the missile by the time the missile arrives to that point in space. Also, active off the rail means the missile will usually take a straight line trajectory to the target which is inefficient compared to lofting. You can tell your missile has gone active when the TTI counter to the right of the contact on the TID starts blinking.

Yep the AI is omniscient. They know where the missile is because they know where it isn't, etc, etc, <insert joke here>. But again, it's still not the main issue. The AI knew were my missiles were in the second half of the above video with no chaff just the same as in the first half of the video when they were carrying chaff. The chaff itself is making a big impact. My concern is the Heatblur devs are saying, "Well it's not our problem ED's AI is omniscient. We have to wait for them to fix that for our missiles to be fixed". But we can see that even the C-model of the AIM-54 is spoofed by chaff most of the time, and the physics of pulse doppler radar suggests they shouldn't be.

That is a problem, but it shouldn't even matter. Pulse Doppler radars should disregard chaff as clutter. Chaff slows down to nearly zero airspeed almost as soon as it's deployed, like a parachute without any weight attached. I haven't noticed that. The AI will start to notch before the AIM-54 goes active if you leave the target size set to norm, and that can affect the track if you don't position yourself at a lower altitude first or use the MLC toggle, but if you set target size to large the missile should always pitbull before the AI starts notching. If you watch my video above you'll see that 100% of my missiles pitbulled. There was never an issue with the AWG-9 dropping a track before the PB. Against the AI there is no reason to ever use any target size setting other than Large. They are omniscient and always know where your missile is anyway. Settings other than large should only be used against human opponents in the current build of the open beta.

It's been a pleasure collaborating with you, Biggus. Thanks for all the help testing. I do want to say though that this missile behavior is not new to me only on the latest version of the open beta. I picked up the Tomcat late in 2020, and started missile testing in November/December, and I've had very low PK% rates for the last several versions of the open beta dating back to the very beginning of my testing. It's very mysterious that we had different results on the same standalone version of the openbeta until now, but I guess that's DCS for you. One of the common things I hear on the forums when I bring up the challenges with the 54 is that the AI notches perfectly. I do agree this is a factor, but I believe the main issue with the missiles is the missile's current counter measure resistance setting. If the AI notching was the primary reason for the low PK of the 54s, then the PK should be similar verses chaff-carrying and non-chaff carrying targets, but it is not. I did some tests yesterday against targets with chaff and without chaff. The difference is pretty night and day. Against chaff carrying targets I score around 20-25% PK, and against non chaff targets I achieve about 75% PK with the same attack profile. Here is an unlisted video I made of my Tacview analysis. I can post the original tacview too, but sometimes seeing how someone interprets the tacview is as important as sharing the raw tacview itself. I don't understand why the AIM-54 is so drawn to chaff in this simulator. I'm only a self-educated civilian without any real world experience with pulse doppler radar systems but according to my research pulse doppler radar (like what is found in the AIM-54) should not be seriously affected by chaff. https://fas.org/man/dod-101/navy/docs/fun/part11.htm#:~:text=Because of its low velocity,not seriously affected by chaff.&text=Chaff is a particularly effective,systems such as surface ships But in DCS the AIM-54 bites on chaff, as long as it's within a certain range, as soon as the target aircraft notches. Even when the chaff being dispensed is coming from a notching aircraft. This seems like contradictory behavior to me. Logical suggests that either a radar is immune to notching but vulnerable to chaff. Or... It's vulnerable to notching but immune to chaff. Unless I'm missing something, it shouldn't be both things. If anyone out there who is more educated with pulse doppler radar systems is reading this, feel free to correct me. Question to the devs: Is the current counter measure performance in the sim working as intended? I've been told that the CM rejection value is supposed to be 0.2 or 0.3 (lower being better), but a buddy of mine found this in DCS World OpenBeta\Scripts\Database\Weapons\missiles_table.lua, line 4519. Could this be causing an issue with the intended counter measure rejection behavior?

I posted a thread about the MK-20s a few weeks ago. Glad to see that it's not just me that can'tdestroy anything with them.

Against humans or the AI? I can understand seeing higher PK rates verses nooby human pilots who are distracted by something and aren't taking the 14 in their RWR seriously, but I agree with the others above. Against the AI, the AIM-54 is practically useless. Very susceptible to CMs. Even without CMs the missiles often make violent maneuvers that shed a whole mach in less than a second. And now after the most recent patch and 3rd scenario has popped up where the missiles just go stupid. I've only been flying the Tomcat for about 3 or 4 months, but I've tested at least 300 missiles against AI and I'd say my PK is less than 10%.

Can someone help me understand how to use MK-20 in the Tomcat? I don't see anything in the kneeboards for setting a burst height. How do I configure this weapon? Weapon wheel: Do I choose MK20A, B, or C? (I've noticed Jester chooses C). Mech fuze: Jester leaves it at Nose/Tail, but that seems to be his default setting for many weapons. In the heatblur manual it states to use nose/tail for the high drag MK-82s, but I don't see anything about MK-20. Elec Fuze: Jester leaves it to INST, but the manual says to use VT. I've tried just about every configuration of the above. My cluster casing bursts at about ~1000 MSL, and the bomblets explode at ~400 feet above the targets. None of my targets are getting destroyed or taking damage, and I don't see any dust from the ground being kicked up like in the youtube videos out there. Edit: No, wait, the bomblets are making it to the ground. But the footprint is tight requiring the same accuracy I would need if I was using an MK-82.

Has nothing to do with head position for me. It seems to happen if I've been alt tabbing.

Not in my experience. Wings are always swept when I cold start on the boat. If I'm in the RIO seat in multiplayer I see them extended, but the driver sees them swept so it seems to be a case of desync.

I'm seeing the same two things. My PK% versus AI is ~10% in the current build of the open beta for those two reasons you've listed.