VC

Hook skipping is only a small part of it. You can trap in the Hornet as well at completely the wrong speed and glide slope, just flare at the end. If you did that in a real F-18... actually you'd probably be fine as well. Fine as in, you wouldn't break the plane there and then, they're engineered with safety margins. But you'd never fly again and the plane might be written off anyway just to be safe.

Are you doing a proper Case 1 procedure or just lining up, flying at the deck and flaring at the end? Carrier landings in game are unrealistically easy if you don't follow proper procedures because you're not going to get chewed out for reducing airframe life with stressful landings or wasting other people's time with long approaches. And your life isn't on the line if you mess up so you can just have a go. I had the same feeling in the Hornet (having learned the Tomcat first), first try just flew it whichever way, trapped and thought it was easy. Tried a proper approach pattern with correct speeds and failed a dozen or more times. I can now just about make passable carrier landings in the F-18. Having said that, the F-14 is a lot easier to carrier land than the F-18. With the Tomcat I got the hang of the pattern much quicker and could land much more reliably with less practice. The plane was designed to help the pilot land it on a carrier. Carrier planes with nasty landing habits quickly get a reputation for it.

You might be starting with a slightly biased desire to dogfight, but all-aspect off-boresight missiles distort the WVR landscape to a point where long close-in fights are not really a realistic thing. That's not to say you need to go to the other extreme and "shoot and scoot" as you say, but modern missile WVR is quick, dirty and brutal, often a "first shot wins" game or a mutual kill. WVR will happen and it often needs to in order to secure a kill, but it's the endgame of the longer fight leading to it, not an end in itself. Your goal in a merge shouldn't be to get close just for the sake of having a good old fistfight. Your goal should be to get close with an overwhelming advantage, get the kill, and get out as quickly as possible, because you'll be on the other end of that if you don't. "Fair" head to head missile jousting is a crap-shoot, regardless of how lucky you get in other planes. You wouldn't constantly take head-on gun passes (I hope) in a guns only scenario or e.g. in a warbird, there are merge tactics for guns only that generate flight path separation and energy advantage while keeping you ouf the enemy's engagement envelope. Same with missiles, you don't charge a guy charging you and hope you jink better, you're just rolling dice at that point. Unfortunately, when missiles make the "death zone" a 15 mile 60 degree cone off the enemy's nose, plus a 5 mile half-sphere forward of their wing line, this becomes very, very tricky. You basically have two ways to generate a decisive advantage at the merge: 1) Force the enemy fully defensive as you press through your BVR. This is where your energy generating prowess and long range missiles shine. This is where your snaking, cranking, barrel rolls, all those tactics come in: at medium ranges where you can defeat the enemy missiles and win the fight kinetically, not at near-merge ranges where you're jinking and praying. If they blink and defend badly, or turn tail, you press and kill. If they notch you or press back, you light your cans in their face and reset, no shame in that. 2) Sneak up on them so they don't know you're there. The Tomcat has datalink but you're no EOS-assassin Flanker and you're much more likely to be high and fast in the BVR as this benefits you. Your bag of tricks here should be sneaky re-engages after the above mentioned reset. If you're on the deck with an AMRAAM on your tail and presumably the guy who fired it as well, dive over a hill while faking a turn one way then immediately turn hard the other way. If you do it right and they take the bait, they'll lose you completely and you come back over the hill point blank at their 3 or 9 o'clock. Sidewinder to their tailpipe and get out of there.

I see what you mean, I had a couple of successful Flanker sorties and I was able to make use of the bars to get above targets and find them with the radar. I guess the reason I was chasing hard numbers is because the relative altitude control is a hard number and I felt I needed to know what to aim for in conjunction with the expected target range. In the F-18 for example a 2-bar scan is quite narrow, so I use the hard altitude numbers it gives you to make sure I'm scanning in the right place. The Flanker pattern seems wide enough that a more approximate approach works. The "no numbers" system is somewhat elegant in its simplicity, guess I should have trusted the Soviet designers instead of chasing western style explicit display.

That escalated quickly :D Most of what you've said is just confirming or slightly expanding on stuff I more or less already knew. It's the estimating hard numbers from the line sizes that is really the core of what I'm asking. So what I got from the last bit... cross-bar about as wide as the triangle on the target is ~2000m. So double would be ~4000 etc. But I can always use my own plane as a basis for the estimate. While we're here, why does boxing a target in TWS not give you their speed and altitude?!

Ah excellent, just had a play around and I see how you do that now. I can't do it just yet as I'm waiting on a HOTAS upgrade but I asked because it will allow me to do much more realistic bindings for most planes so good future info. What's the syntax for all the modules to make sure it's recognised? e.g. just f14b, fa18c, jf17?

Ah, so they're relative? I assumed they were absolute and I'd be trying to convert pixels of a bar length to an altitude. Or are they, and own bar length changes too? I know you said don't overthink but in my experience with other planes getting the elevation right is really crucial to finding a target. Any approximations for when it's maybe +/-2 or 3? e.g. "if bar is twice the width of the V then elev is..."

Silly question, can SRS support different PTT bindings for different aircraft? Is this what the "Allow INCOCKPIT DCS Controlled PTT" option does?

So I know the cross-bar on HDD contacts denotes altitude but it seems fairly useless beyond a basic "target is very high or on the deck" assessment. Is there any way to read it into a useable number for radar relative altitude control input?

Thanks, good to know! One more thing to add to my startup procedure then!

That makes sense, I've never touched the HNS, I assume it defaults to both? Is GPS coverage modelled in DCS or do we basically have it everywhere all the time?

Interesting, I thought this wasn't implemented yet. The question is, as far as I can tell everything works using FAST, why would you wait for GC? You say alignment is better but is this actually relevant to anything in DCS at the moment?

You only need to move it once, then it remembers where you put it for the remainder of that flight, even if you switch modes then back to INTC later. Witness_me's macro idea is quite nice, you can have a single macro that you run at startup to set each MFD to what you want for each mode, then you're all good to go!

I agree with you in principle, but with click cockpits we don't have the benefit of muscle memory. Click cockpits are fantastic but they are not necessarily inherently realistic, due to the limitations of the interface. So yes, this problem does not exist in the real aircraft, because an experienced pilot can probably hit the right MFD buttons within 0.5s without looking. We can't, we need to stabilise our heads (in VR) and find a small button with a mouse to click it. You're right, it's not difficult, but it is more fiddly than it would be in the real thing. That's why I do find it acceptable to map some commands to HOTAS, that are not so in the real plane, if I judge that they would be muscle memory actions that I would argue are more unrealistic as mouse clicks. I hope I'm making sense :lol: in the end it's a personal choice.

Yes, the Hornet works the same way but you can have two separate programs lined up, not just one. And you can override for separate single release. For the JF-17, if this is a limitation of the real plane then fake buttons should not be added to give unrealistic functionality. Stick some MFD buttons on HOTAS to quick change programs is and OK solution.

I definitely had contacts but as with the others, very inconsistent behaviour. I definitely got hit by an AIM-120 with no warning at all of the missile pitbull (but Betty screaming "missile missile" at me). Are you guys using the SPJ? I didn't take it in case that caused additional issues. Does it work better or worse with it? Do you get the contacts at the right range?

I have indefinitely put on hold any hopes of a full fidelity Russian 4th gen. My understanding is that there are some vaguely worded Russian laws that could land a developer in trouble for having/using the kind of data required to make a full fidelity mod of an aircraft currently in service. Exactly, ED cannot make it. But can they be 100% sure they will not get in trouble for having a modern Russian aircraft on their platform even if made by someone else? Maybe they can't even afford to allow a 3rd party to do it.

I just bought one so I guess I would say yes. Disclaimer though, the grip itself is still wrapped in the box and the base for it is yet to be shipped, so my recommendation is just based on the decision process that led to me buying it rather than actual use. For me it was worth it as I settled on getting a Virpil base but none of their grips looked like they would work for me as I needed a shorter desktop stick. The TM F-18 grip is only slightly more expensive than top end Virpil grips. As for buttons, some other grips, especially ones designed for space sims, have way more but I realised I wouldn't use all of them (except maybe trying to HOTAS everything in an FC3 plane but I also realised that's a very silly benchmark to chase). The F-18 grip to me looked like it has excellent ergonomics with enough buttons and versatility to be fine across other modules (e.g. JF-17 stick should map very well to the F-18 layout), plus I was drawn by the part-metal construction and weight. My last reservation was solved by the extra switch, so I don't need to compromise the Hornet HOTAS layout for a little bit of VR functionality I'm used to having on my stick. I have a TWCS throttle which it turns out can also 1-to-1 a Hornet layout with a few to spare, so it complements nicely.

In the default manually steered mode, you can ask Jester to move the scan zone up/down/left/right but the adjustments are fairly coarse and can also throw the bandits out of the scan area. Practice with it though, upper and lower altitude limits at current max display range are shown on the TID, ask Jester to zoom in so the bandits are near the end then up/down so the numbers bracket their altitude. You may need to do some mental maths to interpolate the scan zone boundaries as the targets close. Of course, doing it yourself from the back seat (or getting a human RIO) is far quicker and more accurate. But hopefully TWS-A will be in a patch very early next year, it's nearly done I hear.

Yeah, that seems like a very good generic use for it, since it's not a real button in the Hornet it doesn't clash with real HOTAS use. And for muscle memory it's basically where I have the zoom bound on my T16000M at the moment anyway.

Thanks! Just trying to work out if I got this grip, what I'd use that switch for, in the Hornet partly but more so what options it gives me for other planes. I guess button binding is more flexible overall but an axis would have been nice to use it as e.g. a DLC control in the Tomcat.

Is the little thumb scroll-wheel looking thing on the Hornet grip an axis or just a pair of buttons for up/down? And when it says the push is a "VR reset" is this hard-coded somehow, or can I assign this push to anything else I want as usual?

Well, that's a real shame because the T-50 grip looks amazing and I want one, but desk mount is simply not possible for me at the moment. I need a mobile desktop stick, I guess from Virpil then I will wait for the Constellation Alpha grip (Delta hat placement looks weird and it also seems too tall).

I feared that might be the case. Is that expected in tomorrow's patch?

Is it possible when using a narrower scan e.g. 60 degrees to move the scan zone left or right? I can't work out how to do this, I expected it to follow the TDC but it doesn't.