VC

I'm not talking about 6 PH loadouts. I'm asking about the peformance benefits of not taking palettes. And if the standard loadout (2-3-2) has only 2 PH anyway, isn't the relatively rare but possible loadout of 2 SW, 2 PH, 4 SP, with the PH on the wings so you don't have any palettes, strictly better? Also in MP, assuming I want a more balanced loadout not just PH spam, is the benefit of no palettes at the cost of only 2 PH worth it?

How big is the effect on performance of having the palettes in game? From what I've read, IRL it was a fairly large weight and drag penalty, as well as negating some of the body-lift benefits from the wide tunnel fuselage. Is this effect fully modelled already? And is it worth it, for example, taking only 2 Phoenixes under the wings and 4x AIM-7 in the tunnel if you expect to go knife fighting after your initial TWS shots?

I assume the "spring loaded" behaviour for the radar elevation axis is deliberate and realistic. But not every HOTAS setup has enough of the right types of thumbsticks for this binding. It would be great to be able to bind this to a slider or rotary in a way that it just stays where you put it rather than moving in one direction until you manually center the axis again.

For what it's worth I have never accidentally shut down my engines in the Tomcat, and I often need to hit switches that are partly obsucred by the trottles. I understand your concern but I think the probability of it causing an issue is very low. In any case clicking them to shut down would only work when they're already at idle, which they wouldn't be in flight (except some really heated dogfight scenarios, but then what are you doing clicking anything on the left console?).

Yes, thank you, that's what I was looking for. Those pieces of information together do make it make sense. :) There's still the fact to consider that you would be above him and inside his turn, but I can see that with a significant loss of turn rate (slower speed) without a further radius gain, you would struggle to gain a further advantage from that position. With all aspect missiles yes, but the part of the book I was referring to is about guns only. In guns only, it makes a lot less sense to burn all your energy for a shot you might not even get, then have the guy energy fight you at his leisure because you can't properly threaten him if he sees what you're doing and just extends.

This is the Hornet forum section not Viper. The Hornet cockpit close/open switch I'm fairly sure is already clickable. But thanks for the support on clickable throttles :)

It would be great if you could move the throttles from OFF to IDLE and vice-versa by just clicking on them (the F-14B behaves like this). I know you can bind the commands, but it would be a nice quality of life improvement for VR to not need those additional bindings and just be able to click instead.

I shall do that, thanks :)

Yes I know what the key bindings are. It's just annoying because in VR I can't see my keyboard so that's another thing to bind to my already over-subscribed HOTAS. The Tomcat works by clicking the throttles. Has it been stated why they are not clickable, and is it something that might get added?

Is it intended that the throttles aren't clickable to move them from Off to Idle when starting up?

For now I've used a modifier to map a few of the left DDI buttons to my HOTAS, so I don't have to mouse click to get to some crucial menus. Thing is, I'm sure stores can be useful for A/A missile settings, but in VR the DDIs are quite hard to read, and the separate RWR is very small and badly placed. So I would basically always want SA and EW up if I'm going into a fight geared up for A/A (yes I know RWR info is on SA too but again the clutter makes it much harder to see there).

I think we've migrated off the point my original question. Of course different fighters may be able to do different things while sustaining corner speed. But shouldn't radius be minimised in this case? And doesn't that happen at a speed significantly below corner speed anyway, and at lower G? Why pull tons of G and go nose low to keep your speed, instead of going high to slow down and reduce radius? Even if he goes around his turn faster than you, isn't the whole point of 1-circle geometry that you have the advantage even as a slower fighter as long as you've turned tigher?

Fair enough, if it's something that might be implemented then we wait :) Any shortcuts in the meantime? A key with a macro to press the right DDI buttons maybe?

As far as I understand from reading existing threads, it is intended behaviour that the left DDI defaults to the stores page when you use the weapon select switch in A/A mode. However, realistic or not, this behaviour is extremely annoying. Is there any way to stop it doing this, or to at least quickly get back to whatever I had on there before (usually EW or SA)?

Well, I used the tactics described in some practice fights and was able to gain an advantage in both 1-circle and 2-circle by going nose low. I was however deliberately merging at corner speed while the other guy admitted he was too fast. In the excitement I forgot to try nose-high in 1-circle, actually nose low felt intuitive because I was pulling a lot of AoA and getting buffet and wing rock (F-14), which nose low saved me from. So maybe if I went high I would have just stalled out and flopped about instead of gaining an advantage. I'll remember to actually try it next time. The other thing that's odd is the book talks about gaining as much energy as possible into a merge, but in something like a Tomcat if you "zoom climb to slow down to corner speed" you'll be in the stratosphere. With powerful jets it seems you actively want to dump energy going into a merge if you plan to turn, again counterintuitive.

That's exactly what I thought. But here's the diagram I am confused about. The text recommends reversal at time 3 to keep the fight 1 circle... and then advises a descending high rate turn in what is clearly a radius fight.

I've read "Fighter Combat: Tactics and Maneuvering" and tried implementing some of the advice there in game, mostly in squadron practices. I was revisiting circle flow tactics when I spotted something that I had used before but now don't understand why it makes sense. On page 101, under similar aircraft guns only, it says that if you're going for the angles fight you should turn into the bandit, then if he responds in kind, reverse your turn to go for one-circle flow. This is logical. Then it says you should turn nose low and use gravity to avoid bleeding too much speed going for a max-G, min-radius turn. This makes some sense, but isn't one-circle flow all about reducing radius? In which case, why doesn't it make more sense to go high, deliberately reduce speed while preserving energy and reduce your turn radius without pulling max G? I assume there's a reason the book doesn't recommend it, I just want to understand the physics at play as to why a low yo-yo is the correct move here, not a high yo-yo.

Thanks guys. I did a bit more testing and I am getting steady 70 FPS in SP free flight with 2x MSAA. Anisotropic I'm not sure on. 2x to 16x is an enormous performance hit and in the past I have not seen much visual benefit from it. Personal preference I guess. For CPU, looking closer I can see some cores spike to 80% utilisation at times, I guess that's still single thread limited though. I'll ignore that one. For GPU, I've pushed the utilisation up to ~80% with the MSAA and other tweaks. The thing that's always maxed out is the VRAM usage. :( I need to spend a bit more time actually flying with the new settings (I was doing FPS testing without actually wearing the HMD) to see if I'm 100% happy with the image quality and spotting.

Funny you mention IL2. I am revisting DCS settings and posting this (although it's been discussed before) partly because I got back to IL2 recently and with some settings tweaks I get steady 90 FPS even in a busy MP dogfight, with same SS I use in DCS and most game settings on high. I can't seem to get the same combination of picture quality and performance in DCS. It's possibly because modern plane cockpits with MFDs and HUDs are much more demanding to read, and since spotting is significantly worse in DCS than IL2. Anyway, I feel IL2 is way better optimised for VR than DCS. Not that DCS doesn't look great, but more compromises need to be made as I said. Anyway, I have terrain object shadows on flat already. Main shadows I feel I can't go below medium because it affects the shadow of e.g. the cockpit canopy frame as it passes over the instrument panel, and it really ruins the immersion if that's a jagged mess. I'll play with Visib range. I think last time I had it on medium it made flying in mountains very weird, because huge peaks not that far away are invisible until they "pop" into view as they render and it's jarring. I'm not after max settings, I know that's not possible. But I'm not even close to max settings. I worry about utilisation only because it would be nice to know if there is a hidden bottleneck or something.

I have a rig I believe should be quite capable for VR: i5-9600K RTX 2080 32GB RAM DCS on dedicated SSD Headset is the HTC Vive (original one). I've read a lot of setting optimisation threads and played around, they all converge on similar suggestions. Here's what I'm running: SteamVR Supersampling 200% PD 1.0 in game (I prefer using SteamVR for the SS) nVidia control panel - prefer maxium performance textures - high terrain textures - high civ traffic - off water - medium visib range - high heat blur - off shadows - medium depth of field - off lens effects - none motion blur - off cockpit displays - 1024 MSAA - 0x SSAA - off clutter grass - 0 trees - 75% preload - 75000 chimney smoke - 0 gamma - 1.8 Anisotropic filtering - 2x terrain object shadows - flat cockpit global illumination - off And I still can't hit 90 FPS on a clear day on Caucasus. I have about 80-85 FPS, which is pretty good, and I don't drop below 45 even in busy dogfights so I guess I should be happy. But what really bothers me is that CPU and GPU utilisation are hovering around only 50%. Increasing any settings leads to FPS loss quite quickly, but CPU and GPU aren't working any harder. I'd love to crank SS a bit higher and/or add some MSAA. I've seen people claim to run 1.5 PD (quivalent 225% SS) with 2x MSAA, or 1.8 or 2.0 PD, and still get 90 FPS with older processors and 1080s. I'm hovering around 60 FPS at best with those kind of settings. I'd just like to understand why the performance and utilisation seem so mis-matched. Is there anything else that I can optimise?

Same issue again today with the MiG-29S. The hotkey to cycle presets just changes the C1 to C2, C3 etc. but the frequency itself never changes.

Had a really weird issue yesterday, need to test more but just going to post in case I'm missing something obvious. Flying MiG-29S on DDCS Modern, trying to use fixed channels, had my files set up as per instructions (and it worked fine before). Overlay Radio 1 says R-862 on 121.5 (the first frequency in my file), so far so good. But, pressing the "channel up" binding for SRS doesn't change the frequency, instead overlay now says "121.5 +CN1", then +CN2 etc. What's going on here? Can't seem to cycle through my preset frequencies. Even more weird, overlay is telling me I have an ANARC-164 UHF1 as Radio 2. The MiG-29 doesn't have one of these! Why is it picking up my preset frequency file for the F-15C radio? Like I said I'll try to hop onto a server again today just to test, but in the meantime any help with this weirdness would be appreciated. EDIT: just tried again on DDCS and BuddySpike and now none of my SRS hotkeys are working at all :(

Thanks for getting back and sorry if my opening post was a bit strong, it's just that this was reported as a bug before so I assume someone else had the same issue and didn't test, or maybe it was briefly broken and my binding was hiding the fix. If the real thing is spring-loaded and hold-to-actuate then the way you have modelled it makes sense. There are others e.g. F/A-18 radar elevation that work like that, if you set it to a wheel that stays put it just keeps raising/lowering the radar dish until you manually center it into the deadzone (I have a very wacky curve to make that work). It might be nice if the actual DLC wheel behaviour could be briefly documented in the cockpit overview section of the manual.

Yeah, I've now put it on the mini-stick on my TWCS, also with a large dead-zone. At least that was free since the Tomcat doesn't have a TDC. So on the real plane is the thumbwheel for this also spring loaded to self-center?

That's exactly what I said I did in the end, and it works. What I said is broken is if instead of using buttons you go to to "Axis assign" and map "DLC / Maneuver flaps retract" to a wheel on your joystick (or throttle in my case), then the wheel position constantly over-rides whatever the automatic system is trying to do. So if the wheel is at "retract" they'll never extend, and vice-versa. EDIT: it doesn't work if you assign it to a slider type axis that stays where you put it. It does work if you assign it to a spring-loaded axis that self-centers.