VC

I agree what we have is fiddly and unrealistic, and I would love a proper upgraded Kuznetsov with working deck chocks. But I think you're exaggerating the problem. Yes, the brakes won't hold you on full AB but they will on 100% RPM. Let the engine spool up there then push the throttle the rest of the way: the AB lights come on just before the plane moves. A quick bit of finger work and you've turned on special AB and, as I said, only lost a fraction of a second of maximum power. In the Instant Action take-off mission the plane soars and climbs off the ramp just like in the real life videos.

It takes a split second to switch from holding brakes to turning on special AB. That has never affected my ability to take off. Yes, sometimes the plane dips a lot and I can't comment about how realistic that is. But then again, I haven't seen a video of a fully armed Su-33 taking off and even if it was we don't know what fuel they have on board. With an empty plane you soar off the front of the ramp even without using special AB, looks pretty much like the real life vids. The only thing that causes take-off difficulty in DCS is poor mission/carrier setup. If the carrier is moving at decent speed into the wind, position 1 and 2 take-offs are perfectly doable with the right procedure, full missile load 80% fuel.

If you look at the Su-33 trailer you will see there is an upgraded Kuznetsov with working chocks. This has been planned and worked on for some time, but no date on when it will actually be released. Why can't you press them? Just change the key mappings so you can do what you want. In any case it's good enough to just do them one after the other quickly, release brakes, hit special AB.

Shift+W is not a toggle though either, you need to hold it down to get the effect. I've only ever used that function for Su-33 carrier take-offs. So you're saying the brakes are "on" by default and you need to press and release to sync them up to your button press? That kind of makes sense, will try and keep an eye out.

Is there a hidden "parking brake"? I can't find any mapping for it, but on cold start missions I have to throttle up a lot, sometimes even into AB, to get the plane moving. The plane digs in, nose dips down towards the tarmac, then it releases. After that I can taxi normally. Any idea what's going on?

Definitely something to practice. Thing is, I played the Su-33 first so I got so used to that amazing data link, which unfortunately is just a crutch. I had no issue with missions 3 and 4 though in Over the Hump. Actually my SA is great WVR, diving into that swarm of Phantoms in mission 4 and coming out ace in a day was the most fun I've had so far in this game. Now Mission 5 I failed spectacularly the first time. I engaged the "wrong" group and the second scramble snuck past me and wiped out the Su-24s. I definitely need to work on my overall mental picture in BVR. I'm struggling to imagine all the positions and angles, and things change so fast. First mistake, I had no idea where the strike package even was! Lesson learned, will try again.

More AoA = more lift force = More G. But AoA and G are both limited. Turn rate is a factor of G and radius. A 9g turn at 700km/h and a 9g turn at 900km/h aren't the same thing, the faster you go (at constant G), the wider your turn so the lower the turn rate. Corner speed is basically the lowest speed where you can pull max G.

I was wondering about that as well, since all Su-27 guides say the aircraft more or less self-recovers from a Cobra, but I found that to not be true in the 33. It's very lazy and needs to be manually pushed back to level flight, with huge speed loss. Will watch out for that with the 27.

Ah, that's excellent, I'm now very glad I own both :) will have to spend a bit more time with the "landlocked" Flanker then, see what it can do.

I wasn't initially planning on owning the Su-27, since I have the 33 and I figured why fly the same thing with 2 fewer missiles? But it's a cool family of planes to collect, it was cheap on sale and I figured it would give me more campaign variety and also spawn flexibility in MP. Anyway, I do own both now and only took the 27 for a quick free flight (copy-paste control scheme, nothing to learn really). It felt very nimble. Not that the 33 doesn't, but I thought the 27 was just that little bit more responsive. So I'm curious, do they actually use different FMs that account for their different weights and how the canards affect handling? Or are their FMs copy-paste?

I know the 27T and 27ET have some uses, but usually if you're in that situation, by the time you get LA for a 27ET you're in range for a 73 anyway, and that's the better option by far. In fact, I've often had LA for 73s before LA for 27ETs. So why wasn't the same done to extend the range of the missile with the IR seeker, since they clearly gave it an engine and fuel capacity to fly much further than it could ever realistically acquire anything?

This is what I find the most weird. You can get a solid lock for the R long, long before the T. And yet Soviet doctrine was to fire a T then an R. Isn't that wasting most of the effective range of both missiles? It would really make a lot of sense for the T to have a data link, so it can be guided until it can "pitbull" on IR.

If you missed my more generic post a few weeks ago, X51 Squadron is a growing international community with a strong presence in DCS and we're always looking for more members. We made our debut on the Aerobatics scene with a 6-ship Harrier display at VUAF last month! This recruitment pitch is much more specific, as we have ambitious plans to create more air display teams. Are you a Huey pilot with a penchant for stunts and want to join a fully fledged display team, with the opportunity to fly live at future virtual air show events? Drop in to our discord and say "hi"! https://discord.gg/RQjWPPJ

If I understand correctly, the Russian RWR has two semicircles in the middle. If only the top one is lit, the radar is above you. If only the lower one, it's below you. If both, it's (approximately) co-alt. I was flying 1v1 F-pole practice with some guys in the squadron, and I basically always had both semicircles lit, even when one guy dived hard and was coming in below my radar search cone. I would have slewed it down and found him, but I trusted the RWR telling me he was co-alt and just assumed he was notching or too far away to pick up. My question is, at what relative angle does the RWR stop lighting both semicircles and actually start telling you the emitter is "above" or "below"? I would have thought "low enough to not be in my cone" would be a given but seems not.

I'm not at that point in the campaign yet, but I have edited Mission 2 to change my loadout and was able to play it fine as part of the campaign, and progress past it in campaign mode. Just make sure you're editing the right mission file in the /Campaigns folder, and you should be good to go.

Yes, the English briefing messages are a little immersion breaking, but an OK compromise I think. I do still find in combat AWACS is saying one thing and I need to read it because if I wait for them to finish it's too late to react to the information, or someone else starts saying something and it overlaps. I actually had, earlier today, two AWACS bogey reports going, about different targets, that were spoken perfectly in sync apart from the actual bearing/range information! So weird! From that post: "The brevity code system in Russian AF is very weak." I find this surprising, I would have assumed it's a pre-requisite for an effective modern air force. Maybe they have "unofficial" brevity, where people at operational level just understand each-other without constantly saying full phrases and sentences. I mean, Russian has a lot of long words compared to English, and even in English people abbreviate all the time.

I've been flying the Su-33 and Mig-29 campaigns. I have a basic grasp of Russian so I've been enjoying the immersion of the radio chatter and I'm almost at a stage where I don't have to look up at the chat to read what was just spoken. But something's bugging me. A lot of the calls take a very long time to say, often messages get overlapped making them hard to understand. A BRA from a Russian AWACS is over 3 times longer in total (number of syllables) than a NATO call. I find it hard to believe the Russian air force doesn't have some equivalent brevity system. Can anyone shed some light on this?

I know how to add custom pages to my kneeboard, and I'm thinking up ways to use it more because it's very handy. One thing I wasn't able to find information on - if I add a custom map image as a kneeboard page, is it possible to tell the game that it's a map, so I can mark my position on it? Or can you only mark position on the default map pages? Thanks!

Thanks all, I finally managed it :) well, I edited the loadout slightly, gave my team 27ERs and 4x 73s instead of short Rs and 60s. Wingmen were already on Expert but this time they showed it (Maybe they just like the ER more?). They definitely use radar without being told to, judging by how my RWR lights up. 3 kills to me, 5 for 1 loss to the rest of the flight. Although I'm pretty sure at least one more crashed due to lack of fuel. And the Su-24s got mauled, but I have no idea what they were up to in the first place. On to the next mission!

Did you have your hand off the stick and do you have a dead-zone? If no to both, that "crazy" is it constantly trying to adjust for the miniscule inputs it perceives. If I take my had off the stick completely, it doesn't do that.

You can always download the "Over the Hump" campaign, as edited/updated by MadDog. That's what I'm playing at the moment.

You must have different wingmen to me because a couple of times I got shot down early, I cycled external view and every single one of them was dogfighting with both 27s still on their rails. Trying to fend off in pairs is the best way to quickly lose 2 wingmen in my experience. :( I'll give it another go, try the spread 4. Do you not issue additional commands? Like a generic "engage bandits" or "reform"? EDIT: I should check pilot skill settings in the mission. If it's "random" then that's probably what I need to change!

Erm... have you edited your mission files? I'm flying with the default 2x R-27R, 2x R-73 and 2x R60. I considered switching to R77s but I thought that would be cheating. The F-5s are indeed very dumb in BVR, even with the R27 I have a nearly 100% hit ratio, but because it's SARH I'm merged with the second F-5 in the pair by the time it hits. I can dodge this guy and take him out with an R60, so I'm 2 for 0 at this stage but my wingmen have done nothing. Then after merge my wingmen all disperse and engage randomly anyway, especially since the second and third pairs of F-5s come at you at almost the same time from opposite directions. Then my flight gets picked apart piecemeal or I get sideswiped by a Sidewinder. What do you order your wingmen to do? I normally target lead bandit, order a single wingman to attack him, then attack the second bandit myself. Often wingman is too dumb to fire R27 and I have to deal with both enemies anyway (see above). Also, I'm not really familiar with the kneeboard, how exactly does it help? Isn't it just a flat map?

I downloaded this campaign, as updated by MadDog-IC, to fill in the gap and give me some action with that awesome new FM. However, I'm really struggling. Only on Mission 2, and I'm badly feeling the lack of data-link (I flew the Su-33 before). It's not just that though. Even when "cheating" and using the F10 map for additional Situational Awareness, I'm getting completely overwhelmed by that swarm of F-5s. My best result so far has been me getting 3 kills for 5 missiles fired while all 3 of my wingmen got shot down with 1 kill between them. That left me 1v4 with a single R73 on the rail, pretty hopeless. I know it's me doing something wrong, but not sure what. It mostly just seems like my wingmen are completely incompetent, but I don't know how better to command them, or manage the overall flow of the battle so they actually help. What tactics should I employ for this mission? I guess I also just need general tips on how to improve SA and approach combat in the Mig-29.

Same, full missile load, 75% fuel, No.1 take-off position in campaign mission (ship moving), the way I could take off reliably with minimum altitude loss was to get the tail pointed at the sea ASAP. Basically stick full back as soon as the ramp is cleared. Funny enough, I got this idea from watching the DCS Su-33 module trailer video. In MP I took off fine from the long ramp at max weight from a stationary ship. But front positions with a static ship... nope, don't even try. Make sure the ship is moving in your custom mission, the faster the better.