Chuck_Henry

It seems strange to me that you can manually tune TACAN stations and set courses based on them, but I can't seem to find a way to do the same with ILS in this jet. I know it can be done based on the destination waypoint in the DTC, but I'm thinking, "What happens in real life if weather prevents you from landing anywhere near your intended full stop airfield and you have to divert to an area where you have no waypoints loaded?" Are you just hoping the weather is good enough for a non-precision approach or they can guide you in with a PAR to a military airfield?

There are different lighting configurations depending on day/night, inside towered airspace vs. the enroute environment, unaided night vs. NVG, and covert or not. I can't speak for the F-14, but the following are what we use in the Marine Corps Assault Support community. You can adapt it to specific aircraft lighting systems and DCS scenarios as you see fit.

Not if it’s unable to receive the actual frequency range of NDBs.

In real life, that is the case, but I also use ICLS for all carrier landings in DCS just because the meatball visibility is such garbage compared to IRL.

The only time I hear about pilots nowadays utilizing NDBs are when they're flying to airfields in sub-Saharan Africa. The options are no-kidding either GPS or NDB. No VOR or TACAN of which to speak. It's not unrealistic that modern aircraft lack the capability. We can file to NDBs as enroute waypoints in the V-22, but we have no way to tune up the raw data, either.

Check that the rudder trim knob is centered and that none of your controllers other than pedals or stick w/ twist are mapped to the rudder axis.

Thanks, that solved it.

FYI, the new Open Beta patch (2.5.6) breaks this mod, at least as far as it making the MFDs look like clean black LCDs. The AMPCD screen is untouched, interestingly, but now the left and right DDIs have these weird baked-in cockpit reflections and green undertone that's apparent whenever they're in direct sunlight.

2.5.6 borked cockpit lighting all around; it's not just the JF-17. ED damn well better push out some hotfixes in the coming days. This patch is bad even for Open Beta.

That was faster than I thought. F-5N engine start, straight from a real-life source.

He’s not a friend; just a guy I follow on IG who happens to be relatively public with his in-flight photography. Nevertheless, I’ll send him a message and see what he says.

Sorry, that probably came off more condescending than I meant to be. In any case, you're right, but even the most current F-5N NATOPS manual doesn't really go into detail about what the engine start should look like in terms of the rate or magnitude of EGT increase (or any of the other gauges for that matter), other than the minimum and maximum limits. Short of reaching out to that F-5N pilot I mentioned in my first reply to this thread, this is really the best I can do. Even if the T-38 and the F-5's engines are not the exact same, I'm hoping someone up at ED realizes that the F-5's shouldn't act that differently.

@tom_19d Honestly, man, I have no idea how they produced those clips of the engine instruments during various normal and abnormal starts. I would like to think that if they had the ability to manipulate the gauges like that, they would make the rate of EGT, FF, RPM increase the way they would for real. Otherwise these training films would be somewhat misleading to the student pilots. I know the F-5 uses a more powerful variant of the J85, but that shouldn't have anything to do with how the engine behaves to the point that the one (the real life T-38) would peak for less than a second and the another in the same family (the DCS F-5) would hold that peak for 15 seconds. You'll unfortunately have to take my word for it since I don't film while flying (or doing ground ops), but turbine engines just don't work like that (the latter). I base that on my former experience with the Allison 250, 2 variants of the PT6, and currently the Rolls-Royce T406. As for the idle EGT indications, my point isn't so much about them being outside the green arc, but indicating strangely in relation to the peak EGT during the start. T-38 engine peaks at 760 and stabilizes at ~475 at idle, but the F-5 engine peaks, holds at 780, and stabilizes at 200 at idle? Sorry, but I don't buy that for a second.

Here's what I have right now. The first video, starting at 19:48, shows the engine start procedure for a real life T-38. At about 21:53, you see the EGT steadily rise, peak around 760 degrees Celsius for less than 1 second, and then immediately decrease and stabilize between 450 and 500 degrees. The second video, starting at 1:23, shows the engine start procedure for the DCS F-5. After pressing the engine start button and advancing the throttle to idle, the EGT rapidly rises and holds at about 780 degrees Celsius for nearly 15 seconds before dropping to about 200 degrees and holding there. First point: The DCS F-5's EGT technically falls within limits during engine start, but the rate of increase and time spent at the "peak" is extremely inaccurate compared to the real J85 engine, which it shares with the T-38. Second point: Until now I hadn't paid much attention to the idle EGT indication, but 200 degrees is unrealistically low, especially with such a relatively warm start. Not only is 200 outside the green arc (normal continuous range) of 325-650 degrees (per the current F-5 NATOPS manual), but it is hundreds of degrees lower than the real life J85 engine idle EGT shown in the first video.

Would a video of a T-38 engine start suffice? The F-5 is a much less flown aircraft these days and it could be more difficult to find such a video, whereas the T-38 uses the same type of engine. If not, there’s an F-5N pilot I follow on Instagram who I could ask to take a video of an engine start, but no idea if he’d be comfortable having one of his hands occupied during a critical ground op. Besides that, I have time in 4 different turbine engine aircraft and can safely say EGT/ITT/TOT should never reach 800 during a normal start. Usually they peak anywhere between 550 and 650.

A T-38C would require far more work than simply a cockpit mod. While the T-38 and F-5 are very closely related, they differ significantly in a few ways. The F-5 has slats and leading-edge extensions. The T-38 has only trailing-edge flaps, with no automatic function like the F-5E. The T-38 also has much weaker engines. If I remember correctly, IRIS was contracted to do a T-38C for DCS, but that has sadly long since fallen through. Our best hope would be for ED to bring Milviz into the fold of third-party developers since they have a complete T-38C for P3D, developed and tweaked in collaboration with U.S. Air Force Instructor Pilots.

Yeah, this is another inaccuracy with the F-5 module. It's just one we haven't really raised a stink about since it doesn't break the functionality of the jet for flying or fighting purposes.

Hate to say it, but welcome to what happens when you purchase a module that isn’t “the new baby” for ED. It’s nowhere near the abandonware that the Hawk ended up as, but the serious answer is they’ll get to it when they get to it. Right now, development priorities are the Hornet, Viper, Supercarrier, and DCS 2.5.6 updates. Everything else: don’t expect any semblance of steady progress or any more than cursory attention.

I don’t suppose there has been any work on this bug in the interim? It’s pretty much my one gripe with the F-5 module. Flying Day VFR is no issue, but any actual IMC with such an unreliable attitude indicator gets dicey at best. Suggestion: FSX and P3D both offer menu options to disable gyro drift. Perhaps this can be implemented in DCS somehow?

ED's attitude certainly seems to indicate that they consider the F-5E complete and bug-free, when the reality is that it is anything but. We're still missing the range indicators on the radar scope. Some RWR functions remain inaccurate. Nose wants to drop more on landing than actual T-38 pilots say it would or videos of the real jet indicate. The first 2 are thankfully fixed by mods, but the 3rd along with this definitely cannot be until ED finally takes more than a cursory look at this module. It's all fairly annoying when the F-5 is one of your favorite aircraft to fly in the sim. Maybe if ED gets around to that cockpit update/capability upgrade to which Wags alluded in that one interview they'll include some bug squashing. Until then, I guess I'll just always set the environment to no-wind, standard day.

Well, that's what one of the F-14 crew members was alluding to on The Fighter Pilot Podcast. DLC is something the TACAIR community kinda forgot about after the F-14's retirement, but PLM/Magic Carpet in the Super Hornet and F-35C are essentially a more modern version of it. You control glideslope with the stick instead of a thumbwheel, but you're telling the FCS to move the control surfaces to boost or kill your lift for glideslope adjustments. But it's all the surfaces - flaperons, slats, spoilers, stabilators - not just spoilers. The sight of it on final approach has actually been described almost as a bird flapping its wings.

Does aerobraking not reduce the effectiveness of the engine thrust since you’re adding drag from the fuselage underside and stabilators being deflected up, though?

I use a center stick since 3 out of the 4 modules I fly (F-5, F/A-18, F-14, F-16) use them. I'm not going to shift my mount just for the Viper, even if it isn't quite realistic.

1. Jester LANTIRN control 2. Correct F-14B engine instrument tapes 3. Forrestal carrier 4. Optional Sparrowhawk HUD and/or PTID for the F-14B if a true F-14D is too much to ask

Suggestion - more takeoff and landing data, such as rotation speed, runway liftoff speed, max abort speed, takeoff and landing roll distance, one engine inop climb rate.