Noctrach

Checking out the awesome new EGT at night was a bit of a shocker Something really off about the instrument lights right now. Every dial is extermely over-lit even on lowest settings. Flood lights don't work at all. I did delete FXO and Metashaders as per usual.

Fantastic patch. The AWG-9 PD modes seem to be rock solid after today! Unfortunately the STT bug is still present (both PD and P STT). At short range this doesn't negatively impact Sparrows/Phoenixes, but they transition from normal guidance to pure neutral whenever the bug occurs, spoiling longer shots. TWS seems better than ever

Firstly: Awesome patch! The TWS-M/A transition actually works fine now. In fact, I believe what I was seeing was an unfortunate combination of two close-flying targets drifting in and out of the res cell combined with my own error in interpreting the centroid marker appearing in TWS-A as a false track designation. After today's patch I'm happy to say that TWS is in fact, extremely stable! PD-STT is still showing the same issues and is unfortunately still unreliable as a result

Look at the graph and tell me how it rates better. You people pick weird edge case hills to die on.

Generally idk why were nitpicking percentages on arbitrary feelings of handling. We've got a user posting in-game results from automated flight tests right here every couple patches https://dcs.silver.ru/74,9,IAS_kts,turnrate You can directly recognize all the important key points of both charts in there. I'd say these two jets are pretty much where they should be within the sim. I'm not surprised users doing their own tests find results on either side of the truth. After all, the F-5 was considered to be simulating the MiG-21 nearly perfectly... Seems to me like we're talking about regions that are extrapolated even in the real charts because they are pretty much nonsensical to discuss for combat operations. Below mach 0.3 is where you start preparing for landing... Things will never be simulated perfectly, they're good in all reasonable areas of the flight model.

Pretty sure the Lot 20 -C models got the 404-GE-402 in place of the 404-GE-400 (16000 lbf -> 17700 lbf). The 414 is Super Hornet. The point being that the aircraft that is provably modeled accurately, has 10% better thrust and is aerodynamically designed to be an excellent rate fighter, is being significantly outperformed by its draggier brother designed for tight radius and unlimited AoA. I don't think a 2% wing loading advantage can explain that. But we're drifting extremely off-topic and this subject has been done to death and will mostly likely never improve, since physics can be ignored for the lack of EM diagrams and customer satisfaction. It's an F/A-18DCS after all and ED can model it how they want, we'll just have to deal with the result. We're all gonna have to deal with Typhoons at some point anyway... I hope the G-onset tweaks for the Viper will give us another tool in our box to work with

Aerodynamically it's just bizarre that the airframe with slightly lower thrust to weight and much straighter (draggier) wing profile has an almost 1.5 degree sustained turn rate advantage and significantly lower AoA over the entire speed range. Tight radius, better nose authority, higher max AoA better sustained rate at low speed is all something I can understand. The current numbers, I do not.

What's weird is that the Mk47 Mod 1 thrust and weight in the Lua is 1:1 with the whitepaper, but the Mk47 Mod 0 weighs slightly less and has about 1000 N excess thrust. From the Lua Mk47 Mod 0: M = 444.0, N = 15982.0 Mk47 Mod 1: M = 465.6, N = 15732.1 From the whitepaper:

This has nothing to do with desync or multiplayer. It's happening on straight-flying targets exactly as @Sumoman says. The very instant you switch from TWS-M to TWS-A, be it manual or by firing a missile, the AWG-9 loses the original track and puts a new track on top of the false one. You can even "toggle" false track status by switching between TWS-M and TWS-A as shown below (singleplayer) Note: After some testing I can tell this only happens on reasonably tight multiship formations. In the video below you see a 2-ship of Su-24Ms flying towards my jet. They correllate to two separate tracks at about 70 miles in TWS-M. However, TWS-A gets utterly confused by this situation at the same distance, correllating BOTH tracks as false even though it keeps updating them all the way in. Then at around 40 miles it will suddenly decide it was only a single contact all along... @IronMike Could you move this thread to the bug forum please? This is definitely not right. Right now the only way to do a TWS shot is to switch to TWS-A, sym delete the old tracks and wait for the AWG-9 to HOPEFULLY correllate the bandits you wanted to launch on. Combined with the PD-STT bug where it cannot hold a lock if the sum of antenna azimuth, elevation and roll exceeds a certain value and the AWG-9 is just about useless outside of 25 miles. Adding a video of this as well just to round out the full scope of AWG-9 weirdness I'm seeing. The F-14 has all the makings of a fantastic module, but to be very blunt, the AWG-9 right now is utterly fucked.

This, to quote the manual: "Normally the launch to eject (LTE) cycle of the missile is 3 seconds meaning time from trigger depression to missile ejection. The exception is the ACM active mode where the LTE is shortened to 1 second if within 15° from ADL." But the easiest way to find out is to try it

Just for my understanding: Considering there's no roll gimbal, the gimbal limits on the AWG-9 would work as the top diagram in the following scenario, correct? If the mechanism works like the bottom diagram then the effective gimbal limits would be much narrower, which could cause this weirdness.. Adding roll in the top scenario would "rotate" the box, therefore transposing some antenna elevation onto the antenna azimuth causing the target to drop off scope. I feel this is what happens in the sim only it starts much sooner and much more aggressive (adding them together 1:1).

Our defense was a human defender doing a steady Mach 1.1 slice-back. Altitude delta was ~5000 feet and speed was maintained. This means shot aspect rotates all the way from front to tail aspect. F-14 attacker accelerated to keep the target outside of the ZDF (we maintained ~250 knots closure). AIM-54 seemed to track but there was no RWR warning and the missile ended up intercepting a point well behind the attacker (passed through my contrails and then proceeded to overtake at around Mach 2). Timeout never flashed and just proceeded to count down to -2, at which point a new track was created. Do take care on hard S-turns that the Phoenix aerodynamic limit seems to be around Mach 1.5 for hard manoeuvring targets. Also for the ZDF, realise that the real closure is a bit behind the closure on the DDD because it's measured between pulses, we often seemed to be at >100 knots (outside ZDF) but Tacview showed us dipping to <100 knots (inside ZDF) for about 3-5 sweeps. The AI also seems to use a different AIM-54 and guidance model so I'm not sure how they compare.

Yeah I've tested it some more and it's absolutely still happening. @IronMike It's easy to reproduce: At >35 degrees ATA, pitch down 20 degrees At >15 degrees ATA, roll 45 degrees Both cases will cause loss of lock. @Naquaii What are the AWG-9 elevation limits? I'm losing a head-on targets from PD-STT at 45 degree antenna elevation I'm starting to think this is more closely connected to antenna elevation, because I'm seeing behaviour that makes little sense.

Also @Naquaii PD-STT is still losing track when combined antenna elevation and antenna train angle exceed 55 even though both are still individually WELL within gimbal limits... Also still generating false tracks while doing so. Any estimation on when this might be fixed? Considering how much better PD-STT is at holding locks, our RIOs are quite anxious to see this resolved

We were testing AIM-54 kinematics tonight and noticed that the AWG-9 refuses to send an active command to the Phoenix on running targets in certain situations. We excluded the possibility of the target hitting the MLC or ZDF filters and played around with the target size and aspect switches to no effect. One AIM-54Amk60 actually passed pretty much through my jet at almost a full mach of closure while supported in TWS-A (solid track), but missile timed out to -2 without going active. We'll be testing this futher later down the week, but is there something obvious that we're missing here?

95% sure it's 5 sweeps

Wouldn't full forward be better for energy retention since AoA under load decreases with the wing swept forward? It would be worse for acceleration since the drag profile of swept wings is a bit better, especially at <1G. Hence Jcdata's comment about tuned for excess power rather than lift. That said, I am in no way an advocate for manual sweep, I've seen too many pilots try to "outsmart" ending up in royal fuck-ups during the mental stress of an engagement. Manual sweep "memes" matter so little in terms of performance that you're better off spending the time towards becoming a better BFM pilot.

You would be correct on both counts ^^

Yup, it just gives the missile the necessary targeting information (doppler gates, azimuth, etc) and then it's active off the rail. It has nothing to do with activating the missile mid-flight or whatever other things people come up with. The second part I'm not 100% sure, depends on whether the AIM-54 would be able to fall back on SARH guidance when active or not. PAL is a pulse mode that can't guide the Phoenix, so it does something similar. "You're looking for this kinda thingy in this direction, now off you go" It's like a well-educated maddog shot. Then you have BRSIT which is literally just "Yo Phoenix, good luck :D" None of these modes would be a thing if target safety was a design concern

To be fair, Naquaii really does have a point that it doesn't prove anything by itself. What it should do at least is render the -C much better capable to determine proper loft/intercept parameters, which would benefit terminal energy and lethality. However, I can imagine that this is impossible to represent on the old missile API where they have zero control over anything beyond initial launch parameters. I'd say giving it a bit more kick in the pants on the initial flyout due to the higher motor Isp would at least set it apart slightly from the 54Amk47 but it wouldn't be very significant compared to just using the Mk60. Hopefully in due time. ^^

And this is why nobody who would fire any kind of missile in that situation is allowed anywhere near the launch button of a jet. This is extremely basic stuff that few pilots in online DCS seem to understand. Your friendlies would be equally fucked with a fox-1. This is complete and utter nonsense. Target identification in the real world is down to very few key tactical elements (GCI mostly) because fighter IFF is unreliable at the best of times. It goes way further than "hit button, one bar = pew, two bar = no pew". There's a reason most major conflicts required VID. The guy in the back has ZERO interaction with the missile after he pushes the launch button. If you're one of the people thinking fox-1 into a furball is any safer than fox-3 then you are badly mistaken from a real world perspective. It's not, the only reasons have to do with physical limitations such as seeker strength, battery life, missile weight and volume. Why design an over-complicated, less lethal version of a missile when you can just make sure your pilots aren't airquake monkeys.

The point still stands that the single defining feature that overlaps suspiciously with other known technology does not seem to be enough to prevent the 54C from being simulated as an inferior missile to the 54A-Mk60 in the sim. Personally, I disagree with this decision.

Simply going by the whitepaper

But even then we're still talking guesswork in terms of actual operational characteristics such as doppler gates, guidance laws, seeker sensitivity, etc. etc. All we know is roughly how the guidance mechanism worked, a bunch of kinetic information based on test shots and the workings of the AWG-9. Considering the volume of second-hand information on AMRAAM from manuals like the F-16CJ-34 and real world shoot-downs, I kinda disagree with the statement. The AIM-120 has a more tangible performance record than the Phoenix ever would, considering it was never really used. It's all approximations in the end.

This has been discussed multiple times on this forum tbh, the discretion on not hitting targets that should not be hit is entirely down to the crew firing with positive target identification and clear avenue of fire. The idea that e.g. SARH missiles are incapable of "randomly locking things" is just inaccurate. Radar locks aren't laser beams and tracks merge all the time. If that was a consideration, AMRAAM simply wouldn't exist.