Whiskey11

Having played around with the changes, I'm a bit less happy with their performance... Backfires aren't that evasive but launched on two at 40nmi and missed with both... still smoking MiG28s at that range. Pretty much guaranteed to never hit anything with a half decent RWR unless inside 20 nmi and the missile is still under power when it finds the target. Jester is still struggling in the back seat with keeping TWS tracks though... pretty annoying on long range intercepts to loose targets that ate definitely burning towards you at a constant altitude to have the radar lose the track and thus Phoenix guidance. Jester is still horrible at finding targets between 30nmi and when pilot override modes become usable at about 18nmi.

So I think what happened on my flight is this, but if the INS grenaded like this, a repair would fix it no? I was shut down on the tarmac, engines off, canopy open... No repair. In an earlier session I did successfully repair a collapsed landing gear from a PIO during landing causing the left gear to collapse, so I know aircraft repair works for that. Maybe I'll have to do some free flights and intentionally break things to test it :D Sounds like the kind of testing Grumman did in making the aircraft! Just a shame they didn't make the INS system to the same standard!

Except that in real life the Phoenix would never go active on a TWS launch if you turned away before the AWG-9 told them to go active and you didn't launch them hot off the rails (which I don't think could be done in TWS mode). I'll definitely be interested in testing the new PN model. The sudden 60 degree turn from loft to target was really irritating... Now if only Jester could maintain TWS locks on targets :P

Is this implemented? I don't think it is... at least... I've yet to get it to work. I pulled an 8G (yeah, 8G) turn and the INS went.... heading off by 30 degrees and HUD ladders rotated about 5 degrees to the right.... landed to repair, ground crew wont repair with aircraft completely cold and dark. No other damage either.

A few of my favorite shots! :)

Point mode requires white hot to be selected IIRC.

I think the reason you are seeing people devolve the argument entirely into aircraft performance statistics has more to do with assuming an equally piloted x vs y and comparing raw stats. As you rightfully point out, fair fights mean you screwed up and pushed a tactically unsound position to the point where you had to "fight fair". The proverbial "sticks and stones" gun fights of ACM/BCM fighting happens infrequently enough since the end of Vietnam (predominantly due to the threat of nuclear war preventing a real fight between world powers, and to an extent the reliability of longer ranged actively guided missiles) as to be an anomaly and not the norm. The problem with assuming equally piloted aircraft is that the Tomcat has TWO crew members to the F-15's ONE... even if the pilots are the same, an F-14 will have significantly better SA in a dogfight than an F-15C for that very reason. The RIO could be a nearly braindead potato and so long as he can call out aircraft he sees; he would provide much better SA than a lone F-15C pilot could ever hope to have. This is an advantage that is hard to ignore even if you have the F-14 as being the "lesser" aircraft and can often times turn the tide of a dogfight in the favor of the lesser aircraft. That's why it doesn't surprise me that an dogfight between 2 F-14A and 4 F-15C can end so poorly for the F-15C crews to lose that fight 2 out of 3 times. Now if you talk single seaters vs single seaters or double seaters vs double seaters, it's easier to "ignore" the crew and talk about stats only. Also, I concur... I've seen lots of pictures of an F-15 in the gun piper of an F-14, and none of the reverse... I HAVE seen F-14's in the gun piper of an F-16 (there is a famous video) but IIRC the video was a top gun instructor vs a student and demonstrates as much about the pilot as it does the F-14 vs F-16 debate.

The other night, myself and SK0 were playing around with the LANTIRN pod on the Through the Inferno Persian Gulf Server. I was the RIO. At one point my game crashed (unknown if related to the F-14 or not as my game locked up with the Harrier during the live stream earlier, a few times, as well as since then). After rejoining, I attempted to rejoin the RIO seat and upon rejoin, I was able to get in the RIO seat, but nothing worked. I could not control the LANTIRN pod, nor could I control the TID cursor or anything involving the RIO control stick. None of the pit controls worked either. This was on the Open Beta Server Build. LANTIRN pod was on, and a bomb was enroute to target. I had just latched the target with the laser because SK0 was being lazy and dropped it far enough off line that I had to latch the target immediately to get the bomb to the target. My game crashed at this point. SK0 reported that the laser remained latched, target remained locked, and bomb impacted the target without any problems. Upon returning to the RIO pit, SK0 advised his LANTIRN repeater display showed the LANTIRN pod still locked onto the target with laser active. My screen showed the LANTIRN pod pointing at the ADL straight ahead and I could not control it, nor any other aspect of the RIO pit. Exterior model showed the pod pointing straight ahead for me, and at the target for SK0. SK0 attempted to drop another GBU-12 on target but it did not work even though his screen showed locked and latched (laser active) while mine did not. I also noticed that the RIO pit did not have the same buttons selected as when I crashed. The red lighting was off, the bomb panel had been reset to it's default panel state, and the LANTIRN/TCS selector was switched back to TCS from the LANTIRN pod. SK0, reported his repeater still showed the LANTIRN pod info and not the TCS. SK0 also reported not being able to bring up Jester (this is already reported I think) and Jester never showed up even after I exited again to get in a different aircraft. I'm at work at the moment, I'll try and dig up the respective LOG file of this occurring when I get home. Cheers and thanks for the otherwise epic module! I'm guessing this is a DCS related error (not saving panel states, etc), but figured you guys should know! Thanks again!

That's because aircraft buffet isn't a function of G but a function of Angle of Attack and when viewed against AoA, the buffet is actually VERY easy to tell whether you are in low, medium or high AoA... as others have said, a barely perceptible shake is around 15 AoA or the ideal one... beyond this you neither turn faster nor recover any quicker because you are losing the lift vector associated with the body of the aircraft as it stalls out... no lift in a corner = larger turn radius. All medium and high buffet does is decrease your airspeed. Useful in limited situations, mostly worthless if you need to keep your energy up to not fight a superior low energy dog fighter in ACM, like, the Hornet, which has a massive advantage in nose authority at low speed over you.

What's more impressive is that all of those capabilities could have made it to the F-14 had the Super Tomcat program been allowed to flourish and the navy given even a FRACTION of the funding the F-15 and F-16 received to maintain their service lives. But alas, politics robbed us of the planned Super Cat that would have added some absolutely ridiculous capabilities if even half of it was properly implemented. Imagine, if you will, the F-14 survived till today, what advances an F-14E model could have had... AIM-120D and AIM-9X w/ JHMCS access, a true glass cockpit (think F/A-18 style), a MASSIVE AESA radar (thank you AWG-9 size making a larger aircraft!), Fly By Wire, non finicky INS gyro's, stronger, lighter weight materials, access to the newer racks to hold missiles more effectively, thrust vectoring (if Grumman got what they wanted)... etc. The F-14 was designed in an era of slide rules and fairly primitive computers. She was tested to the extreme by a company dedicated to building the best aircraft they could. The fact that it is competitive with more modern aircraft variants with a fraction of the funding those aircraft received is downright impressive and to say nothing of the fact it had to land on a carrier, repeatedly, it's entire life.

I think the vast majority of your concerns can be explained rather simply as HB has control over only a very very small section of the missile code to work with that basically covers aerodynamics, rocket motor performance, seeker head gimbal limits and loft behavior while ED keeps tight control over the guidance programming and anything that a third party user could tweak to gain an unfair advantage. HB has always maintained a desire for 100% accuracy but has to work directly with ED on the more "advanced" limitations for missile performance and seeker head performance. Hence why the Phoenix operates like a AIM120 in game with insane range.

As one of those people trying to "teach" others using AI, I feel compelled to respond. The intention isn't to cheat anyone, but merely show how the cat reacts to certain opponents and their maneuvering. Yes, the AI is nearly braindead but it can still be a useful tool to demonstrate the good and bad behaviors the cat exhibits as well as some generalized tactics to survive certain situations. I feel I did I good job of pointing out the limitations in the AI and situations in which the AI would have killed me had it been a real pilot. The thing is, the AI is pretty consistent in its performance which makes practicing certain tactics easier than trying to dogfight a real human who is less consistent as a matter of tactics. This means less time spent trying to develop a video to demonstrate various tactics that DO work in certain situations. That consistency is also significantly easier to learn from as you have no idea the quality of the person you are dogfighting unless you know them personally. The only player I know of any consistently good BFM quality is on rarely and that makes it even harder. Different strokes and all that. :thumbup:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the F-14 able to fire an AIM-54 off of Datalink targets without it's own radar on? I don't believe this is currently implemented if that was a possibility. Could get pretty ridiculous when it DOES become available though!

I'd agree, PLENTY of times in both this video AND the MiG-29S video in which a human pilot would have risked the energy bleed to pull nose and take a snap shot. Having done that dogfight with another player before, it's definitely more frustrating how much more nose authority the newer aircraft tend to have.

Nice video! I think you and I are operating on the same wavelength lol. I just put out one today too but vs an AI Hornet rather than a real pilot: I'm not sure I'd want to force a Hornet to a low speed fight because of how much better nose authority it has. Staying in the vertical until you've bled what energy the Hornet has is absolutely critical, then using the vertical to get on their six and finish them in that lower energy state. Your rolling corkscrew scissors was pretty impressive though! :)

Hey, we are all noobs here! :) I have only played with the LANTIRN pod like 3 times and only ONCE in multiplayer. It's not easy to use! :) You are correct, A1688 is autolasing. The laser will turn on at Time to Impact (TTI) of 10 seconds to go, give or take and will continue for 10 seconds after. In Manual lasing (M1688) YOU have to turn the laser on in flight. As others have suggested, turning it on at the same point as Auto lasing saves bomb energy and allows you to do some silly things like drop GBU-16's at 10-15 nmi out at 35k feet of altitude and about mach 0.9! It's quite a lot of fun to lob stuff in like that because you are practically untouchable by enemy air defenses. Flashing L is indeed laser ON. Seeing a solid L means the laser is armed but NOT on. Double check to make sure you have your bomb code set correctly in the kneeboard (rshift-k by default). Remember to only pickle the bomb when the release timer hits zero. It's not like the Hornet in auto mode where you hold the pickle button from Time to Release -10 until release. If the laser is on, the code is correct, the fusing on the GBU-16 is set to N/T, and it actually releases, there is no reason it should miss other than it can't see the laser.

LM is the laser emitter being masked by the aircraft. If you see that then the laser isnt reaching the ground.

For all the hooplah about the F-14's being prone to flat spins, I've only had ONE unintentional one, and only able to FORCE it twice. She's remarkably flat spin resistant for how big of a deal they made it out to be... maybe that's because the -B has better engines? I dunno... For me, the biggest gripe I have with the F-14's handling isn't the departures, it's the complete lack of being able to do a hammerhead... she's REALLY content to just sit on those GE F-110's and burn gas... Makes some vertical fights hard to do when she doesn't want to nose left or right (hammerhead) or nose over or back at the top of a climb... I think I just need to practice more!

I'll throw my hat into the arena here... while not against a real player, I've been practicing against a MiG-29S with the AI set to "Excellent" for quite a while and had some serious trouble at first. It's REALLY helped me nail some of the handling quirks of the F-14B. Here is one of the videos with the raw video and the TACView afterwards: I'm always open to criticisms. Some of the ideas I had weren't fully fleshed out and one commenter has already pointed it out (about slower = tighter being a commonly held belief). I definitely need to change this mission up a bit with different aircraft too for more practice!

A lot of the AI Notching is more luck and the limitations of the DCS Missile Code forcing the Phoenix into a huge 21G dive when it goes "active". It also doesn't hand off radar control nearly as well as the real one did and it is doubtful that ED will let HB accomplish this. The ability of the missile to communicate with the F-14 launching it (or other aircraft painting for it) if the enemy notches it's own internal guidance would make it nearly impossible to do anything except maneuver kill/energy kill the missile with the right F-14 radar layouts. Something like a four ship group operating one at altitude as the launching aircraft and one near the ground to avoid notch filter issues in Pulse radar mode, then handing off between both two flights and the missile's own radar... That said, it's still a VERY potent missile and a GOOD RIO/Pilot combo will make short work of most enemy aircraft with it

The Tomcat has a lot of lift.... and having control over fine tuning the flight path on the carrier trap is super important for safety and ease of landing. Having access to something like DLC is a MASSIVE help in controlling an aircraft that otherwise doesn't want to land when that slow. Frankly, I wish the Hornet had it for landing... SUPER handy.

There sure is! Look in your mirrors (if they are on)! :thumbup: :pilotfly:

Man, I think the DLC makes the F-14B silly easy to land on a carrier. Once you roll out on final, set On Speed AoA (should be close from the downwind portion anyway) and then use DLC to correct to final... only reason I got a one wire was because I turned my head and the headset cable/TrackIR cable slid the throttles back. Not even using Autothrottle which I'm sure makes it easier!