darkman222

The topic is "F16 performance in dogfight" and initially it was asked about outrating an F18. To which the answer is simple. You just cant outrate a player flown F18 in an F16 in DCS. About the question @MTMbrought up later in the discussion, outrating a Mig29 but not being able to sustain 21 degrees per seconds is related to when to utilize the max turn performance that is only available pulling 9G which is of course not sustainable in the F16. To make it clear to @MTM. Thats what my video should illustrate. You need to use the 21 degrees per second under 9G at certain points in the engagement for a certain amount of time. Which was a maximum of 13 seconds in the test I did. Just to compare it to the requested minimum of 15 seconds 9G tolerance for the DCS pilot which make total sense in watching my engagement flown with G effects off. This is even more important against an F18 that you cant outrate. When people talk about dogfight performance its just not only sustained turnrate that counts. I am pretty sure the OP is also happy if someone tells him not to just lock the stick at max sustained turn rate and wait.

@MTM Although you can outrate the Mig as @BIGNEWYshowed, it took him 5,5 circles and 2 minutes to get into the control zone. You want to kill as quick as possible and not to be proud to maintain the perfect rate speed all the time until the wingman of the Mig killed you with a heater while you were doing your airshow. If you start with excess speed, climb, bleed the speed down to gain angles, then speed up again, and repeat: You can do it in 44 seconds for the first shot opportunity and you can be in his control zone after 3,5 circles or 1:20 minutes. Thats 40 seconds less for his wingman to potentially shoot you. But only if you DISABLE G effects. You can watch the tacview the track file creates and count the completed circles in each engagement. And watch the control indicator in the video how often I just go for full stick aft bleeding down my speed to gain angles. The thing why I am saying this is because people have the impression that the F16 is a bad dogfighter. This is not necessarly the case. The DCS pilot is bad and blacks out after a few seconds. So the only thing that remains as gameplan is to fly at rate speed not exceeding 8G to keep the DCS pilot awake. This thread is about the DCS F16 performance in dogfight. And if the pilot is the limiting factor for a jet that was designed to pull 9G with a reclined seat, I find it totally legit to bring the g modelling into this discussion... again. It is being worked on, I know. And in the respective threads there are documents that state that an F16 pilot needs to be certified for at least 15 seconds of 9G tolerance. If not even 30 seconds. How should you fly and win in a jet as it was designed to be flown with that limitation created by the DCS pilot. kill no sustained turning3.trk

@BIGNEWY No! The stutters with aircraft coming close to the player are still there as before. DCS 2.9.3.51704 - 22.02.2024 The gazelle seems to have a good impact for testing. Another F16 does the same, but gives not that much of a CPU impact. As soon as I come close to the gazelle the CPU frame time goes up. Creating bad spikes in fpsVR which are visible as hefty stutters. Thats the yellow dashes in the GPU graph. Thats what looks like stutters in VR. Especially in dogfighting it is really annoying when youre close to your opponent when smooth playback is needed you end up in a stutter mess. See how the CPU frame time goes up every time DxDiag2_9.txt stutters gazelle.trk

The thing is that its not just about rating around a bandit for 3 minutes and flying a nice air show. All of the tracks of the fights above wether its a kill or not took way too long. If there were other aircraft around you would not have the time for 8 or more circles. Especially a human opponent would not wait patiently for you to outrate him. If 7000 lbs of fuel in a dogfight is realistic or not. You decide. You came from a ground strike with 3 bags. Get ambushed. Punch your tanks. Now youre in a dogfight with 7000 lbs of fuel. Totally realistic. Would you decide to fight or to bug out? Possibly bug out. Thats also realistic. Not to choose to fight. If you decide to fight, be aware of that an F16 with full tanks needs a higher speed for optimal rate performance (460 kts) than a 3000 lbs fuel F16 Bignewy flew ( 420 kts). You also need to consider when to spend your energy. If youre just rating, it will take for ever. You need to use the speed and bleed it down to bring the nose on the bandit. That would have saved a lot of time. But currently in the G modelling you cant do that. If you rate around a bandit your pilot is way too exhausted to withstand the final pull to get the bandit in the HUD. So you have to rate around just endlessly as you cant pull him in the HUD exchanging speed for nose position. Also I noticed both of you did that with G effects off. Try it with g effects on. Like it is on public servers. Thats a whole new level now riding on the edge of conciousness

Thats the entire point in this. ED cant model the F16 gear damage due to overspeed as there is no data available, so there is no overspeed damage. But how can they model the 9G or 13,5G regime for the pulled paddle, if there is no data. This is against their own philosophy.

I am not interested in the whole "use the paddle or not" discussion, as we have been there 1000 times. The only thing I really want to know if there are EM charts of real F18 for the 9G regime? Dont care if its from swiss or what ever F18s. As the DCS F18 has been released so long ago the internet is flooded with EM diagrams of the DCS F18 version. I cant find one for the real thing.

Arrived just now. Great Pedals so far. But I cant bring the full motion of the RZ axis, the main rudder axis, into play. Its set to 100% but they have 2 or 3 cm more travel until they hit their physical maxium travel. Would be nice to get a 1:1 resolution for very sensitve jets on the ground like the F16. I know, DCS axis tuning. But nope. That was the reason for pedals with that huge amount of travel, to get rid of any axis tuning. For the toe brakes it works just fine. I can use the entire travel range of them.

It really seems to need the quick "off parameter" part to it. 9.1 G is not what the jet is rated for. Interesting tho that this small amount of over G already is enough to induce the oscillations.

I am particularly interested if it turns out that the drag is the cause for that...

Use DTC for DCS instead. In the F16 you can long press the WX button on the ICP that will start the upload to jet process. https://github.com/the-paid-actor/dcs-dtc

Dude. Without a video or track file, nobody will be able to help you. This just sounds like a double bound hotas button, switching something off while landing, that messes up your alignment.

Exactly. No loadout and low fuel state. Its still there.

Its not that the wobbling oscillations should not happen at all. But once they start in the lateral axis, it wont stop unless you stop pulling. Not really sure if thats intended.

Why is the the F18 with the FM update still oscillating left and right, when rolling and pulling up right after that? I thought I heared this would be adressed as well with the update? Or will that behavior stay because its realistic?

Nice. It did not seem to get a lot of attention though. I was only one who reacted to it more than 3 months ago. I just forgot about it. And the investigations for something that seems quite obvious, like a "no rad" still being able to lock targets are still ongoing. Oh well... Edit: Threads got merged.

First off, I know it might be 2 different, but closely related issues here. As they both together lead to an absolutely unreliable JHMCS in dogfights, I wanted to start a thread about both at once. If you dont look at them both, you might not get why the JHMCS is behaving as it does at the moment. The lesser of the conditions bewlo are met, you might even have the impression JHMCS is working correctly, but start wondering why it sometimes does not work as it should. Reproduction, TMS up "no rad" with radar still emitting : -DGFT mode -TMS up to get the boresight cross in the HUD -TMS up and hold to get the JMCS boresight cross and the radar to be slewable by the JMCS -while TMS up pressed, it shows "no rad" , but in fact the radar is active all the time, as you can see, while displaying "no rad" the JHMCS boresight is locking the target. Note that I dont let go of "tms up". The lock happens whith "tms up" depressed and showing "no rad" all the time. You can even bring the JMCS cross back to the HUD with "no rad" showing and then the HUD boresight cross locks the target too. Video: Track file attached: "tms up hold shows no rad but radar active - single target.trk" This issue leads to the next problem: Reproduction: Put a line of jets flying in a line at same altitude in front of your jet. Try to lock the jet on the right with JHMCS. It will always lock the jet on the very left side. See the split screen video. What happens is because TMS up "no rad" still emits radar energy, it locks the first target it sees. But there is the other thing that comes into play. It always wants to start from the left. So you always end up with the most left target. Watch the the in cockpit video first. Then watch what the B-sweep Radar Azimuth indicator (Bottom of Radar MFD) does. The only chance to lock a target to the right is actively guide the boresight away from the left side, guide it above all the other aircraft, then bring it down to the aircraft on the right side. Also one thing to condsider. Why does the radar always need to start a new sweep from the left? Every TMS up seems to bring it to a "fresh start" from the left side. Just as a side note. This seems to waste time in a dogfight environment for which this mode was designed for. It rather seems like programming wise it initates a reset restart of the radar script. Video: Track file attached : "tms up locks first target azimuth left.trk" This the B sweep radar azimuth indicator I am talking about. Always wants to restart from the left: tms up hold shows no rad but radar active - single target.trk tms up locks first target azimuth left.trk

Yeah., But why does the same IPD setting in DCS produce different results / impressions with different headsets. I mean, if VR was a universal thing. as long as my eyes in my face stay in the same place when switching headsets, the result should be the same between them.

DCS does for Multiplayer missions. Not for single player. You gotta reproduce it. Otherwise I'd say be cautious what you do after touchdown. Dont flip switches accidentally. That includes the ones that you might or might not have bound to your hotas, keyboard etc intentionally, or that DCS comes with it bound by default.

I'd say it strongly depends on hardware including the VR headset youre using. I have the Pimax Crystal and the Varjo Aero. On the Crystal the very close to the pilots head located F16 ICP is hurting my eyes in the Pimax, I have to concentrate to focus on. On the Aero its no problem. I might actually look into the DCS IPD setting, I thought when I was reading through this thread. But what I am saying is, that if already two different headset produce different impressions, the only way would be to create DCS for one certified VR headset as reference hardware to be used with, which is not feasable for a consumer product....

Nope. I am high speed train driver, so I know how it has to look. Lol. How do people know who just ride the bike in real life how it has to look then?! That argument is really a lame starting point for a discussion. As long as DCS is built from real world values and your VR headset is not off, it should be as close as you can get.

You feel the need for speed? Go into VR and fly thorugh the Arc d Triomphe. The feeling of speed seems pretty accurate for me. Sorry for the guys with a flat screen constantly changing Fov to keep situational awareness

Yeah, I noticed. But I would not put it in the same thread as being driven by the boom. Being driven by the boom is just a direct connection, that for my limited physical and programming understanding, should not be as hard to implement, compared to a drogue being driven by an approaching jet that is able to drive the drogue in a passive way due to its position manipulating the air flow. For the original topic: Being driven by the boom. Its seems like its a break away force for the jet from the boom, and the amount of force a certain control input would generate, in comparison to the force that the boom can apply to the jet to drive it around. Feels to me like a little more straight forward, calculations wise. But I might be totally mistaken of course

As many real life pilots who tried AAR in DCS claimed that its much easier in real life than in DCS, I was wondering if there were any plans to implement the forces involved of the interconnection of the boom and the jet. I found this video of an F117 pilot talking about AAR. What he is basically saying: A one or two tons of force holding you in place and driving the connected jet around. You dont have to be particularly precise on the throttle. If we can get some more immersion on that part and with that a relief on the phase being connected to the boom, ED could implement a collision model for the boom to make refueling harder at another point of the process Here is the video: (time 33:45)

Maybe you can just make a track file or a video of it? I can see no issue you should run into with what youre doing. As far as I know you cant just store your heading and restore it. The stored heading seems to be only for the place you started the mission in or where you spawned in. While youre preparing your track file Does anyone know if it is really not possible to store the alignment before engine shut down? And how can I keep the alignment during repair? Or is it just not possible?

Yeah. So I was wondering if there was a quicker way. As far as I know, its not possible to store the alignment before engine shut down. So using stored align is no option after repair. I was hoping that keeping the jet on ground power would keep the alignment valid through out the repair. Does not seem so.