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Thanks, happy to help out. I'm always worried I'm overdoing it and getting into TL;DR. But its a complex subject. I think the DCS wind model (or lack of one) is at the key to a lot (but not all) of these LGB miss issues being reported. Almost all tactical jets since at least about the mid-2000s will have some sort of wind model that will not only calculate the release point based on the release alt winds, but will then extrapolate those winds down to the surface using a set of pre-programmed assumptions so it can adjust the 3D release point taking all of that into account. As tapes got more sophisticated and features were added based on real world lessons learned - the wind models got much more detailed and user configurable. For instance, through the MPD in flight or through the DTC after mission planning back in the Sq - the pilot could preselect several wind bands to either manually input the winds based off the forecast or more ideally capture the winds in the target area in real time. The latter being the prefered method for obvious reasons. That works fantastic if you're doing a low level ingress and then will pop up to med altitude to drop the weapons, because you capture the winds on the climb and they are then used by the bombing computer to massage the release point. But that's not always practical if you're doing a med or high altitude ingress to the target. If the three main jets we are discussing (Hornet, Viper and A-10C) do not have this and rather have the single wind model that adjusts for winds at release only - that's not a slam on DCS or the ED team. But it may just be reflective of the tape loads at the time of the block jet they are modeling. And if so, it means there is still a lot of knowledge of how the LGBs work and a lot of technique to account for those variables. That's real life. The one thing most people need to understand is a GBU-12 and certainly not a GBU-10 is a 100% death ray from above. PWII is a finicky weapon that requires lots of love and understanding to make work well. :smilewink: If you think the PWII is difficult - try a PWIII, which I hope we will be getting soon. Yeah a GBU-24 can handle winds FAR better than a GBU-10 and is far more accurate. But it is a very difficult weapon to understand and employ, depending on the mode used. There were LOTS and lots of GBU-24 misses in the early days of both OIF and OEF due mainly to just plain misunderstanding of the weapon, especially when trying to get them inside cave entrances in Tora Bora.

In a modern combat aircraft, almost every system relies on the INS and/or GPS working correctly with high quality data. A specific INS alignment quality or GPS position quality are often GO/NO GO items. Most systems that now use an integrated INS/GPS nav computer (usually called an EGI - pronounced Eggy) Enhanced GPS-INS unit black box - the parking spot ramp coordinates are no longer required to be input into the jet for alignment. Once the jet has enough Satellites to track for a high quality FOM, the GPS will automatically align the INS on the ground and keep it updated throughout the flight. In the past, before GPS became ubiquitous, the pilot would have to manually align the INS on the ground to his/her specific parking coordinates and then manually update the INS during the flight using the TPOD or the A/G radar (or even an overly mark point) to known locations on the ground as the INS would usually drift over time. Even the best INS's could drift up to a mile or more over the course of a 1.5 hour sortie.

If you're attempting to use AP while refueling, you're doing it wrong.

To your bolded statement above, that is not exactly correct. The bomb doesn't "weathervane" when its released because both the jet and the bomb are flying in the same air mass. For instance if you are dropping in a 41kt crosswind, at the instant the bomb is ejected off the pylon, it doesn't suddenly cock into the wind because its already travelling in the same air mass and drifting downwind with the jet. You are correct, however, that when the bomb sees the laser spot, it will then Point at the laser spot on a direct LOS path. Ideally though, the jet's bombing computer has already accounted for the wind and moved the release point well upwind. So once the laser is turned on, the bomb is already upwind of the target and it doesn't have to "fight" the wind to get there. The easy way to tell this is to look at the TD box on the ground and the Bomb Fall Line (BFL). If you are dropping with no wind or a pure HW or TW - the BFL will be coincident with the TD box. i.e. it will run right through the box or diamond on the ground. However, if you're dropping in a crosswind, the BFL should be upwind of the TD box or diamond on the ground. If you line up early, you will be able to see the TD box in your HUD and compare the BFL to it. The stronger the wind, the more the BFL is upwind of the box/diamond on the ground. It appears that DCS is modelling winds because I've noted the TD Box upwind of the target on XW attacks. But I suspect it's only accounting for the wind at the release altitude. I don't know what the DCS wind model does after that. The worst case scenario is if the winds are relatively light at altitude but strong on the surface, the jet won't account for enough wind correction at release and the bomb will most likely miss because it then has to fight its way back upwind. The reverse is true as well such as a honking wind at altitude but very light halfway down to the surface. But this usually isn't as catastrophic unless the bomb is too far upwind for the target to be out of the relatively narrow seeker FOV. The simple answer is, if possible, try to avoid dropping in a crosswind at all costs.

It has nothing to do with the bomb's wind limitation, it likely has to do with the jet's inability to calculate the winds at other than the release altitude and therefore adjust the release point correctly. If the release point is accounted for correctly and you delay lase - the bomb should (in theory) have sufficient energy to hit the target. I posted a question to the Mod's about wind modelling that might explain some of what you're seeing: https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=257983 The reality is that despite your best efforts and even if you do the attack perfectly - sometimes the bomb just misses. No weapon is 100% perfect, even JDAMs, although they are close. Barring a seeker failure (which does sometimes happen), the culprit for most misses is either too much spot motion - moving the crosshair around in the last critical 10 sec or so - or strong winds at the surface. If the jet's bombing computer can't account for that wind and adjust the release point upwind accordingly, then the bomb will struggle to hit the target. Sometimes "sh*t happens. That is why most weapons accuracies are expressed as CE90 or CE50. I don't remember the exact numbers, but let's say the CE90 of a GBU-12 is 5 meters and the CE50 is 5m. That means that 90% of all weapons dropped will hit within 5m of the aimpoint and 50% will hit within 3m. Which obviously means that 10% & 50% don't hit within those parameters. To mitigate some of these wind issues - if tactics, threats and the target orientation allows - always try to drop with a Tailwind.

Hey Ziptie, to your Q1 - I have not seen any issues so far with lasing the top of a tank turret or the roof of a building. That is the preferred technique with a horizontally developed target and I've had very good success tank plinking that way with GBU-12s. On your Q2 comment - I disagree with your statement about lasing 5 sec after release from a higher altitude drop. A 5 Sec delay after release is (from the bomb's POV) continuous lasing. Typical Time of Fall (TOF) from say 20K is around 35 sec. So if you are delaying only 5 sec - then you are getting a full 30 sec of lase time which is essentially continuous lasing. If you truly want to delay lase, then you want to to wait until no earlier than 15" Time to Impact (TTI). Ideally, you would want start lasing around 8-12" TTI for a true delay lase attack. Anything over 16 Sec of lasing time is considered Continuous lase for practical purposes. As I said on in earlier post - there are two schools of thought on the Continuous Lase vs Delay Lase technique when we are doing Medium Altitude or higher deliveries, i.e. 15K HAT or higher. The Continuous Lase camp correctly says that the bomb will be in an energy gaining maneuver due to the ballistics and long TOF and that it will have more than enough energy to overcome the bang bang guidance issues. The Delay Lase guys say that more energy is always mo better, so delay lasing is the way to go. Plus it keeps you in one habit pattern because Low Altitude deliveries are almost always delay lase, so just do it one way always for muscle memory. There are some caveats however. The accepted technique is that if there are known strong winds at the surface and your jets wind model will account for it, then delay lase to make sure the bomb has more than sufficient energy to overcome the wind. If however you have unknown winds or a suspected wind shear where it changes directions from release altitude to the surface, then continuous lase to make sure the bomb doesn't get blown out of the seeker FOV before the laser is turned on and live with some lower energy and takes your chances that it hits.

Another technique if you are trying to lock a specific contact within a group - place your radar cursors on the outside edge of the contact you want to lock in STT and then command lock while sliding the cursor slowly over the contact. For instance, if you have two bandits in a line abreast formation (side, side) and on the radar the two bricks are almost touching and you want to lock the left hand contact (scope apparent) - then place the cursor just on the outside left edge of the left contact, command lock as you slide the cursor in from the edge of the brick. Same thing applies if you have bandits in range. If you want to lock the nearest contact, then place the cursor just in front, command lock and slide the cursor up into the brick. If you want the trail bandit, place the cursor behind...... etc. This will usually prevent you from locking the wrong bandit. If you just place the cursor over the blob and command lock - it's luck of the draw which one the radar will pick. Edit to add: All the other stuff people said above are correct. Make sure your antenna elevation is covering the altitude band of the contacts. Once you meld into the group, ideally you want to narrow your AZ sweep and reduce your antenna bar scan down and center the altitude coverage over the group altitude in order to get much faster "paints" of the contacts. The downside of this of course is that if the bandits start to maneuver before you get your final STT, they could easily get outside your now narrow radar footprint and you could lose them. So you usually don't want to narrow this down until you are getting close to taking your final lock before shot range.

I'm sorta assuming that DCS likely uses the "release altitude only" wind model for most of the modules. If that's the case, it would be interesting to know then if the DCS wind model calculations interpolates the wind to the surface or if its using ONLY the full value release altitude wind and nothing else. If the latter, that might explain a lot of the GBU-12 misses being reported in other threads. All the practice I've done so far with GBU-10 and 12 attacks have all be fairly light winds - and both continuous and delay lase seem to work fine. If you throw in a hefty headwind or crosswind and the wind model is incorrect, that could easily cause a miss. That would be true even with continuous lase but even more so with Delay lase if the target is out of the seeker FOV when the laser is turned on because the bomb release solution put it out of the ballistic basket. @Wags or anyone on the ED team - can you please jump in here and offer some insights on how winds are modeled in the various bombing computers. Are they accurate to the jet or still WIP? Thanks.

Does this edit have to be reloaded each time DCS is updated? Do the regular updates affect the windows registry?

I'm curious, for public MP - why is OB the way to go? Is it because the OB guys have toys the stable ones don't yet?

I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say. What do you mean by "no explanation needed"??

For the Mods or anyone else in the "know"....... What sort of "Wind Model", if any, do DCS aircraft like the Hornet, A-10 and F-16, etc. have for computing weapons releases in both CCIP and CCRP/Auto? The several recent threads on GBU-12s missing and the discussion of winds got me wondering how winds are modeled in DCS. Typically IRL, most tactical combat jets that I'm aware of have a wind model of some sort that will attempt to calculate the wind from the release altitude down to the surface. The most basic method would be the jet's bombing computer would calculate a "standard" wind model using the winds the on-board INS/GPS sees at release altitude and then interpolates or decays the winds down to the surface using a basic algorithm and set of assumptions such as the wind would decrease X knots per 1000 ft. This would then continually adjust the release point based on the winds it sees at that specific altitude at that given moment. For instance, if the winds at release altitude were 090 degs@40kts, the bombing computer would create a calculation such that it assumes the winds are steady at 090 degs but reduce the wind strength say down to 5 kts at the surface and therefore adjust the release spot accordingly. The obviously flaw with this is that IRL, winds are rarely that constant in both direction and magnitude. Hence why an unguided MK-82 dropped in an auto/CCRP delivery from 20K would be unlikely to shack the target. However, in most cases it would be "good enough" to get an LGB into the basket for it to be able to guide with enough energy to hit the target and achieve desired weapons effects unless there was a significant wind shear and/or big change in wind speed from release to the surface. The more advanced wind models would allow the aircraft to "capture" the winds as it climbed or descended through the air mass. But again that would assume that the winds are captured in the target area soon before release. This would be the most accurate wind model as it would account for "non-standard" wind speeds but more importantly account for wind shear which is common at different altitudes. However in many cases, it's simply impractical to dive down to 500 AGL and then climb back up again to 20K in a high threat target area to deliver a Level release GBU-12. So the common middle ground method is for the pilot to manually inputs winds at various altitudes based off of "best guess" weather forecasts or even from observation. For instance if the jet's computer at current altitude says the winds are 090/40, but the pilot can see smoke on the ground moving from north to south at a slow pace, then he/she might program the manual wind model to account for that wind shear. So that was a long winded way to ask - what wind models (if any) does DCS use for the various jet's bombing calculations? Are they accurately modeled? If not, I wonder if some of the reports of GBU-12s missing are due to inaccurate wind calculations and the bomb is not able to make it to the target. Edit to add: BTW - Wind models are critical for CCIP bombing as well, as part of the Continuously Computed Impact Point calculations is wind. However it tends to be less of a factor in CCIP bombing as you are typically at lower altitudes doing dive deliveries with shorter TOF's than medium or high Altitude Auto/CCRP bombing profiles.

I'm sorry for one last question.... Are VR prescription inserts Model specific? I assume they are shaped for the specific model such as Oculus, Rift, HTC. Any idea of a rough idea on cost?

Perfect, thanks for the responses.

Totally agree with this. I knew what I was getting into when I bought the F-16 module and so far have immensely enjoyed it and eagerly anticipate the improvements as they come out. I would suggest that if ED had to do even a fraction of the rigorous testing that a real mil flight sim has to go through before release - the cost to us would be some factor much higher than it is now and the timeframes on fixes would be many months or even years rather than weeks. The bottom line is that we are ALL free labor here for ED for those that choose to participate, and hopefully that not only keeps the costs low, but the fun factor high. Buying Early Access is completely optional and ED has been very upfront about what it is and what it is not.

I'm currently flying DCS without glasses and it seems OK, but I wonder if some of the slight blurriness or hard to read cockpit stuff is due to my eyes or just the inherent VR capability. My distance vision is fine - I can see 20/20 on a good day at distance with both eyes open but I use Rx reading glasses for PC work and reading small print on stuff. I also have a bit of astigmatism. I don't wear glasses for normal stuff like driving, Flying, etc - just the reading glasses. Will this affect the image quality in the VR Headset since the eye pieces are essentially the same as looking at something really close up? Or do you eyes treat it as a distant object? Can you even wear glasses under the HMD? As an aside, I'm somewhat surprised HMDs don't have adjustable focus ability like a rifle scope or binoculars do? I guess that would add a big layer of complexity.

Perfect! And you are correct, I'm running Steam VR Stable. I haven't played with any of the Betas yet. Same with DCS. At the moment I'm running stable there as well. So at the moment, I'm running 188% custom resolution in the Applications tab, 100% in the video tab, Smoothing on, Advanced SS on, GPU Profiling off. In DCS, I have PD set to 1.0 as you suggested, MSAAx2, everything else set to high, shadows flat, and Aristropic filtering set to 16x. Everything seems to be a bit brighter and slightly more washed out than it was before. I wonder if that is due to the Gamma or the Global cockpit illumination On? I didn't know MSAA kills spotting targets at distance. Is that airborne, ground or both? I'll have to pay more attention the next time I fly, but it seemed I was able to spot the tanker at 8-10nm. I haven't really played with any ground targets yet since the settings changed. Overall though, I'm really happy with the performance boost over previous settings. The overall experience seems really much nicer. My only issue is the Steam app I downloaded for $4 (VRfps) shows that I'm getting a stable 30 fps rather than the desired 45. It appears smooth to me, I'm not seeing any stutters that I can tell and if so only very rarely. But even flying over downtown Vegas at low altitude seems like buttery smooth frame rates. Maybe that app just sucks. I still cannot get the normal Steam "Show FPS" button to work. It shows if I'm running on desktop, but nada when in VR. Huge thanks again for the help on this!!

At the moment, GMT +4. But US west coast time in about 2 months.

So I played with my toe brake settings on my rudder pedals And I set the deadzone slightly higher on the right brake (10) than the left (5) and it definitely seemed to make a difference in tracking on the ground. When it was heavy weight at t/o, it seemed track straight ahead at high speed before NW liftoff. I even took my feet off the pedals and it didn't veer right all. Same on landing while heavyweight. If anything it seemed to want to pull every so slight left now. But nothing like it was doing before. I then tried the same settings pretty lightweight on both takeoff and landing. It was much improved, but did seem to want to pull slightly more left now. But again, nowhere as drastic as it was doing to the right before I made the changes. What I notice is when the jet is really lightweight on landing and you get in the aerobrake and get the nose up towards 10 deg at high speed - it wants to "dance" on the main gears quite a bit. Once you get slow and start to lower the nose, it really dampens out a lot. And then once you're fully on the brakes and the nose strut compresses, the steering is much easier to control. Anyway, in conclusion - it appears that there may be some uneven drag on one of the brakes (suspect R) and perhaps tweaking the different brake settings will get it handling easier on the ground.

Ah ok, thanks. At least it wasn't my alzheimer's kicking in yet.

Hi Wicked, So I followed your setup instructions and as I said to Stuartaston - it all combined to make a huge difference. I notice we have similar computer setup specs, so I was assuming the results would be similar. So thank you for that! I have a couple of questions though on a few things I was confused about with the SteamVR settings. 1. When you are setting your custom resolution setting to 188% or 204% - are you doing it in the "applications" tab or in the "video" tab? In the applications tab, the custom resolution explanation said it was a "multiplier on top of the video application settings". So I sort of assume you set the video custom resolution to 204% and leave the first slider bar in the application tab at 100%?? 2. Do you enable the "motion Smoothing" checkbox in the video tab? 3. Under the developer tab, do you enable anything..... Like the Advanced Supersample filtering or the GPU profiling. I have no idea what any of those do. TIA

I followed the website's "rig setup" video exactly to speed up the machine and get rid of all the windows background apps closed. I then ran the VR steam set up that @wicked suggested and then the DCS settings. OMG what a huge difference that has made to the graphics and the resolution. I'm even running MSAA x2 on DCS and the lack of shimmer now is so amazing. The whole experience is night and day now. Thanks so much for the point out to the website!

A similar thread was started over on the Hornet Forum asking about "buddies" to fly with to better learn the platform before committing to larger MP scenarios and/or a dedicated Sq. https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=257456 Since the F-16 module came out, I've switched almost 100% to learning the Viper as I'm more familiar with the USAF Conops and TTPs vs the Navy. Not saying one is better, just different in some key ways. Any current or former Viper drivers (or just very experienced DCS guys) interested in doing some mentoring outside of the larger full-scale MP LFEs that go on? My goal is eventually to get into a Sq and do this on a more regular basis once I learn the jet better. But in the meantime, some informal FTU style flying would be fun and informative and help the learning curve a bit. I am trying not to build bad habits. PM me if anyone out there is interested. Thanks.

Interesting...... I wonder if there is a bug in the brakes that maybe the right MLG brake is dragging ever so slightly. I see this when I brake as well, the jet pulls ever so slightly right with both toe brakes equally applied. But a slightly higher brake setting on one side would be exacerbated at higher speeds such as takeoff and landing. I may go and play with my brake setting curves and see if this has any effect.

Excellent explanation! Thanks. Out of curiosity, is this (FCS mode change from G to AOA priority) unique to the Hornet for getting on the boat? I've not seen such a drastic flight control change when changing to landing configuration on other jets.