Karon

Third Public Draft released. First post updated. More info about the release, here.

Yep, it does help a lot, no matter the fact that it was written for the "elementary school" on the T-39 In fact, it teaches much more than the 2017 versions. For instance, the relations between the angles, how the BDHI is the coolest piece of equipment you can desire, and how the five Cuts can be used to describe a manoeuvre or a scenario, and the effects they have on the LS (the 2017 version says that the cut is not used anymore - which is fair for modern aircraft). It also teaches you some neat relations, like the CCC formulas, in case you don't have the TID track to immediately find the Collision Bearing. And there's a lot more!

There you go, it will expire in 7d: https://discord.gg/b5cNdpps

Added Part XIII: In-Depth Timeline (continuation: FOX 3/1/2). And with that, the study is pretty much completed. I'm working on an appendix, it should be available in primis on the third public draft of the book I aim to release before the end of the year.

I'd suggest taking those books (and even the 2008 edition) with a grain of salt: each uses a different platform, and therefore many parameters change. They are a spectacular source to build the forma mentis, but they are too elementary and academic in many aspects. For instance, to recognise a bogey jinking in altitude, the trainee should use the elevation strobe. I mean, yeah, it works, but when you translate it to DCS you have more tools available, often more direct and immediate. IIRC the F-4 sets the DT→CT to build circa 7nm, back to the 40k ft of LS goal then (or vice versa, since the F-4 is older ).

I usually read and take notes, I then use them to provide the devs' perspective when I write about different topics. Taking the API as an example, they did say a few things that explain why we have what we have now (long story short, it's a series of workarounds as the work on the API progresses, but it's a long-term endeavour). Unfortunately, as you correctly say, they tend to be less present as soon as the topic derails, and this is really pissing me off: I come here from a position of ignorance to learn more, not to seeing every interesting topic by some idiot that can't tell the difference between DCS and War Thunder. We are lucky enough to have devs open to communication and even constructive debate, but I understand them if they were to stop that.

It looks like that Googling nowadays is surprisingly hard. Heck, even reading is hard, innit? But I guess this does not count because… manufacturer is biased? But I guess it doesn't count because… Iran bad? And +1 to @DD_Fenrir, but even Bio does not count because… he's too nice, I guess? On a serious note, I wonder where the devs find the strength to deal with the same nonsense over and over again. I also wonder why the mods don't action.

Right, a bunch of stuff here made me chuckle: ED and "fast" in the same sentence. The missile API was announced in October 2019. A very rough implementation applied by HB and released in November 2020 and yet, here we are, in December 2021 waiting for features from ED that should make the AIM-54 more realistic. They may have done one thing fast, but I have the feeling this is part of the missiles overhaul that has been going on for years now (and announced years before). "Fast" is not really they modus operandi. They are not a huge company. I'm not complaining, though, they can take all the time they need, as long is it is done thoroughly. Heatblur and "an excuse to not get moving". The RIO has a number of controls aimed to somewhat "compensate" for the ECM in some conditions (it does not compensate for, but you get the point, hopefully). This means implementing an interactive ECM system, something DCS is probably not capable to deliver right now. If I were in HB, I wouldn't waste resources in a half-backed implementation that does not work and has to be redone from scratch later, especially since ED is now finally moving on the CM/ECM side. (IIRC they said the same thing about a decade ago, and only now they are delivering - ref previous point). Not to mention how disappoint would be for the dedicated RIO players. The F-14 should drop loft or something. I advise you to check the tests conducted on 12/04/1973, this is how I summarized it for my book: Quoting directly Huges Aircraft Company: Thank god it should not loft according to you, otherwise it would have reached 200,000ft minimum lol Also, isn't the noise jammer pretty much what we have in DCS? It'd be a shame if the AWG9/AIM-54 would just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and carry on, innit? Now, I get it, querying Google is hard and ranting on a forum is an easy way to vent off. But if you stop and think for 3", you should probably find a better solution than a waste of devs time on something that won't work. For example, you can go to ED and ask them to introduce a flag in the mission editor that disables every ECM in the game. If they don't want, perhaps the ME can set some malfunctions at spawn to the ECM devices to disable them. This will give everyone a way to disable the ECM until every module is up to the same good standard, and also give more time to the devs and ED to do it properly. Personally, ECMs can be disabled entirely until they are ready to be released across the board. However, if the F-14 is to be affected by jammers, then I want to be able to use all the fancy tools I have in the backseat (which probably do little to nothing anyway) to find the source and do my best to fight it. I'd rather wait 5 more years than having a crap implementation.

1- Nah. Although the if affect the cockpit lighting in some odd ways occasionally; 2- I pass on this one; 3- Why would it break the IC? The NS430 is a DCS module, not a mod. That being said, it's not a must-have at all. It's a nice-to-have, extremely rarely useful gadget. I'd buy a 3D version, though.

Added Part XII: In-Depth Timeline (from “Picture” to “Crank”).

Thanks for checking, buddy!

A version of the F-14A closer to what the Iranians got is planned (F-14A-95-GR). Perhaps when the liveries for that particular version are released, they will be available for the other two F-14A.

It has been fixed almost a month ago (mid / late October, I don't remember exactly when).

The abysmal number of views and subs this channel has baffles me. Although most of the content of this series is, so far, quite basic, very colloquial and open, it's always good and interesting to hear the experiences of former crews.

Hey there! I'm jumping back in the rear seat after months and I noticed something about the antenna elevation. It may be a bug, or just me being dumb and missing something obvious. Scenario: - F-14 flying at 15,000ft; - Contact I: flying 5 nm in front of the F-14, co-speed, at 18,000ft (+3,000ft); - Contact II: flying 10 nm in front of the F-14, co-speed, at 21,000ft (+6,000ft); - Radar set in PSRCH, 1 bar. In Theory, the contacts should be visible using the same antenna elevation angle, which should be 5.6° (using maths). I tested it, and it works as expected. I set the elevation at 5.4° up, and I saw both of them on the DDD. See image below: I then proceeded to switch the HCU to RDR and locked in PSTT. I expected a change, but the displayed antenna elevation angle became 3.3°. The Elevation indicator matches the value displayed on the TID. See below: Problem: 3.3° is too low to see the contacts. At 5 nm, the width of the volume should be, approximated via maths, ±0.6°. In fact, by adjusting the elevation to match such value, there are no returns on the DDD. This is the same example above, in a short video (quick and dirty): What am I missing?

Hey folks, in 2018 I opened FlyAndWire.com. Initially focused on Arduino, I then got sucked into the F-14 rear seat stuff and I delved more and more into its details. However, the blog-style format of the website is not suitable for conveying a sense of progression and structure. On the contrary, it has the effect of scattering related articles all over the place, depending on when they are posted. Therefore, I decided to wrap everything together into a single book: "Virtual Backseaters volume I: F-14 Radar Intercept Officer". The goal of this sort of extended manual is to finally give more homogeneity to the content, and a better separation between basic and simple concepts, and the more complex ones. The approach is closer to "simulative" rather than "casual", but the objective is the application of the contents to DCS, hence the word "Virtual" as the very first one in the title of the book. There is a lot of room to go deeper if you want! For this very reason, it may not be suitable for fresh new RIOs: for you, Heatblur's excellent manual is definitely the best place to start. Post the release of the first draft I received many comments and suggestions and I implemented most of them. Feel free to share your thoughts! Contents I published two public drafts so far. I am still very much in the "content-assembly" phase. There are numerous errors in terms of grammar, lexicon and other imprecisions. Those will be dealt with once the core of the book is done. If you wonder what the "Volume I" thing is about, this book is dedicated to the F-14 Radar Intercept Officer. If everything goes as planned and Volume II will focus on the A6 B/N (V3 to the F-4 and V4 to the Tornado IDS - pls HB! ). Releases 10/09/2022 - Fifth public draft. Article. 25/03/2022 - Fourth public draft. Article. 08/12/2021 - Third public draft. Article. 24/10/2021 - Second public draft. Article. 09/10/2021 - First public draft. Article. DOWNLOAD The most recent version is available in this page. Changelog 10/09/2022 Draft 108S: Public Draft V; 05/05/2022 Draft 108S: Public Draft IV update; 24/03/2022 Draft 103S: Public Draft IV; 16/03/2022 Draft 95: 655 pages. 200 more than the last public draft; 24/02/2022 Draft 90: 600 pages. Almost there…; 26/01/2022 Draft 84: 554 pages, 100 more than the last public draft; 09/01/2022 Draft 77: 500 pages! 08/12/2021 Draft 71b: Public Draft III; 08/12/2021 Draft 71: Public Draft III, RC1; 03/12/2021 Draft 70: decreased pages margins. “Lost” 15 pages; 24/10/2021 Draft 61: Draft II released; 21/10/2021 Draft 60: Public Draft II, RC1 11/10/2021 Draft 56: First round of corrections; 09/10/2021 Draft 54: Draft I released; 09/10/2021 Draft 53: Public Draft I, RC2; 06/10/2021 Draft 51: Public Draft I, RC1; 05/10/2021 Draft 47: first private release for feedback; 02/09/2021 Draft 1: opera start.

I am one of them

I think your time is better spent doing something else rather than feeding a troll. Suggestion ↓

TWS is limited to the ~2" refresh it needs to build tracks. Therefore you only have two sets of settings available. De facto, you are looking at the sky through a monocle. Every other mode can be instead spread out to ±65° and 8 Bars if you want, giving you a huge look at the airspace, at the cost of ~15" vs 2". In other words, you use TWS when you already have an idea of where your target is, and you want to increase your SA (by hooking a contact you get plenty of details, you can IFF and employ the AIM-54). RWS, is the most used radar mode, it's similar to TWS (huge range, shows returns on the TID, etc) but the contacts cannot be hooked and the tracks are not built. Nevertheless, you can correlate with the DL contacts often, and it's great in conjunction with the NAVGRID. PD SRCH is similar to RWS but it lacks the FM ranging used the other modes. Ergo it has a longer detection range, but it shows returns only on the DDD. The DDD is PD mode is surprisingly good though, it offers a lot of info once you understand how it works. See if this helps. To give you a better idea, these sketches show the amount of airspace covered by different settings. In green, you see the two TWS options. Red is the smallest possible combination, grey is fully open instead. More info here. Now, LPRH Pulse radar offers the Pulse Search mode. It is a great mode, as long as you are feet wet, otherwise you need to play with the gain and potentially have to reduce the detection range a bit. It's also a DDD-only mode, akin the classic b-scope if you want. However, it is great: it can be opened fully, it does not suffer blindzones due to ZDF or MLCF and it gives you in a glance: - ATA: antenna train angle, so the relative bearing from your nose to the contact; - range: since it's azimuth (abscissa) vs range (ordinate) Probably one of the most useful features it provides is the ability of assessing the Drift effortlessly by checking that the ATA is not changing, and when you have no drift, you have collision course. On top of that, there are other aspects of the intercept that can be quickly assessed from the DDD in this radar mode. Moreover, the fundamentals of the intercepts described between the 70s and ~2010 were quite similar (the really basic and public stuff, so take everything with a metric ton of salt), and they all work with a b-scope. I guess that's why Bio said he used PSRCH. On top of that, we may consider the feet wet factor and purely DCS-related considerations, such as the different usage of the NAVGRID (for almost everyone the YY is placed over the bullseye), or even silly things, such as the fact that many pilots enjoy the TID repeater to have better SA. Well, if someone is in contact with him, ask him

That looks a lot like my first Payload Calculator (which later it became a more complex MDG generator). I took the values from the game in June 2019, so take them with a grain of salt, they may be different now. I'd suggest checking and see if they are still correct. I'm sure some stations are not applicable any more though (IIRC the Mk20 was changed last year).

Exactly that picture. I didn't want to paste it for rights & stuff. (fun fact, I quickly recreated it in DCS just to avoid issues for my book/manual a few weeks ago): What I found interesting is how unbalanced that setup is (wight-wise, 27% pylon 8; 39% pancake; 17% pylon 1 - this with full fuel), but this is going OT. @Naquaii: note, thanks!

Not the answer to your question, but sometimes the AIM-54s were carried in pylon 1 and 8 when bombs were carried in 3/6. See Bio's "Tomcat RIO". Another unexpected but realistic config is similar to the precedent, but with one 54, the LANTIRN, two Mk20 and an AIM-7 behind (#5). I leave the proper answer to Naquaii, but I wonder if they simply mounted them on 1/8 rather than carrying the bombs behind the pair of Phoenixes.

It has been like that for a very long time. It's actually better than TWS in many scenarios (old video from 16/05/21). However, the devs have already discussed the problem. Hopefully, it'll get fixed when the new API is fully implemented (and the additional necessary functions are implemented).