Syndrome

I had the same issue until I watched Wags and others do sample textbook landings with the right speed parameters, AOA, and touchdown flare for aero-braking till at least 100knots. And now I have the opposite problem of having to pump the throttle back up when I taxi off the runway.

Ah sorry, new to DCS, I assumed that bore/slave in the instance of these ranges only applied to fox 3 missiles like the AMRAAM. Never tried to fire a sidewinder outside of 5-10nm before. Is that a thing?

Thanks for the video, Maxsenna! I did try to see if the lever was useful for returning past the idle cutoff, but that didn't seem to work either. In any case the assigned button slot seems that it would be a good double-duty button for lifting the throttle into the afterburner which would be extremely useful for those of us without detents.

Throttle Cutoff Release is supposed to function like the Hornet's "THROTTLE FINGER LIFT" and allow for you to push throttle into the afterburner position. However the button currently does nothing when mapped. All we can currently do is map a button to the "CYCLE AFTERBURNER DETENT - on/off" which means you have to remember whether you turned it on or off. This makes it hard to know if you are burning through precious fuel or accidentally locking yourself into a weak thruster state without looking down in a dangerous situation.

I'm no expert, but the PDF manual says that the Amraam's range can be upwards of 20 nm depending on relative velocity, and can be less than 10nm depending on other factors. I would assume that the 20nm figure depends on whether the target is bugged/tracked or just fired upon "maddog" style. I would also assume relative starting altitude makes a big difference as well.

Only above 800 knots at sea level at 15C with 6% fuel at ~20700 lbs. And I really stomped on the rudders. Will try again tomorrow. It's possible you hit a strange resonance with the timing of the pulse and release. In any case, the jet seems to be significantly more stable at high speed than before, and a little less draggy at low speed. I will try to recreate the oscillations with your pedal timing tomorrow.

Ah yes, I see it now. Had to slow down the video to 0.25x to be sure. It's very subtle. Might be the FLCS acting up? Idk. It's still not the snappiest of planes in terms of alpha, but at least with the better drag modelling, it can sustain moderate speed turns better now without dropping like a rock quite as easily. My top wish list items for the F16 are still delaying the GLOC onset and radar tracking for guns.

How fast are you going and what weight? I have to be going 850knots IAS with 10% fuel before I notice rudder instability and violent oscillations. Previously this could happen at 10% fuel and 550-600 knots. Right now I can stomp back and forth on the rudders at anything below 800 knots with bingo fuel and clean wings and the plane stabilizes itself very quickly. And any amount of typical weight load will damp any high speed oscillations allowing you more stability at speeds above 850. With half fuel and clean wings, I have to reach 880 knots (mach 1.5) before it becomes susceptible to violent rudder inputs. It won't happen from simply using the rudder (which seems mostly inert on the F-16 except for use by the FCS). The manual says it's mostly used for drift and nosewheel steering. I've never found the rudder useful on the F-16 it in a turn, but maybe I'm doing it wrong. Haven't noticed any input variance in pitch rates when pulling high or sudden Gs unless it's at low speed from higher alpha induced drag.

I loaded up the Viper with 6 amraams and 2 fuel tanks, with fumes for fuel so I could hit mach >1 and turned off GLOC effects and set the jet to CAT I & couldn't hear or see any signs of structural damage after pulling 9g at 500-600knots. Maybe the damage is in more extreme cases like dives from high altitude? Or maybe it's cumulative and requires more than a few minutes of high g turns? What I did notice is that they fixed the drag model so the strange oscillations are gone and the Viper FM feels way more in line with what we see on youtube. However since the pilot faints when you get even close to 8g so you can't reenact RL sustained turns just yet unless you set G effects to "None". Maybe next patch they'll address the early GLOC issue? In any case, this is definitely a move in the right direction. :thumbup:

Serious question from a new player: How do you fly an F-16 and get more than 18.5 deg/s sustained turn rate? I'm not saying the F-16 isn't fun to fly, but this turn rate seems pretty average for DCS jets, maybe even a little below average, and not particularly special.

I suspect that the drag/lift model is a bit off in game. There are a few lines of evidence for this, 1) acceleration behaves as if the F-16 weighs about 7000 lbs more than the stated weight in game. 2) instability (violent oscillations) in level flight 3) inability to maintain higher bank angles (82-84deg) required for 9g turns unless the F-16 is ultra light and running on fumes. The video provided in the OP gives information with regard to with the bank angle in level low altitude turns. Now to be clear, we can't assume too much accuracy since we aren't given a true horizontal/vertical line in the video. However we know they are flying at very low alt, so they can't be losing much alt in the turns, and if you average the angles entering and leaving the turns you can get rough idea of the kind of bank angles an F16 should be able capable of in game. The video shows the F16 entering the turn at a relative angle of 82° and leaving the turn at a relative angle of 86°. Averaging these to account for an unknown true horizon, you get a bank angle of 84°, which is possible in game at high speeds for an extremely light weight F-16, though testing it is nearly impossible atm because we black out way too soon. The g-force experienced in such a level turn would be 1/cos(84) = 9.6g. And we can only sustain consciousness under 8g with warmups. So yes, the F-16 is probably under-performing in terms of lift generated in high bank angles. This could be caused by the early access version of the FLCS which seems to be causing other issues as well such as moderately high speed instability. However we can't even really know this yet because we can't stay awake during such a turn at the speeds and weight ranges possible in game.

Can't say that I do. I am still very new to DCS and learning at a break neck pace to try and keep up with most of the conversations here. I'm only chiming in with talk about physics and force diagrams because I like physics, and feel I have something to potentially contribute in that narrow regard. As I said before, I am not overly worried about the turn rates of any particular plane so much as I am curious about the principles so I can know how to find the edges of the flight envelope vs the edges of my limited skill, and mostly so my practicing is more useful and not wasted on trying to push past actual physical barriers, or to know when I have stumbled upon a new trick or started to master some necessary & important level of fine control. I've been playing for a couple months and just did my first successful aerial refueling mission last night. Just so you know where I'm coming from.

That's a good catch! I wonder if the g meter reading instability is related to the issues that cause other instability? I can get this vibration at much lower speeds with lighter weight and enough to apparently cause blackouts from the instantaneous g forces, or maybe concussion?

Well to be fair to everyone, it's a fascinating question about the physics of flight and this kind of passionate interest would exist about this topic whether there was a thread or not. I was certainly curious about it and was hence drawn to this thread despite the apparent land mines. For the people who are still interested in the physics, the basic force diagram behind the formula are as follows: (see attached). The G that we see our HUD is by definition the ratio of the Lift (the force you feel through your seat) and the force of gravity. Or equivalently the ratio of the accelerations of the two forces. G ≡ LIFT/mg = LIFT/[L*Cos(θ)] = 1/Cos(θ) To clarify, since there appears to be some confusion on this point, the centrifugal force (shown in orange) is horizontal in a flat circle turn. The red arrow (not labeled) is the resultant force which is equal and opposite of the Lift force. There also seemed to be some confusion about which g was being measured in the HUD, and that is of course the G defined above by the LIFT (blue vector), and the resultant opposing force (red vector) that feels like apparent extra gravity. So some of the above equations regarding bank angle, velocity, and ratios of the Lift to gravity are in fact correctly taking into account the bank angles and component forces. However, the derived formula for G = (Fcpt/Fg) = (mv^2/rmg)= vϵ/g was also missing a sinθ term since L= (Fcpt/sinθ): ergo G = Fcpt/(sinθ*Fg) = (mv^2/rmg*sinθ)= vϵ/(g*sinθ), and hence ϵ = Gg*sinθ/v. However I didn't notice because we used θ=82 and sin(82deg)= 0.99, so it didn't make a big enough difference in this case to catch the error. My apologies if I added to any confusion. Hopefully this post clears things up a bit, and provides an example of why it is always a good idea to verify engineering formulas posted on the internet that aren't backed up by a derivation, and a force diagram.

As I said above, we agree on being cautious, and we don't have the data to make any conclusions. The tangent function close to 90 degrees can give wildly different results with even slightly different bank angles. Caution is indeed important. Imo, before we worry about turn rate too much, I think we should wait until we see the changes regarding early onset of GLOC and possibly issues with the drag/lift/FLCS model which could be limiting both the turn rate and the sustained turn rate.

That's a fair point, and I considered it before posting, understanding that part of your point is about the small reported turn rate delta could fall under "uncertainty" of a low sig fig inputs. Just fyi, I don't necessarily disagree with you. However, given that the 2 angular speeds above are calculated from different figures according to diffently derived formulae using different physical properties, and are off by only 0.01 deg/s, it's a bit more likely that there are implied zeroes after each of those 2 digit numbers because DCS has to quantize steps between variable g force and bank angles at some figure. Why not the same values shown both in game and in tacview?

You can double press ctrl+Y and get TAS? That's incredibly useful, thank you sir :thumbup:

Yup, but just a heads up: that formula is for the true airspeed. So unless we know the altitude or assume you are 0 ft, then we need a direct reading of the true airspeed, which luckily the F-16 can provide in the HUD. For example at mach 0.65 & 15000ft the result would be 12.33 deg/s, since the TAS is 407.18 (as compared to 429.96 at sea level). Same G loading at a lower velocity requires a tighter turn, etc.

Prancing Killer, I enjoy physics conversations when people work together to find an answer. Being humble is important. I mean, I have a degree in astrophysics, but I'm new to DCS and the physics of aviation, so even I'm scratching my head at the strange short hand of skipped derivation steps in the formulae above, and I'm quite used to highly abbreviated derivations in proofs. That being said, the formulae do work, eg: On the viper you could use the HUD velocity switch toggle for true airspeed, and the G indicator in level flight. So for say a bank angle 82 deg G=7.3 and TAS = 564 knots = 290 m/s : ϵ = Gg/v => ϵ = 7.3*9.8/290 = 0.247 rad/s = 13.75 deg/s. You can also use the rate of turn formula ω=1,091tanθ/V and where θ is the bank angle and get the same result. ω=1091 tan(82) / 564 = 13.76 deg/s

Do you mean in terms of some kind of rpg GLOC fitness training for playing a certain number of hours regularly? I don't think so. But you can do g warmups that will give you X seconds to reach and sustain <8g without instantly blacking out.

I tested the acceleration of the F-16 with 10% fuel (around 20,000 lbs in game) and according to the acceleration charts for the block 50 engine, the performance was that of an F-16 weighing 27,000 lbs at sea level. An F-16 with 100% fuel (around 27,000 lbs in game) accelerated like an F-16 that weighed 36,000 lbs according to those same charts for the F110-GE-129.

Making suggestions to adapt to the current FM would be quite reasonable if it wasn't in very early EA. Given the GLOC from oscillations confirmed bug during level fight, the flight model isn't perfected yet and has bigger issues than just the turning rate. Early g-loc and excessive drag also limit our options in combat making suggestions to adjust your flying moot since the avenues for adaptation are currently blocked (eg bleeding energy at higher speed sustainable turns for alpha = instant blackout, vs sharp turns at lower speed to avoid blackout results in a high risk of stalling). Moreover, according to acceleration tables for the block 50 engine, the stripped down viper in DCS is currently behaving like one that weighs 7000lbs more. Once these issues are addressed, then it will make more sense to argue about whether the relatively minor rate turn difference should be looked into. I'm not complaining here, because even with all that the Viper is still a fun plane to fly. I'm just looking forward to the time when the Viper FM is a bit more polished, however long that takes. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the Hornet FM very much, definitely no complaints there :thumbup:

I would urge you to look up the same reports for the F-16. The falcon acceleration seems to be underperforming by 30% at 20,000 lbs. Where is should make those transitions in as little as 13 seconds. It takes 18 seconds in game. So either the drag is too high or the thrust is too low. The performance issues are compounded because blackouts in the Viper start at just over 6g, and you get initial GLOC several g before the 9g limit. So whatever the energy bleeding snap turning ability of the F-16, no one can really say because we currently pass out before you get close. With g warmups you can barely reach 9g for a split second. The F-16 with the reclined seat was designed to allow for 9g turns and even has a special O2 setting for high g maneuvers (which currently does nothing in EA). Meanwhile the Hornet, which has an upright seat can easily pull sustained 9.6g with the g-limiter switched off with no hint of GLOC onset after a warm-up I don't have any data on g tolerance in the F/A-18 but it seems the g force tolerance in the planes is somewhat reversed atm. I suspect that once the g tolerance performance issues are sorted out, and hopefully the drag model as well (which is currently causing buggy resonance oscillations that can cause GLOC while flying level) the planes will match their RL advantages and disadvantages more accurately.

Haven't tested turn radii in game, but the game version of the Hornet seems to beat the game version of the Viper in both alpha and sustained rate turns for a wide range of speeds from 350 to 600 knots. The Hornet winning on sustained rate seems unrealistic from all real world reports. The Viper bleeds speed much easier in turns, but also recovers speed little quicker when taking a slightly more shallow turn angle. The drag modeling on the Viper might be a little excessive since it's time to reach 600 knots from 350 knots is about 4 seconds too long, or 30% slower than it should be.

Given that I'm pretty low on the rather steep DCS learning curve, the F-16 is a good fit. I figure I can learn each of the new systems as they come online and adjust to any changes. Tbh, I am learning so many different planes and helicopters, I haven't even fully learned all of the early access F-16 systems yet. I'm sure a veteran might breeze through most of the stuff the F-16 can do without even needing a manual, since it is fairly intuitive, but a couple days ago I didn't even know what BVR, STT, or ILS meant so with a 188 page manual, the F-16 has plenty on offer for me to learn.