Exorcet

I've done the test a few times, though not recently. Clean the Viper is a couple hundred miles ahead in my experience. With AAM's that shrinks a bit, but then the gap widens with fuel tanks. AG loadouts is where the Hornet's advantage lies as the F-16 struggles to climb to really efficient altitudes with bombs or AGM's unless it's the bare minimum. Here are some screens from one of my tests, might be a little hard to read, but it's a SEAD loadout. 4x HARM on the top row, then 2x HARM and 2x Fuel on the bottom. Max AAM payload taken as well. Jammer on the F-16 since the Hornet has one internal. Fuel is adjusted for plane weight, which is why the F-16 has a lower bingo than F-18. The F-18 gets 690 miles vs 564 from the F-16 with missiles only. With tanks the F-18 reaches 1036 vs 1011 F-16. In this case the Hornet did go further, but this is a border line payload. I used to repeat these with FM updates, but as I said before, I haven't redone the test in a while. If things have changed recently, it would be good to know.

It seems we were talking about slightly different things and your original point was correct. I was interpreting the question as looking for an adjustment dial, but I guess the switch is more analogous.

That's for the DED. HUD dial is right under the HUD, same one used to turn it on or off.

Probably worth mentioning DCS has unit templates, which usually include some of the SAM systems arranged in groups already. Pick the template, place it down, one click for working SAM. The templates vary by country, which can complicate things, but it's worth trying the templates and seeing if they have ones relevant to you.

The F-16 has the better range, the Hornet is a bit fuel hungry. If you're flying at different speeds that's really going to throw off results because flying faster means higher fuel flow. The F-16 uses much less fuel and has a slightly higher cruise speed, so it will get more distance when it's not heavily loaded. On the other hand: Since the Hornet can carry more, things swap around when the planes are heavy.

This was years ago now. I believe a comment from Chiz or Yo-Yo. I don't think it was ever stated to be actively worked on, but was a consideration at the time. As there are currently no plans for new FC level aircraft, it seems that the consideration was dropped at some point. Separately FF F-15 and other FC planes were mentioned years ago, but again not pursued.

It would make a great addition to DCS. I know some time ago ED proposed an idea of adding modules initially as FC level and then upgrading them to FF. I wonder if that is a more viable path for modern red air. FF is absolutely preferable to lower fidelity, but for planes where that is simply not possible, I wonder if other options could be considered. Technically it's happening to the MiG-29 I suppose.

It has always been one of my favorite WWII fighters.

WWII variants aren't quite right, no, but with the simpler AI modeling it matters a little less. Iran is in a good place in DCS, they have most of their air units and a good number of ground units. Ships are unfortunately almost non existent, but substitutions can be made. With the announced Iraq map, situations involving Iran should be a lot more plausible to simulate in the future.

I mean in DCS though. India is lacking units. I guess they can borrow the generic Su-30 at least. MiG-29 and Mirage 2000 are wrong versions as far as I know. We have the MiG-21 but no Bisons.

What is near accurately? If you're willing to fudge units a little, a lot might become possible. On the other hand, recreating historical missions can also depend on tactics and doctrine. With the AI at least, this is sometimes problematic. Best bets off the top of my head would involve WWII Normandy, Operation Praying Mantis, and missions around Syria. I don't have a truly specific or through list though.

Technically nothing is stopping the save state system from saving multiple player states, but there might be some practical hurdles there. You could instead just save the state of the mission and let players relaunch from airbases the next time the mission is played. This could allow for very long campaigns with a single mission file.

Just wish India had some planes.

Caucasus style boundaries are great for including water, and I'd greatly appreciate it maps went back to have really wide boundaries like that. If we could also place airports, the same would apply to extra land. I've flown missions from Georgia to Crimea before even though the latter is empty. Flights over low detail regions can be made in such a way that the lack of detail hardly matters (night, clouds, etc), but options for launching ground based aircraft are limited to the built in airports currently.

It really depends on what you're asking for. Simulators are perfect for what if scenarios. However DCS specifically would require consideration of a few different points. One of the biggest being that a large portion of the player base, even those not opposed to what if scenarios, also want to be able to limit DCS to realistic situations. Fortunately that isn't hard to setup, and some options for this already exist (like the ability to exclude planes from missions or warehouses, etc). What's currently missing is clear labeling. Not everyone may be able to tell what is historic or what is not. Labeling would solve that issue. Another factor to consider is what exactly do you mean by what if? The plane in the opening post is completely unknown to me. I assume it's totally fictional. That isn't very appealing in DCS, though there are ways to model it (more on that in a bit). In the case of DCS, something like prototype aircraft, or proposed modifications of existing aircraft that were not built may fit in better. They could have more data to stand on and thus be easier to fit into a plausible combat situation. If you really wanted to allow anything, that is possible. It's not even unique in the sim world. Just look at X-Plane: It takes advantage of being a realistic simulator to allow the user to design fictional aircraft. DCS could do the same thing and expand it with weapon simulation. It would be a really cool feature. Imagine for instance simulating hypothetical WWII 1946. If DCS had a plane editor you could load in a Mustang for example, and raise the engine power to simulate a newly developed engine that might have arisen from a more drawn out war. All while being completely plausible. Of course the downside here is that the plane maker/editor needs to be designed and coded. It could be a large and expensive product. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done, but it needs to be considered carefully. Maybe some middle ground could be found by increasing DCS mod friendliness. If ED had a sample module that users could tweak, that could serve as a gateway to adding custom vehicles to the sim. As a bonus it could also work as a compatibility tester or test bed for serious module development. Deka added a thrust vectoring mode to the JF-17 for testing purposes. What if DCS had a dummy module that could be used for such things out of the box to let developers play with the sim and see what it could handle before putting resources into full module development? Might that increase the attractiveness of DCS as a sim platform?

Something to point out regarding this. The one missile at a time behavior may be exactly what you want in SEAD. It's not obvious in DCS because there is no SEAD (Suppression). In DCS it's mostly DEAD because SAM's don't turn off and will guide missiles ahead of all else until they are destroyed. The solution we need is to add more options to SEAD task to control how weapons are released. If SAM's get improved down the line and shut down when threatened with missiles you will want to use one at a time to keep them off for longer so your strike planes can get through. The AI also needs to be able to use different tactics against different launchers. Even when trying to suppress, one missile is not very good against SAM's with ARM intercept capability. In that case the AI needs to have an option overwhelm a SAM, or at least fire more than one missile to increase the chance that the SAM turns off radar.

Thanks for the added info, I was unsure about any safeguard in place for automatic CIWS to protect against friendly fire, I'll have to note that there isn't such a thing. However as far as I know the ship crew should have the ability to disable CIWS manually if necessary. If that's the case, could that functionality be used to prevent, or reduce the chance of, friendly fire? Or is the system designed in such a way that that would be impractical? In that case it wouldn't be part of the CIWS systems modeling as much as ship crew modeling, but externally the result should be similar. Either way, the bigger issue for me is that CIWS turns around too far and gives incoming missiles opportunities to get through while it's facing the wrong direction. Indeed, carrier fleets and their supporting ships in real life can be many miles apart, though as highlighted by the examples above, ships can also be in close proximity at times. Also, to provide some backstory, the reason that I stumbled upon this issue was that I was doing tests on ship formations in DCS for the purpose of defending against anti ship missiles. The best defense is putting Ticonderogas or similar in the way of attacking planes before they can get close to the carrier, but the further you place them from the carrier, the easier it is to leave gaps for planes to get through, especially when you don't know exactly from what direction they will come. DCS maps may also have limited water area, which can force ships to be close. I found that placing one or two ships near the carrier for last ditch defense helps. The close escort ships can also be offset away from the carrier, but the ability of the SM-2's to intercept incoming missiles is greatly increased by having them in the path of said missiles instead of the sides.

Bumping this since no response in over a year, it's still an issue: And it's impacting more than carriers: https://forum.dcs.world/topic/335872-c-ram-bad-target-prioritization/

This is possible, but only with Lua scripting. There are some tools to help you do the job, DML is apparently one: You can search for it or ask @cfrag for in formation, I'm not really familiar. Otherwise, you'd need to copy the group you want to respawn and set up multiple triggers for the amount of times you want it spawned. Edit, well as soon as I posted I noticed the DML thread, so might as well add it

I've been out of online MP for a long time at this point, so feel free to tell me that things have changed, but as much as the label of air quake has been ever present, finding mission oriented online was never impossible. DCS online in the majority of lobbies does stray from reality in that lone wolves are common and dogfights take precedence over winning the war, but at the same time I can remember quite few times finding people to actually cooperate with, both as a flight or as striker and escort. There is a demand for that kind of thing. Maybe it's not the majority of players, but they do exist. Or did. I think it's important to keep this in mind and allow for servers to enable this type of play, even if not everyone will care.

That comment would be in reference to the initial map though. This may or may not have carrier suitable water, but we don't know exactly where the map will eventually expand. From the information so far, since Gulf War is one of the conflicts this map is supposed to model, that implies water:

Increased building detail would be very nice to have. Hormuz is missing some really important and visually interesting structures and locations. It would be nice to have these placed on the Iraq map, or to have statics to represent them that we could place down.

Use dummy targets. Conceptually: Player in zone around SAM > Spawn dummy aircraft (disable EPLRS so it doesn't appear on datalinks, radio silence so it doesn't talk, radar off so it's not on RWR) SAM will maybe shoot at the dummy. If it's slow moving and doesn't mover (Reaction to threat = No reaction) the missile will mostly go straight and look ballistic. This is at least something I've done with AAA. It should work with missiles, but probably not as nicely. You might also consider making the player, or non dummy AI invisible when close to the SAM so that the SAM doesn't shoot at them. Nearby planes will probably get SAM launch warnings on the RWR though, can't really do anything about that. You could try shutting off the radar as soon as the missile fires, but I think the missiles explode in that case, needs to be tested.

The initial area may lack water. I doubt the final map will only cover land. Kuwait has a coast, and if the map is focused on the Gulf War, it has to be there. The bigger question, in my opinion, is how much water will we get. Will we actually be able to place carriers where they operated (ie not 5 miles offshore) or will we have to place them where the map allows because we have no other choice, like the Black Sea.

I can't recall ever seeing a launcher I liked. Will have to see what this one is like, but being able to just bypass it and going into the game directly sounds like a great option. I really miss the original DCS that just started up with no account sign in or anything.