Exorcet

Fox 3 can go for chaff, have the chaff expire, and then relock the plane. Fox 1 will typically give up after falling for chaff. In DCS chaff is a dice roll chance of breaking lock and the aircraft radar doesn't really matter (except the Mirage 2000 radar, which is the highest fidelity right now). No, chaff in DCS works at all aspects.

That's a rather pointless question. Narnia and Lord of the Rings don't obey the laws of physics, don't have flight manuals, and don't have major engineering firms that you can contact for information. How are you going to model them to the accuracy of the F-20 which actually exists? I get that you prefer historical aircraft and that's completely fine. A plane having seen service is not required for simulation though.

Yes, chaff works. In general Fox 1 is more vulnerable to chaff than Fox 3.

Definitely needed.

Sure, but the intent of scaling isn't to make every insect visible. The math for sizing pixels is straight forward enough, but it's not sufficient to make image quality the same as reality. Human eyes don't see in pixels, and while the size of objects relative to monitor FoV might be correct in DCS we're still probably losing visual information that we would have in reality because of the distortion caused by low resolution (compared to the eye) screens. I do agree that more visual effects and better rendering would help though and I do want to see these added as well.

But these two things go hand in hand. Simulation =/= historical recreations only. We'd lose the entire user files section if that was the case. Historical mode would have to be enforced in the ME if that was the case. Etc.

I'd like to see the return of the enlarged visual model as well (it existed briefly during the 2.0 Alpha days). It had some issues with the implementation that ultimately got it removed, but I feel like this was more about not wanting to go through the effort of optimizing the engine rather than being an insurmountable technical problem (correct me if I'm wrong). Something else they might try is a slightly better labels system that only places labels on objects that you can see (ie the labels vanish for objects behind terrain or hidden behind your plane's cockpit). Screen resolution poses realism problems. Scaling is just a method to counter this. I'd say it's more realistic if done properly.

The F-20 was essentially production ready, which differentiates it from planes like the XB-70, which still had much more engineering work to be done. That said, I would not mind having the X-plane series in DCS. Taking on the role of a test pilot would be as fun as flying a combat campaign in my opinion.

What is wrong? DCS is a simulator. The F-20 is perfect. Simulate test/sales flights, simulate weapon certification, simulate the hypothetical simulation where the F-20 was sold and went to war. This is completely typical of DCS, and in my opinion preferable in some ways to historical conflict. Re-enacting history is fun, but you know how things will end, there is less to be surprised about. CFD should provide a fairly reasonable flight model, we also have manuals for the plane. Then there is the fact that it's heavily F-5 based, which gives a reference airframe to help fill in some gaps. Not to mention that Northrop is still around and may be able to help. Honestly, whether a plane has seen combat or not isn't a make or break deal for me. It's just not that important, and I don't see why people care so much about that (but I accept their opinions). As far as DCS goes, we lack details/features to recreate historical conflicts exactly, so while you can have Jaguars and Sea Harriers, that doesn't mean they will end up in recreations of their historical battles. Secondly, DCS has many developers involved. One plane doesn't have to cost us another.

Jester wheel definitely isn't for everyone. That's a hardpass from me. Optional sure, but if it was mandatory it would be a huge downgrade in my opinion.

I sort of merged your posts together when replying, so I guess my answer wasn't super clear and I didn't see the "not" in your original post before, so I thought you had issues with Hot targets too. Anyway, Med is supposed to be better for Cold/Flanking targets, although keep in mind the Hornet INT PRF doesn't work like FC3. It actually swaps between HI and MED instead of creating some kind of average inbetween PRF. So every 1st scan will be HI, giving you range and every second scan will be MED giving you off aspect detection.

Med PRF isn't going to see very far. I usually stay Interleaved.

I've always felt like these are the kind of binds you don't want on your HOTAS (unless you have extra button space left over I guess). It's partly why I like having a pop up kind of menu. I also think making is more mouse friendly is good thing because there are a lot of wingman commands and you sometimes needs to give multiple commands at once. This isn't great with the current system because it can involve jumping through lots of F10 menu levels or having to remember a bunch of keyboard shortcuts, which there aren't enough of to cover every situation. I specifically added an orbit with altitude in my example picture because there is no such option currently, and if there was it would potentially be a nightmare to quickly command because you'd need many F10 options for different altitudes or many shortcut keys for different altitudes. In my opinion, a drop down menu is just so much better here. This would be a good addition for DCS, but I don't think a UI based menu should ever go away. For one thing voice commands require getting additional hardware, it also has to work for multiple languages, and it's not always interpreted correctly. A menu can also give more feedback depending on how verbose the AI is in responding to commands. For example, I imagine it's easier to have a popup for flight fuel and weapon states than creating voice lines to cover every situation.

Not that I know of, but better CM modeling has been asked for and I think they are aware of the demand. I strongly suggest posting critiques on the AI in order to help ED tune it. They are currently spending resources on this area, but I'm not sure if they're aiming to make the AI more fallible. I think it absolutely needs to be. As you say they currently have too much SA. Even ancient planes like the MiG-21 can tell exactly where a missile is coming from and take perfect evasion action. I made a thread to provide feedback on the new AI, but it was eventually moved to wishlist: Still, if more people respond, maybe ED will focus more on AI fallibility.

It is true that I did not consider VR as I am not a user of this feature. Do you think the menu could be modified for VR use? Perhaps it would need to expand to full screen and the drop down menus would need to be replaced with sliders so that it takes less effort to change the settings? Or this could just be one of two menu options. We have one for screens and a totally different one for VR.

I'd like to propose a new menu for wingman coordination. I think most people would like something faster and more powerful than the current F10 menu. I propose a popup window where we can set options for wingmen similar to what is available in the mission editor for tasking: null The above image is a rough concept and in no way inclusive of everything needed for this menu, but I think it gets the idea across. Instead of scrolling through layers to find the right command and issuing commands one at a time, everything is displayed at once. Options are drop down format, click the down arrow icon next to an option to change it. Then of course there are checkboxes for things that need no input, like join formation, or attack target. I think there is also room for new functions like requesting wingman fuel and weapons states. While I do have a drop down for target select, I don't think this would work very well in a crowded mission, so I think this option should also be available on the F10 map. If something appears on the F10 map, you can click it and assign a wingman or your entire flight to attack it. This may require new F10 map options however. For example in a mission where the F10 map is intended to be disabled, we could represent potential targets in a ring around the player position instead of at their true locations, or perhaps the units will only be displayed at their true locations if they are detected (sort of like Fog of War).

Chaff overperforms in DCS. I also think the AI's CM effectiveness is better than players, they only ever sprinkle a couple of CM's every few seconds yet this is enough to break missile lock a lot of the time. If you are making your own missions or editing other missions you can remove chaff from aircraft or tell them not to use it.

Along with the need to have interceptors maintain speed and altitudes, we probably also need a low altitude attack option, especially for less capable aircraft. They could use a setting where they attempt to sneak up on other planes by flying low in ground clutter. They should probably reduce radar usage as well or try to rely on external radars like AWACS and EWR.

One has to be careful with this. It's a total assumption if you don't actually know. In any case I don't want to make it seem like all your points are being ignored. The general consensus is that the Phoenix is wrong, but I don't think the answer is to fixing it is trying to fake it to make it fit "eye witness accounts". Just for one thing, you were using the performance of the missile vs the MiG-21 as an indicator that something is wrong, but then this obviously implies than there is no fault with the MiG-21. There is, the AI flight models are off to varying degrees and the AI itself can be a bit all knowing depending on difficult settings. AI that is more realistic would surely help with some of the AIM-54 issues and I think those changes would be more welcome in DCS than a fantasy missile. Sometimes estimates might have to be made, but I think that should be a last resort.

Checklists remain relevant until we have 100% fool proof switches. We don't use the lists because we expect a problem, but to reduce the chance of a problem going undetected. Technically checklists serve their purpose even now in DCS with (mostly) consistent switchology. Has your HOTAS ever been set incorrectly, affecting your virtual cockpit? Have you ever accidentally bumped a switch a pressed a button? Really every modules should come with a set of checklists in the kneeboard from everything from start up to shut down.

Being seen can be a good thing. Even back in the days when all there was online was FC3 I'd use ECM to cover friendlies. I'd turn it on when I was leaving the battlefield. Unsurprisingly I'd get lock warnings on the RWR occasionally despite being 100's of miles from the front lines. I can't be sure if that actually helped anyone in combat, but it may have. Noise jamming still denies range information, so it can be useful. It prevents TWS lofting of active missiles, which lowers their range. Also, it's not the only jamming in DCS. The F-16 specifically has mode 1/2 deception jamming to break lock. You can even see it in the video TEOMOOSE posted. ECM is better now than it has ever been. It still might not be perfect but I think it's actually in a usable state, barring ECM immune planes like the F-14.

As long as it's optional. I avoid the Jester wheel as much as possible.

Damage modeling is absolutely in the scope of DCS. It's a simulator. The plane you fly is supposed to represent the actual plane it's modeled after in reality. That means if you use it incorrectly things break. And believe it or not that's part of the fun, not a detraction from it. Hardcode mode is already in DCS. It's the default mode, not an option that you turn on, and given what DCS is intended to be, this makes sense. I don't mind giving people options to make things easier for them though. I guess if you don't care to be cautious on takeoff you can just toggle immortal on yourself until you retract gears. Or just air start.

You can only successfully contradict the simulation if you're doing an apples to apples test. If missiles in Vietnam were used one way, and the missiles in the sim were used in a different way, you wouldn't have much of a comparison. Essentially it still comes back to numbers. Missile Pk can't be coded into a simulator because it's a dynamic value that depends heavily on circumstance. It's completely sensible to try to compare simulator Pk to real world Pk, but if there is a discrepancy found the only way to fix it is tweaking the numbers in the sim and you certainly don't want to move away from known, correct information. Pk, eyewitness accounts, etc should be used to inform the numbers. In the current case of the AIM-54 we have a code problem. We can't simulate it properly. Perhaps worse than that though is the fact that this code seems to change occasionally. Even if HB tried to fudge numbers to account for the code issue, there is no guarantee that things would work properly in the next patch. If we could be assured of some consistency then things wouldn't be so bad. The AIM-54 for a couple of patches ago seemed to do reasonably well. In my own experience it comes down to missile glide time, loft trajectory, and ECCM. The Phoenix doesn't like to turn since it bleeds speed rather quickly so you don't want to have it glide for too long. Loft trajectory needs to be such that the missile is not constantly turning, this goes back to the bleed speed issue. ECCM is basically the chaff reject value of the seeker, not much for the pilot to do here. Hitting a maneuvering fighter is absolutely possible with the current missile, it's just that the criteria for a successful hit force a pretty narrow optimal launch window.