GGTharos

I think the default on the real F-15 is not to auto-iff but you can command it to do so easily. Also, this is software so really ... load your preference in with your tape/dtc and there you go

I know a lot more than you probably think I know, and a lot less than I'd like to know. But yes I agree, it isn't unjammable but it is not a fun radar to try and jam. When DRFM jammers came out there were some aircraft the APG-63 wouldn't lock onto, but obviously that got corrected. No, I'm sorry. You got this all completely wrong. The IRST used on the Mig and Flanker that we have right now in DCS is a completely different technology from those IRSTs. Not only that, the IRST is always still the secondary sensor. Yes it gives you flexibility but the greatest value for it is dealing with ECM and IF the instrument makes it possible, identification at BVR ranges. You may consider the tank-mounted IRST dumb but it isn't. Most flight simulation players have no idea how and when and why those things are used. Do you believe its main function is against fighters? Personally I don't think so. It's still very secondary though. Training is one of the biggest factors in how an aircraft is successfully used so yes it should. Another failing of us armchair pilots is wanting to compare the aircraft alone without the system or tactics. Want to know why you don't have radars in the tails of aircraft? Because you have a wingman, so that rear looking radar is pretty useless dead weight the vast majority of the time. No, it was abysmally worse, it was slow, it was just bad by comparison. As a radar it was fine. By comparison, it wasn't. BTW my coworker used to fly MiG-29's, it's his opinion on the subject. Don't care about non-production stuff. The fact that the Flanker's radar antenna alone was 10 years backwards in technology was known when the flanker went into service - the Soviets knew it and it was one of the development failures of the flanker, expected to be corrected later, but ... well, then the wall fell The fun fact here is that the AIM-7 can lock a 2sqm target 30+nm away. This entire datalink thing the R-27 has says more about the radar's and missile's own poor performance. The R-27 hits first, sure, assuming it gets an opportunity to and you're at the right range to take advantage of it. By the time ER was rolling out in great quantities, AMRAAM was also arriving on the scene, so it's sort of a moot comparison. DCS isn't really a good way to compare these weapons. Yes, it does. I mean you can come up with some extremely convoluted scenario where it does not, sure. But if you're being reasonable, yes it does. In 'here's a reprogrammable chip backed by solid state TWT and slotted array antenna' vs 'you might not even have any real eccm circuits backed by a far less stable analog TWT and an old antenna design'. And then you have the radar that's providing the illumination. So no, we can't compare on a graph, but we can see who has the better potential. I am comparing apples to apples. The day the Su-27 entered service it was a decade behind in radar and missile technology compared to F-15C and MSIP F-15A. The Su-27M never had a chance to make the eagle obsolete. Understand, demonstrators don't make anything obsolete. It would be like me saying 'YF-23 would have made Su-57 obsolete' ... makes no sense. My coworker is an ex-MiG-29 pilot. He had very bad things to say about the radar ... but that's an anecdote, so whatever. That was late sparrow era. AMRAAM made the numbers worse for the flankers. These things aren't computed in a vaccum, the fighter is part of the system, not the one-on-one shenanigans that we get up to in DCS. There is no one on one air combat, and in the grand view of things the support systems and training mean everything. You're right, USSR back then. F-15 is a huge threat against an ER equipped aircraft. If you think otherwise, I have a bridge to sell you R-27 is old technology and the only reason it's still used is because it is what is available. You would do better pinning your hopes on R-77-1 than any R-27 variant. R-27 is a thing of the 80s where it was technologically inferior already. It wasn't a bad missile, it was just using older technologies and was left in the dust.

This depends from aircraft to aircraft; some have the IFF antennae mounted on the dish (the eagle does for example) so they operate more or less the same way. The Viper has them mounted in front of a canopy in a 4-antenna ESA, so they operate completely independent of the radar dish motion.

In every study of GLOC I've read, you're not going to be recovering any time soon. You'll regain your consciousness and you can operate but you're not 'recovered'. Or maybe they're a little dehydrated, they didn't sleep well enough or they didn't eat well enough, maybe they're a little bit sick that day, have a cold or something. The G-warmup maneuver isn't there to just get your body an extra g of tolerance, it's there more to help you tune yourself up for your AGSM and evaluate your own g-tolerance at that moment.

So ... IMHO MP is most often the opposite of hard-core. PM if you want to discuss. I agree with the part where nothing substitutes human opponents but I don't want to pollute this thread too much with other stuff. Sure, ok.

Ok, let's get more detailed. The data for G-LOCing is there and ED is using it. Ok, read the cause and effect here carefully: When you GLOC, and you recover, as far as your flight/fight is concerned, the GLOC effects are permanent. Loss of motor control and other fun stuff. There won't be any heroic come-backs, there's no 'stamina bar' that fills back up. You're f'd. The fun part is that the same happens to a lesser degree when you start getting into grey-out. I don't know the details of this though. I mean literally in your gaming chair There isn't. Here's my IMHO: The entire premise for implementing this, the so called need, is stems from utterly unrealistic BFM competition. There are a few dogfights in history which lasted a while, even in the jet era - they exist, like a 10 minute dogfight between some MiG-17s and an F-8. It could happen. But the vast majority of the fights we're interested in lasted less than a minute. Again, IMHO, unrealistic need for something that is unrealistically fostered in the game. Yeah, but is it? Are you sure those Su-27 pylons can't take it? Maybe they're rated for that weight/force? The point is, unless you want to be really harsh (and maybe you do, which is fine) there is no practically good way to simulate g tolerance levels. You'll always be at mini-game level, never realism level. It's already following STOHL curves. So the question becomes, when do you reset the stamina bar? IMHO, not until you switch planes at minimum. If you've started graying out, you should never recover in that flight. That's my opinion until I get better informed.

Ok, let's talk about why this isn't a joke then. You cannot feel fatigue, you cannot even feel how your aircraft is performing. Want realism? If you G-LOC you're out of the fight, period. How do we simulate this? Lag for control input? Certainly hard to simulate the resulting pain and brain fog. Just kill the pilot? Never recover? What's going to happen to the poor people who have this bad habit of pushing the stick forward? (don't answer that, it's just fun to think about) Blurred vision and loss of hearing are poor substitutes for what's happening, and as far as your flight and fight is concerned, those handicaps just became permanent. You may as well eject. Or maybe everyone should be required to fly with a G-Suit that gives'em the squeeze, then you're permanently lose BFM to anyone how has the slightest bit more of more tolerance. There's no good solution for either making this more 'interesting' (wrong goal anyway IMHO) or more realistic. There's no need for some sort of g-strain mini-game, we have plenty other mini-games to play.

Different type of technology about which we know even less than we know about missile seekers. Indeed Russia did a good job with this type of propulsion. Maybe in the future we will find out what limitations apply to it (it's like building the first commercial jet engine). For electronics technology, if you care to look deep enough you will find that no one has truly caught up to the manufacturing technology for certain components like AESA T/R components to the US. Same with various other electronics. So yes, 'they have AESA' and 'They have AESA' but the two AESAs are not the same.

The F-15C radar performance right now in DCS is kinda less than A-ish In all other (it outperforms) ways the same applies to the opposition. But yes I get your meaning.

This makes no sense to me. Everyone's interrogating. You're just lucky that the SAMs aren't doing it in DCS. Not sure what the difference between interrogation and knowing you're on someone's scope is.

It should be unable to track targets based on slew rate, not based on speed specifically. Speed is a quick work-around. However, it's not completely unfair. The maverick ceases tracking the target when it is close because of how the seeker works, from that moment its motions throws it into the target.

The IRST is a backup against ECM environment, not sure why you want to call it an advantage. The APG-63 had powerful ECCM instead. F-15 pilots were heavily drilled in building a picture and backed up by competent AWACS as well as the ability to declare hostile by themselves instead of AWACS and this is a very important fact. Yes, the datalink is better, definitely, but good SA building erodes that very quickly. See, datalink and IRST being backup for a poorly performing radar by comparison isn't a pure advantage, it's trying to plug problems. The SARH missiles on the flanker are not better. They are superior in one thing, speed (And yes it is important) and inferior in everything else. Analog seeker, lack of slotted antenna, lack of programmability, worse ECCM. The flanker's radar and missiles are at least a decade behind the 1984 F-15C when the flanker entered service (it was more equivalent to the 1970s F-15A with the non-upgraded radar), and by the 90s the eagle had such massive improvements that it left the flanker's systems even more in the dust. This idea that the flanker was in any was better is a gigantic misconception that was fed to everyone during the end of the cold war, and later those of us who keep up with technology discovered that it is the opposite. But also, let's be clear about this: It doesn't mean the flanker is garbage or that you should keep it in the hangar. What it does mean is that you're going to lose a bunch of flankers for every F-15 you shoot down (NATO pegged this exchange ratio between 1:4 and 1:6 ... we'll never know if they were right). Obviously the RuAF was underfunded, but not asleep - they started upgrading as soon as they could.

So it doesn't tell you 'you're full' when it fills you up? You're right, that bug may still be there ... but all you need to do is check your fuel gauge and back away gently.

More detail needed. It works for me ok. Do you mean you aborted, flew away and then came back to try and refuel again?

I definitely will, bear with me since I won't have access to my PC for a few hours. Thanks for the help!

Then the intention is bad. Not too long ago I forwarded to ED the math for determining SNR based on the clutter area. If I understand the above thing you've posted here @BIGNEWY, for 10 degrees look-down you lose 35% of your range, and you lose 70% of your range for 20 degrees look-down. The range reduction is a function of SNR which is generally a relationship of the viewed area vs the distance of this area from the radar and the distance of the target from the radar. I haven't tried doing the math do it but I doubt you can distill it to such a nice linear angle relationship. What ED has done here does not represent any real airborne radar that I'm aware of, in fact, every radar document I've seen so far shows us that look-down range is longer than we believe it to be. Please take this back to the team. Personally I would like to see a proper justification for this (yes, it absolutely should be explained - there are no secrets here, it's just RF physics and I wouldn't mind learning something new) or otherwise my suggestion is to switch to the SNR computation for a far more realistic treatment, or revert to the way it was done before, it's still more realistic than this range reduction per degree thing. It's still an easy computation, it won't cause any CPUs to overheat or servers to lag.

Not a relevant question. Various govt's/agencies don't care what you think is weird. They don't have to explain themselves, that's the nature of secrecy. Their concerns may or may not be justified in your eyes, they don't care, and your opinion on the subject doesn't matter :). ED/other 3rd parties probably don't care to cross those lines (ie. publishing based on info that isn't permitted to be used) since that could end up costing them future business.

You're fighting something that's less than an F-15A. The ability to shoot DCS 120s makes up for a lot of course. The flanker was inferior to the F-15C the day it entered service, and it was more or less equivalent to the F-15A in terms of radar performance (except range) and maybe a little less computing power for the flanker but with the advantage of R-73s. But I generally agree about the LOMAC balance, it happened because things aren't differentiated that much. And that's a fair point, but the other point is that this sort of PvP is far, far from the only game in town. Even with this imbalance there can be interesting scenarios, but you won't see those on airquake servers.

Not really. The classification algorithms can have problems with anything that causes obstruction - you would have to read up on various papers to see exactly what and how and why, but basically it isn't perfect, but it is serviceable. As well, while it can give you a basic picture and classification, you can back this up with your visual instruments.

But you don't have to understand it - the USN doesn't care if you understand or not. It's just no and that's all. That's how classified things work.

There probably never was a CW illuminator on the F-15. There was provision to include it should the USAF wish to use AIM-7E-2 and later variants, but AFAIK the radar never gained those components. The FLOOD horn repeats the HSTT signal as far as I can tell. Is there any note on the roll limitations in the manuals? There is none for the F-15 but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.

Put this in the bug section along with a track. The radar doesn't care one bit what your altitude is as long as there's enough closure. Range might be reduced but flying low doesn't confer stealth.

Ok, I'm trying to understand - the question I would as is: Why do you care? Getting a picture and identifying contacts is the first thing anyone would do, and the thing they would assume you are doing. The only case where you're giving up stealth anything is if you're either a stealth aircraft or actually undetected, in which case emitting any signal at all gives up your existence. That they know you're trying to IFF or not ... why does it matter? But, getting to radar OFF, then generally a bogie would likely not have the ability to notice (the newer things get, the less likely this gets) but all of his support would have some equipment that could - like, the AWACS or dedicated SIGNINT stations/aircraft. In DCS this support does not exist, so if you fire off your IFF with the radar OFF no one's going to hear it. But let's think about the results for a moment: If you radar's off and you fire off an IFF, the bandit gives you nothing anyway so .. .???? and if you have dlink and awacs, why doesn't your bandit? I mean he probably already knows you're there. I know DCS MP is super-chaotic in that respect but consider that your bandit has information and IFF gives you zero information about the bandit.

I don't care as much about ATC, AI needs to learn to fly individually and in formation and it needs to know and be able to be told how to execute specific maneuvers (ie sustain a turn at 315 kts with a slice back). They need to understand AORs. Then proper AWACS detection and retention of tracks, classifying groups without cheating ABC proper reporting of these facts. The ATC. Similar treatment for ground and naval AI.

You didn't write anything useful. The F-15E at 41000lbs is comparable to an F-15C at 38000lbs in terms of fuel load. The - for the 15E clearly states that the performance is estimated and assumed based on the F-15C, as opposed to 'flight testing'. The F-15D is 'only' 500lbs heavier than the C but the heavy nose configuration already makes it 'not preferred' for training. You're not going to find this stuff in books or forums, no, but that's ok. 'Someone' is going to advise RAZBAM on the facts.