Bozon

@Ramsay, thanks for the detailed answer. I still think that the door gunner and all Mistrals, are silly ideas in real life, but that’s just me. In game it could be fun to hunt other helis.

Trying out the Gazelle this week. I have little experience with heli-sims, but I always liked the Gazelle and it is a pretty bird so I decided to give it a go. A couple of questions please if someone can be bothered to answer. Q1: what is the point of the door gunner variant? It has no optics so it is not a good scout. It “wastes” 1 seat out of the 3 in the back on the gunner, so it is inefficient at delivering asses (3 crew for 2 passengers?). What was it used for in real life? Q2: Mistral Gazelle - was this thing real? Some air force was flying an “air superiority” chopper? At least it has the day-optics so it can scout, but as a scout you are much more likely to find ground targets of opportunity (L/M models do fine) than multiple enemy choppers where you’ll need 4 Mistrals. A mixed payload would have made more sense (Mistral+HOT, Mistral+rockets?). So, was this used in real life? Q3: The exhaust heat shield. Does it protect you at all? Makes IR missiles harder to lock on to you? Do you lose engine power when it is installed? Thanks.

Exactly. The Hellcat was a perfect balance between performance, carrier capability, cost, and ease of production. Really, a master-piece of a well rounded design. Vought on the other hand tended to suffer a classic case of "best is the enemy of good". You can see that in both F4U Corsair and F-8 Crusader - Vought produced top notch fighters, except that they were supposed to be carrier fighters and not land based fighters. Both were not great around the boat which led to a large number of accidents, low servicibility, and the F4U was not even cleared for carriers before most of the war was over and they didn't matter any more. Grumman on the other hand designed the Hellcat with "just enough" performance - because once you have a fighter that dominates the skies, an even better fighter makes little difference. What does makes a difference during a war is producing a lot of these fighters and fast! The Hellcat cost was almost half as much as a Corsair. Grumman were producing them at a rate of about 300 a month on average. At times they achieved double that rate - this means enough planes to equip a full new squadron every 2 days, or less! The performance concessions made the Hellcat A LOT better around the boat, and a lot more reliable than the Corsair. The result of the above was that although the F4U started flying long before the Hellcat (from land bases), by the time the Corair had its issues ironed out and made carrier capable, the US Navy was already full of Hellcats that completely won the dominance in the skies. Being the best is not enough - you have to be there when the battle happens! and hence the huge differene in the kill counts in favor of the Hellcat, inspite of being "inferior" in performance to the Corsair. As a land-based fighter the Corsair beats the Hellcat and is a good contender to the top of the WWII list, except that this was not the requirement. Grumman by the way fell for the same trap with the F8 Bearcat - its was too good, too late, too complicated, lacked the Hellcat's perfect balance, and at the time it was available didn't really answer any need. Cool plane though.

Yep, the guy in the back is frantically shoveling coal into the radar.

Robin sounds good to me A well deserved tribute to Robin olds.

You mean Phant4stic!

I am very happy to hear that Heatblur are the ones that will do the F-4. I am very impressed by their Viggen and F-14, so if they keep their standards this high we are going to be happy pappies

This is confirmed. Booster button stays depressed after I stop clicking on it - I use the right+left mouse buttons method to start the engines. If I click on the booster button again it gets released and THEN if the magnetos are off the engine shuts down - otherwise I can keep flying with the booster depressed and magnetos off.

The title of fastest plane was for PR/Bomber mossies … in 1942. Later these models were still pretty fast, and could clam the title of “fastest” if the race were a 2000 miles marathon - the cruise speed was very high especially vs. fighters with external fuel required for long distances. The FB.VI was never the “fastest”. It is a low altitude model and was among the top deck speeds… in mid 1943. By june 1944 it fell behind the latest single engine fighters. Around July 44 (that I know) some FB.VI squadrons started using 150 octane fuel and +25 boost on their Merlins - this again pushed the FB.VI to be comparable to the latest Lufwaffe fighters. Our FB.VI is cleared only for +18 boost. In the latest iteration of modeling, DCS FB.VI lost quite a bit of its maneuverability vs. what it was at start of EA - it was a joy to fly then. It now feels like it lost 3 feet of length from each wing, so takeoffs and dogfights are more challenging - I still hope that this will be changed again in future patches. In terms of deck speed this is a controversial, but currently it is modeled at the lower end of uncertain deck speed range.

I did not notice if the booster button stayed depressed - it’s kinda hard to see it from my normal head position and I don’t shove it into that cockpit corner much during the flight… I’ll check this and report back.

I took off and only after 5 minutes discovered that my starboard engine magnetos were both off. Tried again - the engine starts and operates normally with both magnetos off.

ED probably realized what a cash cow the F-4 can be - it will likely be the best selling module of a new plane that is not F-22/35, and has the potential to be sold as two modules.

Heresy! Hellcat is a far cooler name. “Corsair” is just like a pirate, but without the “arrr”, without the eye patch, without the hook, and without the parrot - just a guy who commit crimes on the sea. Sure F4U was a great plane, on of WWII best - if you don’t need to operate from a carrier, have lots of money to spend, and there is no war in progress so you can ssslllooowwwllyy manufacture them…

Fine by me. This is the equivalent of starting cold with the canopy open after you “strapped in” on the other warbirds.

The E has more A2A kills than all the other types combined. That is in addition of being the best ground pounder. Just saying.

This just gave me an idea - maybe I sometimes damage the tail wheel on taxi because of the over-sensitive brakes that lift the tail at the lightest touch? Then on the takeoff run the damaged wheel is modeled to not roll straight and causes the wild skids I sometimes get? Hmmm….

If I may take a wild guess at the (real world) difference between LABS and CMPTR - a ballistic toss to a target has 2 solutions: a flat one and a high one. Normal CCRP (CMPTR) solves for the flat solution. Perhaps LABS solved for the high solution - this makes sense when you are tossing a nuke and want to release the bomb at a higher nose attitude and a longer ballistic path to give you more time to get away before the bang. I don’t really know, just throwing a wild guess here.

There you have it. The Mossy is not an Ent - it just grown at the end of their beards. I wonder how Geoffrey de Havilland was able to grab an Ent by its beard and cut a Mossy off of it.

If each includes multiple variants, the Phantom justifies being developed as two modules, one for the land variants (incl. early and late “E”) and one for multiple navy variants. There certainly seems to be a demand for both, and the avionics/system of the two lines being incompatible require a lot of investment by the dev, almost like 2 modules. If they save a little effort by using the common assets, consider it as a bonus to the devs. I’ll buy both.

I absolutely agree. This is $$$ level module and I would have bought it instantly had it been an official DCS module. Will the development of it continue? Or is this the “final” features list?

I don’t understand your point. Spraying your ammunition does not solve anything except emptying the guns. It’s like saying that you solve bombing accuracy by dropping more bombs or flying more sorties. WWII heavy bombers tried that and failed miserably - 4 low level mosquitoes could do more damage to a specific building than 40 B-17s. Accuracy is all.

Awesome! Congrats to the mod team. Can’t wait to try it.

The FB.VI is currently modeled with top speeds at the bottom of the uncertainty range, and maneuverability that also tends to be as conservative is possible - these things are open to interpretation so they are not “wrong”, plus the real planes also had some variance between individual examples. When Mosquitoes started facing the late war Luftwaffe planes, they were using the 150 octane fuels, in particular those that were doing day ranger missions were the first to get it. Otherwise most FB.VI operations were at night, of flying in large formations and sometimes with escorts (coastal command). As for the ordnance load, a late 44 fighter (p51/47) could carry about as much, but only on internal fuel which meant much shorter range vs. FB.VI on internal fuel. 1945 FB.VI had the option to carry both 8 rockets and DT on the wings giving the a much larger range than a P51 trying to do the same mission, not to mention over a P-47. The cruise speed of a fully loaded Mosquito is also higher than that of a P51/47 with a similar load. None of that will be reflected in online gameplay. In R/L this is why the single engine fighter bombers were used during the day, and FB.VI operated mostly at night when the singles could not operate at all.

The rockets are not exactly precision weapons - this is why they were mainly used against the broad side of merchant ships, and one Mosquito was not supposed to attack a ship. From the descriptions in the books, coastal command developed a system that required multiple mosquitoes/beaufighters to attack in sequence. Strafers went in first probably because they needed the least setup and could fly at a curved path towards the boat (my interpretation). They tended to rake the decks along the ship length - this sent the gunners diving for cover and then they were busy putting out fires and evacuating the wounded. Then the rocket beau/mossies attacked, usually broadside for those below water line hits. This also put them in a different direction from the strafers so they don’t interfere with each other should the timing not be perfect (the latter is my interpretation). The videos show the rocket lobbers salvo all 8 and immediately breaking off the attack - probably to avoid gunners that got a bead on them after the straight shallow rocket run, but also to clear the way for the next rocket totters and… MK.XVIII tse-tse come in last aiming at the ship broadside, in the shallowest dive and longest straight run because they are trying to release multiple shots in one run. They would be the most vulnerable, except that the ship should be in total chaos at this point and offer ineffective return fire. So this was an operation for 10 or more aircraft to overwhelm the ship. Banff strike wing would operate swarms of up to 40 moss/beaus. The book “A separate little war” claims that by 1945 coastal command perfected the system and was trading 1 mosquito lost for 1 ship sunk - worth it, but still a very dangerous business. Earlier in the war over the Mediterranean and using old attack tactics Beaufighters were competing for the dubious title of lowest life expectancy in the RAF (book “Armed Rovers”). So, attacking ships was indeed very very dangerous.

I find it interesting that the rockets are mounted in a different slot than the wing bombs, though you cannot take both rockets and wing bombs/DT - this is because we have the 4 rails type of rocket mounts. I wonder if this means that we will also get the late war “tree” type rocket rails that allowed both rockets and DT to be mounted. Technically, rockets + wing bombs may also be possible, though I never heard of such a load out combination being used (makes little sense operationally).