Bozon

WWI planes are difficult to simulate because too much relies on “seat of your pants” feeling rather than instruments. DCS is good for simulating instruments. Sure it can probably model a WWI plane as well as any other current sim, but that is the point - “as well”. It will not play to DCS advantages. Not that I mind WWI planes, I will probably buy a few, but this will scatter the DCS planes roster even more.

Also the Kermit Weeks tour of his mosquito (not in flying condition at all). Looks like a vagabond used to sleep in it or something. It is a mess... ${1}

Stick forces were indeed an issue in the Mossie at high speeds and high G. At low speeds they were very gentle and pleasant by all accounts. The mosquito has a mass attached to the end of a lever that is in turn connected to one of the elevator cables pulleys. The torque provided by the weight of this mass through the lever added resistance to stick pull, which scales with G load. Reportedly, this can be significant and make the stick very stiff when pulling many G’s. Some pilots of fighter and fighter-bomber variants removed this device. I don’t know how common was this practice. Stick forces in the roll still stayed quite high at high speeds. I have no idea what data DCS will use and how they will model this. Will be interesting to see.

You don’t want to fight the lufwaffe at high altitudes. FB.VI has Merlin25s which were optimized for low altitudes and lose power at higher altitudes. Therefore it is quite fast on the deck (350+ mph at 18 boost), but the speed does not increase with altitude as quickly as with the other fighters. In the war they rarely operated higher than 10 kft, and typically under 5 kft. The wing loading of the mossie (empty ~32 lbs/sqft) is significantly lower than the FW190D, and indeed she should handily out turn a dora, but the weight is significantly higher too. Mass factors at square power into induced drag, while wing area only factors as inverse linear. Therefore the induced drag for the mossie is significantly higher and this breaks the simplistic wing loading intuition. This effect expresses itself as a very steep back power curve - in other words, if you get too slow (“back of the power curve”) the drag shoots up and your plane sags. Mossie compensates this drag with 3300 total horses, so you really REALLY need that emergency power when stall fighting someone. At high altitudes this power is not available and the Dora will have an easier time turning with you (not to mention Dora vastly out climbs you at altitudes, and is so much faster that it is not funny :( ).

Feathering the props. They are so big and red that you just have to... no!... can’t resist!.... :no_sad: About that... Here is KA114 test pilot Keith Skilling talking about flying the mossie and some issues with the ergonomics of the cockpit, specifically about feathering the props in an emergency: [YOUTUBE] [/YOUTUBE]

My expectations from Hollywood are so low these days that they can’t possibly disappoint... And yet they manage to. :doh: I am totally expecting an all female reboot of Top-Gun.

You can have your trainers, but I still want A-4E hunchback, dumb bombs, rockets, crappy sidewiders, and all that jazz. I actually prefer that over any other jet currently in DCS.

I am here in DCS waiting for the Mossie. Picked up the Mig21 in the mean time and will get the Jug when it comes - it’s gonna be a long wait and I only have 10 fingernails to chew on (no, I can’t reach to bite the toes, already tried).

Mirage-IIIc This. Stop everything that you are doing and get cracking on this project!

That is pretty obvious. Yet! This is the wish forum and you don’t waste a wish on something that is likely to happen anyway.:smilewink:

There is no problem to produce an airframe than can pull 20G. Current airframes cannot because there was no need for it. Had they been designed to withstand 20G but then limited to 9G because of the pilot, that would have been over-engineering, which is not a good thing. In any case, the need to be able to pull 20 G is vanishing. Drones will not dogfight using fixed cannons, and will not rely on maneuvers to dodge missiles - that trick gets less and less effective as missiles improve. Even on top of that, using drones to shoot down other drones is generally inefficient.

The A-4E community mod is excellent. I will pay (buy it) if it was officially included in DCS. Its mod status prevent certain things from working (example: the radios) and servers don’t include it because it becomes a requirement of all players who enter to have it installed and manually updated, even if they do not intend to fly it. Pretty please with sugar on top, DCS make this mod into an official module. Most of the work has already been done. I am sure that there is some business model that can allow high quality mods to be included and sold in the store so expenses are covered and even turn a profit for DCS/the developers. I suppose that the A-4E devs do not want to register as a company and negotiate a standard 3rd party contract.

They did have a turbo in it, but then were told to remove it... Anyway, there was a lot more wrong with this plane besides its inability to fight at 10+ kft. I do appreciate Bell’s balls (excuse the pun) to come up with such a unorthodox design: engine in the back, tricycle gears, car door entrance, cannon that fires through the cockpit...

That is one of the ugliest looking things in all of aviation history. :shocking: :puke: It is a good thing they put it out of its misery while it was still small.

Most of you are thinking about replacing the pilot with AI. This is not how such a vehicle will look like. It will be designed from the ground up without a pilot, and to operate in a whole eco system specifically designed to support such vehicles. This is NOT an F-35 with AI. A 100 million $ machine without a pilot is sheer stupidity. Once the human life is out of the equation the whole paradigm changes. The standards of safety go way way down. You can afford to lose some vehicles as part of the mission design. Instead of 1 100 million $ jet, you send 5 smaller jets that carry 1/5 of the ordnance. They have a much higher chance to complete the mission and overall survivability increase due to saturation of the defenses. A smaller plane carrying 1/5 of the payload and specifically designed for it can reach significantly higher structural limitations. This is how you produce vehicles capable of un precedented maneuvers, not by keeping the same airframe and replacing the pilot with something that does not faint.

There is a difference between autonomous and unmanned. Unmanned is a misleading term because there usually a man in the loop. The detailed operation of the vehicle is done by the vehicle (navigation, flight control, etc) but the orders come from a human operator. At this level already man manned air operations become obsolete. Attack helicopters are the 1st to go. Armed drones can replace them for 90% of what they do and do it just as well if not better. Then of course you have the various aerial recon missions - a man on the ground is good enough, not need to put him on the plane. The more complicated the mission the more you still need the carbon unit in the cockpit. This is why deep strikes still need manned jets. In “manned from afar” unmanned vehicles the uplink/downlink is... well... the weakest link (excuse the pun). This is why there is a push for autonomous machines to ensure the execution of the mission even if the communication with the human controller is severed. Swarms of fully autonomous vehicles that will saturate all defenses are still far away in the future, but taking the human out of the semi-classic vehicle and putting him safe on the ground is already here.

QFT Preach on brother :thumbup:

Very cool images. For some reason the A7 is better looking than the F-8. Maybe the relatively shorter fuselage has proportions that are better pleasing to the eye. What does this mean? 39 camels destroyed? I am going to catch some flak for this, but I think the above says more about the F/A-18 as a modern carrier attack plane than it does about the A-7.

It is worse than that - radar return signal goes like 1 over the distance to the power of 4... (Inverse square to the target multiplied by inverse square of the way back). Trying to burn through ecm is a very poor way to deal with it and will work only at short distances before you will get overwhelmed by the inverse power of 4. Also, if the ecm technique is more sophisticated than simple noise even that will not work. Radars and radar guided missiles can be reduced to uselessness by some modern ECM. That part is usually not modeled very in depth in computer games that tend to model simple noise jam or at best range/speed gate steals for radars and adopt the official P_kill values for missiles. That “official” P_kill is for near ideal conditions with regards to ECM. Of course, ecm has its own requirements and conditions in order to function currently so it may not always work too.

1. Mosquito FB.VI (it’s coming!) 2. Mosquito FB.XVIII “tse-tse” (the one with the 57mm Molins BFG lobbing 6 pound shells YIPPEE!) 3. Mosquito NF.XXX After my mosquito fetish is satisfied I’d really like to have an F6F-5 Hellcat.

F-20 would have been a wonderful plane. I often wondered what would have happened had Israel accepted the F-20 instead of F-16D after the US forced it to shut down the IAI Lavi program. Politics kicked in, bribes changed hands, not enough bribes by Northrop it seems, and the F16D shot down and closed both the Lavi and the Tigershark without the use of any weapons.

I will buy a Beau! Make it TF.X variant please... +1 :thumbup:

My network happened to be down when I started up DCS, so I did not login and my Mig-21 module was disabled. Can’t I play the mig-21 without a network?

If you’d build your own air-force you will quickly realize that the choice of planes is a matter of petty politics and bribery much more than calculated logic or strategy.

If a Kfir module goes live it’s an instant buy from me. Also, the Mirage III - WHERE IS MY MIRAGE III RAZBAM?!!