Bozon

The Starfighter was perfectly capable of killing its pilot without a gun, which seems to be the main purpose of this fighter

@GUFA, Indeed it seems that Missiles became the main weapon since the 1980’s. Initially the IR missiles and then the latest FOX1 and FOX3 since the 1990’s. The reliability of the missiles and number carried per plane are what made the gun less needed. However, we have not yet faced the next stage of the evolution - the counter measures. Since the 2000’s counter measures technology has leapt forward. We now have sophisticated active jammers against fox1 & 3, and active laser counter measures against fox2. There could be other means in the future. How will this play out in the next conflict? Will these counter measures reduce missiles effectiveness to the point where guns will be required again?

Here I found this article: https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/Air-to-Air-Report-.pdf It has the breakdown of kills in air combat around the world over the decades. There are strong differences between their air forces. While in 1972 the vast majority of American kills were with missiles, the Israeli air force was still getting 60% of the kills in 1972-73 with cannons. In absolute numbers, the Israelis had more gun kills during this period than all the American air to air kills in Vietnam during this period, combined - so this heavily skews the global averages.

During Yom Kipur 1973 war a significant fraction of the kills by the Israeli air force were still with cannons, divided between Nesher, Mirage III and Phantom F-4E (many gun kills). During 1982 over the Bakaa valley, most kills were by Shafrir missiles and some Aim-9. Sparrows were used by F-15A and had a small number of kills and were considered as poor. They were highly susceptible to ECM, especially active emitters. Still, a few gun kills happened by F-16A and F-15A - I don’t have an exact breakdown. The Israeli air force would not accept a fighter without a cannon. Maybe in 2023 things are different. The F-104 proved that you don’t need a cannon if you do not engage the enemy. Especially in the 60’s & 70’s.

“Should” or “is” fine for the most time in DCS?

The cloud base is what matters the most. If the cloud base is high enough, then they had an instruments descent process to penetrate the clouds and end up just under the cloud base with the runaway in front, to proceed with visual landing. I am not sure of the details, if this was GCI guided, or instrumentation, or both. If the cloud base was under the limit or runway visibility too poor (fog) then they had to divert to another field.

The issue for flak gunners shooting at very low targets is: what happens with the shells that miss? If you fly a few feet above ground across the airfield, the flak gunners are blasting away at their own structures behind you from their perspective - they’ll probably cause more damage to their own base than you will be able to. Even at slightly higher elevations there is a risk that the shells with too long fuses will hit the ground around the airfield before air-bursting, wrecking havoc in a few km radius. I don’t know how it played out in reality, but I expect flak gunners were worried about this when shooting at low elevations.

Israel Aerospace Industries had a flying prototype of Super Phantom, which was an Israeli upgraded “Kurnas” with the Lavi’s intended PW1120 engines. These were small enough to easily fit into the Phantom. The performance could embarrass some 4th generation fighters. This was in 1987. https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/07/israels-f-4-super-phantom-the-killer-fighter-jet-that-never-flew/

@grafspee, you mix things up regarding the Mosquitos. Mk XVI is B.XVI - it is an unarmed bomber optimized for high altitudes. It comes from a different development line (different prototype) than our FB.VI. In addition, FB.VI was special by being optimized for operating at very low altitudes. While the top speed of the B.XVI is significantly higher (30+ mph) than FB.VI’s, it is achieved at nearly 30,000 feet. At sea level the FB.VI was the fastest mosquito model. FB.VI entered service in May 1943, and changed very little to the end of the war. In 1943 and at low altitudes it was faster than any Lufwaffe fighter - the contemporaries were 109G6 and 190A5. By mid 1944 the speed advantage was eroded, and day intruder/ranger mosquitos were equipped with 150 octane fuel and engine boosts of +25 (our does +18). This again pushed the FB.VI to be faster than the Luftwaffe fighters (109G14 and 190A8 by then). By the end of the war, the latest LW fighters 109K4 and 190D9 were as fast or faster than an FB.VI even with 150 octane fuel. However, as mentioned in the posts above, these were a small minority of the LW force and the FB.VI met mostly the older slower opponents. Some FB.VI squadrons whose missions were mostly night ground attack and close to the front lines under allied air superiority, still used 130 octane fuel since they rarely met LW fighters at all. The situation in DCS is that we have the 1943 performance Mosquito FB.VI facing in day light the 1944 190A8, and mostly the 1945 109K4 and 190D9, without the benefit of 150 octane fuel required for that. The story with the speed of the bomber variants and the night fighters is a little different, but we don’t have them in DCS.

A Very flares pistol is a must.

HB are putting the final touches on the C0ff3 cup holder and the A.S.H Tray modeling. After that it is just a matter of texturing the fuzzy dice hanging front the pilot’s rear view mirror and the plastic Jesus on the GiB’s front panel and it is ready for release.

Look, from your replies it is obvious that you are in over your head. There are some basics that you need to learn about each specific plane. Did you do the tutorial missions? Did you read one of the guides (dcs’s or Chuck’s)? https://chucksguides.com/

If you are doing a rudder dance, you are already doing it wrong. If you handle it correctly, the Mosquito requires very little rudder and/or differential braking inputs. The key ingredients: 1. Align the tail wheel and get to a complete STOP. 2. Trim rudder right till the indicator points to the letter “T” of “Trim”. Elevators two notches forwards (a long press). Ailerons 1 notch to the right. Flaps 10 degrees on the gauge. 3. While on brakes, bring the power up to 10–12 boost - no more at this stage! Do not let go of the brakes before the power stabilizes. 4. Let go of the brakes. If you start veering off, apply rudder to resist until fully deflected - if this is not enough (it will not be at slow speeds) only then tap the brakes lever while still at full rudder deflection. When the veering is negated try to hold course with the rudder alone - no sudden changes, and no dancing on the rudder! 5. Within a couple of seconds you will be able to completely overcome any veering off tendencies with the rudder alone. Do not use the brakes if the rudder alone is sufficient! From this point, rudder inputs should be minimal and smooth. 5. Do not mess with the throttles until you have a strong rudder response - then you can go full power if you like.

For some reason, the Mosquito’s “neutral” nose trim at typical cruising speeds is around 2 notches “forwards” on the indicator. This is quite a lot and takes a long press of the “trim nose down” assigned button. Make it a habit to trim elevator 2 notches forward before take-off (10 deg flaps also smoothens the takeoff). This will lift your tail by itself at around 100 mph, and after takeoff accelerating past the safe speed your trim will require only small adjustments.

Interesting, this could explain a few things, like why sometimes the artificial horizon never correct itself and in other sorties it is OK - sometimes while taxiing I do pull the throttle back to slow down into a turn, and RPM drops to below 1200 during the maneuver. So if the quoted above is correct, the state of my AH during the sortie will depend on how I behaved during taxi. I’ll have to test that. In any case this seems incorrect. I mean AH not functioning at low RPM and suction is OK, but it should recover just fine after RPM is increased.

Long time ago, while still waiting for the Mosquito release I started the following thread. It has some lesser known but good Mosquito stories. In each post I also mentioned the sources:

“Terror in the starboard seat” by Dave McIntosh. Hands down. Read it now and thank me later. Easily one of the best written autobiographies I’ve read.

@Skewgear OK, I hope this is not exaggerated and “Fortress Europe” will not be defended by pigeons. If there is no graphic representation of a bird strike, can we get some message? What I fear is that I’ll be hit by birds and not even realize why my engine died: was it ground fire? did I miss-handle it? did I hit a treetop? Most bird strikes did not kill the engine - at least so it seems. This may be a clear case of survivors bias though, where the cases of dead engine did not return to report it… IDK.

Are you guys trying to make the server as unfun for Mosquitoes as possible?

Once F-15/16 took over air superiority roles, the F-4E were not expected to engage in air combat - they were relegated purely to strike roles. This is why of the 83 air to air kills of the 1982 Lebanon war, only 1 was by a Phantom, and that one broke away from the F-15s that were escorting it and raced towards a low Mig it spotted before the F-15s would steal the kill…

This is great, but just remember that the historical tests we compare to were performed by a human flying the real plane, including the minor control inputs and imperfect coordination of flight. I still get a perfectly straight slip needle when rudder trim is exactly neutral (knob on the white triangle), and that gives a slower speed than a rudder trim offset to the right and a small left-leaning slip needle. I am away from home for the next two weeks - after that I will map the top speed vs. rudder trim (and resulting slip reading), so we’ll be able to see where the max speed is obtained.

Though I am not a great believer in the Aim-7s I do understand their true value - they had a low Pk in reality, but they had it where heaters of the period had a Pk of flat 0. That was not only BVR - in combat conditions Aim-9B up to J still struggled even at 90 degrees aspect, where the Aim-7 would guide just fine at any aspect as long as you can keep the radar on target.

The R530 was considered useless. It got exactly 1 kill on an unsuspecting Mig-19 from behind, and the Israeli Mirage 3s hardly ever carried it. In fact the whole radar of the Mirage III was considered as dead weight and the Israelis requested its replacement with a simpler range-finder in the Mirage V (Nesher). Mirage III was considered a better fighter than the F-4E and was responsible for air defense and air superiority during Yom-Kippur. On the other hand the Phantom was hands down far superior striker, no question. Dany Shapira, Israel’s chief test pilot at the time, says in his book he used some personal connections to get a flight in a Phantom before they were even being considered to be sold to Israel. He was impressed, but when the American instructor asked him what he thought he answered tacktlessly “In a dogfight, I’d rather be in a Mirage”.

@Racoon and @Yo-Yo Thanks for posting the above recording, it helped me find the source of the speed difference. There is an issue with the slip/turn indicator. In the recording above, the rudder trim is pointed at the "R" of the "TRIM" label. At that state the slip needle is NOT CENTERED but the mosquito reaches 340 mph - faster than my tests. Rotating the rudder trimmer to the neutral position (white triangle) also centers the slip needle - this is how I flew in my tests. My no-slip trim state should have been faster, however it is the other way around! To confirm, I tested the Mosquito with the un-centered slip needle and indeed was able to obtain 296 kts (340 mph). Then trimmed the rudder to center the slip needle and lost 7-8 mph to get the familiar 332-333 mph result.

Visual ID depends on situation. In the Israeli air force, the CGIs keep a very tight monitoring of all friendly aircraft - this allowed them to authorize BVR “fire at will” in many cases for the Sparrow totting F-4Es in 1973 and the F-15As in 1982. As part of a strike package sparrows are not useful at all. Your job is to strike and GTFO - if you are forced to engage enemy fighters, given 1970s technology, it will be from a range too short for a BVR game. The Israelis had little faith in the Sparrows anyway, maybe that is the reason for this interesting field mod to take heaters in their place. On the other hand in 1973 they still had a lot of faith in the cannon.