Bremspropeller

Generally a good advice, until you're seeing one of the most awe-inspiring sights this game has to offer: An Ace AI MiG-21 doing a three-circle on you (beating you at the one- and two-circle game at the same time) and placing one of those sweet 23mm-pills into your noggin.

I mean something different. Picture you in front of an opponent in the CZ, your and his lift-vectors in-plane. First, you'll roll 90° in any direction (get your lift-vector out of plane) and pull hard, inducing a high pitch-rate. This will bleed the first 50-100kts. Then you roll again (possibly needing rudder due to the AoA) 90° out of plane - possibly into the same direction as before to continuosly create another angles-problem - and pull hard again. This will make a tracking or even snap-shot solution hard for the guy behind you, because instead of just pulling lead (as in you just pulling up in front of him), he'll also need to rotate his nose around to acquire a positive guns-solution. Just rolling won't do it, though, as he'll also have to create a lead angle. By you constantly staying out of plane and creating an overshoot condition, you'll bring him into an unusable situation quickly. The hardest part is to not lose control and having a plan for what might happen next, as you'll find yourself with less energy and hence less options.

Maximum speed loss is not incurred just by idling and popping those hopeless, pesky boards, but by doing an AoA-excursion at a high pitch rate. Preferably lead by an out of plane-maneuver (like rolling off your lift vector), so your trajectory momentarily carries you out of the other guy's snap-shot line. Going for a boot full of rudder will also take you some place else, but don't overdo it, as a spin makes for an interesting target-practise for the other guy. The only way of surviving the guy inside your control-zone is getting dangerous and desparately creating angles and closure-issues, which is hard given he's in the control zone. Be prepared to do something about being out of airspeed and the other guy going vertical next. You're not dead 100% here, but you'll actively have to work in order not to die. Stop flying with and against all aspect heaters. It kills all the fun.

Just hit the brakes and he'll fly right by.

You can always try to lobby for a CG. The CG is what many people secretly want. The AZ and CZ are also very cool. Still trying to figure out how to bribe Aerges into making them (AZ/CZ, CG).

The A. Because reasons.

It's a known issue according to the patch notes. I'm sure they'll fix it eventually.

The Spey had more thrusties and possibly more BLC flow-volume for increased lift. Not sure about the latter part, though.

An RF-4 would offer tremendouns recce-capabilities, much beyond just visual optics - she's also capable of IR and SLAR recce. The RF-4 is very close (and possibly even a good deal better) than the RF-5. Both the RF-101 and RF-8 are down to visual-optical recce with limited night-capability. I'm in with the ADC birds and the F4D-1, which wasn't ADC, but still had at least one squadron under NORAD - VF(AW)-3.

Springs will only give you a fixed force-ratio, which is not what the actual aircraft does, as it also uses the bobweights for g-dependant stick forces. Then there's the q-feel system, that's also a dynamic relation between stick-force and dynamic pressure. Some jets (e.g. Mirage) don't use the bobweights, but viscous dampers, which are working a little different altogether. The sim-based implementation of the Mirage works closer to reality than any homecockpit setup. You'll just have to think of your joystick-deflection as a force vector onto the stick in the aircraft, not a stick-position. The used force-rate should give you a distinct output through the viscous damper: High rate => high damping / low rate => low daming.

Riding Rockets is a great book. Mullane and Hoot flew together on STS-27 which is covered in some detail. Plus some other Hoot stories.

I'd go with the Gazelle. It comes with several versions/ allows you a much broader mission-spectrum than the Huey. Both are simple to learn and straightforward to fly. The Gazelle will challenge you a bit more due to it's twitchier handling. The Mi-8 is nice in terms of handling and getting to know how to handle some mass and inertia, but it's too much the opposite direction to the Apache for just spending flight-time. Same with the Hind. The Ka-50 is a different beast altogether with little value towards your goal in mind. All helicopters are cool and good in their own niche and there still is very little overlap in their capabilities or in what you can do with them and how they'd fly. Go online and fly in the Search and Rescue server. It offers lots of challenges that will make you a good enough stick-and-rudder helo-guy to progress onwards from.

If it's left to the mission designer, it's even better. The missiles, however, would need to be available in the first place. Not sure if the IDF used the -9G/H as well.

It would be cool to have weapons tied to the selected country, so we could load AIM-9Ds on the IDF F-4.

I have offered the FL to WinterH as a deal for peace, but he wouldn't have it The PFM could launch the Kh-66 and had an exceptionally long service-life, while the FL later got four pylons and the late AoA transducer (India things). The FL also lasted very long and was very relevant in the ME. I think it's very safe to say that an earlier MiG-21 - no matter if first (incl. F-7) or second generation - would fill in a very important gap of DCS RedFor. A third gen -21 wouldn't float my boat, as it's too similar to the Bis. Asking for a friend: Any hot tips for indian MiG-21 literature?

Good point! Tom Cooper (Wings of Iraq Vol.2, which includes IrAF up to 1980) says they did with the first Bis arriving in 1979. Those incidentally were refurbished SM and SMT airframes. It seems there also were some Bis in the SyAF for the '82 war.

In the Middle East, there were lots of Ms (a gutless pile of dung at those latitudes) and some MFs, but mostly PFs, FLs, PFMs and F-13/F-7 around. I think there were no bis at all until way after '73.

If we're talking from a standpoint of nearly unlimited cash, then that is certainly correct. Finding a mixed middle ground is always going to be better than artificially polarizing and deciding in favor of one option. Most countries won't be able to look through that lense, though, and it becomes a game of money-allocation and going down the way of the threat-path most likely to occur. Or even a question of what you can attain at all and at which (political) cost. That may turn out to having been an expensive bet 20 years down the line, when there's too much "Hi" in the mix or when circumstances fundamentally change. Like today. At the bottom line, your level of spending is basicly determined by the acceptable losses of a potential enemy. Turns out, you can beat a highly sophisticated coalition of forces (!) by just outlasting them while having no air force at all - *cough* Afghanistan */cough* - if the other side isn't willing to pay the high price required for a victory. I'm trying to look at it from the perspective of "Generic Air Force" rather than the USAF's perspective: If you need to train a greater number of maintainers to a higher level to make systems work, those ppl won't be available for other applications (opportunity cost) and industries and at some point you'll have to think about the value of throwing people towards a system that's too expensive to run in a possibly low intensity conflict with a neighbouring country that's in turn facing the same challenges. Suffering an insurgency? A mix with too many sophisticated jets won't do you any good, since the HCMT campaign has shown that neither dumb hi-tech (Arc Light "monkeybombing") nor smart hi-tech (Igloo White) approaches will lead to any meaningful long term success. The portugeese experience using G.91s wasn't all that bad in comparison - safe for the increasing threat by manpads later in the campaigns. Then of course, there's the polar opposite of air forces that mainly consist of said country's arristocracy and where the 3.5 serviceable fighters serve the sole purpose of looking good during the annual parade. The discussion is becoming pretty tangiental as to whether the F-4 is a useful dogfighter, but I find the topic to be fascinationg nonetheless.

Yeah, I think 2-2.5 secs is reasonable. Thanks a bunch for looking through the videos and finding good examples! @fausete pls gib

I was having a similar feeling. Please note, that a significant part of the sequence in the real jet video is masked by the air intake, so your timing may be off by a second. I think it's safe to say, nonetheless, that the in-game movement is around half the speed of the airbrake on the real jet.

Lighter also often means laden with less troublesome electronics that provide a marginal gain in capability at the cost of incresed MX effort and possibly a lower in commission rates. Think A-6A or early F-4Js. What jet is going to project more air power? The one with more powerful and complicated systems/missiles and more range that can be over the battleground once a day (or less, factoring in availability), or the jet that is less complicated, less capable but "up" all the time, flying two to three sorties a day? It's also interesting to see how that equation shifts with different theaters of operations. If you look at SEA, the MiG-21 was a pretty good aircraft for the defensive operations conducted by the VPAF. In the Middle East, where arab air forces were trying to establish larger scale offensive operations, the lack of an aircraft with similar capabilities of an F-4 greatly hurt them.

Neither the 21bis, nor the F-4E are the initial design iterations of the jets. Those would be the MiG-21F and F4H-1. The F4H-1 was designed to defend the carrier in anyweather and dropping some dumb bombs onto the target when neccessity arose. The -21F was essentially a MiG-19 with an engine that wouldn't explode every time you looked at it the wrong way. Well, not quite, as the R-11 also had it's fair share of teething troubles that needed resolving. The F-4 came to the fleet without any engine-trouble, as the F-104 had mostly solved those two years earlier. What's amazing about the initial F-4H-1 was it's capability of carrying eight (!) missiles from a carrier in all weather, possibly reaching Mach 2 and on the return trip land at ~120KIAS on the boat. That is a technological achievement that isn't credited enough today. People tend to look more at it's records (all with tweaked jets), which I believe isn't really the amazing part of the early Phantom-story.

I think the RF-4B wasn't employed all that much on the boat. First, it came to the party later then the RF-4C and when it did, there still were lots of RA-5Cs und especially RF-8Gs around. I did look for some evidence of the nose folding over, but I couldn't find any. What's interesting, though, is that it had a lot of mods from the F-4J right from the start, or introduced over time: - slotted stabilator - uplocked inboard droops - J79-10 engines were introduced during it's service, while the USAF's RF-4Cs stuck to their short-nozzeled motors (though export RF-4Es had the -17 motor) - ECM antennas on the intakes, similar to the late Js The RFs are pretty awesome jets and I do hope that we at least get to see them as AI assets. Now, it would be even more aresome if we could get one as a module, but I guess people aren't ready for a full-time recce platform just yet

The -21 wasn't meant by it's design team to be an air superiority fighter (neither was the F-4), so switchology is a result of that. Their thinking, which is more or less mirrored by your approach is "set switches at the right time and go on with the flow". That's a very GCI centered approach. Vietnam showed both sides, that this approach doesn't work, when you're jumped by an opponent out of the blue. If your first indication of a fight is a "BREAK!" call, or your buddy going way up in entropy, then going inside the pit to find a switch should not be number one on your priority list. I think (not sure, some Fishbed-priest probably knows, though) the bis and MF already did reflect some of the experiences in the field and had their switchology optimized to some degree. The F-4 also went through several cockpit mods and quality of life upgrades that came directly out of the SEA experiences.