Bushmanni

I think there's no CG shift modeled when losing tail as you only notice it by the chopper refusing to fly nose first faster than about 120km/h. The Ka-50 tail could weigh enough to cause controllability problems. At least I have hard time believing it's light enough to not require noticeable change in stick position in hover. If you look at the Ka-50 layout, it has all the really heavy components (engines, weapons, fueltanks) right under the rotor mast. But then it has thick walled titanium cockpit with big bullet proof windows, gun and Shkval optics forward of it. All that is balanced by the tail which means it's can't be featherweight.

DCS used to consider tailless helicopters fit for combat which created problems in the AI front. Mainly AI wingmen of hopelessly spinning tailless chopper didn't engage enemy as they still considered the tailless chopper is going to take care of the job. It was fixed by flagging tailless choppers dead but seems the same logic is applied also to Ka-50 as to other choppers with tail rotors. Hopefully this gets fixed.

Although we know from real world incident they will take the wings with them.

http://sa-sim.com/

Tacview shows you averaged numbers over few seconds as you can't get stable numbers out from DCS. Hence it will not show spikes in G or any other variable.

Imperfections cause trouble only at high angle of attacks. If you look at the accident reports mvsgas posted both accidents happened when pilot made hard maneuvers ie. pulled lots of AoA and the plane spinned.

Imperfections on nose have high impact on handling in F/A-18 at high AoA. Pilots inspect the tip of the nose for scratches and bumps before flight just for that.

You can still have F-22 vs. F-22 fight like we have F-15 vs. F-15 fights. I think fighting with more capable machines requires more abstract thinking and strategy while in older planes you are more concerned with switchology and just keeping the plane from departing. They are different beasts but you can't say one is easier than the other.

While not space related you can do pretty interesting flight testing experiments in DCS like NASA does because of the high fidelity flight modeling. Just read up on some aerodynamics, get some engineering related education and create some data collection scripts and you are set for some flight testing and Matlab fun analyzing the results. DCS is great tool for learning about aerodynamics and the engineering side of aviation.

I just did some more measurements in MP. When firing head on at each other around 18k feet from about 13 NM distance and then flying straight into the opponents missile we got launch warnings 4.0 NM and 3.7 NM distance. Both planes got warning 8 seconds after the missile went Pitbull. So you can get warning earlier (with respect to distance to missile) if you have less closure like when beaming (what I did to get the 6.2 NM warning distance). What would cause such a long delay in missile warning? The delay is the same in SP and MP so it's not because of netcode. From what I read about F-15 TEWS it can analyze radar signals pulse by pulse, measuring all the relevant parameters (pulse width, power, frequency, direction) and recognize pulse interval patterns (not just PRF). It doesn't take long for the TEWS to figure out a signal when it's given one, at least not 8 seconds. Only if the waveform would use some kind of LPI methods would there be problems recognizing the signal but AFAIK AIM-120 doesn't use LPI radar.

I just checked Pitbull ranges agains AI. Pitbull timer times out when missile is 10 NM away from target but you will get RWR warning from Slammer fired by AI only about 6 NM away earliest. I dumped chaff when pitbull timer timed out and then measured the distance to target with Tacview. Farthest RWR warning distance I managed to measure was 6.2 NM away using the above method but now dumping chaff when RWR gave the warning. The warning is clearly lagging behind as if you stop maneuvering and point your wings at the missile when it's 7 NM away you get the warning only about 4-5 NM away. Maybe there's bug or maybe F-15 RWR has issues recognizing missile radars and giving immediate warnings?

I'm not sure if there's some cheating going on with the player Pitbull timer but anyways you wont get RWR indication of player launched AIM-120 until it's 6 NM away. DLZ and missile impact timer aren't very accurate so I would think that Pitbull timer isn't accurate either but as long as you time out the Pitbull timer your missile will find it's target.

Player fired AIM-120s also pitbull at 6 NM.

F-15 pipper doesn't provide enough lead to hit medium aspect targets but you need to provide some extra lead yourself. You can see from acmi yourself that shells will fall way short if you keep the pipper on target. You can still kill targets with gun if you actually hit them though.

That 5 seconds is just animation time. If you drop out of afterburner your fuel flow will drop pretty much instantaneously which indicates that there's lot less heat coming out of your tail pipes at that time. Flares also become much more effective just as quickly as fuel flow drops. I was watching ACMIs more carefully and noticed that pre 1.5.4 missiles would track the intercept point with their velocity vector pretty much in real time while in 1.5.4 missiles can take even 1-2s to correct their aim after target makes a maneuver which puts them in a position where they can't turn tight enough at end game to make the intercept.

Most of the misses in my tests that previously should have hit had about 90 feet miss distance. From cockpit it looks almost a direct hit if you happen to see it but it's still two times farther or more than the fuze trigger distance which is 15 m for AIM-120C, 11 m for R-27 and 5 m for AIM-9/R-73 (DCS missile values). There were also some near misses that failed to trigger even when the distance was small enough but proximity fuze failure occurred only twice in about 40 hits. It's probably more than it used to be but not the main problem.

F-15 gun pipper in 1.5.4 seems to gone back to the previous version that didn't provide enough lead so your shots always miss behind the target.

Miss distances are larger than they used to be. All you need is a 6G pull do dodge AIM-120C fired from 8 NM away @20k. Proximity fuses fail occasionally also but most misses that I counted from ACMI were due to miss distance being about 90feet or more because the missile couldn't keep it's nose pointed to the intercept point. 90% of missile hits were due to proximity fuse so I don't think it's any worse than it used to be. Miss distance has increased for AIM-120C, AIM-9M, R-27ER and R-27ET by my experience (all the missiles I have used so far). I think this is a global phenomenon affecting all missiles.

Maneuvering is effective only against missiles fired from way too far away and only noobs do that as everyone else know that those missiles will have zero practical effect on the bandit. All you need to do is slalom past those missiles. Only when the missile has enough energy at end game to force the target to break lock because of his defensive maneuver (beaming or running away) the shot has meaningful effect that can be exploited. After certain point slaloming becomes ineffective and you need to resort to more effective maneuvers which force you to break lock on the bandit. After this point you get pretty quickly to the point where you can't evade the missile by maneuvering at all. So you could evade a missile fired from 10 NM at 20k by hard maneuvering but you would end up low on energy (and likely low on SA due to disorientation from maneuvering) and helpless target for the second shot. Also it's very easy to actually be in a situation where you can't avoid the missile by maneuvering as the margin is small and hard to judge. Basically after slaloming becomes ineffective it's safer to resort to other tactics to defeat the missile that also preserve your energy.

Depends on altitude. Around 10k and above you need to start evading before you get missile warning, especially if the bandit is below you and therefore you can't notch.

Running away is preferable if you have a wingman to shoo away or kill the bandit if he's aggressive and decides to start a chase. Kinematic evasion is the most reliable way to not get hit by a missile. In 1vs1 you want to beam the missile and dive into notch (while chaffing) so that you can turn your nose into offensive quicker and hopefully shoot the next missile before the bandit. You want to be able to shoot your next missile faster so the bandit doesn't have time to shoot or turn into notch (and live) if he does shoot. When you force the bandit defensive you keep shooting the bandit until he takes a hit and goes down in flames. If a missile is launched from a lower altitude then you you might be able to drive it into the ground by diving and pulling up at the last minute. Beaming is simple to explain but not that easy to pull of quickly. You need to put the threat emitter exactly at your 3/9 line using RWR as guide. First you should make a coarse 90 degree turn while diving (you need to get below the radar for the notch to work) and then level wings to check RWR and make adjustments accordingly. RWR has blind spots on top and below the plane so you need to turn the bottom of your plane away from the radar for the RWR to pick it up and update the marker position on the RWR screen. Chaff works the better the closer you are to the notch so dump chaff while you try to notch. You can usually decoy the missile with chaff even if you fail to notch it. You can't reliably decoy the missile with chaff especially if you don't get very close to the notch so you should always try to notch and deploy chaff at the same time. The range where the missile is able to catch you depends on relative altitudes and speeds of the target and launcher. The 10 NM distance is way too far to expect a hit at sea level while almost impossible to avoid at 30k. Still if you can notch quickly and reliably you can trash missiles fired from very close ranges. In optimal situation you need about 4 seconds to get into the notch and if you have that time you can defeat the missile.

Seeing Elbrus without snowy cap just doesn't look right.

Nice pictures. If you want to engage an attack chopper with rifles you should have at least a platoon firing at once or even a company so that you get decent volume of fire to ensure enough hits in critical areas to make it worthwhile and to make the chopper crew to think about retreating instead of shooting back. The target chopper probably has a buddy close enough to provide support with gun and rockets so you still need to think twice what you want to do. Although unless the chopper has special equipment to detect and find you they probably don't even realize you are shooting at them unless you happen to stand in the middle of a field or use tracers. Of course hitting a fast moving chopper from farther than 200-300m range without training or tracers is unlikely. You can read books about Apaches in Afghanistan and they have remarks in all of them finding bullet holes in the chopper after mission although the crew never realized they got fired on. Usually they know they are being fired on when the JTAC tells about it. You can't hear the muzzle blast (and can't see it during the day either) inside the chopper and can only faintly notice the sonic cracks if there's lots of bullets whizzing by at the same time. None of the current attack choppers are immune to even 5.56 if you hit engines or tail rotor as neither is armored in any of them. Main rotor hub can also be damaged critically but as it's larger only the pitch change links are likely to be broken with rifle rounds so it takes luck (few years back AH-1 was brought down by a bird strike that broke a pitch link). Single hit is unlikely to cause critical damage regardless if you hit the engine or tail rotor but with luck it's possible. The biggest threat to any chopper are MANPADS, light AAA and rifles as the chopper doesn't have any means to reliably find them until they open fire and even at that point can reliably detect and find them only with special equipment.

Comparing public server stats tends to be equally sensible as missile P_k deduced from combat statistics. You don't have any idea where those numbers came from so you can't make any meaningful comparisons either. It can be a good aid for an individual to measure progress as long as the conditions on how the numbers were achieved are taken into consideration. There are competitions for those people who want to measure their skills in a fairly consistent environment although luck does still play considerable role for example in Virtual Red Flag but much less in Top Gun or similar events where there's only few players in the fight at a time (the player with most skill always gets the kill instead of one that happens to stumble into the right spot at the right time).

FC3 F-15C is realistic enough that you can utilize and learn realistic combat tactics with it and there's lot to learn. If you simply want to learn the switchology (not so much to learn) then you need to start reading the real F-15C flight manual as the FC3 F-15C is the most realistic F-15C sim available at the moment.