Bushmanni

I didn't say it's useless, just that it doesn't look natural on the city trees as it's too strong. It looks perfect on the trees in the forests as they are surrounded by other trees that create that shadow but it should be toned down on the trees inside cities. I also agree that it makes the trees look better than the stock ones but there's room for improvement IMHO.

Missile fight is all about launching your missiles at the edge of the enemy missile range and then executing most efficient and effective maneuver to dodge the enemy missiles. If the enemy fails at this, he gets hit while you don't. The closer you get to the enemy no-escape-range, the smaller mistakes is needed by bandit for him to get hit. Of course this applies to you too which means that you have to be very good at judging the enemy missile range and executing proper missile avoidance maneuvers. AI sucks in all of this very badly. You can easily get close enough of the AI that you are guaranteed 99% hit probability because AI doesn't know how to defeat missiles and thus can take out multiple of them in one swoop while remaining safe yourself. If bandit fires his missiles from too far away you can dodge them just by changing your crank to opposite side. (crank is a maneuver where you turn away from the bandit enough so that he is at the gimbal limit of your radar) At 20k feet altitude you can get to 11 NM distance safely by approaching the bandit while cranking, then turn at him, fox and make a split-S to escape and run away from the bandit missiles. If the bandit fires at you from long range, just change the side of the crank and the missile won't catch you. The previous technique is a bit hard to practice properly against AI as AI doesn't wait to the 10 NM distance to fire his missiles but fires early so you don't get the feel of dodging missiles fired at the edge of no-escape-zone. You can set up the AI to start closer so that he fires the missiles at 10 NM mark and then try to dodge them.

Amazing story and achievement. I wonder if the source of those bullet holes ever got investigated.

While I think your textures are amazing overall, the trees inside towns look to have a little bit too strong ambient occlusion simulation making them look strange. They tend to stand much more isolated form other trees which reduces the shadow intensity at the lower part of the tree.

Merge can mean mainly two things in air combat, planes flying past each other (BFM) or arriving within visual arena of each other (BVR, usually considered as less than 3 NM separation). In context of BFM competition "post merge" means the time after the fighters have passed each other head on.

You are correct. I watched some slow-mo videos of the railgun tests and the flame "burns" only for a short distance after the muzzle, after that just crazy intense light bending shockwave.

The chart already considers mach number dependence separately. Metal fatigue happens when the metal bends ie. static load doesn't cause metal fatigue except when the load is applied. If you apply a steady 9G load, you can keep it essentially indefinitely as long as it's within allowable limits. It's the repeated loading and unloading that causes fatigue. From this point of view it could be speculated that high G and buffeting uses more flight hours than high G without buffeting and OWS has been programmed to preserve flight hours.

For comparison it's important that the flight hours are comparable ie. calculated the same way. The figures in the report might be comparable or not but until it's made sure they are comparing them is pointless. Essentially Boeing or Eurofighter consortium changing their numbers based on Danish needs could be an effort to skew the numbers for their benefit or make them more comparable to counter bias.

I think IPD affects sense of scale.

Does anyone know why you can get less G at 20k vs. at sea level or at 40k? I'm suspecting it has to do with buffeting ie. you need to pull more AoA to get to the limiting G at higher altitudes hence more buffeting but at high altitudes air is so thin that buffeting isn't a problem anymore.

Longitudinal aiming mode (number 6) is meant to be used with your radar off. You can achieve the same result by just shutting off your radar when you have missile selected. The only thing you need this mode is for firing AIM-7 in FLOOD mode. FLOOD mode is a backup mode where a special antenna fires about 10 degree wide radar beam directly forward and the missile guides on the reflected energy if there's a target close enough inside the beam. Radar starts emitting the moment you select FLOOD mode (FLOOD text in the HUD and radar scope) and all targets within 10NM in your HUD will get lock warning in RWR. As radar simulation is somewhat simplified FLOOD mode serves no purpose over just locking the target and then firing at it. In order to fire a radar missile you need to lock the target in RWS or TWS mode or one of the auto acquisition modes (vertical scan, boresight, autoguns). Locking target from RWS mode, BS or VS gives you STT (single target track) lock. STT lock works for all the missiles. If you lock a target in TWS mode you can only fire AIM-120 and AIM-9 at that target. AIM-9 can also be locked onto the target by pointing the missile seeker circle at the target. You can use radar also in navigation mode but you can't select weapons. When you change to BVR mode you will lose lock if you had a target locked. Select your nav point in NAV mode and then switch to BVR mode and start scanning for bandits. When you find one or more of them select TWS to get better picture of how high the bandits are and where they are flying. You can also lock targets one by one in TWS to get more info about them. You can use TWS continuously but you need to remember to move the scan area also sideways regularly to keep from getting surprised. When you are close to firing range, lock the target in TWS mode or STT if you use AIM-7 and fire when needed. If you are in dogfight or find an enemy visually the best way to lock target is to use BS or VS mode. You can also use guns mode to automatically search a bigger area than in BS or VS and automatically lock a target and then switch to missiles. If you manage to get a jump on bandit and don't want to spook him needlessly you should use AIM-9 without radar.

Here's a page showing the OWS limits.

Put the autopilot in path hold, point velocity vector roughly at the target and engage autopilot and what you get is essentially ground stabilized maverick. Autopilot in A-10 doesn't restrict the pilot in any way, it will disengage the moment you move the stick away from trimmed position for maneuvering. You are much better off shooting your mavericks quickly on targets you intended and breaking off early than trying to fly the plane at the same time and messing up the aiming and ending up too close to targets because you took too long to lock the target you wanted to shoot. SA is all about directing your attention to the most relevant things. When you need to fly the plane straight the autopilot can do it for you with a single click of a button which frees more attention to making the attack run properly. This in turn will keep you out of harms way and help you notice hidden threats earlier than if part of your attention is directed at keeping the plane flying straight.

Oregon Air National Guard's 173rd Fighter Wing and Finnish Air force F/A-18C Hornets training together at Rissala Airbase. My footage: Official combat camera footage:

BAE states Typhoon flight hours as minimum 6000. http://www.baesystems.com/en/product/typhoon Where did you get the 11000 number?

AIM-9M has exact same locking range as R-27ET so you can use it to get a sense of how far away the ET can be fired. Make note of how the afterburner affects lock range. You will see that lock range on MIL power target is equal or less than the effective range of AMRAAM. If you get a heat seeker fired at you, it can be easily spoofed by turning towards it and putting out your afterburner and then dropping flares. This will work always as long as the missile is still at least 1 NM away. Basic technique against Flankers is to drop out of afterburner just before you get within lock range of heat seekers.

Sorry, I'm not having this issue myself but wanted to bring it up as there's definite issue with the updater ie. presumably correctly installed game according to updater (doesn't do a thing when attempting a repair) doesn't pass IC.

Multiple friends of mine have had corrupted DCS install that DCS updater thought is OK and solved it by re-installing DCS. I have not reported it as there's no solid evidence of the cause but now after the new IC implementation the IC will fail your installation even if updater clears it OK in some cases. The only way to clear this issue is to delete all the traces of the module in all installations (release, beta and alpha) causing IC fail and then reinstall. If you don't do this the updater will copy the mutated data from other installations and the problem persists. Obviously the file integrity check in IC is superior to the one used in updater so it would make sense to use the new IC technology also in updater and maybe DCS users would have fewer odd bugs and problems and fixing these issues would be less of a chore.

The problem Stuge described also occurs if the planes crash into ocean leaving no visible debris or smoke.

Blowback (ie. pitch up in forward flight ) is a feature of helicopters that happens with all of them due to physics. Unless Gazelle has some system that makes this un-noticeable to the pilot there's something wrong with the FM. Then again as blowback makes the chopper want to keep the speed it was trimmed in designing a system to overcome this effect would be counterproductive as it would make the chopper harder to fly. So an explanation for this apparent deviation from basic helicopter aerodynamics would be in place.

Radar controls are important. First of all ACM modes, ie. boresight and vertical scan, then lock and unlock button, TDC control, scanzone up/down, wide/narrow scanzone, TWS/RWS select, PRF select, BVR mode select, radar on/off, longitudinal/FLOOD mode. You need to adjust radar scanzone elevation angle and TDC all the time and it's also important to be able to manipulate them quickly when needed so it's preferable to have them (and the lock and unlock buttons) in the HOTAS over the other stuff. AIM-120C is the best BVR missile with longest range. AIM-120B has shorter max range but also shorter min range so it's better in a dogfight but then again you are better off with the C version as you should try to kill the bandit before you get into dogfight. AIM-7M is semi-active missile that need STT lock on target for guidance while AIM-120 is active which uses its own radar to home on target. AIM-7M has the shortest range of the three but it will only home on the target that's locked versus AMRAAM that can switch targets two targets get lined up together. If you fire AMRAAM into a dogfight there's good chance it will hit the friendly plane instead. AIM-7M will not change targets and will always hit the bandit (or the target you have locked) in this situation. AIM-9M is an all-aspect heat seeking missile while AIM-9P is a rear-aspect heat seeker with less range than the M model. M model also has smokeless motor so it's much harder to see the launch. You can fire both missiles without radar lock by pointing the big circle in the HUD to the enemy and the missile should lock target indicated by higher pitched tone. If you have target locked in a radar the missile will track it with it's seeker and when the missile seeker locks on to target you hear the higher pitched tone. With radar lock you can fire the AIM-9M significantly off axis as long as the target isn't too close. You can also fire AMRAAM without radar lock by firing it in the direction of the enemy you see visually. The missile will go active immediately after launch and target the first contact it finds. This is not wise to do if there's friendlies in front of you. AMRAAM radar activates at 6nm range and this is indicated in HUD by the T counter reaching zero and changing into M counter which indicates time to impact. These counters are somewhat optimistic ie. the impact can happen more than five seconds after the M counter reaches zero but T counter will always be true. When AMRAAM goes active you don't need to keep the target locked anymore. AMRAAM is best used with TWS mode. In this mode the target doesn't get launch warning untill the missile goes active and you can fire multiple missiles at multiple targets at the same time. You do this by first locking multiple targets and then firing equally many missiles. the radar will switch primary target after each launch so each missile goes to separate targets. When multiple missiles are in the air the T counter shows time for the last missile to go active. Don't expect to get kills from long range as any player who knows what he's doing will try to not let you get into firing parameters where you can hit him. Your main tactic for staying alive is also doing just that. This implies a very good knowledge of missile range in different situations and techniques used to defeat missiles either kinematically or by spoofing the seeker. You should find more about these by searching the forum. I'm not going to repeat them here as it's a long story. Firing from longer range is still beneficial if it forces the bandit defensive (maneuvering the nose away from you so he can't fire at you) so you can get in a better firing position while the bandit is busy with your missile. Besides good engagement technique you need good situational awareness (SA) that comes from effective and efficient use of radar, RWR, Mk1 eyeballs and radio comms with other friendlies. Besides knowing what all the radar buttons do you also need to understand the weaknesses of radar, RWR and Mk1 eyeballs to know what you can't see or know so you can take measures to eliminate those blindspots. At the same time you should strive to use those weaknesses yourself to gain surprise on the enemy.

One thing I forgot to mention is that in a plane like F-15 that stalls very gradually and only at very high AoA thrust will be a major factor turning the aircraft. Even if wings and body provide little lift at high AoA now thrust has a significant component pushing the aircraft into the turn. Also when you are low on fuel and have more thrust than weight, you can make the plane stand on its tail at very low speed and still have enough control to move the nose around to make a turn. Minimum speed at level flight is around 120kts for F-15 but in a climb you can go as low as 60kts and still be in controlled flight.

Your only concern regarding AoA in a turn fight is to not stall the aircraft (like the beeper in A-10). Other than that your actual AoA for turn is decided by other factors, mainly how much you want to bleed or gain speed. F-15, Su-27, F-18, etc. don't stall in the traditional sense but just turn tighter and bleed more speed so you can pull as much AoA as you see fit for the situation. A-10, P-51, etc. on the other hand need to be driven at the edge of the stall for tightest turn. F-16 is kind of special case as it can get into deep stall with too much AoA so the FBW limits AoA for the pilot.

Thanks