Bushmanni

During design leading edge slats were considered and tested on a F-4 testbed but ultimately found unnecessary for F-15. Because of the tests the F-4 got the slats though.

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=124439 http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=32019 http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=121551&page=16

Real 4 bar scan is 10 degrees and that's what DCS manual also says about LRS scan pattern height. Also contacts on radar scope are updated in four distinct bars. It's hard to notice unless you create a scenario that shows it in a clear fashion.

Four bars is 10 degrees, so one bar would be 2.5 degrees.

If you know pretty much exactly which direction he is, then go for narrow scan but otherwise go for wide. Scan pattern is only 10 degrees high in elevation so at close range it's coverage is small. You need to move it vertically in order to find the target. Wide scan takes 4 seconds to complete and narrow 2 seconds. Change the elevation after every 5 (or 3) seconds until you find what you are looking for. Keep the radar scale at 20 or 40 and TDC far out enough that the altitude numbers don't overlap so you can move the vertical setting accurately.

Does every square kilometer need to be built to the highly detailed tanker standards or would it be feasible to make ground battle areas more detailed and surrounding empty deserts/wilderness/irrelevant areas less detailed so that same map can cater for both tank and air units.

I was just making a point that whatever the type of warhead, if artillery shell or rocket lands on top of a MBT it won't just shrug off the damage.

My instructor in the FDF had an interesting story. They were practicing direct fire using decommissioned T-55 as a target. Direct hit from 155mm round would bite a big hole in the side armor and send pieces of armor flying. I also saw in some magazine a result of a test fire of the Russian Krasnopol laser guided artillery round that had hit top of a more modern tank and showed similar results ie. a hole that you could crawl through.

I was referring to how the apparent compression of the insides of the glass changes with view angle.

All the refraction does is show the world from a little shifted viewpoint so the technique in the unreal engine video is capable of reproducing essentially what some brute force simulation of photons would give as an image. The compression effect can be simulated with separate compressed 3d model of the window frame for the refracted viewpoint as there's not going to be anything but glass inside the glass. If you want cracks in the window for damage model you can make them also compressed. If you want to make the refraction simulation really hifi you can scale the window frame model in axis perpendicular to the window plane to simulate the slight difference of apparent compression when the viewing angle changes. This effect is very small though and is visible to the eye only at very shallow angles. You can actually see it in the demonstration video if you look closely. But IMHO simulating it is overkill as I doubt it's noticeable from the pilots seat.

The ray angle inside the glass is different but it always exits the glass at the same angle as it entered if the faces are parallel hence no distortion but apparent shift of the viewpoint but no shift of the image. What the angle difference does is make the glass look thinner as it really is (things only inside the glass seem compressed or "distorted"). This effect is the reason why the front edge looks thinner through the glass.

If front and back faces are parallel in glass (like it is in this case) effects of refraction are a apparent shift of the viewpoint or "camera" and compression of the insides of the glass. The apparent shift of the camera needs to be calculated only once per frame. You can achieve this effect with same tricks as portals in Portal and using separate compressed 3d model for the inside edge of the glass. How doable this is in current DCS engine or EDGE is another matter.

Unit name table shortcuts don't have that kind of feature unfortunately. On the other hand it's relatively simple to make a function that builds a table of unitnames that contain certain string like "client". strNameTable('client') would return unitnames/pilotnames of all units that contain word 'client'. Used with the previous function it would look like msgToGrpsInZone(strNameTable('client'), {"TheZone"}, "This is the message!"). There could be a direct way of finding out if the unit is a client or AI but I'm unfamiliar with that. function strNameTable(targetStr) local unitNameTable = {}; for key, unit in pairs(mist.DBs.unitsByName) do if string.find(unit.unitName, targetStr) then unitNameTable[#unitNameTable + 1] = unit.unitName; end; end; return unitNameTable; end;

Here's a function that does the job. Example usage: msgToGrpsInZone({'client1','client2'}, {"TheZone"}, "This is the message!") Note, 'client1' is the pilot name of the client plane. The function uses mist unit name table shortcuts and you can use multiple zones in the zone table. msgDelay = 60; function msgToGrpsInZone(unitNames, zoneNameTable, msg) unitNameTable = mist.makeUnitTable(unitNames); local unitTable = {}; unitTable = mist.getUnitsInZones(unitNameTable, zoneNameTable); for index, unit in pairs(unitTable) do local grpId = unit:getGroup():getID(); trigger.action.outTextForGroup(grpId, msg, msgDelay) end; end;

Have you been able to destroy the engine of P-51 or Fw-190? It seems to me like the plane disintegrates or catches fire much before the engine quits due to damage. If I rake the enemy plane from nose to tail with a long burst I score lots of hits to cockpit, tail and wings but no hits to the engine and the plane keeps flying like nothing happened. I would think that it takes only few hits to the engine at most to kill it with .50 cal.

Obviously you need to get relatively close to the enemy to detect them passively (visually) but after that point there's no problem sneaking behind the enemy if you manage to get close undetected. Doing it purposely from a long range head on initial setup is hard and usually you get close to the enemy because of some kind of confusion after initial volleys from multiple aircrafts. There's also notching but it's hard to get actually behind the enemy using it but getting to the flank is quite doable. Success at modern day air combat requires good knowledge of the technical aspects of air combat, ie. aircraft and missile (aerodynamics, sensors, control) performance and weaknesses and skill in exploiting their positive and negative characteristics better than the enemy. Typical reason for bad exchange ratio is poor SA. In order to build SA you need data and then some knowledge to interpret the meaning of the data. Gathering data effectively means reducing blind spots to minimum, ie. scan every relevant direction with the radar, especially move the scan volume vertically as it's only 10 degrees high while 120 degrees wide. It takes 4 seconds to scan the entire volume so if there's no new contacts then move the scan volume and wait for 5 seconds and repeat until you find something. You might not want to move it every 5 seconds but maybe every 10 to ease the mental burden except when trying to find a close enemy who is already in firing range. Pay attention to every new contact in RWR and always consider if the new contact is something to be worried about before possibly forgetting about it. There's going to be lot's of beeping (in F-15) as contacts (often friendly) pop in and out of RWR and it's easy to stop paying attention to it constantly because you have also lots of other things to do. That kind of laziness leads to unpleasant surprise of bandit in your six. Technical knowledge is important when trying to make sense of the data you have gathered with various sensors. You need to understand what the sensors tell you and especially what they don't tell you. The most dangerous enemy is the one you don't see or know about so you need to know where the possible enemies are that you can't have knowledge of and then move yourself in a way that helps you clear that space while being in a good position to defend against those enemies. Radar range changes in look-up and look-down situations and also due to target aspect and then there's notching. My advice is quite abstract but I hope it helps you to understand what you need to learn better or know more about. If you are not yet watching acmis of your flights I highly recommend making the extra effort to generate the acmis from replays if you can't get them directly. Acmi is usually the only way to get accurate feedback on how your mental image represented reality and how your decisions worked out.

Dots are actually visible for quite a long distance but they are hard to spot. I have found that disabling anti aliasing helps the most as it will make object edges and dots stand out better. I used to use Mustangs sky color mod but that made sky darker and dots harder to see so I stopped using it.

We tried this about a week ago and managed to escort the convoy to the airfield. Transport planes weren't coming and we couldn't figure out exactly why, maybe it was one Shilka still alive in the city well clear of the airfield. At this time we decided to end the mission as people were getting tired. A friend of mine had fixed some show stopping bug in the mission but I don't know what it was.

I have played BMS and it seemed to have ridiculously good visibility at long ranges but that might have been due to more narrow FOV at max zoom compared to DCS. I was able to visually ID aircrafts dogfighting beyond AMRAAM max range to determine which one was the enemy. In BMS you rarely lose a dot against city backdrop as cities are just a fuzzy texture where sharp edged plane stands out well. Otherwise I didn't feel any practical difference between BMS and DCS in visibility of targets. I do take advantage of the zoom to the fullest in DCS though as I have it in a slider on HOTAS. As a disclaimer it's over a year when I last tried BMS. It's perfectly realistic to look through a straw to scan for targets as that's what it effectively is when you try to scan for a target that's more than few miles out. If there's any kind of visual helper applied to counter low resolution and large FOV, it should be applied gradually so that the full effect is restricted to a small area at the center. Losing sight of the enemy is realistic and it can be avoided in DCS if you keep sight of him like you should. Dynamically colored dots that consider shadows, lighting, overall directional color, reflections and distance would be good to have in DCS.

My idea was to remove the R_aero missile only after the AI is within lethal range so that it will waste only one missile. But of course altering ROE or some other method that prevents the firing altogether before in sensible range is much better solution.

That wobbling is most likely due to net code. There's a prediction algorithm that moves the plane between updates to make it fly smoothly but it can't anticipate the pilots actions so there's some slight error that shows up as wobbling when new update corrects the planes position and orientation.

It should be noted that human vision is sharp only in a very narrow angle (about 3 degrees). If you have a smart scaling or label system that gives a spotting ability of central vision to whole FOV we get unrealistically good ability to see and spot targets. Any kind of spotting aid should consider acuity gradient of the visual field. Current zooming method does simulate this though in a rather cumbersome way. If you want to spot a hard to see target you need to scan the area where the target is with your central vision in order to spot it. Too good spotting aid will make realistic sneak attacks impossible or at least too hard which is not good either. I don't want people to spot my plane as a dot (or something else) from 10nm out with no effort to scanning as that would be completely unrealistic.

There's already a check on the missile speed that will remove missiles that are slower than their target. It still doesn't help much against AI launching missile at R_aero and then waiting for the missile to slow down though. Maybe also missiles launched before sensible launch distance should be removed when AI plane gets into good launch parameters. This is much harder to do but it would actually make a big difference in AI lethality.

I think angular visibility in DCS is pretty much like it should. I can see targets far out (>10nm) if I know where they are and I might lose a bandit at 3nm distance if he is below horizon against cluttered background. There's some discussion in Shaw's Fighter Combat- Tactics and Maneuvering about impact of visibility and it seems to hold true in DCS pretty well. You do have to use zoom to get correct results and according to Sithspawns quote from ED thats how it's designed to work. Personally I like this approach as it provides realistic results with just raw math. This approach could be problematic with Rift though as variable FOV might not be possible and in that case something needs to be done. I do have to say that sometimes it seems like contrast between bandit and ground/sky is less than it should due to shadows not being rendered correctly due to LOD or sky color is too dark. The contrast issue is problematic especially when the bandit is just a single pixel. Anti collision lights, after burner flames, sun reflections and flares are also less visible than you would expect as they are not rendered when the pixel size gets too small / LOD changes even if they would be clearly visible in real life. For example distant stars angular size is miniscule but still they can be seen well with naked eye because stars are immensely bright (lots of Candelas) objects. Similarly small anticollision/nav light can be seen much farther than similar sized white blob due to its brightness but currently they both seem pretty much equally visible in DCS. I hope ED would improve sub pixel rendering and visibility of bright light sources.