Bushmanni

You can see objects from way too long distances now even with wide FOV. Although the object is only one pixel wide it makes use of radar unnecessary, especially against skylined objects. You can also easily see the missile objects themselves from beyond 10NM. I know some people will rejoice with this but it renders BVR combat unrealistic as you can find enemies too fast and easily using just eyes instead of radar. I haven't tested exact ranges yet but obviously seeing F-15 from 15 NM away with default FOV and also the falling droptanks is way too good visibility. Default FOV should amount to about 2-4 NM visibility (off-center vision) and max zoom to about 10 NM (central fovea vision) for fighter sized targets according to literature.

T-50 is planned to have DIRCM, ie. a laser that blinds seeker heads of IR guided missiles so it would be essentially invulnerable against AIM-9X or similar missiles. It could also be invulnerable to radar missiles using combination of tactics, stealth and jammers. If you really need to kill it then how would you do it besides gunning it down? Adding all that gadgetry also into F-35 is possible and relatively easy but you can't improve it's performance in gunzo with similar ease. Anyways it could be premature to declare dogfights to be history as new methods for disabling missiles are becoming reality. It could be possible to build missiles that are resistant to these methods but to me it seems uncertain at this moment if things will stay as is or not. I don't think there's any doubt that F-35 is going to own any non stealthy plane but that's not the threat it needs to be able to deal with in the future. This is especially true for the nations that don't have F-22. F-35 needs to stay relevant weapons platform for some 30 years into the future.

Moving intakes act like leading edge flaps on the wing. How much effect they have is another question. I'd like to point out that making quantitative predictions about aerodynamics of a plane based on it's looks is misleading and way too prone to errors that it would be productive or smart. You can make qualitative estimations based on looks but that's as far as I would take it.

I have had the same problem as Cibit with all limiting effects disabled. Sometimes it works but then suddenly stops working. This same problem affects both AWACS and spectator audio. This problem occurs mostly between aircrafts and AWACS/Spectator. So if I can't hear transmissions from aircrafts I can still hear them from other spectators and then if I get in a plane I can hear transmissions from other planes also. But if I go back to spectator, I can't hear transmissions from planes again.

Small turn circle is useless in a situation that demands good STR performance. The only advantage is that you need to accelerate less to get to optimum STR speed but this applies only in the case where you start slow for some reason. When you are fighting a slow radius fight, it's all about minimum turn radius and controllability at slow speed. So there's no need for F-16 for example to slow down to slower speed than where the jets performs at it's best when in a rate fight. At slow fight the F-14 seems to not be better either so F-16 has the advantage there also. Tactically there's no middle ground between radius (slow speed) fight and rate (higher speed) fight. In essence it matters little if F-14 has the advantage at M 0.5 if loses in max rate and in min radius. You should start practicing dogfighting to gain a better understanding of what matters and how much as you are assuming way too much. Turn rate numbers alone won't tell the truth as there's lots of other variables that determine what you can do with the jet and what you can't. For example, by the numbers Su-27 in DCS is superior to F-15 in gunzo but it's actually not the case because of factors not captured by simple performance numbers. They are pretty much equal or F-15 slightly more likely to win, as long as F-15 doesn't start prolonged turning with the Su-27. The trick is that F-15 has acceleration and climbing capability that it can use to keep the fight neutral. It's also superior gun platform in head to head shooting so as long as the fight stays neutral, F-15 has better chance to score a kill. F-15 has also much better agility and more responsive controls in general that makes jinking and tracking jinking targets easier giving F-15 shooting opportunities that the Su-27 can have. You can't see things like these in turn rate numbers and hence make a relevant conclusion about fighting capabilities of a plane. As an extreme example WWI biplane has mind blowing STR numbers but it would still easily lose to WWII plane or a modern jet in a turn fight. It's similar situation between WWII plane and a jet. In documentaries US Navy pilots tell that F-18 is better than F-14 in dogfights while F-18 is supposedly inferior by simple performance numbers. How do you explain this? As long as STR and ITR turn rates don't give decisive advantage to the other plane, other things are likely to be more important factors. How much difference is decisive depends on how big differences the planes have in other areas. In the end the better plane is the one whose best tactic works better than the opponents best tactic. What this tactic is could be pretty much anything in which the planes are different enough in a matter that affects factors regarding weapons employment.

GCI's ability to provide information during actual combat (max demand) is for only about four fighters. After that pilots start to not get all the information they could and should get. At least in Finnish airforce this is how it's done and based on practical experience in DCS I can agree with them. Strikers and helos can probably manage with single GCI responsible for all of them but for fighters in A/A combat you need one for each flight.

It's not ED's obligation to keep us posted about timeframes and stuff, especially when it's obvious and has been told many times that those estimates are just estimates. Getting hurt over it is just like sticking a splinter under your nail and kicking a wall and then cursing the world for your pain. It's especially stupid when ED actually communicates with customers about delay then people get hurt because they weren't told sooner. If people can't help getting hurt for postponement of release dates then ED would do a service for these people by not telling anything until next product is essentially finished as there's essentially nothing else you can do to avoid hurting them.

I can get into a PIO with a direct mechanical control input while driving a big boat (extreme example to illustrate my point). The issue isn't how fast rudder starts turning when you turn the helm but how quickly the vehicle responds to your steering inputs (which in case of a big boat is very slow). There's also the issue about being able to perceive the response. In the case of the big boat it'll turn only slow regardless of your control inputs and it will keep turning slowly in the same direction long after you turn the helm into opposite direction. You need to pay attention to see the slow turn in time before the boat is going in a wrong direction or you end up in a never ending zig zag (i.e. PIO). If the response to control input is is hard to see or the sensory data of the response is lagging, the effect is the same, PIO is much more easier to get into. Bottom line is, that PIO is a function of lag between control input and perceived control response, regardless of where the actual lag happens in the control loop. Overcorrecting only happens when the response to your control input comes late and you keep increasing the control input in hopes of seeing response and then suddenly you get more than you wanted. You can overcome this by knowing how much lag the control system has and anticipate it. But regardless how good you get at anticipating how the laggy streering works, it's much harder to control a laggy control system and you can only make smaller control adjustments than with one that has less lag. Overcontrolling without laggy controls happens only with noobs who are completely unfamiliar with the system and pay attention to wrong things (sensory lag) or outright use maximum control inputs because they don't know better. Control lag is one of the reasons why in a gunzo match between F-15 and Su-27 flown by ace pilots the Eagle pilot has a better chance of winning as he can hit the Flanker with snapshots from much harder shooting situations because of much faster control response of the Eagle. Eagle pilot can easily track the Flanker with the gunsight and the Flanker can't dodge it while in the reverse situation Eagle pilot can easily (as long as the Eagle has speed) dodge the Flanker gunsight and there's nothing the Flanker pilot can do about it as the Flankers nose follows the control inputs with too much lag. When the flankers nose starts to turn towards the Eagle, he has already changed his direction again. The funny thing is that Flanker can actually turn it's nose faster in a steady turn. PIO is a function of control lag and with more lag PIO comes more easily regardless of how experienced the operator is.

PIO is a function of control lag. If your steering inputs cause reaction only after some time you will get easily into PIO. More lag causes PIO more easily. While the F-15 in DCS is controllable with very careful steering, if it was in my power I would definitely send it back to drawing board to get nosewheel steering work with less lag and with more positive feel of control.

I have had the same problem with A-10C since DCS Warthog came out. To me it seems like a TGP bug as there's no such jitter in my ministick when making small adjustments. TGP is also the only system with this issue as Shkval, TAD cursor, etc. slews smoothly using small adjustments.

As there could be GCI available if it's requested by players so I'm requesting it. I'm also hoping we could do it using LotATC as the F10 map gives too much information and oftentimes doesn't work reliably. I haven't been using LotATC recently so I'm not sure what kind of state it's currently in but if it works it should be much better option. Also it would be nice if the there could be multiple dedicated GCI's available as ideally you should have one GCI per four fighters and as such there should be an option to sign up as GCI so squadrons can bring their own and to provide enough of them to serve everyone adequately.

The theoretical idea (ie. a hypothetical aircraft with hypothetical engine taking inspiration from F-35B) was that you could use the "lift fan" to make the low bypass engine momentarily into high bypass engine by using the extra fan to produce extra thrust in forward flight. So you would not be routing the flow through the engine or the bottom fins but have it mounted so that it can operate efficiently also in forward flight. USAF is actually trying to develop an engine with variable bypass ratio to achieve better efficiency without sacrificing hight maximum thrust but this program (ADVENT, AETD) has nothing to do with VTOL.

I think the point was that if you could vector lift fans thrust backwards it would act as a turbofan, theoretically increasing efficiency in slow speed flight. The question is if you can make the thrust vectoring in a manner that doesn't cause reduction in efficiency. And I suspect the theoretical increase in efficiency isn't much as the lift fan is quite small in comparison to the engine spinning it. You generally have much more bigger fan driven by a much smaller engine in highly efficient turbofan engines.

+1. BFM is broken currently.

Your new bigger monitor has so much more pixels that they end up being smaller despite the monitor being bigger. When the contact is only size of a few pixels bigger pixels will make it easier to see.

G-LOC behavior was changed some time ago, maybe already a year ago. If you pull lots of G sharply you will get sudden G-LOC with very little warning if any at all. If you pull G more gradually you will get the tunnel vision before G-LOC. Not sure if this is intended or not but it's definitely a bit annoying as there's no indication of G other than the G-meter and tunnel vision. The AGSM breathing only tells if you are above 4 G.

I have GTX 970 and 16GB RAM but same CPU and MB. Normally my frames are between 40-80 and with Oculus it was between 30-60 and perfectly playable.

Here's the recording from my test, details in the video description. We had lots of problems setting audio levels so that sound quality would be comprehensible so if something can be done about it it would be great.

I'll try to get some recordings and the other peoples values. My mic boost was -61% and speaker boost 105% (can't adjust it to 100%). But I think there's a fundamental problem with the mic boost and speaker boost adjustment as there's many balanced settings (as many as a slider has possible positions) and therefore you are unlikely to have similar (compatible) settings for every client unless you have some systematic way of ensuring it. Basically you need some benchmark that everyone can use to adjust their mic boost to correspond to like indicate a desired level in the VU meter that people should target.

We had lots of trouble adjusting volume levels last night as the preview didn't sound anywhere near the same as it would for other people. Basically when you adjusted it to a good level using preview, it was ear piercing loud for everyone else when transmitting and after adjusting mic boost to a good level (about -70) by feedback from others you couldn't hear yourself in the preview anymore.

While it's optimal to be able to intuitively judge what speed you need to be flying and where to turn it doesn't mean the theory is invalid or getting max performance out of your jet isn't important. Quite the contrary. The theory exists so that you can know how to get the best performance from your jet and not getting that performance is going to get you shot down against a pilot who can do it. I have seen countless pilots who "keep their energy up" and end up turning very slowly and give me an easy kill. The thing is that energy is nothing if the bandit gets into your tail. Also bleeding your energy unnecessarily gets you shot down. The easy way to learn to eyeball your turn performance is to first do it by the numbers and get it right. When you learn how the "right move" looks you can then maybe learn to eyeball it. While it's also possible to learn the "right moves" by eyeballing it takes considerable effort and time to do it.

The problem is that you can't get exact time out of DCS scripting engine (and it seems export scripts suffer the same problem although I don't have personal experience about that). If you fly in a steady level flight and export position data with steady sample rate and then analyze it, you will see that the distance between each position varies slightly and hence speed that you calculate using position data. If you measure the time at each data point and use that to correlate the positions to get correct speed, you can reduce the error but you still can't get rid of it completely. This problem exists with all the calculated variables that rely on knowing the time between datapoints. The longer the interval, the less effect the time error has so you can average the error out with long enough measuring interval. Here's an example mission using mission scripting to export data. https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=2692721&postcount=15

You can't get much better export data out of the sim than what Tacview already gives you. The basic problem lies in the time code that you get from the sim that isn't accurate but jitters around the real value by some 0.1 seconds. So while you can get accurate data on the plane position and speed vector, you can't accurately measure the time between samples and hence you can't get accurate rate of change for anything that must be calculated by comparing datapoints measured in different times. I don't know if it's a bug or just intentional measure taken to prevent reverse engineering but it does prevent you from getting absolutely accurate information from the sim. I bet it's pretty easy to tell difference between 5 and 6 G pull in a real aircraft just by feel, although I don't have any experience to back up this claim. What we would need is some artificial way to let the virtual pilot to know how much G he's feeling. FPS games have icons on the screen to tell if you are crouching or standing, exhausted or not, etc. to let you know this kind of things. Why not have something like this in DCS also. Or make the cues a bit more discrete like making the G breath change a bit but noticeably as the G load increases so you can hear the difference. Or put in an effect similar to G-LOC that darkens the edges of the screen in accordance with G-load but only the edges. The G-LOC simulation would still be applied on top of this G load indication. Or maybe you could have both aural and visual cues.

I had a Rift on loan from a friend for a week, here's my impressions. The biggest worry I had was that my GTX-970 would not be able to run DCS with decent fps for the Rift to be enjoyable. How wrong I was. While my fps was indeed rather poor being mostly between 30-60 with low visible distance, high texture settings and 2.0 pixel density, it was still entirely comfortable experience. The ATW seems to make low fps feel smoother that it would on a monitor. Even 20 fps didn't feel bad at all although you could really feel it in sluggish response to controls. While I do get slight motion sickness sometimes while reading in cars I generally have had zero problems with motion sickness otherwise. Sense of space and distance is real asset when gunning down other planes, judging if you have enough altitude for split-S and especially when flying with helicopters. There seems to be some inconsistency in cockpit scales between different planes. F-5 cockpit especially seemed double the size as my legs would have reached only halfway to the pedals. While it's only cosmetic it does look and feel very strange. 1:1 headtracking is both an asset and "problem" when compared to trackIR. It's fast, accurate, realiable and extremely intuitive but you also have problems turning your head to look behind. Checking six during BFM is a real workout. The only real issue in DCS is visibility of other planes. Contrast in Rift isn't as good as on a good monitor or TV and hence the dots are harder to spot even if they would be visible. The other thing is that besides lower resolution, Rift users don't have the zoom capability of the monitor users either. The current zoom function is veeery slow to zoom and it doesn't zoom enough. It's better than nothing but doesn't help much. I hope you could have the zoom in an axis slider like you have when using a monitor. Then you could zoom as fast and as much as you need. Cockpit instruments are generally easily readable but using mouse to click buttons is a bit complicated as you have trouble finding the mouse. You can easily aim the cursor by turning your head though as the head tracking is excellent. Overall I was pleasantly impressed by the Rift and would by my own if I had just a little bit more of extra cash. It's just so much fun flying with it as you really feel like flying. I could do pretty much everything as well as with monitor except PvP on 104th server. I was unable to approach a bandit visually from 7 NM out but lost him in ground clutter despite the zoom. With monitor or better zoom with the Rift he would not have had a chance. As long as I could depend on my radar and instruments I could fight just as I would have using a monitor.

Try pressing the S key while you push the nose down to see if it pulls up into cobra again. :smilewink: