rossmum

Here's a video of the JA 37 cca. early 90s by the way - you get a pretty decent view of the more fighter-specialised HUD symbology. It looks a lot more like what you'd be used to from other fighters of the era, as the AJ's was very specialised towards its strike role. Really wish we could've got both. Maybe one day

2, technically speaking. As for forcing it to be a striker... yes, because that's what it is. The fighter (JA 37) was a different airframe with different physical characteristics (longer fuselage, taller tail fin amongst other things), different engine (additional compressor stage), and different avionics fit (in fact, completely different, a new radar, and with completely different HUD symbology). The version we have is a 90s update (AJS 37) of the strike variant (AJ 37) which was as much a fighter as a Skyhawk or Su-17 - they could carry self-defence IR missiles but had no air to air radar whatsoever and were never intended to intentionally engage in air to air combat. IIRC Heatblur's reasoning was that some systems used in the JA 37 are still classified due to derivatives being used in the JAS 39, but they probably also did the AJS because it offered a niche that nothing else in the game could do at the time. I wouldn't call the AJ 37 a good stand-in as it's as much of a 'totally different aircraft' situation as an F-16A bl 15 vs. F-16C bl 50, if not more... just be glad Alpen's handwaved Swedish neutrality to include it as it is.

Noticed this one today. Looks fairly straightforward, like somehow the normal maps flipped (or perhaps always were, but wasn't evident until 2.7). Running on high settings, 2.7 OB.

If you want to have words with him or something I can DM you it just do the mob don't get all bloodthirsty. I think I've seen him on the server before, guessing he didn't bother reading the briefing and/or wasn't on comms, and since he had no idea what was going on, took the opportunity to do some carrier practice... with that loadout. There was another case where a SEAD-loaded 16 speared into the ground in full AB because he couldn't work out how to get his wheels up. This is pretty much what we deal with most days, if not less severe than usual, just in this case the stakes were a little higher because it was an organised event. There were a few other mind-boggling things too, but not worth splitting hairs about. Suffice to say I don't think blue would've had much better of a chance despite the two incidents above, and the one or two we had didn't really impact us either. Anyway, screenshots: Full album - https://imgur.com/a/bKyrgWo (it's still uploading at time of posting, so give it a little while - apparently Imgur has an hourly upload cap now) Sadly I couldn't get any of me unwittingly running away from 16 (!) missiles at once, as my trackfile glitched out after an RTB. I'll have to borrow someone else's for that

Going through the trackfile for screenshots. I'd like to give a huge shoutout to the Hornet who (I won't name him) was the first blue player to spawn in, loaded 10x AIM-120B, and proceeded to spend the next 34 minutes doing Case I landing practice before finally landing and disconnecting. Turns out that sometimes, Tacview doesn't reveal everything. Ed.: he jettisoned them during the process. That's what, 1/3 of blue's AMRAAMs gone in less than half an hour, and none of them shot at the enemy? Yikes.

I'll try to remember to test this out later, but so far haven't noticed it, and I'm a pretty prolific radar user. I do have a much better system than I did previously, though, so maybe that's factoring into it.

Ehhh, sorta. You could potentially figure out a "safe bubble" from home and then just use alpha checks with the AI to work it out. It's clunky but it's better than nothing. The big problem blue (well really, anyone) runs into with the low altitude stuff is that once you are spotted, you're going to have an exceedingly hard time getting away. The 15's acceleration means it can at least turn cold and run, but if it mistakenly commits, the now-faster R-27R will arrive first and have a longer reach than an uphill Sparrow shot. You're also vulnerable to SHORAD for which you get no warning, versus larger systems where you will have some time to react. In this particular case as well, the overcast meant that they couldn't see us merrily chilling out in cons, so they had little to no idea if they were flying right into us unless they got a callout. In general, the crawling stuff isn't a good idea and is an even worse one for BVR. Whoever is highest and fastest upon launchingwill usually win, all else being equal. I don't think it was the reason they lost, but it absolutely didn't help. I think one or more dedicated GCIs for the whole match would've had a significant impact, and I think if some of the guys who are more specialised to the modern jets were around it would've been extremely hard for us. I was expecting 104th to turn up and go in dry on us again, but apparently Red Flag was running at the same time so ironically they were all off playing our usual mounts while we were trying to get our heads around the gucci tech they're more at home with.

Blue's fighters were spending a lot of time on the deck and I honestly have no idea why... as soon as the Patriot site was dealt with it made our lives a lot easier, but even with it in action, the 29s and 14s were rarely threatened unless we dived down to try kill someone. Not sure if it's just habit from flying the F-5 or due to weather or what, but it certainly didn't help them. About half the team last round were doing it, too.

There is no way you'd need afterburner below 10 AoA, especially if you're not overweight. The only other thing I could possibly imagine is airbrakes out and even that shouldn't require you to use the burner. Whatever you're doing is obviously wrong, there is no situation where you should ever be in AB on approach. If you can't provide a trackfile or video, we can only connect the dots, and figure you're doing something wrong. I've never had to use AB to land and from the sounds of things, nor has anyone else here, whether flying by the manual or not.

One of my pipe-dream hopes is a "bugs" overlay that fades in the longer you fly below a certain altitude

So just for clarity: are we going to attempt it again today, or is it still postponed?

This again? I already told you last time you repeated this "needing AB to land" thing that if you fly it correctly, you should not ever need to touch the AB during landing unless to go around on a missed approach. Don't land overweight (and you say you're not - which makes this even more confusing), don't hold the AoA too high (I can only imagine you must be descending at something absurd like 20-25 indicated AoA to need AB!), and if you're already low when you enter your approach, only use one stage of flap. Full flap + too low of an entry point into the pattern will cause you to 'need' AB because you're configured for a much steeper descent than what you're attempting to execute. I really don't know what on earth you're doing but whatever it is, it definitely isn't what you're supposed to be doing. Work on your airmanship.

Seems about right to me, reflections are much stronger in a real perspex canopy than most sims portray.

You've heard red comms, don't imply we aren't already

Worth bearing in mind that both Hornet and Viper have got some pretty substantial HARM updates since last time, and it doesn't take a 104th member to work out that they can just lob the things from the west shore without ever leaving their own SAM coverage. Allowing radars to be turned off and units to be moved is going to be pretty essential if red are to have any operational SAMs left after the 30 minute mark, especially considering even AI Strelas will turn their radars on and make themselves easy targets.

You can't disable avionics features (nor the 18C lot 20's better engines). JHMCS will be available and people will be using it, even without the 9X it's a pretty huge upgrade.

Worth looking at - apparently hotspot tracking dropped with the update. The AV-8B was already pushing things a bit, but if there's no way to turn this off in the editor, it might be time to ditch it and replace with more A-10 slots - I don't think we can rely on people not using any system available to them, even if it's technically not supposed to be used. RB intentionally made the system a little janky to prevent it from being essentially a "cheat" in modern settings, but even with positional uncertainty/false contacts, it's pretty far outside the capabilities of anything else either team has here and once people adjust to it and learn to differentiate false contacts from real ones, we'll have problems.

The MiG-15 EWR usually co-locates with the 19/21 EWR, so it's not providing extra coverage in most missions (if any). As for it respawning... the only EWRs we can sling with CTLD are on 124MHz and as far as I'm aware there's no way to change that, so destroying the 15 EWR would otherwise leave anyone flying that aircraft blind without a human GCI. I suspect if some of you spent as much time actually in the air fighting as you do looking for literally any excuse to say red has an unfair advantage, blue might win a lot more. It gets very tiring reading the same things over and over again, or hearing some Pepe Silvia-level justification why this or that all-aspect missile or standoff guided weapon is needed, but only for one team. I mean, if you guys really want, how about Alpen gives us a week where all aspect missiles make a comeback, all EWRs and mission-start SAM sites are invulnerable, airframes are unlimited again, and the full range of air to ground weapons are unlocked? At that point perhaps we can change the server name to "Growling Sidewinder 1947-1991". I understand frustration when one team is stacked and the other team can't effectively offset the numbers advantage, sure. That'd be somewhere where I'd be looking to kill EWRs to blind them, or crater secondary airfields to delay the incoming waves, but you can still do that to a decent enough extent. A couple of weeks ago blue was heavily outnumbered but thanks to a good GCI and some good F-5 cover while the Hueys set up a monstrous amount of IR SAMs and a couple of Hawks, red were unable to make much headway. A week or two later, we had a mission where right from the start, red aggressively claimed airspace over the entire battlefield and blue barely challenged it. Whichever team plays better on the day usually wins, the number of times a team wins due to a difference in available units, an extra EWR, etc. is pretty minimal. It comes off as grasping at straws. I can tell you that most times I've flown red and we've lost, it's either because of a total lack of comms, capable pilots joining too late in the mission, over-focusing on the air battle while ignoring the ground game, or being massively outnumbered at the same time we don't have anyone on comms. The only real 'mission design' loss I can think of recently was when S&D literally wasn't spawning a single red ground unit on the objectives, and when Behind Enemy Lines only had like 2 Mi-8s for us so we couldn't sling (and even then we won that one a few times with what we had at mission start).

Some sort of marking for the road bases would be nice. The red one on When The Mountains Cry is very hard to find, which is a little bit suboptimal during a fuel emergency... in real life road bases would have RSBN and other radio nav aids set up, but since we don't have mobile RSBN stations in DCS we'll have to make do with visual marks. Maybe (neutral-coloured, orange/purple/green for instance) smoke nearby and then white tyres alongside the road?

laughs in PVO In seriousness: blue generally has access to better A/G capability (except for helicopters), and so it's much less of a hassle for them to go crater an airfield or harass a FARP as a result. Sidearms snipe off Kubs with ease and the Harrier itself is usually hard to find and kill, A-10s and Viggens get Mavs which are quite competent for sniping off Strelas, and of course the Viggen is absolutely fantastic for rendering an airfield into the past tense. Red can generally do the same stuff but with a lot more steps involved, or with having to work around certain limitations. As a result they tend to focus more directly on both A/A and attacking the actual objective, while blue can divide its effort if needed and try to harass red FARPs/airbases to keep their aircraft grounded and buy time. So yeah, not really surprised that blue do it more than red, it's just easier for them. In a galaxy far, far away, I am sure the Su-17 will solve that problem and red will be able to return the favour without having to sink in far more time and effort. The Tor itself is dangerous, but kind of overstated. Just stay high and it won't touch you, or alternatively, don't fly into the valley where the FARP is. Blue's FARP is also risky to overfly because the Avenger, while it often fails to do much damage and only has a ~5km slant range, is extremely accurate and doesn't decoy easily. Sometimes you can get away with rolling the dice on damage, but the one time you get deleted by the launch you never even saw kinda makes it not worth it.

That's some real next-level Swedeposting right there. Impressive. I am not sure where the "Viggen was the only plane capable of locking SR-71" thing came from, presumably SAAB's marketing department, but it is patently false. Soviet interceptors routinely locked it, but did not fire, because it did not violate the border and nobody wanted an international incident that could lead to open conflict. Czech MiG-23s also routinely achieved lock on it and in at least one attested case, the pilot requested permission to fire (the 71 was still on the other side of the border) probably just for the bragging rights. Ability to guide a wingman's missile was also achieved by the Soviets in the same timeframe. It's not an exclusively Swedish technology and nor was it 'copied'. I do wonder how come the Swedes used US-made air-to-air missiles, if their tech was so amazing. Perhaps next we'll hear they were the first to land on the moon.

The one with every possible bort number permutation is the default skin trying to replace a skin you no longer have, hence the bort numbers being a mess. When the external model update was done, it reset all MiG-21s in all missions to either use the current default (which is the Serbian Air Force livery), or reference a file that no longer exists, which results in it using the default but also displaying 3 or 4 different styles of bort number. You will need to manually reset liveries in the mission editor, or just select them during rearm.

Radar shouldn't affect it (of course this is DCS we're talking about, so who knows). Best I can tell it still usually won't track when fired directly head-on, but if fired ~3/4 front it may track, and if fired on a beaming target who then turns into it, it will usually continue to track. It probably needs some looking at from the actual devs, but it's not that huge of a deal in the grand scheme of things, considering half the guys in MiGs launch at like 5km, or salvo-fire head-on at point-blank range, so they aren't going to hit anyway. Remember, tone from a Soviet missile does not mean it will even make an attempt at tracking - if people want to waste R-60s on hail Mary head-ons, that's up to them, but personally I'd be a lot more concerned about the guys who wait for a better shot before taking it.

Worth note that the 9L doesn't line up with this chart either - in DCS it performs as a full-blown all-aspect missile, and will reliably track when fired from 0 degrees head-on from quite far out. I've had suspicions the R-60 is still making hits it shouldn't for a while, but ultimately, so are a lot of other things and the 9P almost seems to be the exception here. I don't think the R-60 can make pure head-on shots anymore but I also haven't tested extensively enough to say for sure. It does hold track on a target once they turn into it though, so hits that are in the realm of that chart's R-60M zone are common - against afterburning targets, which brings me to the following... An important note, though I don't know how sigificant an impact it makes: this chart is explicitly labelled as being for mil power ("maximal without afterburner") and at an altitude somewhat above where most of our fights take place, which should mean slightly better missile and seeker performance than down low, logically. I'd love to ditch all of the newer missiles and go to R-13M1 vs its actual historical equivalents (9D and E?), but it's looking doubtful whether older modules will be able to carry the older Sidewinders when they come with upcoming modules, and they may even end up making shots they shouldn't do, which brings us back to square one. On top of that we've got 7Ms being chucked around, occasionally someone decides to visit a road base or FARP and load up on all-aspects, etc... the R-60's effect on gameplay isn't severe enough to really warrant yet another missile row, because they aren't constructive and will inevitably result in someone asking for a better/all-aspect missile under the guise of "fairness", again. If you don't want to get slapped by an R-60, either don't get in front of a MiG, or stay too close even for that thing to turn - a lot of F-5 guys are already doing this well enough that I'm still relying on my gun a lot. Better yet, don't let a MiG get close enough to even hit with one, learn the acceptable launch parameters of the 9P, and slap him from further out. The R-60's performance comes at the expense of easily being duped by flares, short range on the deck, and low hitting power. The 9P is pretty much the opposite and is a very good missile when actually used correctly. As for the "newbie trying to figure stuff out" argument - maybe if they only do it once. There has been a pattern with some people either teamkilling (particularly ground units, and some even taking control of ground units to shoot down friendly helicopters at the FARP), taking very limited aircraft and flying them into the ground repeatedly, or what we had yesterday, where someone switched teams and proceeded to use team chat to try and give away the locations of enemy units (which is extremely not cool), followed by taking control of vehicles that were in close proximity to the enemy and sitting idle so the tac commander couldn't move them. Once might be an important phone call or someone who doesn't quite understand how the server works, multiple times is pretty suspicious, especially if they've gone to the trouble of blanking their name out like old mate yesterday did.

It's changed a bit since release, mostly stall/spin behaviour being improved as far as I know. Not sure about since this time a year ago. The rapid speed loss and accelerated stall at AoAs well below what is usually expected hasn't been changed yet, but has been confirmed as incorrect behaviour to be fixed. It might just be that you've come back with a better feel for what it'll tolerate - for me it very much just clicked one day, and while I still run into trouble sometimes, I can at the very least hold my own until either the other guy screws up, or I make the kill. It took months of frustration before I figured it out, and I went from barely flying it and having a very strong love/hate relationship to thoroughly enjoying it, even if I still fly the 21 more.