rossmum

The BK 90 worked flawlessly about two or three months ago when I was using it to annoy the crap out of red's FARPs. If even I can set it up, I don't understand why anyone else can't. Then again, I hear that even loading the data cartridge into the CK 37 can be too much for some. There must've been 'nobody' on the server the other day, when some were lobbed at our FARP and Ras Al Khaimah on the Prince of Persia mission. The Vikhr has an actual air-to-air function as an emergency capability. Personally I would like to see both the Ka-50 and the Su-25T removed from the server, but then we would be down to the Su-25's laser-guided missiles while blue would still have Mavericks, and the Mi-24 still hasn't arrived. Once it has, I very much hope those two aircraft disappear. The difference is that the Viggen's Maverick, when locked onto an aircraft, will follow it until it hits - you can't run it out of energy, it will either match your turns or loop back and reacquire you, it can be fired from the ground, it even lofts sometimes. This is not some emergency capability, because it defies the laws of physics to score the hit. This is a bug. During one session of The Desert Has Eyes a month or two ago I watched some absolute genius in a Viggen misidentify another Viggen in a furball ahead of him, lock the guy, fire a Mav... which then lofted, flew over to him, followed all his turns and killed him. I've seen it done a couple of times on the server (and even more on Tacviews saved from others). Just because you are not using them (and as I've seen so far, nobody who posts in this thread is) it does not mean that nobody is using them that way. I'll have to dig through my old ones to find which mission I saw it on, and there were other instances earlier in the year which happened within the 10 min window that Tacview doesn't record. Let's have all the changes red players asked for recently reversed, and see what happens. After all, we were the ones asking for R-60s to be taken out of the rear aspect weapon set, we were the ones who got the MiG afterburner bug fixed so it was no longer immune to RB 24s/GAR-8s/9Ps while in full burner, etc...

For months, red have had organisation, just a looser kind between players and GCIs. For months, some of us who mostly play red (but play both teams when needed) have tried to have advantages taken away because it felt unfair on blue or just wasn't creating an interesting environment. It came to a head several sessions where blue were almost unable to leave the airspace over their own airfield, because red had plenty of players on SRS listening to GCI and talking amongst each other, while every time I went blue... silence, and a total lack of understanding about the capabilities red's aircraft had, especially under the older version of the 'rear aspect only' restrictions. The MiG afterburner heat signature bug, which made the older AIM-9/RB 24 models unable to lock it when the AB was lit - fixed because of red players reporting it. The previously unfair weapon set where blue had no missiles that could engage from the frontal aspect and we had the R-60 - fixed because we pointed out that we had an advantage. We pushed back against the people trying to claim the unstallable FM bug a few months ago was 'better' because we knew it was unrealistic. If you'd like the 'rear aspect' weapon set to return to the days where all a MiG pilot had to do to win any engagement was force a head-on merge and fire a close range R-60 while neither Viggen nor F-5 can even get tone, then be my guest. I brought up rear-aspect missiles with the idea it might be interesting in a few missions to give the MiG-19 some semblance of relevance, and Alpen decided to implement it fully of his own accord. While I do find it has brought about much more intense fights, if you think I wanted to kiss my R-60s goodbye because I thought it'd somehow make things easier for someone like me who mostly flies the 21 on red and knows not to go head-on with it while on blue, I don't know what to tell you. The Viggen's Mavs had been used, albeit infrequently, as wake-homing A2A weapons. If you'd like to tell me that's realistic or even remotely logical behaviour, be my guest. You still have the other Mavs and from what I've seen, they worked fine. You had (and seem to have again, on some missions) the BK 90, which red has no counterpart to (let alone no counterpart to the Viggen itself, in a strike role). We tolerated it for a long time despite this, hell I learnt how to use the things while on blue, waiting for the MiG's FM to get fixed. However, it is a weapon that falls outside the Cold War time period. The Harrier was being used almost purely as an air to air platform because it had far more modern missiles than anything else, and a very tanky DM - I haven't seen a Harrier used to perform an actual strike mission in months. Maybe if this is acceptable to you, we could have the Su-25T back with its R-73? It's interesting how, for a team with "no organisation", any time we have more than one person in JTAC slots people trot out complaints about how we supposedly have 4 GCIs, or how every time they get into a fight it's not with one MiG but two or three or four. Really impressive how any time certain people want things made nice and easy for them they ask for it and get it, while apparently red players are only allowed to ask for changes that benefit blue, and still that isn't enough. And then people wonder why we've stopped playing both teams, like anyone would want to deal day to day with the double standards or condescending attitudes that fill the thread. So yeah, perhaps let's have our R-60Ms back, I guess, and our Su-25T/R-73 while we're at it. ---- EDIT - the 21 can occasionally tank missiles and remain flying, but generally is not combat effective, which you would know if you flew it more. It absorbs 20mm like a champion (and it shouldn't, though I suspect this is a problem with cannon damage values in the game in general rather than any one module) but any close prox det or direct hit by a missile will either partially or fully destroy the electrical system. As anyone who regularly flies the 21 is aware, this means you can't even jettison your missiles, let alone fire them - if you're going to continue fighting it is going to be with your gun only, and most likely without a gunsight either. By comparison, we have the Viggen, which for at least nine months now has been fully capable of firing missiles off of wings that have been physically blown off of the aircraft. Let's not play little games of intellectual dishonesty by claiming this equates to a 21 sometimes limping home and crash-landing either in a farmer's field or alongside the runway. I have seen this and caught it on stream numerous times, both as the MiG who's trying to kill the Viggen and as the Viggen who's just had their plane blown in half yet still has enough control to put the seeker FoV over a MiG and blow him away. I didn't bring the issue up previously, because the MiG was also sometimes capable of flying effectively (but not firing back) with no wings. That has since been fixed and the aircraft is no longer controllable with a wing gone - the best you can do is limp very awkwardly until the fuel leak runs you empty or the fire burns the whole aircraft down. You're not talking to some tribalistic luddites here who only play red aircraft. Many of us own and fly blue aircraft as well, we know what works and what doesn't.

Wasn't it only recently that some Sabre slots were removed to provide more AJS-37 slots, because "nobody flies the Sabre" and blue "needs more strikers"? I think it was that day or the one after that I first played Fight Island, and noticed while checking Tacview afterwards just how many of those "strikers" were striking... didn't take long before red had more than twice as many units on the ground, and we didn't exactly have many strike sorties running either. It's one thing to acknowledge that the sim is flawed. For the longest time I didn't worry too much about the Viggen's ability to fly without wings because the MiG could do it too (though at least the MiG couldn't fire missiles in that state). It's another entirely to expect accommodation for one side while telling the other to suck it up because it's only a game, and everyone needs to adjust to what the flavour of the week module is. Incidentally, the Viggen (despite issues) was fine with the all-aspect setup. Its problems were balanced out by the wider envelope for engagement. Unfortunately, that environment made life a bit unpleasant for the F-5s having to deal with MiGs, and reduced most fights to a jousting match to see who got tone first, or who flared early enough. Personally I like flying the Viggen and I'd rather keep it around, but when it suddenly replaced the F-5 as primary fighter and ground targets perfect for its capabilities are being ignored or left for A-10s or even F-5s, it makes me scratch my head and wonder.

This is a common and consistent issue. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen one or both wings come off, stores fall loose, and as I turn away I receive a missile off the phantom wing for my troubles. I've also been on the giving end, blasting MiGs as they overshoot me despite losing most of my flight surfaces. It's similar to the problems the MiG-21 had a year or two ago, where you could still fly and retained full control authority even if the entire wing was visibly gone, but in the 21's case you'd almost always lose the electrical system so your missiles couldn't be jettisoned (let alone fired). In the Viggen it's a somewhat more pressing problem, as it rarely loses the ability to continue firing no matter what state it's in.

That's probably a more accurate description of what I'm talking about - it will 'follow' a target only in the vertical plane and exhibits no lateral movement whatsoever. It only does this when locked and it's still not accurate enough to cue you onto the actual target if you're struggling to see it, you have to use the radar display itself for that. I don't use gyro often so I'll have to check that out. E: It does indeed track the target directly in gyro mode, welp :noexpression:

It tracks radar-locked targets, but only in the vertical plane - it's caged horizontally. This is accurate behaviour IIRC.

There is a difference between understanding what a pilot means when they say something, and blindly repeating something similar to what was said without understanding what the pilot meant. I'd like to refer back to another thread where it was claimed that because the early MiG-21s didn't have an AoA indicator (an instrument that only became commonplace in the second and even third generation jets), it could not have any particularly dangerous stall behaviour. I won't say who made the claim, I think they know who they are, and I'm surprised they learnt nothing from it. Pilots are not a hivemind. Each pilot feels the aircraft differently and will use different words to describe it. Some remember the systems as well as any of the maintainers, some remember the feel but are liable to forget some of the finer details of the systems. I know of at least one pilot who was perplexed by something they likely would have had some kind of instruction on, at least in manuals, because they didn't use the relevant equipment in their particular variant and probably skimmed or altogether skipped out on that part of the manual, even though it was technically a system their aircraft supported. Sometimes pilots don't know everything about the plane they fly, or they forget little details, or they muddle up one thing with another, or maybe they even heard an old wives' tale about some subsystem only really relevant to the ground crew and retain it as trivia, even if it's not strictly true. Everyone does it. I never heard so many myths about small arms in my life as I did while in a job centred around them. The MiG cannot hold its speed in a consistent 60 deg. climb, at any power setting. You lose like 20-30% of your max thrust when the emergency burner kicks off at 4,000m ASL (which puts you back below 1:1 TWR), and the remainder is tapering off with altitude. You will either need to shallow out your climb to maintain speed, or realise you're essentially in a ballistic climb that's going to put you well below where you could get with a proper climb profile (and too slow to sustain the altitude when you get there).

Mission settings override player setting. If you're playing somewhere like GS or DDCS (unless Red finally fixed it) - then bring it up with the server owner. My pipper doesn't follow the IR seekers unless I'm playing on a server which enforces server settings for special options - in both SP and on Alpen's Cold War the ASP behaves as it should. I've been away from home for a few days so I'll double check it didn't break in the most recent update, but for now that would be my first suggestion - check in SP and different servers.

I'll be away from home until next week, but if you need any pointers with the 21 I'm happy to help. If you see me on the server give me a shout and we can fly together, maybe do some basic orientation/mock combat stuff behind the lines then go on a patrol, like I used to do for when my friends got into Rise of Flight :D

The R-13 turns very well but only after its initial burst of acceleration. It can make some impressive turns, it just won't make R-60-like turns. I haven't had much luck with the R-3S previously, but I might give it another go and see how it is now.

What? Where are you getting 2017 from? The DCS MiG-21 came out before 2017. The last real-life MiG-21Bis rolled off the production line over 30 years earlier. There has been no redesign to make it "closer to the Cold War era". There were corrections to external dimensions and details of the DCS MiG-21Bis, because advances in graphics allow more detail, and the developers have more reference material to correct inconsistencies with the real aircraft. That has nothing to do with era.

Yep. DCS simplifies it (like the amount being auto-set by the ground crew) but for most purposes it's close enough, and fully trusting the fuel gauge in pretty much anything in the real world is a bit dicey at the best of times.

21 radar can be temperamental. If you turn it off and then suddenly need it again, it takes forever to warm back up. I flip it to standby during my early startup and don't turn it back off unless I know I'm RTB with no likelihood of a fight. Ditch the second gun for a countermeasure pod, requires a subtle roll trim (which the Viggen can thankfully perform, lol) and go like that. That way you get the best of both worlds - a gun for dealing with helicopters/finishing people off, and flares to save you from missiles. Two AKANs is overkill and you're right, they're very heavy. I wish they could be mounted on the centreline in place of the X-tank, but it is what it is. As for the missiles not being good... the 24J isn't great but it sure isn't bad. The biggest problem I've noticed on the receiving end is that a lot of people overestimate the turning ability of the Sidewinders and fire them too close or at far too high an aspect. It's a problem I'm now having too as I adjust back from the R-60. Fire from further out or uncage and pull lead, they should give better results.

A 70s Viggen could only carry two AAMs, not six. Despite not having a proper air to air radar, there are ways to cludge a sort-of-functional look-down capability out of it if you know what you're doing - which most don't, at least. MiG-21Bis meanwhile does indeed have a radar... which is not especially useful when everyone is flying below 500m. It's not entirely useless but it definitely isn't very good, and at that altitude mostly exists to catch co-alt/low targets while in steep turns (which I'm not sure about, I think this might be a peculiarity with how the ground clutter is simulated), IFF contacts where they're visible, and deal with the handful of people who fly at higher altitudes. There is also a way to force a very poor boresight mode, which doesn't do much other than make the R-3R usable at lower altitudes than it normally would be, but it's not very reliable (neither the missile nor the technique in question). I have a few suspicions the radar is doing things it shouldn't be or not doing things it should be, but I don't have the documentation to check against, and at the end of the day it doesn't significantly impact gameplay - same as the Viggen look-down trick, it's not common knowledge and doesn't work very well anyway, so not really a problem. To somewhat balance out the 21's ability to lock a target and derive ranging data and fire R-3Rs (where applicable), the Viggen can uncage a missile seeker and pull a leading shot for a better chance of a hit. The 21 cannot, you have to boresight the missile and hold lock for a few seconds. The R-60 hid this flaw quite well, but it can be a problem for close range or high aspect shots with the R-13 (an otherwise reasonably good missile, even if it's a bit slow). With a top speed at low level that surpasses literally every other aircraft in the server, the Viggen is actually Blue's best air-to-air missile platform and has been for a long time. You can catch a MiG easily, blast him, then run away with impunity. The 21 cannot exceed 1300km/h IAS safely and is guaranteed to flame its engine out by 1400km/h, by which point the Viggen is still happily accelerating away with a clean or AAM-only loadout. This seems a bit strange when compared to documentation, but I'll leave that to the experts. Operating visually and with GCI direction I would take a Viggen over an F-5 in every case with unrestricted loadouts like we had previously. It's still very strong now, but needs to keep its speed up and make slashing attacks from behind as it can't sustain a turn well and lacks an internal gun. By comparison, the F-5 can only barely keep up with the MiG at low level, is hopelessly outsped at higher altitudes, but has excellent guns and sustains a turn well. The F-5 behaves like a dogfighter while the Viggen behaves like an interceptor, regardless of the fact it's meant to be a strike variant and lacks a proper airborne intercept radar. I really think people underestimate just how enormously the Viggen's speed benefits it in a WVR missile fight in this setting and how many options it gains as a result. It's been my preferred blue air to air platform for months now. On the plus side, the R-13 is powerful enough to delete a Viggen so hard that it can't keep fighting with one wing like they regularly used to.

Fuel quantity is automatically set when rearming/refuelling (it will happen after rearming is complete). Full internal + ventral will set to about 3800L. When the ventral tank is full, the "SUSPENDED TANK/PODVESN. BAK." light will come on (right of the fuel gauge, top light). You'll see it flicker for a minute or so as the last of the tank empties, when it comes on steady, the tank is drained. There is no need to adjust fuel quantity after the ventral tank drains. If you need to get rid of the ventral tank before it's empty, wind the fuel gauge back to about 2800-2900 (to give yourself some safety margin) before you jettison it. When the 450L light comes on, you want to be relatively close to a friendly airfield. The next light below that signals about 250-300L total remaining. Consider it your "you need to land within the next few minutes" warning. The final light ("SERVICE TANK/RASKHOD. BAK.") top right of the main warning panel, indicates the 80L service tank is being drained. If this light comes on it means you have a dire situation on your hands and have anywhere between 5 seconds and 2 minutes of flying time left depending on your power setting and altitude, before the engine is starved of fuel.

You can only IFF in search mode. The system can't IFF a locked target. OP was not aware that IFF is performed by manually telling the radar to perform an IFF rather than the magic automatic IFF of, say, the FC3 modules. For what it's worth, OP, pretty much every full fidelity module also requires a button press to IFF - even the modern jets. In several cases it will only display for a few seconds and will not 'save' into the radar's memory, just like the MiG. The portrayal of IFF as constant and automatic on FC3 jets is fantasy, not even the Hornet or Viper work like that.

Again, the R-73 on the MiG-21 (if we assume the only necessary work is to fit an APU-73 rail and all hookups are the same for electrical/cooling systems) is not comparable to the R-73 on the MiG-29 or Su-27. You will have no high off-boresight capability. It will still require you to boresight the missile exactly like an R-60 does. Given the R-60 is already quite agile at close range, the only improvement will be a slightly further reach - maybe 6-10km versus about 3-4, which still leaves you outranged by modern blufor jets - and more explosive power. You might also gain a slightly better probability of kill at close range but it will not be comparable to the gen 4 Soviet fighters. If you want a good comparison, use the phi-0 ('longitudinal aim') mode in those jets or the Su-25. Citing the Indian incident is irrelevant on two counts - 1) it hasn't been confirmed by sources outside India, and thus should not be treated as a given fact; 2) even if factual, the MiG in question is a Bison, a heavily upgraded Indian-only variant that has little in common with our Bis. It is essentially a whole new aircraft avionics wise, the only thing MiG-21 about it is the basic airframe. Not even close, but nice try. Then either don't take the MiG-21 onto a server where everyone is using AIM-9X, or do so with the knowledge that your aircraft is outmatched? This mentality that everything has to be able to fight everything else on an even footing is absurd and has no place in a simulator. There are servers that place the MiG-21 with aircraft from its own timeframe, and it performs very well. Even on a modern server, a well-flown MiG, especially with GCI assistance, can get good results. You cannot expect to go toe to toe with Hornets or Vipers over open ground and somehow win, unless you ambush them - in which case even a MiG-15 or Sabre can kill them. You're arguing for adapting the aircraft's systems to a missile that not only was it not designed to carry, but which didn't exist until the MiG-21 was approaching the end of its Soviet service, after production of the type stopped in the USSR. This means extra work on the part of the developer, which means less resources dedicated to features which do belong on the MiG-21 and less resources dedicated to other projects. You can't just shove an R-73 onto an R-60 launch rail and be done with it, there are adaptations that need to be made. The R-73 might look like a fat R-60 but that does not mean it is interchangeable with one. What next? Are you going to be demanding the 9X be added to the Crusader when it comes out? Honestly, I expect you probably will. Either get better at using the aircraft's strengths to play smarter against modern opponents, or accept that a 1972 aircraft cannot be expected to perform on an equal level with a mid-2000s high level upgrade of a 1980s aircraft. This absurd demand for feature creep - especially demanding aircraft come with features that were either used only by a single minor operator of the type, or never actually used in real life at all - needs to stop. It will turn this game into something so absurd that even War Thunder will look realistic by comparison. If you don't like having to deal with the real capabilities of an aircraft, maybe a simulator is not for you - try Ace Combat instead.

Yep, common to all aircraft. It also makes the windscreen and particularly the gunsight extremely hard to see through when the light hits at certain angles.

Really awesome run on Prince of Persia today, lots of wild furballs and good coordination from red. Fujarah took a lot to capture. I did spot some MiGs taking R-60s from Ras Al but hopefully that will no longer be an issue next time (and to be fair, I'm not sure how effective they were anyway, since the one I spotted had a lot of holes in him and missiles still stuck on the rails).

Downgrade your drivers to 442.16 or earlier. I don't know what specifically is causing the issue but it is exclusive to newer drivers. I'm lazy and rarely update mine, so I've never experienced this issue at all.

Switch them to night mode, day mode will bleed out badly in the dark (and to be honest, even in daylight).

For what it's worth btw, as I missed it when I replied - 'pig' is shorthand for warthog, of course. That whole engagement was interesting as first I didn't get tone - I was sure I still had at least one missile left but would have to check again - and then the first A-10 was 'dead' according to both DCS and Tacview. Not dead enough unfortunately as it hit me with a fairly long 9M shot right as I recovered that careless stall. Zweistein fired at the guy I was tangling with but the seeker went for me instead and I only barely outran it. On that note, this is one of the only servers I play where clientside Tacview recording works, and I'm enormously grateful. There have been some amazing things I would've missed otherwise.

The A-10 had 9Ms (same as the Harrier), which was the sticking point, as unlike the Harrier it can carry the 9P5. I would say strikers should be an exception to the new missile restrictions but a) there's no way to do that, and b) we'd end up with people using them purely for air to air, which is exactly what happened to the Harrier. My own flying has been pretty poor all week but I made the mistake of thinking I'd killed one of the two A-10s and thus was safe to deal with the other. Tacview revealed it was another classic case of a missile spawning from the aether - it happens most commonly with F-5s and Viggens, where DCS considers the aircraft to be killed but it remains fully combat capable. GCI also can't see them and thus assumes they're dead. I suspect if the 21 could fire missiles with a dead generator, or if it didn't lose its generator with almost any missile hit, there'd be a lot of complaining there too.

Don't pat yourself on the back too hard, considering it was red players who pointed out that the old 'rear aspect' weapon set left us with the R-60 and its limited all aspect capability. We could go back to the days of MiGs winning every head-on merge if you'd like, but a true rear aspect only setup means I get a chance to play with my food, now. :) Personally I had no issue with the old set, in the 21 - but it made the 19 distinctly disadvantaged and also meant most fights were over extremely quickly, sometimes before one side even got visual.

The Rb 24 being unreliable shouldn't be a surprise, as the GAR-8/R-3S are similarly unreliable. As for the Rb 75 - the thing is like a wake homing torpedo. On The Desert Has Eyes the other day, someone fired one at another Viggen (presumably mistaking it for a 21 somehow) and not only did it track easily and score a direct hit, but it actually even lofted. Sure hope HB get to fixing the Viggen once the 14A is out, because between the unshakeable air to air Mavs and its ability to continue fighting and firing missiles without wings, it's turning into a serious meme machine.