rossmum

Don't make me post the one of me almost joining formation on two of yours, then hitting them with a one-two before either of them showed any inkling of a reaction :D

AeriaGloria is correct, but it should also be noted that servers can override this setting. It won't work on GS for instance, because for whatever godforsaken reason it isn't enabled there.

There's an issue with the nosewheel clipping into the ground and shimmying, which they're aware of, but it does feel like the longitudinal bounce on takeoff has turned into a lateral one. It's more pronounced if you try and rotate a little early, I've noticed.

Yeah, it was. I got a taste of my own medicine earlier today though, the guy I was coming to support panicked when he got a merge call and I ate a missile. At one point I think there was also a single F-5 somehow baiting a bunch of MiGs into shooting at each other, thankfully they were all terrible shots and not a single one teamkilled anybody :lol: The server was absolutely jumping on Catch Me If You Can and especially Sail Ahoy, it was awesome seeing (and hearing!) so many MiG formation takeoffs. I also made my second kill using an enemy Chaparral, this time instead of killing my target it smacked an F-5 that was trying to get me off of the Viggen I was chasing. I think the Chaparrals are more of a help to red than they are to blue!

I haven't felt a difference. I'm usually pretty close to the deck and have only done a few higher alt intercept runs since the patch, but I haven't noticed any difference in my ability to hold around M0.95 with a full air to air load at low level or hold tight turns. I threw the thing up to about 55 or 60k ft the other day and it seemed happy up there too, and for the intercepts I was holding a climbing left hand turn for about 300 degrees and at 500-600km/h IAS and then flattening it out, burner the whole time, and was closing on my target at M1.9 by the time I reached its altitude at 35,000ish. Climb profiles are a thing, that's probably why you were having issues. I start flattening my climb out once I pass about 15-20,000 when I do go upstairs.

The biggest problem with the canopy is that everything else in DCS is pristine, which is also kinda iffy as you collect so many bug guts in flight and the things go like concrete almost immediately. I don't think I've ever seen footage from a fighter cockpit where there wasn't at least one good-size smear on the windscreen. In an ideal world it'd start spotless and occasionally collect some crap over the course of a sortie, based on time in the air and altitude, but I think I'm dreaming with that one. New cockpit should probably fix it anyway and if all else fails, there are some nice clean canopy mods. FM feels pretty solid now. The trim is even more painful than before - it always either under- or overshoots, but that could well be how the real aircraft behaves and it's not too big of a deal to be honest. Departures are fairly abrupt and a tiiiiny bit harder to recover from at very low altitude, that or I've rusted up over a month of flying other stuff, but feel about right and are still relatively predictable. The aircraft exhibits a lot less tendency to porpoise or wander at low speed and almost none at high speed, SAU modes feel good, and it's nice to see all the people who were abusing last patch's issues back to stalling into the ground and dying mad.

I had a damaged friendly pass overhead who I knew was being closely pursued. I then had a callout for a target directly off my nose, picked up on radar, IFF hostile, dropped from radar due to terrain, regained contact, IFF again hostile, fired twice (as clean R-3R shots are a rarity and I'd rather use them while I can) and as the missiles hit and he passed over I spotted the triangular planform and heard the reaction over comms. It was at that point I realised that SRS, which had been fine up until that point, was not transmitting and probably hadn't been for several minutes, and as I scrambled to type in chat the actual F-5 killed me - he must've been very close when it happened, no more than a few seconds passed. As far as the MiG's radar goes, I know what a merged friendly looks like. I also know what a pair of very clever F-5s flying in close trail looks like - one of them has to slide slightly out of formation before you realise it's two enemies rather than a single friendly. In this case the only contact I saw, and the one I locked, IFF'd hostile immediately before I locked it. IFF in itself is not properly simulated, but coalition-based "IFF" certainly is. If you don't turn the system on, you will come up as unidentified/hostile. This is the reason Hornets used to teamkill constantly back in the day and still frequently do - if either the target aircraft's IFF is powered off or the firing aircraft's identification system is powered off, it will return unidentified. Just because it is not a properly-simulated transponder system doesn't mean it's not there. We just have a simple coalition-based abstraction instead. In a closing head-on engagement with both sides having all-aspect missiles and a damaged friendly saying he has an F-5 directly behind him closing to firing range, you can't reliably visually ID until either yourself or that friendly is dead. It was an unfortunate circumstance but it happened. I've been teamkilled at least a dozen times on the server because of friendlies firing heaters into a dogfight or someone forgetting to IFF a new contact after a hostile one faded, it just comes with the territory and I would hope everyone who plays here realises that you can have the best GCI in the world and everyone with IFF on, and still, a missile seeker head will sometimes get distracted by a friendly and make a turn you didn't think it would, or in a confusing mess of planes someone will see a shape and their brain will 'autocomplete' to what it expects to see, not what's actually there. I really, really wish the ingame VOIP system wasn't a laggy mess... SRS is great when it works, but I've had so many problems with the scripts breaking or connection dropping that it drives me mad sometimes. Such is life with third party addons.

I had a bit of a dumpster fire yesterday... first SRS wouldn't transmit in the 21, then wouldn't receive at all despite working fine only an hour before, then someone had their IFF off and was exactly where I expected an F-5 to be (sorry!) and finally managed to accidentally overwrite my main TrackIR profile, so when I got on later and got into a dogfight, I immediately lost sight and couldn't regain it. :doh: The F-5 we have is a 70s variant IIRC, 21bis is 72. I would say both can still play with the Crusader (in fact I'd group the F-8 in their class), F1, and MiG-23 - the F-5 especially has a decent RWR and the MiG's, while not good, is just good enough to know you've been shot at. You have to see the guy to flare, and the fact that the R-60 can make a frontal aspect shot isn't widely known. I almost never saw people flaring even when they knew I was coming while the 'rear-aspect' limitation was on. Lots of dead F-5s.

If only there was a way to lockwire the emergency AB switch to simulate the older engines on the MiG. I think you can induce failures with the ME when placing aircraft, but I don't know if there's a specific ability to disable the emergency AB.

A certain aircraft which has been mentioned on this page has been able to fly comfortably with only one wing, and fire missiles from the detached wing (somehow), for at least six months. I have both been shot down by one in this state, and myself killed two MiGs with magical missiles from a missing wing, on two separate occasions. Comparisons to this or that module don't really do anyone any favours. As for the brake chute, what's broken with it? I was under the impression people complained that it visually clipped the runway so it was given a collision model to avoid that, but DCS doesn't simulate soft bodies and so the trade off is that it scrapes. That sounds like a problem for the people who demanded it not momentarily clip through the runway surface, to me...

Maybe if you fly red. The R-60 in DCS has limited all-aspect capability while the AIM-9P and RB-24J have none. The MiG would win a head-on merge every single time, because it will get tone and you won't, and the R-60 turns just sharply enough to connect. Couple this with the fact that a well-flown MiG has far better turn performance than either F-5 or Viggen, and you have a recipe for trouble - even as a chiefly red player I used to hate this, because it meant that I would win almost every merge, and if the first R-60 didn't make the turn, my far better instantaneous turn performance meant I had a far better setup coming back. Even if I couldn't land a hit on him with a missile, there was no way in hell a 9P or 24J could even come close to hitting me either. There are only so many times you can swat someone in the first pass before it gets boring, now there's enough threat of him returning the favour that have I try to avoid head-ons. Aside from that, taking away the R-3R wiped out the MiG-21's signature weapon and a fairly useful part of its arsenal. The only way you could make rear-aspect-only work is by taking out the R-60, so the MiG pilots are down to R-13Ms... but then the Su-25 either doesn't have an AAM, or has the R-60 still, which risks the "mooooom, why can HE have it but I can't" effect :D

FM is back to normal, basically as it was before the DCS gods magicked away its ability to stall. It's a little less wobbly than it used to be though, so maybe that'll sate the "it's too hard to fly" crowd a bit, now even I can manage to fly form with it. I think the S-24 crash has been fixed as well. There are some new lighting bugs (white flood won't go out once turned on, red flood control is inverted, console lights won't go fully out once on, console and instrument lights cause faint pink glow from within the A/C) but overall it seems a lot better than it was. e/ Pucara is a longish term Razbam project to go with their Falklands stuff, will be flyable (or at any rate they're making a cockpit for it). Probably years away though. Kiowa we're getting is fairly modern, I think the most recent update before it was retired.

Awesome, thanks!

The only change I noticed is that the gear locking thump seems to consistently work now, while for the past year or so I only heard it maybe one in every ten flights, or it came through much weaker. I think something was choking the sound channel out, if that makes sense... it seemed more likely to be audible if I went through my usual post-takeoff routine a bit slower.

I'll be honest, at that point I'd probably quit flying the Mi-8. I far prefer the slinging over CTLD internal loading (not least because I'm rubbish at hovering), and to be honest I kind of feel like if you're going to do something, you may as well do it right. The Huey seems (from an observer's viewpoint) to be a bit less easy to sling with, but it isn't impossible. @ Alpen - server seems down? Is it updating or something? Itching to get back into my MiG now it's no longer a UFO :D

Yep, feels fine. Seems a touch less wobbly than patch before last as well, though it could just be me. Departures are definitely back on the menu.

Part of the reason that the Mi-8 is more popular might be that it seems easier to do true slinging with - I've watched far more competent whirlybird wranglers than me have endless problems with swinging loads and crates falling off the rope in the Huey, while my first ever attempt to sling went off almost without a hitch (right up to the point I noticed the VRS too late and went into the ground). The crate barely swung at all and I was able to build quite a lot more speed than I'd been told was safe, no problems.

The bounciness only really became an issue (again) recently - it seems like it's a reversion to the early days, as I didn't play DCS back then but did keenly watch a lot of MiG-21 flights in it. I actually wonder if something was adjusted in the base game, because I've noticed some other A/C feel very bouncy on their takeoff rolls lately as well, especially on Caucasus.

TrackIR doesn't go through the cockpit by my experience. VR going through pits is a universal DCS problem but the MiG has it worse because the cockpit is smaller than it should be physically - this and the gaps in the panels are being addressed in the big update, whenever that comes.

C-5 crew won't be happy about the skidmarks :lol:

You didn't fall like a brick if you hit 30. You could pull up to 33-34 AoA before the aircraft would roll-off or drop out from under you, depending if you were in a turn or level, respectively - which matches descriptions I have both read and heard of the MiG-21's behaviour during a stall, mostly stating it was fairly benign and self-recovering. If you pull the stick to your guts, pass the stall and continue trying to pull the stick into your lap, of course it's going to drop like a brick. Any aircraft will. This is a problem with lack of pilot experience, not flight model. The amount of times I saw people in MP servers stall at 2-3km altitude and simply continue downwards in a stall to the ground made it pretty clear that the FBW jets have spoilt a lot of people. In your second video the pilot is staying well within the core of the yellow/black zone. To force the aircraft to depart with the previous FM you would have to aggressively pull it past the middle of the red/black zone, or hold it around that area and neglect to ease off stick pressure to account for increasing AoA as speed washed off. The aircraft takes stick and rudder skills, so develop them.

Well, the F-16 is made out to be a BFM god in much the same way - but in DCS, it's pretty toothless, because our DCS pilots spent too long filling up in the O-club and can't handle the 9G sustained turns the aircraft is designed for. Likewise, the Hornet has a reputation for having incredible high AoA performance, but unless it's flown very well in DCS it doesn't stand out as much as the hype suggests. There are a bunch of factors to take into account and one of them is that the sim allows things which never happened in real life, or would've seen a pilot lose their wings. A lot of DCS Hornet pilots make extensive use of the paddle switch in BFM, which would get them a very stern talking to at minimum, and could well see the aircraft written off and cannibalised at worst. The better Flanker pilots will flip the ACS off to haul the nose around with alarming speed (it feels more like fighting an overgrown Mirage sometimes!) and subject the airframe to enormous stress. The F-14 is usually flown well beyond what it was limited to in service, because in DCS every airframe is 0-hour and doesn't need to be preserved for another 40 years of flying. The 29 is much harder to fly well than anything else mentioned (except maybe the Tomcat, but the F-14 is a much better gun platform in my opinion) but is very dangerous when flown that well. It's taken me a very long time and I'm only just reaching the point where I'm confident to take on other players in F-16s or Hornets with it, and out of all the aircraft we have, the F-16 is the closest Western equivalent in performance and fighting style. Except for maybe the F-15 (when flown very aggressively and mostly due to its enormous ammo reserve, which people seem to use for head-on jousts) there is no one plane that is the best at 'everything', so by the same token, the F-18 is a joke against faster fighters which can simply outpace it or the F-14 which can (by breaking real-life service limits) easily outrate it in a horizontal 2-circle as well as the vertical plane. You have to fight what you're presented, the 29 will (in my experience) happily rate the DCS F-16 when treated right but obviously struggles at the low-speed, high-AoA fights the Hornet or ACS-disabled Flanker dominate. Incidentally, my few experiences with the Su-27 with its ACS disabled have left me longing for the MiG-29, because I know the latter isn't liable to flip upside down into a near-irrecoverable inverted stall. I'd definitely agree with a large part of the reputation being due to the shock it gave the West, though. That speed coupled with solid turn performance and HOBS capability was scary at the time.

No, this is not the reason. Instruments which were reused from earlier aircraft had no redlines of their own, these were instead painted around the rim of the instrument or as hash marks on the instrument panel itself (see: Su-25 airspeed indicator marks, MiG-21 RPM/eng temp gauge marks). The AoA vane is positioned where the airflow hitting it is already disturbed, so the AoA reads higher than the true AoA. This was common for aircraft of the era (hence US Cold War fighters measuring AoA in 'units' to note the difference). The red zone starts at 28 degrees, where the operating manual states the pilot is not to increase AoA any further within a particular speed range, and runs to the end of the scale - the aircraft's actual critical AoA is only a few degrees before the gauge runs out. The UUA-1 is marked exactly according to the same restrictions, charts, and cautions laid out in the aircraft's operating manual. The instrument absolutely was required, the 21bis did not magically solve the problems of departure from controlled flight at excessive AoA or low speed. It had more thrust to help avoid that situation but thrust isn't the answer to every problem, and the engine can't be relied on to deliver its full rated thrust at especially high angles of attack/low airspeeds anyway. I'm guessing you're talking about the LanceR HUD footage, but the vane is still in the same place - the AoA is being fed through to the HUD and you can still see the pilot is very careful not to exceed more than 28-29 degrees of 'local' AoA as registered by the DUA sensor.

By the way - regarding that LanceR display, posted a few pages ago: as far as I know, the LanceR does not change the position of the AoA vane. That means that the reading on the HUD is being fed the same data the UUA-1 would be in our 21bis - and notice the number only barely exceeds 28 once or twice. This corresponds to the stated maximum permissible at this speed and altitude in documents Shmal/Skyrider has posted in the past and also corresponds to the border between the 'yellow-black zone' and 'red-black zone' (as referred to by name on some of the graphs posted earlier in this thread). 25 as per UUA reading is child's play and the aircraft (as per previous FM) would comfortably fly at this AoA, so I'm not surprised to see the pilot maintaining it here. I think it's a reasonable assumption that references to AoA would, especially in handbooks distributed to pilots, be given in the same units displayed by the UUA. You don't have time to do arithmetic when you're on the edge of your aircraft's performance envelope, so training pilots to use the true AoA rather than local AoA units would make no sense. The previous FM would not display any unpleasant behaviour until somewhere between 31-33 AoA as displayed on the UUA, which from memory translates to somewhere like 22-24 degrees true. If you had a good 'feel' for the stick inputs and kept an eye on the UUA you could hold it quite comfortably at 33 in a hard turn, easing off the stick gently as speed decreased and AoA naturally began to increase. We are now able to maintain an AoA so high that it goes off the scale of the UUA. Again, if this was realistic behaviour, why even install such an instrument?

Found it, it's in this post: https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=4253234&postcount=14 From 1986 manual. He's provided a translation as well.