rossmum

...I mixed up 75A and B. Too many izdeliye codes

Yefim Gordon (while he sometimes flubs on technical details) is good for an overall view of the design and operational history of a type, and I also impulse-bought Mikoyan's official history when that released, since it was very limited print and I didn't want to risk them deciding not to print an English edition. I've been working my way through Gordon's Sukhoi Interceptors and there's quite a lot of good stuff in there - the Su-9 really is underappreciated, I think. Worth note that it was still another ~2 years before the MiG-21 even received a search radar, because they had to figure out how to cram the TsD-30 into its nose, and it was even longer before it got radar missiles. In addition to the actual academic stuff, there are clues in the wording of pilots' handbooks and technical documents as well, and the overall organisation of the armed forces. What we think of as "interception", this monolithic all-encompassing thing where if you're steered onto an intruder by ground control, you're an interceptor, is a lot more nuanced. Most fighters will perform interceptions during their service, but an interceptor is a much more specialised aircraft optimised exactly for the role. The MiG-21 versus Su-9/11/15 example (and F-104 versus F-106 for NATO) is probably one of the best, because not only is there that distinction in role and specialisation, but in both cases you have minor partners in the alliance using a modification of the fighter to fill the interceptor's role. The two major powers never exported their actual interceptors even to allies, as they were too sensitive for homeland security (again the MiG-25 is the exception thanks to Belenko's antics). Getting any kind of primary documentation on PVO assets versus VVS assets is an absolute pain for that reason, even for retired ones - probably the main reason we aren't likely to see my dream module any time soon.

Everyone's concern until 70s was climb as high as you can as quickly as you can, US fighters were the same. F-104 is in the same boat as MiG-21 - a fighter that gets called an "interceptor" based on the perception that it can't do backflips or sustain 20d/s turns, so it can't be a "real" fighter. It's an anachronistic view from applying modern standards for a fighter to aircraft designed 70 years ago and drawing on experience from WWII and Korea, where boom-and-zoom attacks were common and so pulling hard turns was less desirable. Real interceptors all share universal common traits - they're generally larger aircraft, with longer endurance, more powerful radar sets, and usually some form of ground-to-air datalink that in many cases is capable of controlling the aircraft via its own autopilot. For the Americans this means the F-101B and F-102/106. For the Soviets, it means Su-9/11/15, Yak-28P, Tu-128, and MiG-25P/PD and 31. The PVO also ended up employing pretty considerable numbers of MiG-23P (basically a PVO-tailored ML modification with some changes made to avionics) because all their interceptors at the time proved unsuited to low altitude work and lacked LD/SD, which the 23 did not. Later the 25PD came along which was essentially a MiG-23 avionics set scaled up and stuffed into a MiG-25P airframe. What Vietnam was doing was using the best plane they had for air defence, but it wasn't strictly what the aircraft was designed for and nor was it any different to how the Americans would've used their own aircraft in a defensive situation. By necessity aircraft of that era had to be vectored to targets because none of them were capable of independent search, and there's no reason to mount standing patrols if you have early warning radar available. Basically, if you apply the logic that gets the MiG-21 called an interceptor, every single fighter aircraft until the 1970s is an interceptor as well, and the term becomes completely meaningless. The 21 was intended to support air operations over the frontline, hence its classification as a frontline fighter and its short legs. That would involve some interception at a tactical level, but it would also involve offensive sweeps, ground attack, and (if necessary) standing patrols. At the time of the MiG-21's introduction to service, the Soviets were finalising development on the Su-9, whose role was explicitly air defence of the Soviet Union against incoming bombers or recce aircraft.

Nobody was dogfighting with landing flaps because the flaps physically cannot deploy fully at the speeds people were dogfighting at. Even pulling to within a hair's breadth of a stall in AB at sea level will leave you too fast for the flaps to come down far enough to trip the SPS microswitches. This is the difference between actually testing things and studying the aircraft, and looking for any excuse to claim an advantage.

It literally isn't an interceptor per the documentation of the country that built it, and that wasn't its primary use. If the MiG-21 was an interceptor by trade it would have served in the PVO, not the air force. The "F" in the first variant's designation literally meant "frontline". Mikoyan's two interceptors were the MiG-25 and 31, Sukhoi primarily built interceptors and Yakovlev and Tupolev also had designs in that role. The Soviets needed larger aircraft with all-weather capability and longer range to serve in the air defence role, and the initial MiG-21 was a clear weather daylight tactical fighter with no radar search capability (only radio-ranging as in the F-86) and very little internal fuel capacity. The Vietnamese used it in an interception role because it was all they had that was really suited to the task, but that was both outside of what it was designed to do and outside of how the Soviets operated it. Pact allies often operated MFs and sometimes the second bis variant (izd. 75B, we have 75A) as interceptors as that's what they had - with the sole exception of the MiG-25, particularly thanks to Belenko, the Soviets never exported any of their actual interceptors to anybody, not even their closest allies. Western lay sources term the 21 an interceptor because they generally lack understanding of how the Soviet military was organised, or apply the same standards to the USSR proper as they do for its allies, but the fact of the matter is that the 21 entered service with two guns, no missiles, and no radar and picked up an interception role later in life. The true, purpose-built single-seat interceptor of the era was the Su-9, while the Tu-128 and Yak-28P covered the more remote border areas due to being larger, longer-ranging, and having more powerful radars. They did pick up adapted frontline fighters (21PF/PFM, 23P) where necessary to fill gaps in capability, but it seems to be the particularly western idea of "fast, high rate of climb, poor sustained turn rate = interceptor" that's been at work in the English-speaking world while the actual Russian nomenclature, let alone doctrine, is rarely even translated properly outside of military intelligence circles. Air defence, particularly Soviet air defence during the Cold War, is one of my primary areas of interest and I will absolutely die on this hill e/ To further expand on the matter, western fighters of the era also had absolutely terrible SA and were entirely reliant on outside control right up until the 70s. American fighters in Vietnam were under the control of either the big radar station at Da Nang, the Red Crown picket ships, EC-121s, or some combination of the above just as much as the Vietnamese were reliant on ground control to find and kill targets (remembering as well that the Vietnamese did not have many MiGs with their own search radars until partway into the war when they received their first PFs). The whole mindset of Soviet fighters being interceptors slavishly following ground controllers' orders while Americans searched the sky independently or coordinating chiefly with other flights is a weird conflation of more modern US air doctrine combined with assuming the Soviet air defence force was actually the same thing as the air force (they were not even the same service branch - the Soviets had five, not three - army, navy, air force, air defence force, strategic rocket force).

If that's the case with the nuke trigger, it's not a big deal then, not really worth worrying about. I didn't really get to talk through the mission after since I needed sleep, but if you're keen to swing by TS at some point today, there are a few points that I don't think really came up in the debrief afterwards and will probably affect the outcome when it's re-run in ways that perhaps aren't expected. Saves me writing walls of text here

The ASP is actually the nexus of several of the module's best-known issues, including a good mix of actual bugs and incorrect modelling. Use actual original documentation as your source for what is correct and what isn't, not community-made guides, other games, or the module itself. RP-22 has some issues and potentially more than currently known, because documentation for it is incredibly hard to get a hold of, but hopefully that situation will see some improvement at some point. Then we have the entire radio nav suite and the autopilot, the latter of which is enormously underrepresented and would make life a lot easier if it worked as it's meant to. In fact, to your point about unrealistically including nosewheel steering or mechanical assistance - the module does include a subtle form of assistance for steering, which is why you will find its ground handling substantially different to the other early MiGs in DCS. The aircraft was known to have excellent rudder authority at surprisingly low speeds, but I think enough to make subtle turns even at 20-30km/h might be taking some liberties.

Double check the B-1 triggers - when I checked out the video from Kebab's stream, it seemed to trigger the shootdown state instead of the attack state. We saw the correct trigger and Tacview (and ingame track) confirmed it hit the target safely, since we couldn't see it to intercept it, and then landed without incident. Also, whichever trigger you used to destroy the buildings at Khasab when an RN-28 was detected in-zone also fired about 5 seconds before the bomb itself hit. It isn't necessarily a bad thing (if the airburst function actually worked, I would've used it rather than a ground burst), but can be a bit discombobulating for people who don't realise that's what's going on. We actually had factored in the SPS-141s as part of our plan - I won't say for what purpose, though Luckily that contingency proved unnecessary. Also, Alpen - could we get MiG-21 fuel tanks at all red airbases, rather than just Jiroft and Qeshm, by any chance?

I don't have the charts on hand to compare their turn performance IRL, but I can tell you now that in DCS they aren't very widely separated. The F-5 will sustain around 13.5-14°/s against 12-13°/s from the 21bis. The US used the F-5 specifically to simulate MiG-21s in the aggressor role because at speeds below ~M 1.5, they have very similar performance, particularly for earlier MiGs with a little less engine power to play with than our bis. I can tell you definitively that the MiG-21 is a tactical fighter, not an interceptor by design. It is termed "light frontline fighter" (=tactical fighter) in Russian, "interceptor" to them implies something very different - a larger aircraft, usually twin-engined and with a larger fuel load, and with an even lower emphasis on turn performance in favour of speed, acceleration, and climb. The Su-9 (which does look kind of like a big MiG-21, from a distance) was an interceptor per Soviet definition while the 21 was not. The PF/PFM and later subvariants of MF and bis were adapted to point-defence interception, but the type itself was always a frontline fighter, like the MiG-19 before it and the MiG-23 after it. "Interceptor" in Soviet service means an aircraft was operated by the PVO (air defence forces), not the VVS (air force), and was used in a completely different manner operationally. The Mirage's TWR is not all that crash hot - it's about equivalent to the MiG-19 and MiG-23 at ~0.9:1. That's not significantly better than the 21bis (~0.78:1) and is actually worse than the 21bis with its additional AB mode enabled (which puts it above 1, up in the realm of F-16s and other such things).

I'll be saving both runs, don't worry

F-5 RWR broken, not sure about F-5 radar visuals improvement, I'll have to test it later. Viggen RWR mod broken (though not sure if it's supported anymore, which is a shame, it sounds much nicer to me - and was allegedly more accurate, but who knows). MiG-21 and Mirage sound mods seem fine, shaders and smoke still fine as well. I think the Hind can be dealt with a little better now with pylon restrictions and forcing human operators (although Petrovich's aiming ability seems noticeably more similar to a real human now, with his corrections coupling into aircraft oscillations badly enough to make him miss). Giving them a max of 4 ATGMs should force them to work together on single platoons of tanks more often, as well as force more RTBs that will get them away from the front. Totally right about the Gazelle, but for my part, I'm waiting to see what they do with it after the Kiowa. I really like the real thing and I feel like I'd enjoy flying it, but the FM just isn't even close to where it needs to be for me to enjoy at the moment, sadly. Hopefully once they can apply some of what they've learnt with the OH-58, it'll become more popular. The MiG-21 is a frontline fighter, not an interceptor. The MiG-21PF/PFM were interceptor variants and most later 21s also had the option of fitting the ground-to-air GCI datalink, but the aircraft was designed as and mainly used as a light tactical fighter. The idea of it being an interceptor is based on incorrect Western interpretation of Soviet air doctrine as well as the idea that anything that flies fast and climbs well is an interceptor instead of a fighter, when really, almost all fighters of its time were designed for speed and climb as it was seen as the best way to win a fight while also providing interception capability. It's the lesson everyone learnt in WWII and then in Korea: whoever gets above the enemy and can make repeated high-speed passes at him will usually win. The 21's wing is bad for sustained turns (so is the F-5's) but fantastic for sharp instantaneous turns, which translates to being bad for a specific type of dogfighting doctrine which the US adopted in the 1970s and 80s, not being bad at dogfighting overall. Its performance is very similar to the F-5 at low altitude in both parameters. Blue Flag has the option of enabling text callouts (I think they're disabled by default?) as well as changing the time between text GCI pop-ups, so people who find them annoying can make them less frequent or turn them off. Their version of the SRS bot also definitely only sees targets the EWR can see, and although I don't think it has quite so many features as the Overlord bot, it works perfectly fine for what it is. It also doesn't require players to change their names, because it won't reply to player communications, it'll just automatically run through callouts for all players currently on its frequency. I'm not sure if it's publicly available though.

Unfortunately the clip's missing the context of why I was so pumped up, on the last minute of the run I had several Mirages pass close by over my canopy and two more chasing me in I think there was a full scale furball going on and I flew right through the middle of it.

I think you're greatly overestimating the defences, but I guess we'll see. If you're forced to actually, genuinely go defensive, the bomb is as good as written off anyway.

I can tell you now that it doesn't even take a heroic effort to hit that airbase despite an active NASAMs and Hawks I don't know where you plan on putting the launcher, but I ran tests with it in all the most likely locations. In most circumstances, between entering its range and popping up to toss the bomb, it had time to fire once (and missed). In every test I was able to survive the entire attack run and egress, and only one test went badly due to me not minding my bank angle during the toss, so I missed just enough to consider it a failed attack. I also made the joyful discovery that NASAMS apparently has horrible radar elevation limits, because it couldn't even track me through the toss manoeuvre and did not reacquire and fire again until I was on my way back out. Avengers would genuinely be more threatening.

If the NASAMS is there for the 21s to keep them off the deck (spoiler - it probably won't, depending where you put it it's likely to have a very limited amount of low alt coverage) but the 21s are unlocked by the 25Ts killing the Hawks and NASAMS, that seems a bit contradictory to be honest. Not really sure it has a purpose at that point as basically anything else is going to be a bigger threat to a 25T, and it should be gone by the time the 21 rolls in. Even if it isn't, if it's covering the harbour it probably can't cover the airfield well. E/ I just did some testing. I'm not sure if you're going to use scattered infantry as triggers for the "objective destroyed" or not, but the RN-28 will not destroy the buildings at Khasab. What it will do is destroy any road traffic nearby, any units parked at the airfield, and leave a huge crater that will make it fairly obvious where the bomb hit. Honestly any 28 landing within the airfield boundary at the end where the structures are should be a hit for the purposes of the objective, you just won't see any demolished buildings. Here you can see the bomb landed dead centre of the runway on the top end of the field, the buildings in question are within the crater's inner rim, and the blast killed ??something?? way off on the left down that other valley (plus civ AI traffic and a NASAMS site at the airfield). No destroyed buildings

NASAMS? The AMRAAM itself wasn't even properly operational yet - NASAMS reached IOC in '95 and full OC in '98. Not sure what it's doing here, to be honest. If you want decent shorter-range coverage over Khasab, stick Avengers around it and then a Hawk or Patriot to deny the airspace above the Avenger's ceiling. Their hit rate when controlled by AI isn't fantastic, but a couple with interlocking fields of fire will kill anything that comes near them. In any case, depending where said NASAMS is, the Jiroft 21s should be able to land RN-28s close enough without ever exposing themselves to it - I wouldn't count on SAMs alone to stop them.

What target aspect? Did you try the low speed filter? The radar will struggle to hold a lock on a slow-moving, beaming, or co-speed retreating target. It will also struggle to hold a lock on a target that's very low (less than approx. 70-100m) above the ground, when diving on a target close to the ground, or a target that's very near the top or bottom of the scan volume.

Just to drive home the point about the futility of engaging the red helicopters with the Huey's miniguns, by the way - about 80%, possibly more, of the helicopter's side-on silhouette is fuel tankage and/or void space. The only places you will do any genuinely fatal damage to it are the cockpits (too armoured for 7.62 to penetrate, except maybe through the plexiglass hoods), the engine and main gearbox (both armoured from the side, again proof against 7.62), and then the shaft running to the tailrotor (a tiny target) and the tail rotor reduction gearbox (which, if I recall correctly, is also armoured) and the rotor blades themselves, which are also fairly sturdy against rifle calibre. 20mm will go through that armour, miniguns will not. Even head-on, about half the helicopter's silhouette is void space. It'll survive hits to the fuselage and lower part of the tail boom all day because there's nothing there to be damaged, at least besides fuel tanks that might leak or some minor subsytems or weapons mounts. Most people are going to aim for centre of seen mass, which is the correct way to aim at something, but in the case of the Hind that will work against you as its centre of mass is an empty troop compartment with no structural significance to the helicopter. This is exactly why the Gazelle L is such a big deal - it can actually hurt them, albeit you still have to aim with it, it just punches through the armour around the critical components. By comparison both the Huey and Gazelle are small, single-engined, and completely unarmoured. They also have void space near their centre, but it only takes one lucky hit to an engine or the cockpit to kill them. The Mi-8 has roughly the same armouring scheme around the engines and gearboxes, but obviously is a lot more vulnerable around the cockpit. With that said, hitboxes for the crew do seem inconsistent at times. Like the Mi-24, if you shoot it anywhere except the cockpit or the very top of the fuselage where the powertrain is, you're doing pretty much nothing to it, especially with 7.62. Also, the "V" in Mi-8MTV stands for vysotniy, high altitude. Its engines are specifically optimised for flight at high (for a helicopter) altitudes and it has two of them. The Hind is the same. You can climb above them if they're low, because they're sluggish and heavy, but you cannot climb higher than them, if that makes sense. Ultimately what we need are closer blue counterparts in the form of a Cobra and a Blackhawk (although even the Cobra is built to a slightly different role and relies more on standoff than protection), but in the mean time playing with the number of helicopters available to each team and adding more 20mm-armed Gazelles will have to do it if you want to keep the mission rotary wing. e/ you beat me to the punch, but I'll leave this up anyway for the Huey guys.

Australia. This morning's run (well, yesterday's for you) was at 0400 my time To sum up said mission, from what I saw ingame, in Tacview, and catching up on blue's overall picture now - first and foremost, blue need more helicopters by a factor of two for all types, maybe even three for the Gaz L. The Huey's guns barely tickle either Mi-8 or Mi-24 and hitting a helicopter with a HOT requires a well-laid ambush, a completely unaware target, and a considerable amount of luck. I still don't think that subbing out the Merkava for the Abrams will give blue a fighting chance, if anything it'll likely make stalemates more likely. It has the same gun as the Merkava, takes maybe one extra ATGM to kill, and has a similar FCS. Its only clear advantage is that it's faster. If you go the route of limiting Hinds to 4 ATGMs only rather than 8, you're basically achieving the same goal without having to swap out the Merkava with something that is exceptionally difficult for the T-72 to kill, which in turn will swing the balance the other way, etc., etc. It's a feedback loop. Limiting the missiles should help do the trick. More IR SAMs (maybe Avengers rather than, or in addition to, the Stingers) and heavier AAA should help too - sprinkling a Vulcan or two along with each platoon of tanks will force people to use ATGMs on those first and thin out the herd a bit. If red start grumbling about wanting mobile AAA too, you can give them ZSU-57s set to conscript skill or something I guess. Moving FARPs to account for weapons load/helicopter speed might be worth looking into as well. There's also some stuff that I think will come with understanding of how the other team's equipment works - for example Petrovich's uncanny accuracy gives a false impression of how easy it is to hit something with the Hind's ATGMs when you've got a human in the front seat, and there are specific tricks you can figure out that will cause them to miss pretty consistently. Enabling the 'dumb Petrovich' option so he cannot aim ATGMs will also force people to multicrew the Hind and should both reduce its accuracy, as well as reduce ground unit teamkills. Understanding the netcode is important too. Just because you see a hit from someone else's (including the AI's) shot, it doesn't mean there actually was one. DCS hit detection is done on the firing party's game client and the server will use that to decide hit/miss. Other clients will extrapolate where they last saw the weapon going, and so it's almost 100% repeatable to see a whole chain of Stingers "hit" someone and cause no damage, when the firing client saw every missile narrowly miss behind the target (remembering the Stinger is impact fuzed - it must hit to do damage). This effect applies to every weapon in the game and is why it looks like ATGMs are killing with wide misses - they aren't missing, your client just doesn't know where the missile actually is and it lulling you into a false sense of security. For about the clearest example of this possible, check out a guns-only dogfight, and watch in amazement as a stream of tracer that misses someone by an entire plane length saws them in half. If you can get a hold of the firing client's perspective, you'll see a clear hit, and that's all the game cares about. In any case, blue fought red to a standstill today despite losing their only viable air cover very early in the mission and I personally spent 2 hours and 2 Hinds trying to clear out a single platoon of tanks. I think there are definitely changes to be made, and the first one is increasing blue's helicopter count and particularly their Gazelle L count.

2AM start let's gooooooo

I heard blue had some teamkilling issues. One of the more spectacular ones was, at least, a freak accident... a Phoenix somehow did a 10km split-S to hit a friendly passing far underneath the firing Tomcat, who as far as I know was STTing me at the time. Tacview did also reveal some pretty wasteful flying... the victim of the above took 6 Phoenixes, flew below 500ft at M 0.8, then blasted 3 of them at once at a similarly minded J-11 while he was close enough that even a Sidewinder would've made a hit. He spent the other 3 on a MiG-21 at similarly short range. There were also a few cases where people blinded themselves with their own jammers, one Hornet actively steered himself into an R-27ER somehow, and blue lost 5 aircraft for the exchange of 2 Su-33s later in the mission because they all went seagull mode and chased another Su-33 all the way back to Kuznetsov. Overall it seems that when these special, more modern missions run, the side with more of the server's regulars on will win, except in cases where guys like the 104th turn up. More capabilities to play with means more ways to screw up for most people, it seems.

I think I figured out what happened re: F-14 the other day - Muzi was the one who teamkilled the F-5, was then immediately killed by me, then quit the server and his slot was pretty much immediately taken by ALURi (who also has a reputation for teamkilling on blue, for what it's worth). Hence ALURi got given the commissar treatment on the one day he hadn't actually teamkilled anyone yet. Something to be said about fog of war here I think! Really can't sing Tacview's praises enough

Alpen - you need to add more waypoints to the ships, or make them follow an endless loop. A few hours in, the red fleet stopped dead in the water quite far from the action, so we simultaneously needed to carry more fuel but also had no headwind to get us off the deck safely with a heavier load. Not sure if blue had the same issue. Re EWR, seconding that the F10 version is horrid and I don't even run VR, I just hate having huge text boxes constantly blocking my screen. The SRS bots that are used both by Hoggit's servers and (a different version I believe) Blue Flag are really worth looking into.

I had my jammer on. If you activate the MiG-21's anti-jamming filters (top left 3 buttons above the scope) it'll clear the interference and then you can IFF. If you aren't 100% sure about an IFF return, don't take a shot until you can visually ID the target, because the situation can change very quickly and it takes Su-25s a very long time to get to their target. I understand the mistake.