rossmum

Worse engines for a start. Our F-18C is a later lot with uprated engines, with about 10% better static thrust, cca. early to mid 90s (our jet specifically is ~mid 2000s). No JHMCS (you can force-mount the NVGs and then remove JHMCS from warehouses I think? Pretty sure this is how BF 80s does it). No self-designate ability or ability to hit targets lased by other aircraft. If you want to go pre-87ish: worse radar, no Mav, no Harpoon, no ASPJ, far worse air/ground radar functions including mapping, the original top row MFDs were monochrome (not something you can change in DCS). I don't even know if they originally had the colour moving map. I also don't know exactly when Link 16 became a thing, but I'd put good money on it falling outside the desired time period. I've sent off a message to my bug-crazed mate, so it may be a day or two before he gets back to me, but basically: the Hornet we have in DCS is so fundamentally different to a Cold War Hornet as to be a completely different aircraft, same deal as the F-16 and A-10C. Even if there was a way to disable the offending avionics, you're still sitting on a substantial thrust upgrade and a number of quality of life things that didn't exist in the original jet.

Guys, please IFF before shooting. Someone who has posted on this page blasted two (!) R-3Rs, a burst of guns, and then R-60 at my Su-25 over an enemy ground objective in When The Mountains Cry today, and killed me. Going through a Tacview of the mission before (Open Range), one Tomcat teamkilled an F-5 with an AIM-7M, and a regular F-5 player nearly scored a teamkill on Dawger because his missile wasn't looking at the target he thought (nose was pointed at a MiG-21 at point of launch, but seeker had been uncaged seconds earlier while Dawger was in front of it). Someone also got what I can only guess was revenge-for-a-previous-mission teamkilled on takeoff in a limited airframe, although said person was teamkilling in a Tomcat the other day so I guess it was seen as 'damage control'. On the other hand, it turns out that it actually wasn't my rogue missile that wiped one of the 475th guys chasing a crippled MiG the other day - said MiG somehow got an R-3R away without anyone noticing.

Behind Enemy Lines.

The RPG troops also downed several helicopters, seems they're absolute crack shots with those things. I would definitely love to see more infantry - as far as I remember the main reason for its absence was to stop chain capturing in some missions? Maybe there'll be a way to address that at some point, or just make captured airfields not spawn any units in so that removing the inf to capture another will neutralise it again. Before I forget - missiles. Any chance we can get Rb 05 (MCLOS air to ground, can be used for air to air but very very bad at it), RS-2US (hilariously bad beam-riding air to air), and R-55 (RS-2US with R-13 seeker) added to all missions next time you make changes to each? They're fun weapons to use because of how janky and unreliable they are, and won't significantly shift the way the missions play out. The only exception would be maybe the Rb 05 could knock over precision objectives a little faster, but it takes considerable skill to actually score hits with. Some more diversity in SAMs would be nice, too... maybe some shorter-ranged stuff like Osa or Roland? I'm not super knowledgeable on the latter, but the former are fairly easy to defeat if you know what you're doing while still providing reasonable cover to nearby objectives. So far the only place I've ever seen them on the server is at Kutaisi on Two Towns, which is a little odd, as it's very unlikely anything will get within 8km of the airbase as it is. More short-range units like those while trading out some Kubs and Hawks could be interesting in some missions, and give the helicopter guys more to play with. On the topic of helicopters, I'm not sure if you've been given the heads-up yet, but some science was done and we've found that the CTLD issue where one unit spawns in place of another is caused by those units sharing the same "weight" in the CTLD settings. If you change the weight up or down even by a couple kilos, it should solve the problem. It might be worth looking into what other settings can be tinkered with as well, maybe to make things like Kubs only spawn one launcher per launcher crate, so multiple trips become more necessary and the poor Hueys aren't the only ones making 4 or so trips to set up a single battery.

Agreed, the 24 is too tanky for the Huey to realistically deal with (one resorted, ironically enough, to taran tactics to take Seal and I down ) and the Gazelle L is the best solution to this. It'd also be quite handy for spotting I think - not sure if it can load smoke rockets, but if it can, that'd probably be a huge boon to the guys doing CA. The mission was an absolute blast and was played fantastically by blue's usual star tac commanders MD and Count, though it was a shame to see a lot of the blue heli pilots leave so early. Not sure if they ran out of airframes or what, or maybe just didn't want to try fend off much larger machines with the Huey's popguns, which is understandable. Rockets are the better bet in that case I think.

I don't know exactly when it was phased out fully (it was mainly in fighter-bomber service by the mid 80s), but there is a definite end date: all single-engined combat types were retired by decree by 1998. You might encounter some in less 'frontline' units or the far east into the late 80s, but I wouldn't expect them to persist into the 90s, so it's entirely possible Russia never operated them and they all went to other former SSRs before or at the collapse of the USSR.

Haven't tried it against a human-flown 15, but I can tell you it is a very close match in sustained turns with a human-flown F-14. The problem becomes the Tomcat's insane nose authority and good low-speed handling, which the 19 can't really keep up with. It's a very interesting fight.

Sounds interesting, and finally enough Hind slots for everyone

R-60M is all-aspect, and adding it would mean adding AIM-9P5s back for blue.

2,170 litres, which works out to ~1700kg. Bear in mind that the fuel totaliser (not a fuel gauge!) only reads from the final 1400l and may misread if you have a leak.

AI flight models have nothing to do with the player module flight models, they're separate SFMs.

Max Mach at height also seems a bit low, unless that's a service limit (I don't have the manual to hand right now). I know it will reach 1.3 ingame, and IIRC 19S is 1.35, 19P should be only slightly below that figure.

It was more common in earlier aircraft, but as I said, was also used through the Cold War for major or 'ultimate' upgrades of existing aircraft. The more common Cold War system was what Russia still uses - suffices that speak to what was actually changed, e.g. F - uprated, M - modernised, U - training (or sometimes strengthened/improved), K - shipborne or export, T - additional fuel, P - interceptor, etc.

If it's happening when the server's populated and teams are about even, I'd agree. I have previously said the same thing about defending airfields versus the "no bombing runways" rule. On the other hand, people who single-mindedly go for this or that critical part of one team's infrastructure generally don't do it when there's a risk of them actually being intercepted. It can be a fun thing to have to protect your radar or airbase normally, but when you join the server and it's already been destroyed, where's the fun? Where's the challenge? Not everyone has helicopters to fly out a replacement, and if the teams are imbalanced, it can be impossible to even leave the FARP without being shot down.

Generally speaking, if one person is persistently doing something they know will make the other team miserable, they know full well what they're doing and will take a warning as encouragement if anything. This (along with people just randomly teamkilling friendly units for hours on end, bombing own airfields, etc.) is why people have asked for active moderation in the past and is why you end up getting messages here on the forums. It's all well and good to have a vision of how the mission is meant to be played and what kind of community you want, but as you said yourself, you haven't played so much lately. For those of us who do, it gets very frustrating very quickly.

When I called it a day, Tau was sitting on 14 kills and not a single loss. I don't think blue's problems had anything to do with lack of air superiority, more with not coordinating strikes to arrive at the same time they had fighter cover.

24 is enormously more powerful. Since DCS doesn't simulate explosions properly, it's more or less suicide to use below 10+km altitude and supersonic speed. The RN-28 can be safely tossed from low altitude, by contrast. In both cases, the braking chute and airburst features are sadly not functional, despite the switches being there on the control panel. Also, not sure how much you want to get into rivet counting kinda stuff with loadouts, but worth noting - only fighter-bomber regiments' aircraft were ever wired for the jammer pod or nukes, and in the latter case they also had to remove the main gear doors to fit the bomb on. Fighter units were never issued either and their planes weren't wired for them. Could provide some slot-based variation for this or future missions, maybe, where there's x amount of fighter-bombers with access to more A/G stuff and jammers, while y amount of fighters have A/A missiles and only basic rockets and bombs. e/ other points to note about the nukes - the damage is very spotty. Many buildings seem impervious even to a near direct hit, and units who are in dead ground from the point of impact will likely be unharmed due to only being able to do ground bursts and the simplified behaviour of explosions in the game. They work much better on flat, or near-flat, areas than they do near hills - and I don't know if they ever fixed the 'floating craters' that would happen when one detonated on a hillside or high elevation point. They definitely still sink into the ground if they hit a low one.

It was used multiple times for aircraft variants, but of those, few actually made it to service (e.g. MiG-15bis, MiG-21bis). Others didn't - Su-15bis for instance was to be a Su-15TM re-engined with two R-25-300s, but those engines were needed for MiG-21 production, so it was cancelled. It possibly came to them via loanwording from the French (who did have habit of using 'bis' to denote an improved variant of a tank or aircraft, and who the nascent USSR obtained many of its aircraft from).

You'll need to be on Open Beta, then just search for "cold war" in the server browser. It should pop up as "Cold War 1947-1991", then you can just click to join.

I thought going straight up at the merge was a natural 21 pilot instinct

You came on the server and pushed for everyone to move to 124. Those of us who play regularly already were, but since more than half our team (including most of our Flankers) weren't, we took to using 251 out of necessity. We lost our GCI after about 30 seconds because he felt like he was being personally blasted for trying to use the frequency that he could see most of the team was on (whether he was or not is neither here nor there). There is no point 4 of us being on one channel while the other 10 or whatever people are on 251 and everyone's wondering why they can't talk to each other, comms on the wrong channel is better than no comms at all.

For what it's worth, 21bis was the final Soviet production variant. Anything since (other than J-7 and its million permutations) has been an upgraded MF or bis. 23MLA was the penultimate variant, MLD does indeed modernise it further, but not as significant a jump as M/MF -> MLA. There are very, very few aircraft in DCS which represent an 'early' variant or config, except maybe the Fw 190A-8 and the Spit LF IX. A-6E (pre-TRAM, but even post-TRAM would still kinda work), A-7E, and particularly F-8J would all fit in smoothly with our 1972 MiG-21bis or our mid/late 70s MiG-23MLA.

Observations from today - Without external views it is very hard to get the Su-33 lined up on the starting chocks properly. There is a very high chance the JBD will strike your tail and lift you off the deck, or the chocks will launch you into the air, or it'll just refuse to work. I ended up giving up on flying it when after being stuffed around for several minutes, I had the chocks lift me up and dump me so my gear broke. I'm not sure if you fly the FC3 stuff or do anything naval, but I cannot state this enough: Kuznetsov is nowhere near Supercarrier in terms of actual usability. We have no deck crew, no callouts of how close we are to the chocks, the ATC is spotty at best, and unlike the original Stennis, there's no margin for error where it gently moves you into the correct launch position if you're "close enough". Su-33 players need to understand that you can't just send it from the shortest two launch positions, especially with a heavy load. I watched two or three of our Su-33s simply bellyflop into the water, one after the other, and then another two somehow exploded on the bow which damaged the ship. Great start. Red players in general need to be aware that not only can the later Sparrows home on jam, at which point it will follow you no matter what you do, but they're also blinding each other by jamming. I know most people seem to roll around with the radar off doing barrel rolls in IRST close combat vertical scan, but for those of us who do actually want to use the radar, it's a nightmare. It makes IFF difficult until we're close, other contacts can hide in your jamming strobes, and the radar gets spat back to search rather than TWS if there is any source of jamming within its scan volume. Without TWS it's much harder to try keep track of a target without just STTing and alerting them. As for comms, as I tried to tell you - FC3 modules defaulting to 251 means people just don't change frequency. Nobody reads briefings in PvP servers, or even if they do, they assume their SRS is auto-set to the right freq. If that's outside your control that's fine, but you need to have realistic expectations of your playerbase and you need to understand that this isn't a new problem. This is a public server and at any given time, maybe half the players on it bother reading the briefing or are regulars who understand how things work. I regularly find half the team on any given mission on 251 while I'm resetting my own freq to 124. You have to design for the playerbase you have, you can't realistically expect random players on a public server to treat it like they're flying a closed squadron co-op mission on a passworded server before hanging out on TS/wherever afterwards. The mission has potential, but between the frustration caused by Kuznetsov's sadly unfinished state and people just not knowing what they were doing, it ended up being a bit too much for my nerves today. It might be worth just using the ME to set the regular channel presets for the 19 and 21 to 251 for missions where FC3 aircraft make up the bulk of redfor. I'm not sure how to account for Kuznetsov without adding external views though.

It won't, as the A-4 guys have made it clear that they intend to keep it as a free, community-led project without signing anything over to ED or any other official party. IIRC one of the team passed away during development and so the already decided-upon position became basically set in stone to honour their wishes. It's unfortunate for us multiplayer creatures, but it is what it is.

You do, however, have to wait for the devs to put significant hours and expenditure into remodelling and retexturing the cockpit to fit the systems (izd. 75B isn't just changing one gauge, it's substantially rearranging several panels in the cockpit including on the walls), programming the systems from scratch (Lazur adds an entire new control unit that takes up most of the left side of the cockpit wall), adding tutorials, rewriting the manual, and getting all of this tested and in the game. This isn't a modern jet where you add a new page to the MFD, this is a substantial physical alteration to the aircraft.