Detection Range

[hein22]

I've been away this year and one of the things I found most changed is the detection range of the radar.

Before I could see a HOT fighter sized contact at 75nm with small scan volume at HI PRF, now with the same settings and aspect it pops up at 48nm. And I'm talking about a flanker size fighter.

I understand how a radar works and don't have any particular doubt about it, though far from expert. I just would like to know if this big change reflects the reality or is perhaps a misinterpretation from ED's part.

Thanks.

[Tholozor]

The radar was adjusted to better match real world values, though it may still need to be tweaked in some areas: 

 

[Hulkbust44]

Dosen't help that ED basically doesn't understand RCS.

Mobius708

[hein22]

14 minutes ago, Tholozor said:

The radar was adjusted to better match real world values, though it may still need to be tweaked in some areas: 

 

According to the post you linked, the values from last year were closer to the real thing, so maybe this adjustment was wrong. Maybe it is wrong now to leave space to a better adjustment in the future. Still a down step for now.

[Preendog]

Was wondering what the boresight autoaq range was against helis now.  You can't lock, at all, at any range, from above (against Mi-24).  That is some aggressive ground clutter through the sheet metal.

Also, the "look down" logic seems to be based on relative altitude to the target, and not the terrain itself.  You can lock a heli right hovering right in front of a hill, as long as you are personally at a at a lower altitude.

And the AMRAAM, which is 1 pixel big, gets picked up right away.

 

-removed off topic comments

 

e. and before you say it's rotor interference, the locking works just fine at many miles from the side or below, with similar interference.  

 

Edited October 31, 2021 by Preendog

[maxTRX]

5 hours ago, Preendog said:

Was wondering what the boresight autoaq range was against helis now.  You can't lock, at all, at any range, from above (against Mi-24).  That is some aggressive ground clutter through the sheet metal.

Also, the "look down" logic seems to be based on relative altitude to the target, and not the terrain itself.  You can lock a heli right hovering right in front of a hill, as long as you are personally at a at a lower altitude.

And the AMRAAM, which is 1 pixel big, gets picked up right away.

 

DCS is rad and peerless and a lot of fun, but it would be very nice if ED in-house testers would give feature changes a try under a variety of conditions before pushing versions to customers.  Public beta testing is ostensibly to have a wide audience that can find edge case and hardware configuration bugs.  This could have been discovered by any tester that tried to lock a heli, even once, under basically any conditions with any radar mode from above (the default approach for an aircraft toward a helicopter).  Same with versions where the hornet CCIP didn't work at all, and other plain sight bugs.  If I personally had made these code changes I would have wanted to load up the game and mess around with a variety of contacts at different aspects, at least for a few minutes, to know if my changes broke something.  I notice the 'repair breaking the radar altimeter' bug was recently fixed, which is great, but it was also a plain sight bug that happened 100% of the time, and with an audible alarm that would have guaranteed that any tester would have found it if they did a repair even once.

If the funding model relies on pushing out new early access modules and leaving existing ones hacky, or being overly reliant on customers to catch plain sight bugs and spend time complaining, maybe it's time to rethink how the game is paid for.  For example, Steel Beasts uses a subscription model, and they seem to have time to uniformly polish all content to a stable and uniform standard.

 

e. and before you say it's rotor interference, the locking works just fine at many miles from the side or below, with similar interference.  

ee. tone

 

 

I noticed that the heli's speed is the main factor for detection. I remember fighting a few helis in the past, some of them fairly big and all they had to do is slow down or go into hover to throw me off.

After reading your post I decided to give it a try again. The results were the same as in the past. This time I placed a small heli (SA342 minigun) at 3k ft., at 2 different speeds. First at 30 kts., then at 110 kts. In both cases the helis were tasked 'nothing' so they didn't get very creative and flew at steady speeds.  One thing that surprised me was a maddogged Amraam shot at a slow heli. It tracked and blasted the heli out of the sky. The Hornet's radar was blind.

https://youtu.be/z1JQfptoktQ

Edited October 30, 2021 by Gripes323

[Cathnan]

Locking helos is a problem of the hornet radar - and has been for a while now. In the rise of the persian lion campaign there are helos going very fast only for the sake of being lockable. don't quote me on that but the magic number is in the 120kts range iirc. AIM-120s indeed have no problem finding helos and never had.