USAF Pilot wants DCS as Squadron Sim.

[Phantom88]

Very interesting podcast."Vader" a USAF Viper Driver explains his frustration with The USAF Simulator and try's to bring DCS to his fighter squadron.

There is alot of Real Life background noise in this one so skip to around 53.00 to hear Vader's comments concerning DCS

 

Edited October 18, 2022 by Phantom88

[Wags]

Thanks for the heads up. 

[Dragon1-1]

From what I've heard, professional sims quite often kind of suck, particularly graphics. DCS is great compared to what they have to work with, even with some things not being modeled.

[Mars Exulte]

6 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

From what I've heard, professional sims quite often kind of suck, particularly graphics. DCS is great compared to what they have to work with, even with some things not being modeled.

From my understanding, most professional sims are designed for specific use cases, ie simulating a certain series of events and your response, switchology, etc. In this context flight model and especially graphics are irrelevant. They're rarely intended to recreate the "real thing" 1 to 1.

[joey45]

Wasn't TBS the commercial version of DCS??? 

[SkateZilla]

23 hours ago, joey45 said:

Wasn't TBS the commercial version of DCS??? 

TBS is gone though.

[joey45]

I know.

[Zad Fnark]

Years and years ago (1989), I got to sit in a T-37 sim at WIlliams AFB.  It definitely was better than the PC sims back then.

[Dragon1-1]

That was then, and the professional sim technology advanced slower than the PC market, which, being driven by rivet-counters often far more obsessive than military bureaucrats, had really gone a long way. Professional sims typically have better hardware, but since the requirements are primarily to simulate switchology, not every single quirk of flying the real thing (since most of the time, training time on the real thing is readily available for the military), they're typically less accurate.

[macedk]

F-16 Flight hours For Danish air force was cut and replaced with more sim time. Now the situation in Europe has changed and I guess this will reverse in the coming future.  

On 10/18/2022 at 9:22 PM, Wags said:

Thanks for the heads up. 

We all hope for a nice juicy gov. contract, which may trickle onto the DCS team

[Mars Exulte]

  Somewhat ot but since we're talking about simulators. This old school one was pretty impressive!

[Dragon1-1]

Yeah, great fun until a cockroach finds its way onto the model landscape...  

[MAXsenna]

8 hours ago, Mars Exulte said:

  Somewhat ot but since we're talking about simulators. This old school one was pretty impressive!

Thank you! I love Tom's videos. Somehow missed this one!

[Mars Exulte]

19 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Yeah, great fun until a cockroach finds its way onto the model landscape...  

Haha ''TUNDERIN' JAYZUS, 'ES 'UGE!!!''

[Aquorys]

It depends on what kind of simulator you are talking about. There are "professional" simulators that are not that much different than yours at home, e.g. the USAF has used a product from one of their main fighter aircraft suppliers for a while, and if you look at the details, you'll quickly find out that this one is simply a heavily modified version of probably the most wide-spread home flight simulator (yeah, that one from a well-known very large software company). That is by no means a secret, it even says so in various public documents describing the technology.

Some other simulators on the other hand, particularly for pilot training in the civilian market, are way ahead of anything I have ever seen being available for use at home, especially concerning the accuracy and completeness of all the avionics, and how it works and reacts. Many of them are also full-flight simulators (meaning the entire cockpit moves to trick you into thinking that you are moving). Many parts of those simulators are from the real aircraft, and for that reason, they obviously come with the same price tag. Suffice it to say that a seemingly simple sidestick for one of those simulators is a whole order of magnitude more expensive than most people's entire home flight sim gear.

[Dragon1-1]

Motion platforms are a thing in home setups, and I've seen some really fancy builds. They have their limitations, though, even the professional ones supposedly don't quite capture all the physical feedback. Also, real switches are sometimes used by cockpit builders who want full authenticity. Sometimes even actual, flown aircraft sticks and throttles. In fact, if you're in the US, it's fairly easy to find surplus military aircraft parts, though in other places it's harder (other countries don't have quite so many aircraft, and the US doesn't like this stuff being sold abroad). 

Also, remember that hardware is one thing, software is another. You can have a really nice, full cockpit sim running software that makes it turn and climb nothing like the real plane. This is not obvious at a glance, but a real pilot would notice, and from what I heard, this is the area DCS is one of the best in. Systems less so, currently, out of modern modules only the A-10C has truly comprehensive systems modeling, including the all bits that you might not touch even once through your whole career flying the real plane, but I think the ambition is to bring all others to that standard. 

[Aquorys]

44 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

You can have a really nice, full cockpit sim running software that makes it turn and climb nothing like the real plane. This is not obvious at a glance, but a real pilot would notice, and from what I heard, this is the area DCS is one of the best in.

Not sure about the other modules, but the F-16 was all over the place in DCS. It was quite snappy first, but didn't turn to well, and it seems the drag model was off, now it turns, but it feels really sluggish in pitch response now, more like a traditional aircraft than an unstable fly-by-wire one.

But apart from that, yeah, the realism in some flight simulator has been taken quite far. One of those other sims is realistic enough that they could use the simulation to test changes that were later implemented on the real aircraft. That particular sim you can run on your home PC too, and it's not even expensive.

[Dragon1-1]

I know that one, unfortunately, it's less accurate in supersonic and hypersonic regimes. It uses blade element theory to figure out aerodynamics, which has its advantages, but it is still an approximation, even if it's a useful one. I don't know how DCS FM works under the hood, but it's more of an empirical model, translating real curves, CFD and flight test data into how the sim aircraft behaves.

Any EA module is subject to being unfinished, and the F-16's current behavior is actually correct. The "instability" (really relaxed stability, the Viper is not unstable) isn't really felt in the real thing due to FBW. I'm also not sure if our Viper applies the stick curves from the real jet, which has a force-sensing stick with nonlinear response.

[Aquorys]

5 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

I don't know how DCS FM works under the hood

Rumor has it that it's table based, like one other very widespread flight sim. That would typically work quite well under conditions that are somewhere within the boundaries of what's in the table, not so much outside of it - which is probably less relevant though, because those areas are normally the ones where you've seriously departed anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter how exactly you're gonna crash 

[Dragon1-1]

If it was a simple lookup table, it would be much easier to match the available curves exactly. This is not the case, suggesting some sort of physics modeling is going on that can react to values being tweaked in a non-obvious way. It's very apparent that one can't fine-tune DCS FM values in complete separation, and getting the in-sim behavior to conform to a real curve, even approximately, seems to take some doing. I'd expect it to be a sort of aerodynamic approximation, perhaps more general with regards to speed than BET (supersonic regime is important in DCS), but at the same time, more reliant on experimental data.

[SUBS17]

The Future US Air Force Helmet could be compatible with DCS although the Graphics would look real and it would have G affects. If any of them were to ever post a screen shot Eagle Dynamics would never hear the end of it. Who would CODE such a MOD for a HELMET?

[sgtoinkz]

I can't agree more with him regarding scenarios in the sims...I have had the same experience setting up professional simulation training scenarios and sometimes they just don't work, cause bugs or crash our systems entirely. It can create wasted training time. Unfortunately all of this programming/development is cost driven. With that in mind there is a balance of what was mentioned above by @Aquorys regarding full modelling 1 to 1 of the airframe, avionics, flight model etc... Most times the quality of the overall picture generated scenes are left to the "cost savings" side of overall sim build costs within budgetary constraints. The first time I stepped into a scale sim as a sim tech, was a CH-47 trainer and the scale was on point, looked the part and flew great, but the overall projected image was sub par in my opinion. Years past, working in a newer sim now, the overall image quality has gotten better, but seemed to stay stagnate. How much are you willing to spend on development of your database for your projected "map" per se. Firing up DCS, one can immediately see the difference. The scale sim picture quality has room for improvement for sure, but the reality of cost savings is shifting the market toward mixed reality and immersion into VR. In my opinion, there will always be the need for scale simulators, but with VR and mixed reality improvements, it's going to be harder to sell costly projection systems in lieu of VR. 

[Mogster]

On the ACS podcast the AH-64 guy (can’t remember the name, sorry) has remarked how a room full of commercial type sim rigs and software would be useful for large squadron co-ordination exercises. Apparently it’s not the sort of thing they get to do in rl often and the sims they have aren’t directed towards multi unit missions being more systems orientated. He seems to like the idea that several aircrew could just go in the room and fly together easily, and at quite a reasonable cost. 

[Thinder]

The  French gets it for their Mirage 2000C, You can be certain that the flight envelop, weapons, systems are home made for the AdlA and this sort of practice is already common with NATO Air Forces...

RAZBAM details unprecedented access to the Armée de l’Air.

Edited December 26, 2022 by Thinder

[silverdevil]

i was an armor crewman in the 80s. at ft knox there were simulators. at that time, essentially all we learned from it was process. was for commander to see a target and direct loader to load the appropriate round, gunner to identify the target, loader advising the round was loaded and gun off safe (UP!), and the gunner pulling the trigger (ON THE WAY!). we all had to allow our imagination for team work element. i think it would be great for real pilots to train with DCS for teamwork purposes. i am sure there is a government contractor taking advantage of the military when it comes to simulators. anyone remember the $640 toilet seat?

https://apnews.com/article/d9128f4c388db34492beb040c120de3e