Rockets are pretty useless with the current DCS modeling; convince me otherwise.

[Eagle0110]

On 8/27/2023 at 12:36 AM, Iron Sights said:

I think the AI is in need of much more work as well as splash damage. I was flying the Hip on the practice range with ground troops as targets. I was spraying them with the mini gun pods and you would see the whole area covered by bullets, but there would be some that just remained standing. No running away or ducking, just standing and firing accurate as hell. Hopefully, one day this will get better. Maybe it’s how I set them up, maybe they need instructions on what to do next, but it would seem like they would at least run for the tree line .

At least, I hope that with the bone-based animation for human characters originally developed for the aircraft carrier simulations, the technical groundwork is already laid down for implementing something like this in the near future!

[corbu1]

I use Coop-Mode with 4 rockets per Salvo as well and it‘s good against infantry.

regarding AI effectiveness…in most cases it‘s not the sniper capabilities of the AI which concerns me most in most cases, because I learned to stay in distance with them….it‘s my AI wingman who tries to get in infight with the ground AI in his AH-64 for using his rockets.

[Sobakopes]

В 26.08.2023 в 23:44, shagrat сказал:

That's what they were designed for... A rocket is not an anti-armor weapon unless you have APKWS and those are only really effective against light armor.

Anti-Tank Helicopters use stealth, standoff weapons and short time of exposure to enemy fire to fight tank platoons.

Apaches in Afghanistan were shot down by RPG and 7.62mm ...no AAA, no MANPADS, no IFVs with 20mm autocannons.

We need to learn tactics and optimized weapons employment.

Unfortunately that still won't solve the AI shortcomings and lack of detailed damage modeling. Though, ED already started working on the AI stuff. Most prominently infantry is now no longer armored like a tank on two feet, in rank formation they actually use fire and maneuver when in contact with an enemy, Mk-20 bomblets have been fixed/enhanced... Unfortunately ONLY the Mk-20, and critical damage seems to have been at least partially implemented as I have seen mobility damage, suppression effects(?) to some vehicles at least.

 

 

В 27.08.2023 в 02:10, Hotdognz сказал:

This is the reason why we use a splash damage mod on our server missions, helps a lot with rocket attacker and helps against the abysmal ED ground AI which has been this way a long time.

Splash script is really bad. Heat frag rockets killing tanks with splash damage its extreme hand holding 

There's nothing wrong with the fact that rockets need direct hit on armored vehicles.

Damage itself is ok but AI is too good at shooting back with everyone pretending to be AAA

AI ifv with autocannons push you to 2.5 km while you d prefer 1.5 or 2 for direct hits.

KOM rockets are a good weapon against ifv if it was possible to close to 2km but it isn't. I dislike the AI ability to easily detect and track the helicopter even in non AAA vehicles

 

But then the hind has wonderful sight that allows hitting at 2.5 km too

Edited August 31, 2023 by Sobakopes

[Extranajero]

On 8/30/2023 at 9:34 AM, Eagle0110 said:

At least, I hope that with the bone-based animation for human characters originally developed for the aircraft carrier simulations, the technical groundwork is already laid down for implementing something like this in the near future!

Near future ? are you new to DCS ?

But it would be nice to not have the RPG gunners stuck in a kneeling position and gliding along like hovercraft, even if it is hilarious.

[shagrat]

vor 2 Stunden schrieb Sobakopes:

 

Splash script is really bad. Heat frag rockets killing tanks with splash damage its extreme hand holding 

There's nothing wrong with the fact that rockets need direct hit on armored vehicles.

Damage itself is ok but AI is too good at shooting back with everyone pretending to be AAA

AI ifv with autocannons push you to 2.5 km while you d prefer 1.5 or 2 for direct hits.

KOM rockets are a good weapon against ifv if it was possible to close to 2km but it isn't. I dislike the AI ability to easily detect and track the helicopter even in non AAA vehicles

 

But then the hind has wonderful sight that allows hitting at 2.5 km too

 

If you read the code, you will notice how it works and that it doesn't change the "splash"-damage (specifically because it doesn't/cannot change, any Lua files where the weapon parameters reside).

If you would test it, in addition to looking at the code and compare the results with stock DCS, you will notice the actual effects are marginal (e.g. you still can't kill main battle tanks with a handful of HE rockets, but the infantry in the middle of a 4-8 rocket attack will no longer magically survive. Basically, after ED fixed the armor/damage for the infantry units a while ago, the infantry is dead, either with and without the script, but the area covered by the explosion is still the same, with or without the script.

The thing is, that ED does not model fragmentation of explosive weapons, at all. You have blast damage only calculated from the explosive weight in the weapon definition, which is totally unrealistic, as a major lethality factor of any fragmentation weapon is the little pieces of metall shredding a certain area around the explosion (bomb, HE-shell, HE-rocket, even an RPG or handgranade).

ED adjusted some weapons (by tweaking the explosives blast), but this still isn't remotely modeling actual weapon effects. E.g. blast damage does less damage to trucks than even a handful of shrapnel through the motor block would, let's not talk about infantry (try dropping a CBU-87 - blast damage never adjusted - on a battalion infantry in parade formation), or unarmored, totally exposed SAM radars and launchers. If a bomblet has a direct hit, you're fine, but no fragmentation that IRL would utterly shred the SAM site.

In the end you don't need to "use" the script to simulate at least half-heartedly realistic modeling of what fragmentation damage would do.

I personally don't use it in most missions I create, since ED fixed the infantry damage and rockets and 30mm HR shells can finally kill infantry.

On the other hand the blast damage from ED's implementation magically kills infantry behind buildings, behind tanks etc. because it has a damage radius and everything inside a blast radius is damaged no matter what. That means danger close implementation of guided 500lbs bombs is nothing like a real bomb. Infantry standing in the blast gets killed even if shielded by a building, but at the same time the actual fragmentation radius in reality is at least 5 times higher than the blast damage modeled in DCS. If we only assume the RED 10 (Risk Estimate Distance where 1 in 10 people will be incapacitated) used to define "safe distances", we should have damage effects in 200-250m distance from the impact of a 500lbs bomb... Last I tested the damage effects to infantry end at about 40-50m.

So I personally wouldn't call simulating at least a small amount of the actual damage effects of real weapons  "extreme hand holding". If you need a tough challenge and hone precise employment of weapons, we can use stock DCS, to make killing stuff harder than in real life. On the opposite we need to be aware the current stock blast damage model, does kill everything in a certain (too small) radius, with no fragmentation and thus no shielding effects of vehicles and buildings.

If someone's interested, the "Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining" has some interesting study on weapons effects in populated areas.

https://www.gichd.org/our-response/policy/explosive-weapons-in-populated-areas/

The report can be downloaded here:

https://www.gichd.org/publications-resources/publications/explosive-weapon-effects/

 

 

Edited August 31, 2023 by shagrat
URL fixed

[Sobakopes]

6 часов назад, shagrat сказал:

If you read the code, you will notice how it works and that it doesn't change the "splash"-damage (specifically because it doesn't/cannot change, any Lua files where the weapon parameters reside).

If you would test it, in addition to looking at the code and compare the results with stock DCS, you will notice the actual effects are marginal (e.g. you still can't kill main battle tanks with a handful of HE rockets, but the infantry in the middle of a 4-8 rocket attack will no longer magically survive. Basically, after ED fixed the armor/damage for the infantry units a while ago, the infantry is dead, either with and without the script, but the area covered by the explosion is still the same, with or without the script.

The thing is, that ED does not model fragmentation of explosive weapons, at all. You have blast damage only calculated from the explosive weight in the weapon definition, which is totally unrealistic, as a major lethality factor of any fragmentation weapon is the little pieces of metall shredding a certain area around the explosion (bomb, HE-shell, HE-rocket, even an RPG or handgranade).

ED adjusted some weapons (by tweaking the explosives blast), but this still isn't remotely modeling actual weapon effects. E.g. blast damage does less damage to trucks than even a handful of shrapnel through the motor block would, let's not talk about infantry (try dropping a CBU-87 - blast damage never adjusted - on a battalion infantry in parade formation), or unarmored, totally exposed SAM radars and launchers. If a bomblet has a direct hit, you're fine, but no fragmentation that IRL would utterly shred the SAM site.

In the end you don't need to "use" the script to simulate at least half-heartedly realistic modeling of what fragmentation damage would do.

I personally don't use it in most missions I create, since ED fixed the infantry damage and rockets and 30mm HR shells can finally kill infantry.

On the other hand the blast damage from ED's implementation magically kills infantry behind buildings, behind tanks etc. because it has a damage radius and everything inside a blast radius is damaged no matter what. That means danger close implementation of guided 500lbs bombs is nothing like a real bomb. Infantry standing in the blast gets killed even if shielded by a building, but at the same time the actual fragmentation radius in reality is at least 5 times higher than the blast damage modeled in DCS. If we only assume the RED 10 (Risk Estimate Distance where 1 in 10 people will be incapacitated) used to define "safe distances", we should have damage effects in 200-250m distance from the impact of a 500lbs bomb... Last I tested the damage effects to infantry end at about 40-50m.

So I personally wouldn't call simulating at least a small amount of the actual damage effects of real weapons  "extreme hand holding". If you need a tough challenge and hone precise employment of weapons, we can use stock DCS, to make killing stuff harder than in real life. On the opposite we need to be aware the current stock blast damage model, does kill everything in a certain (too small) radius, with no fragmentation and thus no shielding effects of vehicles and buildings.

If someone's interested, the "Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining" has some interesting study on weapons effects in populated areas.

https://www.gichd.org/our-response/policy/explosive-weapons-in-populated-areas/

The report can be downloaded here:

https://www.gichd.org/publications-resources/publications/explosive-weapon-effects/

 

 

 

Don't really see the improvement here. Troops die nearly the same but attacking vehicles produces bad outlier results like when s8kom rockets kill tanks with splash. Even s5ko rockets do

The script kind of improved lethality but not where it should have

Edited August 31, 2023 by Sobakopes

[shagrat]

vor 20 Stunden schrieb Sobakopes:

Don't really see the improvement here. Troops die nearly the same but attacking vehicles produces bad outlier results like when s8kom rockets kill tanks with splash. Even s5ko rockets do

The script kind of improved lethality but not where it should have

 

Again, blast damage is the only thing simulated in DCS explosions. There is no fragmentation, thus no splash damage.

The problem with killing any ground unit is that blast is calculated as a damage value. So in a way too small radius everything takes damage. Armored stuff takes more damage, but at the same time unarmored vehicles and before the damage model adjustment even infantry could take quite some hits without even flinching. 

What the script does, it ensures, that at least in that small radius unarmored stuff dies (it would be enough to incapacitate, but DCS can only do healthy, critical hit, or dead). The drawback is a dozen rockets will kill a tank, where IRL the tank would likely "just" have been shredded and the tracks damaged, periscope, mirrors and targeting equipment damaged, but it would be able to limp around and fire blindly.

That said, the thing is, for me at least, to decide on the mission in the design phase and depending on opposition to use, or not use the script.

A helicopter only scenario with lots (more than you would tackle with 2-4 helicopters IRL) of light armor and vehicles, I prefer the script over the frustration of needing to rearm for 30-40 minutes, simply because the 26-38 rockets' blast damage wasn't enough to eliminate 3 trucks and a Grad-launcher on a clearing in a wood, because the rockets did not have direct hits.

For a counter insurgency with lots of infantry and a couple technicals and AAA with the occasional BTR it's fine without the script, since the rockets can take out infantry.

Edited September 1, 2023 by shagrat