Cold War AI Aircraft

[PhantomHans]

With the current inclusion of the F-14A (And, hopefully some day earlier versions of it) as well as the upcoming F-4E, I would like to request some more AI only cold war aircraft.

I understand that all of these take time and that making new AI aircraft can take away from other opportunities, but I'm hoping it may be possible to leverage some existing assets to make more AI aircraft to oppose our new player ones and cover a broader era of the cold war.

For example:

The MiG-23MS, equipped with the RP-22 radar (currently found on the MiG-21Bis in game) and armed with R-3S, R-3R, and R-13M 'Atoll' missiles only.  Used by, among others, Libya (two lost to F-14s over the Gulf of Sidra), Iraq, and Syria.

The MiG-23M, or MF, or ML, earlier predecessors to the MiG-23MLD already found in game.  These would be similar but less capable, as they're older.

 

Older MiG-21s, again with the F-4E upcoming, would be great to get as well.  There are a whole TON of variants, but perhaps the MiG-21F-13, the 21PFM, and perhaps something else like a 21S, M, SM, MF, SMT, etc would be excellent earlier cold war aircraft.  Admittedly, there are a ton of variants after the 21S that just keep getting closer and closer to the existing 21Bis, so it may be best to just pick one and run with it to cover a whole range of variants.  That also probably makes the F-13 and PFM more interesting than the later ones.

[Exorcet]

Something for ED to consider, while newer assets seem to be focused on specific models or units (which is not a bad thing), perhaps we can repurpose the older AI units into more flexible stand-ins for different variants.

Take the MiG-23 mentioned already. If it had a checkbox for version, we could quickly swap out the radar and armaments without needing a new 3D model. Possibly we might also get away without flight model changes, but that could be iffy. Maybe some simple multipliers for things like thrust might be needed. The basic idea is give us the ability to tweak the lower fidelity AI units to cover more aircraft.

In the long run it would be best to have specific AI for each aircraft version, but it seems like this will take a long time if we go by the updates to B-1/B-52/S-3/etc.

[upyr1]

On 12/30/2023 at 6:25 PM, PhantomHans said:

With the current inclusion of the F-14A (And, hopefully some day earlier versions of it) as well as the upcoming F-4E, I would like to request some more AI only cold war aircraft.

I understand that all of these take time and that making new AI aircraft can take away from other opportunities, but I'm hoping it may be possible to leverage some existing assets to make more AI aircraft to oppose our new player ones and cover a broader era of the cold war.

For example:

The MiG-23MS, equipped with the RP-22 radar (currently found on the MiG-21Bis in game) and armed with R-3S, R-3R, and R-13M 'Atoll' missiles only.  Used by, among others, Libya (two lost to F-14s over the Gulf of Sidra), Iraq, and Syria.

The MiG-23M, or MF, or ML, earlier predecessors to the MiG-23MLD already found in game.  These would be similar but less capable, as they're older.

 

Older MiG-21s, again with the F-4E upcoming, would be great to get as well.  There are a whole TON of variants, but perhaps the MiG-21F-13, the 21PFM, and perhaps something else like a 21S, M, SM, MF, SMT, etc would be excellent earlier cold war aircraft.  Admittedly, there are a ton of variants after the 21S that just keep getting closer and closer to the existing 21Bis, so it may be best to just pick one and run with it to cover a whole range of variants.  That also probably makes the F-13 and PFM more interesting than the later ones.

I know you are focused on Cold War aircraft, but it is important to remember that the DCS timeline covers almost 90 years and includes both air, land, and naval assets. We need enough variants that using historical mode there is no gap. 

 

[PhantomHans]

On 1/8/2024 at 9:16 AM, Exorcet said:

Something for ED to consider, while newer assets seem to be focused on specific models or units (which is not a bad thing), perhaps we can repurpose the older AI units into more flexible stand-ins for different variants.

Take the MiG-23 mentioned already. If it had a checkbox for version, we could quickly swap out the radar and armaments without needing a new 3D model. Possibly we might also get away without flight model changes, but that could be iffy. Maybe some simple multipliers for things like thrust might be needed. The basic idea is give us the ability to tweak the lower fidelity AI units to cover more aircraft.

In the long run it would be best to have specific AI for each aircraft version, but it seems like this will take a long time if we go by the updates to B-1/B-52/S-3/etc.

In the case of the 23 I would be happy to have, for a start, older weapons available.  For example the ability to load 4x Atolls and pretend it's a MiG-23MS, etc.

 

The ability to downgrade existing aircraft would be excellent, even if it doesn't get us a 100% faithful rendition of something older.