Tips for keeping the energy for dogfighting

[WildeSau44]

Hey guys,

I see some videos on ytube of ppl dogfighting almost without losing energy. Well, not me! 
I am not sure what I am doing wrong. I even cheated using unlimited fuel and abusing the afterburner.

My dogfights always start with energy but as I start turning and chasing, I lose energy so fast that I need to dive. Then I get some distance turn to face the enemy and the energy is gone again. I keep fighting stalls.

Any tips and advices would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[draconus]

There's no magic to it. When you go down you get energy back, when you go up you lose it. AB can accelerate you but only if you don't kill the thrust with the drag. That means you have to control how many Gs you pull on the stick. If you're fast you can afford to pull more. If you're slow you have to be gentle with it and allow it to regain the energy - yes, you'll lose some angles, that's part of the game. You can also mix it - pull more while nose down and pull less when going up. Practice, practice, practice!

[Jayhawk1971]

Specifically for the Tomcat, as a rule of thumb, try to not exceed 15 units of AOA when turning, or you'll rapidly lose energy. Pay attention to the audio-visual feedback HB baked into the module, this will give you hints as well regarding your energy state. Don't fly lead/ pure pursuit until you are in a good position to take a shot. 

Other than that, practice. Learn how to modulate stick input. Your best rate turn in the Tomcat is 307Kts at 6.5g. I'd set up a simple exercise where you try to hit those numbers. You'll develop a feel for that eventually (probably easier IRL, as you don't feel acceleration/ deceleration and g-forces in DCS).

FFB stick helps a lot!! 

[draconus]

4 minutes ago, Jayhawk1971 said:

Your best rate turn in the Tomcat is 307Kts at 6.5g.

Where do you get that precise number from?

[Jayhawk1971]

vor 5 Minuten schrieb draconus:

Where do you get that precise number from?

"Paco" Chierici, via Reflected's Speed & Angels campaign. It's in the campaign doc for mission 6.

[Dragon1-1]

1 hour ago, draconus said:

There's no magic to it. When you go down you get energy back, when you go up you lose it. 

Err... that's very, very wrong. You're probably thinking about airspeed. Going up is the best way to save energy while still being able to make a tight turn. In fact, going in fast and pulling up lets you bank that extra energy and maintain your best turning speed, while being able to pull a bit higher G than 6.5, since when you're coming down, you're gaining airspeed, so anything above about 310kts can be turned into Gs at your leisure. Very few things can defend against an F-14 that can use the vertical right.

[draconus]

6 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Err... that's very, very wrong. You're probably thinking about airspeed. Going up is the best way to save energy while still being able to make a tight turn. In fact, going in fast and pulling up lets you bank that extra energy and maintain your best turning speed, while being able to pull a bit higher G than 6.5, since when you're coming down, you're gaining airspeed, so anything above about 310kts can be turned into Gs at your leisure. Very few things can defend against an F-14 that can use the vertical right.

Yeah, that's better wording.

[Dragon1-1]

It's not a matter of wording, but of factual correctness. Airspeed is not energy, that's the whole point of the E-M theory.

[AH_Solid_Snake]

Its mostly wording, no need to get focussed on nitpicking other answers while not contributing to the original question.

What @draconus was aiming at was kinetic energy, what @Dragon1-1 is talking about managing is potential energy.

Think about it a couple of ways, before the fight you have all the time in the world to set yourself up for a good engagement, build up a solid bank of both types of energy (get high, get fast). Then think of it as making trades, you don't want to tank all your potential energy on the first turn, if you just spiral downwards pulling all the Gs you will trade away everything for 1 good turn and 1 chance. 

Once the fight begins as draconus said, you need to start trying to hold onto speed or altitude wherever possible, and depending on what you're trying to do like lead or pure pursuit you are trading PE or KE to do it. Generally the PE you started with is pretty much what you've got to work with as if you try and level the wings and go up you risk giving the bandit an easy angles problem. Going downhill during a sharp turn will help maintain the circle so long as it's worth it. If you find yourself fast for some reason then instead of using the brakes or throttle, then as Dragon says, you could bank that energy by doing a yo-yo or something rather than just throwing it away like your opponent just did.

There's no simple answer to winning dogfights, but if you understand your best rate / radius turns and can do those, and you know your basic aerobatic manoeuvres, then start combining them depending on what you and the bandit are doing. It's fairly normal for new pilots to start thinking very horizontally and to master the vertical later, but there is always something to learn and its a very very currency driven skill.

[WildeSau44]

Thank you all guys! Much appreciated all ideas and advices!!!

[DD_Fenrir]

Also have a gameplan for each enemy aircraft type you encounter. Know what strengths or weaknesses you can deny or exploit in both your opponents jet and your own. Fuel and ordnance weight will also factor into what you can achieve so keep these in mind.

For example, in an F-14B vs a MiG-29 choosing a 2-circle fight is not usually a great idea as under most circumstances a good MiG-29 will at least match or better your best turn-rate; this means a 1-circle is probably a better option...

However, this generally means you'll need to get slower than the bandit and you'll be sacrificing kinetic energy to do so at the merge. A smart driver will use the vertical to drive their speed down to their best radius speed whilst using a gain in altitude to gain PE and mitigate the overall loss in energy. That said, if you can get your nose on faster, you can drive bad decisions from the opponent, which if you are able to expolit can compound their problems and allow you some good follow-on BFM options, if not an immediate weapons employment opportunity. 

[Dragon1-1]

16 hours ago, DD_Fenrir said:

Also have a gameplan for each enemy aircraft type you encounter. Know what strengths or weaknesses you can deny or exploit in both your opponents jet and your own. Fuel and ordnance weight will also factor into what you can achieve so keep these in mind.

For this, a good general purpose piece of advice is "take the fight where the bandit can't follow". In the Tomcat, it usually means into the vertical. There are some opponents, like the Viper, where it can means slow (but slow is always risky, and the only way to get there is through his corner speed), and for a MiG-15 it can mean so fast that his ailerons lock up. Once you get there, you just have to figure out where the bandit decided to be instead of staying with you (all his options are bad at this point), then go down there and kill him, now armed with plenty of spare energy and probably decent angles, as well. If you mess up, go back up and try again. Just make sure not to break the wings (often a risk, particularly when you're coming into the merge supersonic from a Sparrow fight) or run out of gas.

[RustBelt]

The Tomcat especially favors flying “The Egg” as described in Fighter Combat: Tactics and Maneuvering, Shaw. 
 

Never throw away speed to turn, always convert it to Altitude.  Because you can always cash the altitude back out. 
 

FBW fighters let you cheat the egg by (mostly) not letting you scrub speed. They’ll always try and give you “best turn” without an accelerated stall when you pull all the way. 
 

The Tomcat will let you pull it all the way into the stall, while turning all your speed into Noise and Drag. Especially with a game joystick.  (The real plane has ways of making full aft stick very difficult) 

[Rhrich]

Lots of good advice. But perhaps a bit too complicated. there are several excellent videos on YouTube that will go into this in great detail and with proper terminology.

I’ll assume you’re fairly new to flight, welcome its a great place, so I’ll give you some pointers without terminology and with simplifications. This is not a proper lecture and I’ll skip a lot of things, but here’s how you can think about this before you take the time to learn it the basics:

First of all, it’s going to depend on what tomcat you fly. The A is quite weak, but the B is a rocket ship. If you’re flying the B then going full AB while getting as close to 0g as posssible for a few seconds should be all you need to regain speed  

There are three types of energy: your altitude, your speed and the chemical energy in your fuel that can be converted by your engines. 

Remember Newton’s first law: Your plane would like to continue in a straight line unless forces are applied (gravity is always applied, but other than that it’s up to you). The only force you can apply has its source in your energy state. That means you’ll loose energy every time you change direction. 

Thats OK though, because your engines keep turning chemical energy into kinetic energy (speed). As long as the amount of energy you loose from changing direction does not exceed the amount you get from your engines, you’ll keep your energy. 
One of the great tricks (which at least I find much harder in DCS than in real planes) is to turn without loosing to much energy.

Might be helpful to think of a car. You can make quite a sharp turn and keep much of your speed, but if you do it too much you’ll lose grip and loose a lot of speed. Same with planes: If you pull your stick to hard or to fast, you can end up «drifting»  too much. I think anyone who as flown a fighter or acrobatic airplane will tell you that you can feel this happening. Not so stationary in a simulator. However there are plenty of cues in the tomcat, and you can always look at the AOA meter as well. If your aoa is too high, you can bet you’re bleeding a lot of energy. Now, there’s a lot more too this, not to mention how you blend your stick and rudder controls, but focus on that as a start. The rest you can learn when you feel more confident. 
 

There are one more thing you’ll need to consider: Altitude. If you’re 3000 feet above someone, you have a lot of potential energy that can be converted to speed. That means you can turn harder than your opponent. You will bleed off speed, but you can recoup that better than him since you have more altitude you can trade for airspeed. 
We therefore like to think of a planes energy as a combination of speed and altitude. How you manage that is key. For example, if you are going to fast, you can trade some speed for altitude, thereby preserving energy. 
That’s why most evenly fought fights tend to go downwards: To match the opponent’s turn rate both will trade altitude for speed until they run out of altitude. 
 

This is extremely hard, and you’re trying to play 3D chess against an opponent at the same time. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you struggle, a lot of real pilots had it the same way. And they knew (or should have known) all the theoretical framework before they ever tried it. 

[Spurts]

On 4/10/2025 at 4:54 PM, RustBelt said:

  (The real plane has ways of making full aft stick very difficult) 

I get around this by going full forward trim on entering BFM.  Stops me from getting that last bit of up elevator and means all I have to do is relax pressure to get the "nose down" to speed up.

[Joch1955]

I have been working more on this aspect. Close in dogfighting has always been my weak point.  Fighting against F5Es, going vertical is a good bet. It is almost impossible to out turn a F5E, but if you zoom up with full AB and get an altitude advantage, it is then relatively easy to use the pent up energy to dive down and get on its rear. As others have said, it is very important to stay high and fast in the F14.

[Rhrich]

Depends on what plane you meet. 
 

I would suggest going for a drive. Stick your hand out of the window. Angle it a bit, you’ll notice it pulls up or down. Angle it more and it’ll pull more. Keep going, and suddenly it’s mostly pulled back. Use that as a mental picture. Carve as a skier skis down, not skid as he does to slow down. 

[RustBelt]

A dive throws out all your kinetic energy. Even with the big engines, once you start working turns you’re in a deficit you need to be lucky to get out of because you are still limited to turn speed to make best rate. 

You typically want to save dives for bugging out. If you already gave up your altitude now you’re low and slow. 

It tends to be better practice to bank that speed in the altimeter than throw it away in drag. As the fight progresses you cash that energy out bit by bit for advantages.

In the Tomcat you want to take the high road most of the time because the transition from a Mach 1 BVR timeline to merge means there’s a lot of excess energy for a turn fight. Don’t throw it away. (Unless you’re running away.) 

[Rhrich]

You don’t want to go too high in the Tomcat, the wing sweep works on Mach not indicated. So in the thin air your in a severe disadvantage against planes like the flanker or the eagle. 

[Dragon1-1]

If you try to turn with them up there, yeah. A brief visit to 30kft when going over the top won't hurt you. That said, at that altitude, the Phoenix is a real beast. You shouldn't ever need to turn with something that's so obliging as to fly in your optimum BVR envelope (at least as long as you brought Phoenixes).

[captain_dalan]

On 4/8/2025 at 4:39 PM, WildeSau44 said:

Thank you all guys! Much appreciated all ideas and advices!!!

It's all a matter of practice. Reading on good material helps, but you still need to be able to implement it in an actual fight. Start with AI's and then switch to MP dogfighting servers when you feel comfortable. 

NOTE: Many of the AI controlled planes cheat big time and have infinite energy reserves. Notable example are MiG-21 and F-5, but there are others as well. 

[RustBelt]

You could also find training servers where actual people will train you into it as opposed to jumping straight into “get gud” MP. 

[IronMike]

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is what I like to call "fapping for energy" - it is a technique on how to use the stick, and in fact very simple to practice.

As others already have stated you want to manage your energy, that is Gs and speed. Ideally you want both at ideal numbers, so corner speed at around 6ish G. But that won't always be the case, a climb may reduce speed, a sharper pull will reduce it, and a dive for speed may reduce your Gs, etc. Now, of course we need to stay observant of our instruments (in time you also get a feel for it, as the cockpit rattling and buffeting feeds back to you, so you can have more eyes on the bandit).

But how does that actually look in terms of stick work, if say we fly a level turn - hypothetically (since usually you should go half a circle up and half a circle down). So, let us say, we fly a level turn and suddenly have too much speed and not enough G? How to get back G load without really bleeding all your speed? A good technique is to pull (quick release), pull (quick release), pull (quick release), pull (quick release) ... on the stick, aka very fast stick aft movements. This will quickly load G back on, without bleeding speed, since you have a brief release of the stick between the pulls (hence fapping for energy).

Vice versa, if you have a lot of G, but losing speed, you do it in the opposite direction. You push (quick pull aft), push (quick pull aft), push (quick pull aft), push (quick pull aft), ... This will allow you to load back on speed without sacrificing too much G, aka just letting go of the stick and G load.

Note that while the "fapping for G" is a more pronounced quick and sharp pull and release, the "release for speed" is a more relaxed, slower movement that you adjust as needed, sometimes as little as one slightly relaxed ease forward on the stick, can gain you back enough speed, and then you bring the stick back again to hold the Gs, etc.

Try and train that by simply flying level turns, and observing how either loads back on G, or releases G and loads back on speed. And observe how the aircraft behaves. It is a very good thing to have in your muscles memory for dogfighting.

This technique is not Tomcat specific and can be applied in any dogfighting aircraft, even in a glider, a fokker dr1 in ww1, a bf 109 in ww2, an F-4 in Vietnam, or an F35 in post modern times... and allows you to stay at full throttle at all times (which you generally should, unless you are trying to force an overshoot, or as a last resort, or some more advanced split throttle shenanigans, yada, which I'd consider more of a gimmick than base dogfighting skill.)

I hope I explained it well enough to make sense. Happy training! 

Edited April 22 by IronMike

[Kageseigi]

On 4/22/2025 at 6:00 AM, IronMike said:

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is what I like to call "fapping for energy" - it is a technique on how to use the stick, and in fact very simple to practice.

As others already have stated you want to manage your energy, that is Gs and speed. Ideally you want both at ideal numbers, so corner speed at around 6ish G. But that won't always be the case, a climb may reduce speed, a sharper pull will reduce it, and a dive for speed may reduce your Gs, etc. Now, of course we need to stay observant of our instruments (in time you also get a feel for it, as the cockpit rattling and buffeting feeds back to you, so you can have more eyes on the bandit).

But how does that actually look in terms of stick work, if say we fly a level turn - hypothetically (since usually you should go half a circle up and half a circle down). So, let us say, we fly a level turn and suddenly have too much speed and not enough G? How to get back G load without really bleeding all your speed? A good technique is to pull (quick release), pull (quick release), pull (quick release), pull (quick release) ... on the stick, aka very fast stick aft movements. This will quickly load G back on, without bleeding speed, since you have a brief release of the stick between the pulls (hence fapping for energy).

Vice versa, if you have a lot of G, but losing speed, you do it in the opposite direction. You push (quick pull aft), push (quick pull aft), push (quick pull aft), push (quick pull aft), ... This will allow you to load back on speed without sacrificing too much G, aka just letting go of the stick and G load.

Note that while the "fapping for G" is a more pronounced quick and sharp pull and release, the "release for speed" is a more relaxed, slower movement that you adjust as needed, sometimes as little as one slightly relaxed ease forward on the stick, can gain you back enough speed, and then you bring the stick back again to hold the Gs, etc.

Try and train that by simply flying level turns, and observing how either loads back on G, or releases G and loads back on speed. And observe how the aircraft behaves. It is a very good thing to have in your muscles memory for dogfighting.

This technique is not Tomcat specific and can be applied in any dogfighting aircraft, even in a glider, a fokker dr1 in ww1, a bf 109 in ww2, an F-4 in Vietnam, or an F35 in post modern times... and allows you to stay at full throttle at all times (which you generally should, unless you are trying to force an overshoot, or as a last resort, or some more advanced split throttle shenanigans, yada, which I'd consider more of a gimmick than base dogfighting skill.)

I hope I explained it well enough to make sense. Happy training! 

 

Thank you for the tip! Do you happen to know if there are any videos available to show that technique in action? Preferably with the control overlay active?

[IronMike]

1 hour ago, Kageseigi said:

 

Thank you for the tip! Do you happen to know if there are any videos available to show that technique in action? Preferably with the control overlay active?

I don't think so, at least not to my knowledge. Maybe I can find a moment next week to record a short snippet. It's fairly easy and intuitive.