i'll probably get around to picking up better equipment eventually. it's a real bummer though, no one seems interested in making a dedicated F-16 HOTAS. the cougar exists but afaik it's been out of production for a long time, maybe 10 years. i didn't know about that throttle though; interesting.
edit: i'm not sure if i like the split throttle to be fair. it seems moderately pointless unless you can lock it to scale on the same, or if it's hard to split them. notwithstanding the fact that the falcon is a single engine plane, it seems like throwing your engine states out of whack wouldn't be terribly useful, if you want to yaw why not just use your rudder?
i don't have the experience to conclusively say it's useless, or any experience at all for that matter. i guess it's nice as an option, though.
It's totally useless on a Falcon but for twin engine planes it comes in very handy when you're experiencing engine failures and damage.
You don't turn one engine down to turn faster, that's not how they work. Vectored thrust accomplishes that but it's all fly-by-wire. You use the two throttles to turn one engine down when it takes damage or loses oil pressure to prevent it from bursting into flames while pushing your good engine harder to make up for the loss.
I've found myself wishing I had a split throttle numerous times in the A-10. Because without it, if one engine takes damage and becomes at risk for that kind of catastrophic failure you have three choices:
1) Kill it completely with a keyboard command
2) Reduce your output with BOTH engines (and pray you make it home)
3) Keep running the engine like normal (and pray it doesn't explode, or just accept it when it does)
Spent about as much time reconfiguring my HOTAS and TrackIR as I did shooting down MiGs. D'oh.
Cik killed a ton of shit. I blew up one Mig 21 and crippled one Mig 23.
I evaded a bunch of SA-2 shots. I confused my ECM with my Radar switch, drawing on my Silent Hunter experience I went silent and disabled my detection systems instead of turning my music on.
On our first sortie my HOTAS config didn't even have a guns or pickle button, so I had no way of even firing any of the ordinance I was carrying. Basically just showing off to the DPRK what an F-16 looks like with a combat loadout. Don't hit on me, silly NORKS.
Last edited by Timbrewolf on Sun Nov 23, 2014 10:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
We've been dropping bombs and missiles into the ocean for years and that fucker still wont die.
OKAY
So I can manage my MFCD's, ECM, fire weapons and guns, my wheelbrakes aren't locked up all the time, and I can lean forward/backward in my cockpit again.
My combat efficiency should improve 10000%.
This is the struggle a CH products owner must go through everytime they play a new sim. Every game wants to treat everything a little differently. I had falcon installed before but when I wiped my computer I forgot to save all my HOTAS settings for Falcon and DCS.
It's gonna be SO MUCH FUN going through all the DCS planes and configuring the controls all over again.
ANYWAY
We should do this again real soon, with more folks if possible. It'd be nice to get some recordings of us flying around blowing shit up.
sure. i can usually gather up 4-6 people depending on what day it is, sometimes more sometimes slightly less. we generally fly long campaigns, and do all kinds of simple to hypercomplicated ops.
would be nice if we can poach some more from this forum. the more people you have the more complicated cool stuff you can do.
really, the minimum is pretty much 4 people to do anything other than simple sweeps or CAS. esp. in the harder campaigns, you really will probably need a dedicated escort / SEAD escort to do anything that isn't just brushing the enemy's frontlines and shooting some stuff down.
no official time. it just happens when everyone shows up most of the time.
that does tend to happen quite often on weekends. we had 5 guys on friday and were doing some sweeps towards the russian border.
if anybody from here wants to join the "group" (very informal i guess) you're welcome. we fly against high-tier threats often though, so if you're new it's kind of rough, but that's easy to solve with some 2shipping.
I'm totally down to fly along and help out if you guys don't mind me being a little behind the curve. I'll play some more single-player during the week and get my confidence in the F-16 back.
I promise not to crash into anyone or blow up friendly targets, at least.
BTW Did we not have any external fuel tanks on today? Maybe I was just flying really inefficiently but I've never come as close to running completely out of gas as I did today.
both times we were internals only, the first time to carry more weapons and the second time because the air tasking order fucked up.
internals only falcon is a bitch just because you burn 800~ pounds on the takeoff run. the engine doesn't really get efficient until angels 20~
you can carry an underbelly 300 gal. but it replaces your jammer which is worth more unless you're 100% sure you've cleared out hostile SAMs where you're going.
but yeah, internals go dry worryingly quickly. generally we'll carry 2x 370 gals which put you up to 12000 fuel (up from 7200) which gives you much longer legs, considering you can easily get to 30 angels by 11000. you can easily say make it 300 mile round trips. internals only is generally for situations where we won't need the fuel and want to carry more weapons for enhanced destruction (short <50 mile CAS) or where maneuverability is more important than longevity (MIG-29 directly over airfield) otherwise, especially for sweeps and the like there's no reason not to carry at least 370s, as they take up a pylon that can't be used for AAMs anyway.
I flew like an idiot on the first sortie dodging all those SAM sites and losing my bearings that one time. I dont think I went over angels 20 until the trip back.
When I landed I only had 200lbs of fuel left and no countermeasures. I should've just jettisoned all my stores when I realized none of my weapons worked. I guess I made the taxpayers happy, and I didn't litter.
I'm used to always carrying the two side tanks so that explains it.
yeah, tanks are standard issue but on CAS and SEAD you'll sometimes drop them for more weapons. in particular, those two pylons can be used for 6(!) rockeye II, an extremely deadly cluster munition. a 4ship that drops tanks can expect 20+(!) more kills just because of the extra bombs, and when there's 300 DPRK tanks on the seoul perimeter, that makes a huge difference. a single plane with 6x AGM-65D and 6x rockeye II can expect 15~ kills on average, and that's not even high bound. i've gotten 30+ tanks before, which is an entire battalion gone with one plane's weaponry. sure, it's not common because it requires them to be pretty clustered, moving across a bridge / down a narrow road or whatever, but still. if you're not flying far, it's 100% worth it.
and not littering is important besides. think of those poor north korean fishermen: they went out to get some food for their family and catch a AGM-88. it homes to their weather radar and then poof, no more fishing boat. you saved lives!
I flew the F-15, Mig-29, A-10 and SU-27 in Lock On, back in 2008.
Is the F-16 close to any of those planes in terms of interface, commands, etc ?
I remember Lock On giving you no margin of errors in terms of high-g turns. Get past your angle of attack once, you're gonna stall in a neverending spiral.
Plus, missiles are for pussies. Real mens know when to squeeze the gun trigger to score headshots on enemy pilots.
"He can't be bargained with. He can't be reasoned with. He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are brigged."
LOMAC became DCS FC3. All those planes are in DCS in that package.
The F-16 is baby-tier easy to fly, it's fly-by-wire so it's almost like it's on autopilot all the time.
The avionics and fidelity of the systems, on the other hand, are much better and more realistic than what they had in LOMAC or what they've got now in FC3.
Flying the plane itself will be easy as piss for you. Learning how to juggle all the systems will take a minute to get used to.
like anon said, the F-16 FLCS is a wondrous automaton. while making the plane depart from controlled flight is possible if you know what you're doing, it's very, very difficult. even in the case of a 9G turn, the thing is rock solid.
lock on, while a sim, is much lighter than falcon. lock on barely simulates avionics for instance, while falcon simulates pretty much all of that (menus, ramp, radios, deeper A-G weapons interaction etc)
it's a much better sim in my opinion, and even a much better game due to the dynamic campaign and coop stuff.
An0n3 wrote:
The F-16 is baby-tier easy to fly, it's fly-by-wire so it's almost like it's on autopilot all the time.
Good news because that's not the case with the Mig-29, the only plane that gave me problems in high-G turns.
Putin patch this plz.
"He can't be bargained with. He can't be reasoned with. He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are brigged."
afaik the flight models for the F-15 etc are very far from realistic. for instance, that shit does not lose control just from turning. i think it's gotten better since 2008, but it's still not very realistic. it's loss of control is still out of whack, the F-15C is very stable.
MIG-29 i'm not sure about. where they're getting the flight model information from, who knows. it might have LoC problems in turns, though i think it's a fairly nimble plane.
I figured out how to set a target, load a data cartage, and ramp start the F-16. I can use guns, the AIM-120, and AIM-9 with reasonable success. CCIP is very easy to use and I can do CCRP in level flight.
I do not know:
How to use most AGM or guided bombs
Missile evasion maneuvers, or using my RWR with any reasonable success
Also, I get no audio indication of an enemy launch at me from my RWR, and I have the threat volume at max.
make sure HANDOFF button is punched on the panel left of the RWR, and your MODE switch (by CM thumbswitch and SYMBOLOGY INT switch) is set to semi.
if handoff is pressed and you are on MODE: SEMI you will get an audio warning if:
the enemy fires a SARH (semi-active radar homing) missile at you.
an enemy aircraft hard locks you
a SAM hard locks you
a older radar SAM system fires at you (SHORADs and the SA-10 don't give a launch warning! pilots beware!)
an ARH (active radar homing) missile putbulls onto you (giant flashing M and very alarming tone)
as infrared seekerheads are passive and do not emit radar, enemy infrared launches, whether MANPAD / SHORAD / fox2 will not give a launch warning.
nice progress though. we should fly some time.
oh yeah i guess i should also address the rest of your post:
laser GBU (GBU-12, 24 chiefly) are not that important. GBU-12 are very useful for CAS, as you can carry 4 of them on two pylons and they will hit with almost 100% certainty when dropped even from very high altitude. depending on the situation on the ground, it's often a very good trade to trade the extremely high destructive potential of rockeye II / CBU-87/97 for the reliability and safety of a GBU (which can be dropped far more accurately, safely and from a much higher altitude)
24's on the other hand i find almost useless. they are a perfectly serviceable bomb, as they pack a huge amount of destruction. however they are eclipsed in almost all respect by the GBU/31, which gains a number of advantages over the /24: it's effectively F&F, considering it uses a GPS guide and not a laser, this means you can drop two 2000 pound bombs with perfect accuracy from angels 20+ in about 4 seconds, whereas with the /24 you'll have to do one bomb per pass which is DANGEROUS.
mavericks are also complicated, but a staple of CAS. you will be using them constantly due to the fact that they are :
safe (can be employed from 15000~ feet)
reliable (hitrates are very high)
extremely deadly (will easily destroy heavy tanks)
standoff (have a 10-15 mile range when at high altitude; can effectively destroy deadly air defense threats from outside their effective range)
numerous (6x per plane is a reasonable amount of pain to put that in perspective, a 4ship flight can effectively destroy a tank battalion with just it's initial 10 second burst of fire, assuming you coordinate well)
mavericks are really important, if you want a new system to learn after you are done with brushing up on RWR and practicing AAMs etc, mavericks are a good one to choose as they are both very useful and are semi-similar to the GBU-12 in how the maverick seekerhead/TGP and lasing work. if you know one it's much easier to learn the other.
anyway, i hope that's helpful and not as condescending as a lot of it sounded to me.
I just did a flight test, and i can confirm. The F-16 is super easy to fly. This thing almost never stalls, even in high-g turns, loopings, split-s and other acrobatic figures.
"He can't be bargained with. He can't be reasoned with. He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are brigged."
1) Turn them on in your DSMS
2) Cycle to t heir seeker head page in your MFCD
3) Uncage them
4) Slew the seeker's POV over what you want to go boom
5) Wait for crosshair to stop wiggling around and start tracking the thing you want to go boom
6) Double check that range is good
7) Boom consent
8) Fun flight time (you can use the TGP during fun flight time to watch your target prepare for impending doom)
9) Glorious money shot fuck you DPRK
10) Uncage the next one and repeat
Getting comfortable with the air combat is still a bit of a hurdle for me. I don't have any experience knife fighting in a wing. The majority of my flightsim experience is in ground-attacks in the A-10C.
it just comes with experience. if it makes you feel any better i played sinai yesterday with a friend of mine and out of 3 sweeps over the egyptian oil rigs we lost the whole element 3 times.
i hate F-16s, fuck you F-16 you are 2maneuverable4me
1) Turn them on in your DSMS
2) Cycle to t heir seeker head page in your MFCD
3) Uncage them
4) Slew the seeker's POV over what you want to go boom
5) Wait for crosshair to stop wiggling around and start tracking the thing you want to go boom
6) Double check that range is good
7) Boom consent
8) Fun flight time (you can use the TGP during fun flight time to watch your target prepare for impending doom)
9) Glorious money shot fuck you DPRK
10) Uncage the next one and repeat
Getting comfortable with the air combat is still a bit of a hurdle for me. I don't have any experience knife fighting in a wing. The majority of my flightsim experience is in ground-attacks in the A-10C.
Thanks! I've figured the Mavericks out now, they're really potent.
For me, I think the biggest hurdle was not only the, "Look at these 1,000 buttons," but also the performance gap.
When you go from things like LaGG-3's, or P-51's, the ability to zoom climb from sea level to 40,000 feet is a bit... amazing. It lets you be much more aggressive with your maneuvers and not worry as much about an energy advantage.
Cik wrote:snip
o7
What would be your recommended flare/chaff programs?
if you want actual numbers i can dig it up. i do spend 99% of the time on 1 or 2. if i'm at long range and not threatened by any heatseekers (over the ocean, high altitude, etc) but am getting spiked by SA2+ i'll switch chaff only to save flares for OSHIT FOX@ INBOUND moments. otherwise 2 works for general purpose OHFUCK
1) Fuel economy:
The plane goes fast as fuck but chugs fuel and can't hold as much as you would want. Use the juice when you need to but otherwise never go over military power and never go below cruise altitude.
2) Limited countermeasures:
Holy fuck you can't hardly hold any of these things. At least not compared to what I'm used to.
Again, spoiled A-10C pilot here. That plane can loiter for hours and hours while carrying a compliment of counter-measures that's like three times as many as the F-16.
yeah. flares especially are very, very sparse. if you're ducking into strelas or 13's you've got maybe 10 seconds worth of flares. you get 2 passes, tops before it becomes VERY dangerous to stick around. it is a one pass+haul ass plane.
chaff is more forgiving. you have a decent amount of it.
and that makes sense really. the A-10 is bound to spend tons of time at <10,000. the F-16 can at pretty much any point "cya later losers!" and burn to angels 20 in about 10 seconds.
Man just talking about the Warthog makes me want to fly the Warthog again. I fucking love that thing.
Especially once you've mastered using this fucker:
Calling for tasking and getting a BRA for a target, you just punch that shit right into this fucker and away you go. Add your own steerpoint, slew your TGP to it, and start looking for shit to kill.
An0n3 wrote:The hardest parts of flying the F-16 for me are:
1) Fuel economy:
The plane goes fast as fuck but chugs fuel and can't hold as much as you would want. Use the juice when you need to but otherwise never go over military power and never go below cruise altitude.
The funny thing about that is that the F-16 actually had the longest range out of the all the candidates for the Lightweight Fighter program.
An0n3 wrote:
The plane goes fast as fuck but chugs fuel and can't hold as much as you would want. Use the juice when you need to but otherwise never go over military power and never go below cruise altitude.
Just try going full afterburners with a F-15. This thing is like " Holy crap, this plane is fast ! I wonder what's the max spee... *out of fuel* "
"He can't be bargained with. He can't be reasoned with. He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are brigged."
An0n3 wrote:
The plane goes fast as fuck but chugs fuel and can't hold as much as you would want. Use the juice when you need to but otherwise never go over military power and never go below cruise altitude.
Just try going full afterburners with a F-15. This thing is like " Holy crap, this plane is fast ! I wonder what's the max spee... *out of fuel* "
The flight model for the F-15C in DCS FC3 / LOMAC is terrible though. The real life plane isn't that maneuverable at all. It's a stand-off BVR fighter/interceptor. High energy passes and fantastic radar systems. It's the same design philosophy that gave us the F-22...which is also a terrible dogfighter.
For whatever stupid reason they (at least initially) modeled it prettymuch just like an F-16's flight envelope. It banks and turns like an F-16...which when you compare the sheer sizes and shapes of the two planes is laughably fucking wrong.
They DID update it with a recent standalone version of the module (and FC3 owners got a free upgrade, hurray!) so I'm not sure if that's still the case. Fingers crossed they fixed that shit. Speaking of those upgrades HOLY SHIT MY DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICK:
i'm going to see if i can get a group together to play maybe tomorrow or friday at like 3-7 CST (-6), or if anyone's around i'm going to be 2shipping with a friend of mine, tonight.
all experience levels welcome. we can teach you if you're new. also we should friend up on steam or IMs or something so we can adhoc this faster. forums are glacial.
I think I'm missing something with steerpoints.
I'll recon an area during a briefing, select a target as a steerpoint that isn't part of my navigation steerpoints, and check my data cartage page to make sure they're there. When I get into a flight and I cycle to that steerpoint with the 'S' key, it'll just read the distance as '999' as if there was no steerpoint at all.
what steerpoints are you setting? i think it's like 10-24 are targets, if you go above it hits markpoints and might get fucked.
uh, proper procedure for tgt stpts is recon --->, select target, switch up to steerpoint you assign to, accept, repeat. is your INS configured correctly? if you're ramping it should be 1.5 RDY+ otherwise you'll have steerpoint issues, they won't show up, they'll drift, etc.
which master mode are you in, which weapons do you have selected, which MFDs are you looking at. is your radar off?
I was practicing earlier and double checking to make sure my HOTAS and TrackIR were configured right. Created a whole new profile that lets me get my nose right up into the instrument panels and switches. Good times. Did a few gun runs on a nuclear power plant wishing I had my GAU-8.
Another way to wrangle steerpoints is to use your UFC and press 4 (which should be labeled something like STRP) and then type in the number of the steerpoint you want to go to and press enter.
An0n3 wrote:I was practicing earlier and double checking to make sure my HOTAS and TrackIR were configured right. Created a whole new profile that lets me get my nose right up into the instrument panels and switches. Good times. Did a few gun runs on a nuclear power plant wishing I had my GAU-8.
Another way to wrangle steerpoints is to use your UFC and press 4 (which should be labeled something like STRP) and then type in the number of the steerpoint you want to go to and press enter.
Now that I'm using the UFC, my target steerpoints work!
One other thing, how does one return to the "default" page for the data entry?
Down at the bottom, see the up/down/left/right thing? In the game there's like a control stick that sticks out of it. If you click to the left of it on RTN it'll bring you back to the default page.
also fucking RWR modelling is a lot deeper than i thought disappearing sparrows errywhere fuck sinai why am i even here fuck deserts seriously F-4s are fucking gay
shit
fuck you guys want to play falcon tomorrow or something how about tonite post here if you're interested we could maybe get shot down a few times mite b fun
Nah man, Su-27 and Mig-29 pilots that know what they're doing with IRST can fuck your day up with you barely having any warning.
Infra-red missiles that can lock, track, and hit from 50km out. You'll get a spike from the enemy craft when they find you at range with radar, then switch to IRST and go silent. You'll never get another spike on your RWR again. If you haven't spotted them on your own radar you'll be totally blind that they're out there. You wont get a lock notifaction, you wont get a launch notification, you wont get any kind of warning that there's a missile on you unless you look out your window and see it coming.
Only caveat is that the range of IRST is limited by weather conditions.
TRUE RUSSIAN ASSHOLES WHO CHEEKI EVERY BREEKI know that if you use BOTH the R-77 and R-77T at the SAME TIME comrade Putin gets a huge boner and capitalist scum are fucked really hard because now they have a secret infrared missile chasing their shit at the same that the active radar missile is also chasing their shit.
If you want to experience the glory chug a bottle of vodka and load up a Mig-29 in DCS.
>burn
>climb
>launch at arc
>notch to limit
>wait for 10s to pitbull
>turn defensive and head for dirt as fast as possible
laugh as 2+ adders are helpless to catch you as you fall like a meteor
of course, if you are ever out of this ^ window and you're not prepared for pitbull you are 100% unavoidably dead.
unlike AA7s etc, adders are not something you can dodge without controlling the engagement. if you are ever unprepared for one you are toast.
