Apocal

Despite what was posted, Falcon doesn't do 1 or 3. The approaches to an airfield are always straight in (no break) and while there is a radio command for calling in the RESCAP, it doesn't appear to actually do anything. And after the chute hits the ground it just disappears from the gameworld, as far as I can tell. F/A-18 had it implemented though. You would actually hear your wingmen calling out their ejection (most of the time), then they would go off air for few minutes while they were in their chute. After awhile though, you'd hear, "Any allied aircraft, any allied aircraft, this is (callsign). I'm down safely! Enemy near, hiding!" The last two statements wouldn't be made unless there actually are enemies nearby. And a rescue helicopter would launch (usually from a forward location or picket ship closer to your mission area) and it would fly out to their location. If you suppressed the threats and the helo got in quick enough, you could actually recover the downed airman. Of course, it is very hard to keep them the area in sight, since you don't have a marking feature (which Falcon, ironically enough, does).

If you don't mind occassionally being imprisoned, FDNF is OK. At least you're hitting places like Australia, Thailand, and Hong Kong. Thailand... it has to be seen to be believed. "Chocolate man! Chocolate man!" Those who know, KNOW. BTW, I was raised in Tacoma and Federal Way before I joined the Navy. Stadium High (Stay dumb and High) School.

I dunno dude, merging against a Fulcrum when you're in a -16 or -18 with 9Ms is pretty much a kick straight to the pills.

We're keeping the Kiowas dude.

With UAVs taking over a large portion of the tactical recon mission, why waste money developing and fielding an entirely new helicopter for the same mission? Especially when we are as pressed for dollars as is?

I've found you pretty much have to launch from 1g against a non-maneuvering target to get a decent Pk. That and getting much closer than required, just outside of effective gunnery range. Since I usually fly the Crusader online, if it's a real balls-out turn-fight I stick to guns, only using the Sidewinder if they screw up an extension. BTW, nice name.

VICTORY IS MINE! Sweet man, thanks. Are these the 'realistic' settings or just settings that give a realistic result?

-Play as a backseater. Admittedly better suited to a study sim, vice survey sim. -More control over the different strike elements, ie. being able to tell the SEAD guys which threats are priority and which are opportunity, telling escorts to commit or blowthrough, being able to move up or down the push time, etc. -Realistic recon requirements. Flight of the Intruder actually had this implemented in a way. Some targets had photo-intelligence associated with them, some didn't. Also, BDA should actually have to be performed, whether by satellite, UAV or recon aircraft, to confirm mission success. Although I could see how that would take away from the instant gratification of sims. -Wingmen who aren't cookie-cutter. Because god knows you can (and usually do) wind up with as many morons as you do aces in any outfit. -Rank progression that actually matters. The closest I've seen have been IL-2 and Tornado. If you start the campaign as a new guy, you shouldn't be planning missions and deciding ordnance loadouts. Although I can see how a lot of people might get pissed if that was the case. -Lasers/IR that doesn't work through clouds, smoke or heavy fog.

I gave it a shot, exact same problem as before. They appear to be using identical flight models. I've been searching, but I can't find anything related to the MiG-29.

I guess my question should be, what other line items in the ini affect top end speed? I'm not as knowledgeable about aerodynamics or flight modelling as others around here.

According to the Wikipedia entry and my "How to Fly and Fight in the MiG-29" the SFC is mostly correct. I went through the SLThrustDry/Wet entries and found them to be pretty much on the mark (slightly overrated), so I can't figure out why it won't break Mach 1. I'm draining the tanks right now, like you suggested, but I really don't think that is the cause of the problem. If it was simply slow accleration, yeah, I could see that, but right now, the aircraft just hits a brickwall at about .93 Mach and simply won't go faster, regardless of how much coal you put in the burner. Thanks, giving it a shot now.

OK, I checked all those places, no joy to be found. Can you give a ballpark area to search, I might be able to it on my own.

Just about every reference out there, including Marshall Michel's "Clashes: Air Combat Over North Vietnam 1965-1973" says that the ONLY way for the F-4 to effectively fight against the tighter turning MiGs was by maintaining an energy advantage and making judicious use of the vertical. The Phantom driver's negated their disadvantage in horizontal maneuverability by turning while (nearly) vertical, which is fast and costs very little energy, then using a rudder slice to quickly flip the F-4 180 (straight down) and driving to the MiGs tail. Combined with more flexible combat doctrine (loose deuce vs finger four), it allowed the Phantoms to dictate the terms of the fight. The author does mention, several times, that the USN and USMC effectively taught the skill of handling Phantom vertically at low speeds, while the USAF discouraged vertical maneuvering in the Phantom until after the war. They had legimate reasons, the F-4 did suffer from adverse yaw issues. Which is where I suppose your boss could have gotten his line of thinking.

I included all the modes you would find on standard IFF gear. Which is why I said absolutely nothing about employing any Mode tactically. Except Mode C and if anyone thinks Mode C is classified, I got some oceanfront in Kansas for 'em. Honest.

Most likely they retain some noise jamming capability for certain specific threats, but not a general blanket of noise. By design self-protection pods are small and light, which is good if you want to use them in a variety of flight regimes, but the tradeoff is rather narrow focus (fire control-type radars). RE: active missiles. Potentially, yes. But that would be when the aforementioned home-on-jam capability would shine. By time it's that close, the missile is already in the terminal phase, using lead pursuit, high-G manuevering. A better way of handling it would be to trick the fuze into detonating early, outside of the lethal radius, or not at all. If anyone doubts what I am saying, all the relevant information is publicly available, open source. About the best basic primer on the technical aspects (that I've read) is the Countermeasures chapter of "Principles of Naval Weapon Systems". It can get a little bit "techy" but not excessively so. Tactics wise, "EW 101: A First Course in Electronic Warfare" I thought was fairly good, though again, it could get techy. Admittedly, what I consider a little techy might be what you think is too much. On the other hand, I've never once calculated fuel consumption on a long range strike or used sine/cosine to calculate my offset IP to a target, so to each his own. I'm not in the avionics industry, I'm the kind of guy the pods are designed to defeat. Worked on every stage of the IADS chain from the search (EW) radar, right down to pressing the 'FIRE' button. It's an interesting game, move/countermove, like chess but with explosions. Oh I believe higher is safer. Unfortunately in my present campaign the aircraft aren't LGB equipped, so it's either radar bombing (AKA 'Player has destroyed s**thouse with MK84') or low level. I haven't noticed that low-caliber stuff is particularly lethal, but MANPADs have taken a slice out of hide plenty of times. Just never when I'm fast and very low.

Well, doing IFF right is a bit more difficult. I suppose I could write a little something about that too... The biggest is figuring out just what IFF is. With an IFF system, you have two basic elements, a transponder and a interrogator. The interrogator sends out the query, the transponder squawks a response. Virtually all aircraft have a transponder. Relatively few have interrogators. Early F-16s didn't have interrogators them. There are five basic modes of IFF: Modes 1, 2, 3A, 4 and C. Mode 3A is what civilians have used for years now. I forget exactly what Modes 1 and 2 do, (been awhile for me) but they are unencrypted as well. Mode C is used to squawk altitude. Military IFF systems can use all these modes, but have the addition of Mode 4, which is encrypted. Additionally, interrogators can be set to either automatically interrogate unknown contacts or only interrogate contacts momementarily all in various combinations of modes. Transponders can be set to respond only to valid Mode 4 queries (to prevent an opponent from tracking you by constantly sending false queries) or turned off entirely. It's nowhere near as precise on a fighter compared to a large aircraft or ship, just because of the antenna sizes. The reciever can only recieve one response and it's entirely possible that a correct Mode 4 response can be recieved but mistakenly corrollated to the different track. This can be operator error (too big of a query gate so that multiple contacts overlap and give false responses), atmospheric (you can simply fail to recieve the response) or hardware (you haven't detected the friendly, so the nearest track is given the friendly ID). Also a note on the system. IFF is very much fixed frequency (IIRC the query freq was 243Mhz and squawk freq was slightly different, but still fixed) without variation throughout the Modes. If an opponent jammed either freq, the system would be useless in the vincity of the jammer. Since most transponders and interrogators are quite weak power wise, it wouldn't take much a jammer or very many to make IFF performance spotty in a particular area. There are other issues as well, but these the well-known, public-knowledge workings and flaws of IFF. Just looking at these you can see that why IFF isn't, by itself, considered a positive ID. Sets mounted on AWACS sets and ships are better in most regards, which is why they tend to carry more weight.

Most sims have a fairly decent representation of deception jamming. Noise jamming I don't think I've seen in any sim except Jane's F/A-18. Incidentally, it also has towed decoys, so if I had to choose a sim with the best EW modelling it would have to be that one. If Falcon 4 has noise jamming modelled I haven't noticed. Only played LOMAC a little bit so I really can't say there. The most modern ones are pretty simple operating wise. Turn them on when you get over Indian Country and leave them on until you fly out. They stay silent until a valid lock from a threat emitter is detected, at which point it can safely be assumed whatever cover you had is blown, and throw out some deception jamming. Done properly, deception jamming shouldn't offer a target for HOJ missiles* as the jammer is simply mimicking the threat radar's signal (hence the 'deception' part). The idea is for the jammer to 'seduce' the radar's track gate, then walk it away from the jet. Which is why you sometimes hear deception jammers referred to as 'gate stealers'. If your advantage in jamming is large enough, the missile will miss completely without any further action required. If the threat radar is particularly capable (or your jammer a POS relative to it), then you'll have to hope for a increase in miss distance while you do the missile avoidance drill. More advanced jamming systems are alleged to have an active cancellation capability, wherein they take a threat signal and broadcast an exact copy 180 degrees out of phase, cancelling it out. Of course, due to limitations just how large a transmitter a fighter could haul, it wouldn't cover every radar out there (unless we've done some real miracles in EW technology), but it could conceivably cover enough to provide a VLO-esqe penetration capability to conventional aircraft. Noise jammers are a whole different ballgame though the objective is the same. Noise jamming could be compared to blasting someone with a fire hose so they don't realize it's raining on their head. The further away the hose is, the weaker the spray and the more likely they are to notice raindrops. If the raindrops increase in size (RCS) the hose's spray needs to be stronger to cover them up. Of course that isn't a perfect analogy, because it's generally lopsided in the OTHER direction, with the hose being relatively weak while the rain is strong, but hopefully I got the point across. There are a few counters to it, frequency diversity/agility/hopping, alternate tracking methods such as IR or EO, home-on-jam missiles, but for the most part it's something you learn to work around. Frequency shifting techniques are good because it forces the jammer to either play catch-up to your freq changes or waste a lot of power covering your full operating spectrum. Dual- and multi-band radars really shine in this sort of arena, because the have a huge range of freqs compared to legacy radars. * Regarding HOJ against aircraft: You really shouldn't be happy if a missile goes HOJ, especially at long range. In real life, HOJ removes target range from the missile, creating a situation where the missile has to fly lead pursuit throughout it's flight. At longer ranges, that means that even slight variations in the target's heading equate to large variations in the predicted intercept point. And since the missile doesn't know how far away the target is, it reacts to those variations as quickly as possible, G-ing away it's energy in an effort to maintain lead pursuit on the target. In contrast, with range data available (ie not HOJ), the missile is able to fly a much smoother, more energy efficient proportional navigation course to intercept, only switching to high-G manuevering when the intercept point is suitably close. More energy in the terminal phase of flight, a better chance of getting that aircraft inside Region R and filling the sky with hair, teeth and eyeballs. ECCM (now EP) is a pretty broad term to cover a lot of stuff (some hardware, some techniques), but yes, you can get rid of the jamming spoke. The caveat is the target(s) go with it, unless you've achieved burnthrough. As I said before, properly employed there isn't a whole lot you can do against noise jamming, especially the high-spectral density stuff that can simply cover your full range of operating frequencies. You take the hit in range and keep on truckin'. That, IMO, is a cop out. The basic "whats" and "whys" of EW aren't classified. As a matter of fact, there is probably about as much publicly information on basic EW than basic BVR. But no one is suggesting we remove AMRAAMs from the sims, right? It really shouldn't do that, it should be silent until you've been lit up by something that talks to warheads. Yeah, cuts that horizon on search radars right down to size. As long as I can stay low throughout ingress, I can dance around the tripwires and service my target without too much intereference, rocket-propelled or otherwise. I've also noticed that above about 490 knots and lower than 400ft, MANPADs have problems tracking. It isn't unusual for me to see a few popup in front of me as I run in on an airfield, but they never hit, and I don't use flares. I know they have my name on them, before they burn out I see that they've tipped over in my direction, but after that... nothing. Large caliber AAA on the other hand... let's just say a diving attack down to 10K isn't my preferred method of doing business.