gbnavy61

GMagos, Don't get discouraged. The AIM-9B was a really lousy missile and pilots frequently missed their targets with it. It was one of the first IR homing missiles, so it had serious limitations. Many turned out to be duds. Many won't track targets even if you fire with a good tone. And if your target maneuvers, the missile will likely lose lock if the target pulls more than a few G's. So, yes, the low accuracy is normal. In my last 7 AIM-9B shoots, I've gotten 2 hits; that's actually a bit high for me. I think I've been trying to be more patient with the missile and wait for a good tone before I shoot. On the first, I got a good tone from about 1.5 miles away and shot one at the MiG-21 I was chasing. He pulled into a right hand turn, at which point I thought the missile would just keep trucking straight ahead as it couldn't follow the maneuver. To my surprise I saw the Sidewinder arc across to the right and go up his tailpipe. Splash one! In another mission, a MiG-21 was crawling up my wing's arse, so I thought I'd help out. Got in behind the MiG and using a couple barrel rolls to stay behind him, I was on his tail at only a couple hundred yards. I was thinking about going to guns at that range, but just then I got a boresight lock and a good growl from the Sidewinder, so I shot. I saw the missile go streaking forward, but thought it was going to be a dud. Again, I was surprised to see a cloud MiG bits go by the left side of my canopy and a trail of smoke follow that MiG spinning down to the desert floor. On the other hand, in my last flight, I fired off 4 at this one MiG, from a decent position, with a good tone, and got zilch. Had to gun the bastard down. The early Sparrows also tend to fail a lot. Down low to the ground, they can be easily confused by ground clutter (radar reflections off the terrain). Also, if your lock on the target is broken, the missile will go ballistic and self-destruct. I'm not sure about Scouser's advice on the Sidewinder. At 4-5nm, you'll probably have a real hard time just getting a tone on a bandit. The distance seems too far. If it has worked for him, then give it a try. But, I would think that shooting from such ranges will result in more misses. First, you have a pretty poor heat source to lock onto at 4-5nm (unless maybe the bandit is in afterburner). Second, you are giving the bandit a lot of space in which to maneuver to defeat your shot. Third, you're giving the bandit a lot of time to defeat your shot. I'd listen to Scouser on the Sparrow shoots. Generally, I too try to get my AIM-7s off the rails early on in the fight so I can take advantage of their strengths. They generally don't do too well in a close-in dogfight, so shoot them at targets that are still a ways off. Additionally, you may want to consider being slightly below the target's altitude to help your radar look up into a clear sky - makes it easier to pick out and stay locked onto your target (no ground clutter). It's also a big plus to have to option of going to guns. If you're flying an F-4, I'd try to slap a gunpod on that sucker or take the F-4E. If you're flying an F-8, that's even better. (With the F-8, just make sure to use the "gun group" function so that you can fire 2 guns at a time - you have a total of 4. The MK 12 cannon are prone to jamming - particularly when firing with more than 2 G's on the airplane. So, try not to shoot while hauling back on the stick. If you do jam though, you should have 2 more guns to switch to and kill some MiGs.)

Took me a couple days to figure out where that was buried.

SO TRUE! The person below me is a large distributor of MiG parts.

What did that palm tree do to you?

I got it to work. I'm not sure exactly what did it. The only things I changed were: 1. Copied woiCamp1 folder and files and renamed to woiCamp4. 2. Inserted flyable F-8 squadron info over the original [AirUnit002] info. 3. Moved the campaign.cfg and campaign_data.ini into the woiCamp4 folder. Originally, I was simply trying to edit the woiCamp1 files and save over them. Otherwise, I had all the text entries set up as they needed to be Thanks for the assist, Dave.

Taffy 3? Good stuff. Go Navy!

Compensating for something there, Russia? Quite possibly the ugliest thing I've seen in a long time.

Ok, I'll try moving it up a bit. Thanks for the suggestion, Dave.

According to Vigilant that is incorrect. In any case, that was how I had it set up initially (UnitID=59) and it still does the same thing either way. The problem must lie elsewhere. I don't think it's a matter of dates for campaign and aircraft. Six-Day War is set in '67 and the F-8E's years of service are '65-'75. Would weapon years of service be causing the error? I've noticed that when I load the campaign I get the Mirage III, 101st Squadron. When I click on 'loadout' it brings up the screen, but no weapons are listed on the left side of the screen. My other thought is that I don't have the nation or force sorted out correctly. I really have little idea of what it takes to effectively add something into an existing campaign. I tried following the KB "adding a campaign" tutorial, but while it explains a lot of what the entries in the campaigndata.ini mean and do, it doesn't really tell you how everything links up for the total package. I'm kinda groping blindly here.

bump

USN: 13 October 1775. Congress legislated the outfitting and manning of 2 ships to intercept British transports carrying troops and supplies to the colonies. USMC: 10 November 1775. Congressional committee met at Tun Tavern to draft a resolution providing for 2 battalions of Marines to kick ass on land and sea. I thought that was drilled into your grape?

No. What squadron ini's are we talking about. The "squadronlist.ini?"

Stuck in the same boat. Tried adding TMF F-8E to Six-Day War just as a test. I can select USN from the service drop-down menu, and then, VF-191 from the squadron menu. Hit 'accept' and get to the first mission and I'm flying a Mirage III, 101st. From WOICAMP1_DATA.ini [AirUnit059] AircraftType=F-8E_MF Squadron=VF-191 Satan's Kittens ForceID=1 Nation=USN DefaultTexture=VF191 BaseArea=Hatzor Airbase BaseMoveChance=0 RandomChance=100 MaxAircraft=16 StartAircraft=8 MaxPilots=20 StartPilots=14 Experience=100 Morale=100 Supply=100 MissionChance[sWEEP]=80 MissionChance[CAP]=75 MissionChance[iNTERCEPT]=25 MissionChance[ESCORT]=70 MissionChance=15 MissionChance[CAS]=0 MissionChance[sEAD]=10 MissionChance[ARMED_RECON]=50 MissionChance[ANTI_SHIP]=0 MissionChance[RECON]=25 UpgradeType=NEVER Supply[001].WeaponType=MK81 Supply[001].Quantity=150... As far as I can tell that all works correctly. From WOICAMP1.ini Service002=USN... [uSNUnit001] UnitName=VF-191 Satan's Kittens ForceID=1 UnitID=10 StartDate=06/05/1967 AircraftType=F-8E_MF DescFile=woi1Start.txt StartText=woi1Start.txt According to Vigilant's post, the UnitID should be correct. There were 58 air units before I added VF-191 (making it 59). With 9 friendly units, that should make VF-191 number 10. Squadron and Nation are already in the appropriate .ini's. I can think of no reason why the decals would interfere. I'm not really sure what isn't working, but there must be something. I've noticed that there are two files named woicamp1.ini (woicamp1.ini - in the woicamp1 folder - and WOICAMP1.ini - in the MissionData.cat). I've been changing the data in both so they match. I don't know if the game reads one or both. Not sure if that is making a difference in this case. I tried adding USN as Force003 in the campdata.ini but all I did was copy the Israel entry and swap a few names. All that did was make the game crash after selecting the campaign. So, I undid that part but I don't have enough experience playing with the campaigns to figure out what I'm missing.

I could listen to the Merlin all day. Love it!

It's probably also worth mentioning a few things that play into a long-range BVR shoot. Obviously, the goal is to kill the other guy, so the thing is to give yourself the best chance of doing that. - Is the target coming or going? If he's headed away from you, unless you've got some monster closure on him, it will likely be easy for him to outrun your missile (assuming he becomes aware of it). If you're closing head-on, you're in good shape. Not only is the missile going to speed off towards him, but he's doing part of the work by flying at the missile. - Is he above or below you? There's things to consider with both. If he's above you, that's good because the radar can pick him out against a clear sky very easily. However, your missile also has to climb uphill to get him and use energy to climb that could later be used to maneuver for a kill. On the other hand, if he's below you it will be harder to pick him out of the ground clutter and you might lose the lock - bad for Sparrows. The upside is, though that the missile can use gravity to help it go downhill, saving a little energy to maneuver. The best mix would probably to be no more than 5K below the target. The missile probably won't lose a whole lot of energy climbing a few thousand feet, but you still give your radar a better chance of keeping lock on the bad guy. - How fast are you going? The faster, the better, at launch - your missile starts off at the same speed as your aircraft and then accelerates a couple Mach above that speed. The more kinetic energy the missile has at the start of its life, the harder it will be for your target to bleed it out of energy. After you shoot, however, you may consider slowing down to prevent yourself from rushing into the bad guy's missile envelope unnecessarily.

40% Dixie. You are definitely a Yankee. Not really surprised being from Sweet Home Chicago.

Leading the Division

Robbing the cradle, eh?

University of Illinois has a great aviation program as well as all 3 ROTC branches. If you do it right, you can get out of there with your commercial, SEL, MEL, Instrument, CFI/CFII, MEI. Overall, a pretty solid group of instructors - lots of full-timers with many many hours of experience, as well as the part-time crowd which tends to be former students who have excelled and are building time to move on to the next step. Last I checked it was an all-Piper fleet. About 28 Archer III's, 6 Arrow III's and 3 Seminoles. Great maintenance department. Class C airspace at Willard, but aside from the other trainers, not a whole lot of traffic, so usually not a lot of people to worry about flying into. There's generally two options to get some flying done along w/ college credit. First is Private Pilot - you take the first 4 semesters, 2 for Private and 2 for Instrument Rating, while your major is something else. Additional flight courses are up to you. Second option is Aviation- Human Factors. Same flight courses the first 4 semesters. After that, you work on commercial and up, in addition you take several psychology courses - some general psych stuff along with more human-machine interaction related courses, design courses, etc. There's also a couple good ones on aircraft systems - one basic and one advanced (basic deals w/ your average GA aircraft systems, advanced examined King Air and ERJ). The accident investigation course was really interesting. We did a lot of case studies of accidents - some well known and others not so much. Learned a lot from that course. The greatest hidden gem, though, is the Human Factors course near the end of the 4-year program. Classroom lectures and discussions along with flight labs - Seminole sim. You fly about 6 sim hops with a partner - alternating pilot/first officer duties. Before each hop you get the conditions as if its the pre-flight brief. Then, you get in, fire up and get "airborne." After that, it becomes a dial-a-disaster event where you and your co-pilot get to react to different situations and see how well you work together and when things go bad, analyze why. Debriefs are where the money is made in that course - stuff you can take with you for the rest of your flying career. There is also a good-deal cross country flight in the Seminole where you exercise the same "crew" concept - the destination, as with most cross-country flights, is determined by the availability of good restaurants within range. We flew to one of the Lambert's Cafes - in MO I think. If you want more into the engineering side of things, U of I has a well-known engineering department and a few of my classmates did Aero E.

Anyone else really frustrated w/ the weapons? Flew a Navy F-4B over on a fighter sweep. Weather was crap: rain and poor vis below with a solid overcast from 6 - 10K. Bee-lined it over to the target area and caught 8 Fitters near their base. I locked one, fired all four Sparrows, all duds. As I got closer I could see what the problem was - I had somehow managed to get a lock onto the bastard while he was sitting at the hold-short. So, as I was zorching in, I got low and fired off a burst and flamed him on the deck. Fight was on. Got behind another Fitter. Popped off all four Sidewinders - 3 with a good tone. Got nothing. Moved in for guns. Click. Trigger press but no rounds in the air. Max A/B and zorched off towards home. I've had difficulties with the Sparrows a lot - though I think I've got that one figured out. Seems to be down low, they can lose the target or get distracted by the ground clutter. Sidewinders, particularly the early B models I almost always chalk up as useless ordnance - maybe they can scare some MiG pilot to death. But the thing that really pissed me off is the damn Mk. 11 cannon. Allegedly the Mk.4 Mod. 0 is the only pod rated for the stress of carrier ops. But the thing jams at the slightest provocation. I've have more than one flight where I've squeezed the trigger and got about 17 rounds of of the thing. At that point, I'd rather have the centerline tank on - at least I could use the gas if I'm going to have the extra drag on the jet. Anybody else in the same boat?

Well, I think the article is funny, but I have to agree with the other Navy guys here. This is one of those "perceptions = reality" things. The sub skipper should have watched his comments regardless of the fact that this was a light-hearted interview. If you wear the uniform, any uniform, you are supposed to represent your service well in a public setting. He dropped the ball on that one. Unfortunately, we live in times where a few poorly chosen words can end a career. However, it usually isn't hard to recognize when to say something and when to keep mouth shut.

Intruder Sunrise

Got 2GBs. How much is a lot of activity? There were maybe 24 enemy aircraft and 12 friendlies airborne. I saw a couple AAA batteries and radar. Also saw about 15 T-55's and a couple ZSUs - guessing those would've been my targets. Is that really too much for the game/my system to handle?