Do335

bloody hell... yes it was. I think at the end of day i'll take a D/H/G winder and just shoot him to save all that trouble. The gunpod weighs almost like a mk84 2000 pounder and is twice as draggy. in campaign mode you can use it to get some opportunity kills but in 1 v 1 where he's always got eye on you... it's pretty hard. what's worse is the gunpod is declined 2 degrees below the nose to facilitate ground strafing, but in a2a it's a hindrance. iirc the eagle as an air dominance fighter has the gun inclined upwards even.

Oh yeah, notice the mig-17 dubbed "ufo" in my report. caesar mentioned this a few posts back and evidently, the mig17 made by thirdwire has no problems turning at 450+. one last vid... this is a campaign flight, but i thought... hey it's what dacts are for so why not. I was tuning the landing speeds in the fm so AIs could properly land themsevles and this was only a test flight. But it got exciting and decided to film it. We were doing a sweep northwest of wonsan, about to go home and things went for the worse. being an actual mission the flight has more to do with incomplete info, mutual support (or saving wingies) and fuel ammo considerations. I illustrated the different situations with subs and pics, so will save the wall of text here!

oops, sorry for the net fluctuation induced text duplicate.

ok, as suggested, hard wing F-4E vs Mig-17 aka the UFO, both clean guns only, 10,000ft. 2 engagements. Probably my last as free time is winding down again. First engagement, separation 25miles. Went nose low full burner, accelerated to mach 1.3 at the merge. Pitched up into a loop, mig follows, he ran outta juice and started pitching down into a left hand turn, regained some of his speed and started pitching up again. I came back down, the mig was high, not enough turning room, no nose on no shot. Rinse and repeat for a few times, the mig would always end up above me as i was going for a nose on. I then became a little more aggressive in my pulls and started to let the rhino buffet a bit. This ended up in me putting the pipper on his tail pipe, but not enough to lead him, so again no shot. OTOH, I bled too much energy in return and as I was starting to climb back, the mig's guns opened up. Thankfully my speed reserve was still good enough to out run him. This lasted until I was down to 3000lbs of fuel. The mig had 1000lbs+ and was still in the fight. So I decided to end it and call it a draw. Me being totally unsatisfied ofc. Fires it up again into 2nd engagement. Accelerated, merged, pulled up, came down to find the mig at an odd angle, same deal. The 2nd loop, I was able to get on his tail with him doing 120ish kcas. I was hanging there at about 270 and had very little nose authority so had to let him go and went nose low to accelerate. The futile loops repeated for a few more times, then it dawned on me what went wrong. I had so much speed pulling up, and the rhino's turn radius being huge, I had gained so much horizontal separation traveling upwards that it made my downward turn too early, and left me with too much angle off towards the mig. So the next time as I arrived on the apex of the loop, I stayed there, 170~180kcas, wings inverted, still maintaining a bit climb rate to maintain altitude advantage, until judging the mig was at the right angle to start pulling down. This resulted in me sliding right back on his 6 at about 1nm with 400+ kts to spare. The mig was again floating at 100+ kts, started a right hand turn but this time was unable to escape and the rhino came out victorious. All in all, while I am fascinated by the phantom, I deem its flying characteristics less than satisfactory for a fighter jet. Its turn radius is the size of texas and easily goes into buffeting at the slight onset of alpha without enough airspeed. I can fathom enough awe and respect for the airmen that fighted them against the agile migs but am more thankful for the 3rd gen teen fighters that came into being because of this... ok, as suggested, hard wing F-4E vs Mig-17 aka the UFO, both clean guns only, 10,000ft. 2 engagements. Probably my last as free time is winding down again. First engagement, separation 25miles. Went nose low full burner, accelerated to mach 1.3 at the merge. Pitched up into a loop, mig follows, he ran outta juice and started pitching down into a left hand turn, regained some of his speed and started pitching up again. I came back down, the mig was high, not enough turning room, no nose on no shot. Rinse and repeat for a few times, the mig would always end up above me as i was going for a nose on. I then became a little more aggressive in my pulls and started to let the rhino buffet a bit. This ended up in me putting the pipper on his tail pipe, but not enough to lead him, so again no shot. OTOH,%2

affm i use the mission editor, have yet to find another way as convenient. however the saved single missions (.msn files) are in text format, so... a simple text editor should do the job too. alas going vertical with buttloads of energy at merge seems indeed to be a good idea. i did that in sabre vs fagot, and found one of caesar's (i believe) old vids which has the same happening in the first engagement with fast kill results (edit: ooot, note! video is caesar's!) but it also reminds me of exceptions, where the oppo has excess energy and comes up to get you. i think one of mine resulted in a series of vertical scissors, and i always hate scissors in whichever shape or format. but it depends on what the AI was thinking and how he was doing energy wise i suppose:p

nice one out turning the flanker! looks like the ai puts up a good enough struggle as well.

Caesar, did a F-4J with gunpod vs mig-17 clean. I think the added weight and drag of the pod really slowed me down, when coming down from the loop with flaps extended everytime, i was unable to put nose on him. He otoh was able to point at me many times but due to my huge speed advantage never got inside 1nm, but that was it. A few loops later I ran outta juice, dropped down low, repeated the same trick of loops, and still no joy. Eventually the mig got down to ~500lbs of fuel and started running away which was when i chased him down and got him. I think this was a exact repeat of my earlier dogfights when flying the 'nam campaigns when was outta missiles. Simply put, tough bastard UFO he is indeed... actually it seems all the pipers in SF are 1G piper, i.e. the rounds will connect if the target is flying straight, but not if they're maneuvering. Therefore you still have to pull lead, just no need to calculate bullet drop and your own ac's G. i think it's one o'those simplifications TK chose. however i'm not sure if i even prefer the "full" lead computing gyro stuff, too jittery maybe. I dunno.

Caesar was there ever a good old hard wing phantom vs mig-17 guns only in here? figure that's where sf series started with. i can't ever get on his tail. best was run him outta fuel. or catch him with a heater shot if i had one.

OK my ride is ofc the F-86F, opping the Mig-15bis in two 1 v 1 engagements. First one went real quick. I spotted him about 5 nm out and was already doing mach .96. He was dragging along at some 300kts. We merged, he went down, I went up, he'd gone into a right hand downward spiral and.. was still doing it as i came down from upstairs and shot him with a fair bit of deflection. My aim went a bit to the right but the 50 caliber rounds clipped him in the right wing, tearing up the right aileron. After my firing pass the mig continued his right hand turn, but with the damaged wing he inevitably went into the flat spin of death, hence concluding the 1st engagement. Seeing how bad the AI is in the vertical I decided to make the fight fair. So in the 2nd engagement I slowed to 300ish kts before the merge, almost the same as the mig. As we went head to head I roll to the left to create some turning space and, avoid head on shots with the mig. I rolled back to the right just in time, and we went into a completely horizontal 2 circle. As I came around I was lagging him with some 70 degrees angle off, and so promply went into a high yoyo to create some vertical turning room. As I was coming down from it the mig does the same! I follow him up into my 2nd yoyo, decided it was close enough to press while on the apex, and so with the help of god's G and a tigher pull the nose gradually came up to the mig, when he was in a slight climb in his seemingly 3rd yoyo. The mig miraculously senses the imminent danger and bunts down the nose to spoil a gun fire solution. I opened fire, booted some rudder, and got some sporadic hits on him. I overshot to the right side high, he appears damaged and attempting to evade in a gentle left descending turn. I saddled in his six, boards open, and followed up with a few bursts. The last burst probably killed the pilot because the rounds were seen to go there and the canopy came off. I pulled up just in the nick of time to avoid becoming a human sidewinder, glancing back over the left wing to see the mig bursting into flames. You gotta admit, the 2nd engagement is more like a samurai's fight hence more exciting and enjoyable, but it is apparent which one is more efficient!

indeed, so once i reverted to an old 09 install to check something. When I brought '13 version back none aircraft were left flyable coz none of them had any skin entries in their inis.... I went berserk for a while coz thought i had borked my install.

thank you Caesar. my sf2 install is dated 70s and earlier so the latest match up I got between F-16 and Mig-29 was in falcon bms. Although i could feel the viper enjoyed a definite advantage there was no way i could get on his tail until low on fuel (except using game exploits or being a dogfight master that is..). looks like the 2 aircrafts are truely equally matched.

aannd the DACT thread is back and continues...:D caesar, i wonder what would happen if you went vertical at the merge with the viper like you did with the cat. the fulcrum albeit with twin engines cannot match the viper in the t/w department especially down low they say, it's sorta like a beefed up hornet. getting low and slow with the mig in a one circle altho unavoidable for me as well many times, should be imo tried to be avoided.

the roll is indeed fast. kink is it rolls very slow with initial stick input, and suddenly mounts up a lotta roll with further stick. which's a bit weird and hard to control.

i don't mean to sass SF here but since falcon is the definitive f-16 sim and way up there on the realism scale... you know. there are ofc exceptions. the viper in sf seems to have a very large roll inertia same as the eagle. the FM could use some more fine tuning imo. the real thing uses fbw and gets a force sensing stick so the rolls are really snappy, ailerons actually deflect opposite ways when the pilot release the pressure on the stick to brake down the roll rate.

eehh, i'm not even sure that worked at all before the teen fighters appeared!...

you're on a roll cougar! keep em coming :)

wait... are we saying aim-9Bs can now actually hit things? i might start packing them.

sweet! we need more sf2 videos. the fury is a monster with those 20mikemikes!

interesting... putting the player in command mode. i may not be able to let go like that, but will try it out.

when flying missile fighters no.2 is indeed manageable, just target him on whatever you prefer. after that target is shot down no.2 will go to attack mode on his own until rejoin command is issued. if bandit gets on his tail, a msl shot can clear his six since the attacking bandit doesn't maneuver against you. or, just ask him to cover me, save his missiles only to lob 'em at rtbing migs at the end...no.4 is mostly a lost cause because player has no command to control him. the one thing i found that worked when flying phantoms was just flight rejoin. 4 will kick in burner and leave the mig in the dust while you turn around to engage preferable with sparrows. i suppose this works for cats v mig17s too. however i'm mostly flying f-86s these days. apparently there're no missile and afterburners which.. changes things. i'm somewhat hoping the break command does that, flying more missions to find out atm but.. wouldn't hold my breath on it :|

same here, i'm currently experimenting the break command. if the wingies can't cover each other, maybe just send them all out to attack. the "engage air" command always seems to put no. 2 and 4 in limbo mode..

24th kill for captain Bernie, his lead...

fraps here. also there're many other choices like bandicam etc. true that, leakers always make a mess of everything...

in before the cat fetishists...:) against AI vertical's always the best bet. those deflection shots sure are tricky tho.

does the ol' phantom have a 2nd rwr in the back for the wso? edit: right... remembered he'd turn off the kid in the back too lol