Recent air combat sim recommendations?

Oof… Not that I know of tbh. Most of my mission building experience has been:

Ten groups of red fighters over here. Ten groups of blue fighters over there, all set to “client” (gives a menu of toys to choose from at mission load). Rig up a trigger to have only one random group of red fighters active. Fight Murder them with one of the blue jets.

Oh boy, wait til you see what I’ve been cooking up LOL.

Is there a way to let the player take over another fighter when he dies? I have 2 waves of fighters going in 10 minutes apart and the first wave is pretty much a certain death. So I’d like to allow the player to grab a jet from wave 2 to finish off the mission. Is that possible somehow?

Yes, set them as clients not player. Label them correctly and make sure to mention it in briefing.

When you all are going to use an AMRAAM what mode do you use to shoot it?

I also see why you got those finger things schurem. I have to use my mouse so much, it’s pretty awful in VR having to try and find my mouse to go click on important things. Do they work in MS Flight Sim as well?

Maddog with unlimited ammo?

Maddog? I was thinking more about the 3? different radar modes.

Aamram will acquire a target on it’s own without radar lock. It’s great fun. Set up some groups of bad-guys. WW2 planes work well for this. Turn on unlimited ammo, switch to aamram, point and shoot. Repeatedly. I had about 90 planes stagger in on one mission. They were bombing a boat. I was trying to stop them before they sunk it. With all the smoke trails, parts flying, etc. made for a great mission.

Of course maddog is dangerous as hell and should never be used :)

Why is it dangerous? Because you could target a friendly?

I’m still having major issues “finding” enemy aircraft if they don’t start in the cone of my initial direction.

They could. If you are absolutely sure no friendlies are in the area I suppose it would be safe. I seriously doubt it’s ever been actually used though.

For the game though… you could point sortof in the direction you think the badguy is and fire. The missile just might pick em up and save you the hassle of finding the target…

Turn on “Dot labels”. Find out how to turn on and view datalink. Know which way is “indian country”.

Is pilot-speak for an AMRAAM with an activated radar seeker. The little radar in the missiles’ nose is on, and any target it finds, it’ll do it’s level best to fuck it up. Agressive little fuckers, those.

Launching it maddog means launching it without a radar lock from the mother aircraft. You just fire it in the general direction of some target and hope it’s in the missiles’ cone of view when that activates (usually about half a second after launch IIRC).

The finger things are divine. In MSFS they work ok’ish, but they aren’t tuned for it, and the mouse cursor does weird things in VR in that sim, so close one eye to get it to click right.
A cheaper, easier fix for blind-mouse-grope’itis is to put a trackball near your stick or throttle.

I use AMRAAMS when the target is within the engagement range of said missile. If you play it right (IE. fly as high and fast as you can) at a target flying straight towards you(“hot”), that can be really fucking far. At low level versus a retreating (“cold” in pilot-speak) target, the AMRAAM is decidedly a WVR (within visual range) weapon. Also great for face shots just before the merge (The moment in aerial combat where the radar tracks of the blue and red plane merge, ie, they are so close the radar can not distinguish them. It often means the end of the jousting phase and the time to do some of that pilot shit. Turn & burn baby!).

Preferably TWS or what it’s named in the hornet. The mode that allows you to keep a bead on everything in front of you while maintaining detailed track files on two or more targets. Those tracks are fine enough to guide a missile on, but to the target the radar still registers as in scanning mode, so it might not clue them in to their impending doom.

For the closer range stuff, use one of the WVR radar modes, such as vertical scan or boresight. Get a lock, shoot.

Once you launch the missile, you see a timer in the lower right corner of your HUD. First it counts down to missile activation, at which time you can drop lock (turn cold), then to missile flight time. If it hasn’t hit past that, it’s missed.

All missiles have a relatively short boost phase and a longer coast phase in their life. Once their rocket motor has burned out, they are pretty much very fast gliders. Every course change, and even straight flight costs them speed. Below a certain speed, the missile can’t move anymore and it’s called trashed in fighterpilotese.

Awesome, thanks for all that.

I’m happy to say that tonight I learned how to reliably shoot a harpoon in (bore sight?) mode, or mad-dog as you called it. I can even make it skip over a friendly target before activating to seek a proper enemy.

For the data pod to work, do I need an AWACS or JSTARS?

Your machine has a built in datalink. Sort of an internet for planes. I don’t know off the top of my head the exact procedure but Chuck will have it. MIDS is the term to look for.

I wanted to practice my F18 SEAD warfare, so I setup a mission where I attack a Russian site with every single AAA and SAM unit the Russian Army has.

I get up to speed and am barreling through their zones of influence expecting a deluge of AAA and SAM fire to overwhelm me, but instead… silence. Literally no one tried to attack me nor defend their site. Could anyone help me figure out what I have to do to get the SAMs and AAA to attack incoming fighters?

Are they red and you blue? Are they active or did you get them from the props menu? Are the sam sites complete? SA-10 for example needs a search radar, a tracking radar and a command vehicle.

They are now! Thanks! I also just discovered not to do proper carpet bombing. I set up 8 B-52’s and B-1B bombers and was so disappointed to see them either not bomb at all, or plink out just one my-82. Setup a new scenario just for testing this, and figured it all out. It’s now Armageddon under the carpet .

Do you find it hard to use the lower nav/map MFD behind the stick? Even with the stick off I find it dry difficult to see and utilize.

Yes its a suckass postition for an MFD. Luckily the bottom half hardly ever sees much use. In SA page for example, the top shows whats ahead, which is the interesting part.

If I port my stuff to DCS standalone, do I lose access to playing it within Steam?

Nope, but afaik they are different versions of the game, so if you buy things in standalone they are not usable with steam version.

That’s why I was considering the move. There’s a bunch of campaigns over on DCS that sound good, but aren’t on Steam.

BTW, are you flying on Friday again? If so, what do you plan to do?