Matuchkin

Wow - my impression of the stab mode was that it served as a primitive oscillation damper for aircraft movement, I didn't know it had the above purpose. That is a pretty big oversight on a model of an aircraft that doesn't have roll trim specifically because of this system. @rossmum I believe I have found that POH. Is this the one you're using? https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FZN487bOKkmHAnw702T13r5ekhrP1xd0/view?usp=sharing Edit: and looking at the POH, here's about the SAU stab mode: So indeed it dampens stick input and enables the trimmer (which may explain why the trim does not work in normal flight). The roll stabilization function is what appears to be missing.

I would like to know what documentation you use, and how you make your conclusions. I understand the above word dump likely sounds extremely snobbish, but the truth is that I am new to analyzing simulated aircraft like this and I would like to know, from someone who has dealt with this before, whether I'm thinking correctly here and whether you observe the same.

Uh no, it isn't. If you give it a realistic loadout, it will be a good representation of its real life counterpart. I don't understand what you mean by "targeting system". The ASP and RP-22 are both simulated very well to my knowledge.

The ingame model is a representation of the MiG-21Bis Fishbed-N, which had the mirror. If the mirror were to be removed as you requested, the aircraft would no longer be that. It would in fact be a fictional aircraft. What you want is equivalent to asking whether or not the main pitot boom can be removed, or whether the canopy can be opened forward like on the MiG-21F13, or whether the nosewheel can have mechanical steering. They can't, because this is a simulation of a real aircraft that existed and never had these features.

Understood. I need to reread the manual.

Except it hasn't been, because it still shows all four directions when locked on the latest version of DCS.

_

I mean I don't get why there can't be an option to fit this plane with either POLYOT-1 or Lazur. This is still a flight simulator, and flight sims had configurable aircraft systems/interiors/engines/etc for decades.

Wait, so the RWR is supposed to tell you what direction you are being locked from? I should have known this, that is amazing. Literally, for the past several months, I have been asking myself who in their right mind would implement a system that simply enters a panic mode when detecting the most crucial event a fighter pilot could experience. This isn't something that needs to be fixed, it should have been on the aircraft since release.

Didn't think about that, you're quite right unfortunately. Our best hope is most likely for someone to make a mod that replaces Caucasus assets. That being said, you may be surprised that buildings/infrastructure in the 1940s did not look as different from more modern buildings as on first glance. The same boxy apartments, albeit a bit shorter, were present in every city. Those houses and apartments with triangular roofs that you see are likely from that era or are refurbishments. I'm not saying there isn't a difference, I actually agree with you. What I'm saying is that, at least for now, even if modern apartments look different, there is certainly room for imagination. What detracts from the experience is that the houses in the Caucasus are of course completely intact.

We have a significant Eastern Front map available, and it happens to be the free one. Operation Edelweiss entailed the securing of the Caucasus until Baku by Army Group A of Army Group South and accompanying Romanian troops. The map has almost all major locations of this operation: Novorossiysk, Maykop, Krasnodar, Mozdok, Vladikavkaz, pretty much everything north of the Caucasus mountains, was an important part of the Eastern Front. In my personal opinion, we have the map we are looking for. What I would ask for is development of aircraft such as the La-5FN or IL-2M.

What I'm excited about (with multi-thousand kilometer maps) is the ability to be taken places, to look at a map and feel that you just did something draining. I think those who fly civilian flight sims would appreciate something like a long range bombing mission, or a lengthy intercept. More importantly, relevant to the aforementioned fleet-based actions, imagine a carrier-based campaign in which your carrier group actually moves and dynamic, location-based changes happen along the way. I recall the first ArmA game, and how its significance was that everything that happened in the campaign actually happened in game. If you went to whatever location in the island, you would actually meet a bunch of patrolling Russians. That mechanic (and the potential for unplanned hostile encounters), in a game dedicated to simulation that is currently working on dynamic campaigns, is invaluable. For those who don't play carrier-based fighters (i.e. me), the equivalent would be a campaign in which you need to constantly transfer bases because you are part of a moving frontline. You start the campaign in one place, you end in another - you are part of the operation.

On further thought I think that spherical maps are the next big step for DCS. This is a simulator after all - regardless of what this thread is about, pushing towards larger maps would of course be inevitable at some point. What you're talking about is probably one of the most important steps for physics simulation. Even so, it should still be reapplied somehow to current maps. The Caucasus easily fits in the horizon radius at 10km altitude, this has to be quite important. Perhaps it would be possible to re-map a flat terrain in such a fashion. Place an attractor at coordinate (0, 0, 0). Consider that the flat plane of water used in the map is at a 6371000m radius from the attractor, and thus every terrain point on the map is at a radius of 6371000+h m, where h is the height of the point above said flat plane. Convert horizontal distance into angular distance, then create some sort of algorithm to map every point on the flat projection onto a corresponding point on the spherical projection. Of course, it has to be more difficult than this. The first issue that I can think of is that we do not know how any given map has been distorted in order to accommodate its flatness: if Mt. Erebus, for example, is distorted such that it has its correct real-life dimensions in the current planar Caucasus map, it will be stretched upon projection. This may or may not be a negligible change, but I'm just brainstorming right now.

I think this whole question warrants the answer "why not both". I come from civil airsims, notably FlightGear. The higher fidelity models in FG allow for replacement of components like engines, wheels, doors, et al. I thought such options were the norm until I got MSFS 2020 and understood that most of these simulators are extremely low fidelity and simply market themselves off of how good they look. DCS, I am happy to say, is far from such a sim. Which is why I question whether or not we could simply have an option to replace the physical map holder with a GPS and vice versa. Perhaps this can be extended to other aircraft - would it not be nice to be able to replace Polyot 01 with Lazur on the MiG-21Bis, for instance?

My suggestion is that you look up the specific history of military events that happened in the region. By this, I mean the following: find any specific place, and search for that place's specific military history. The city of Palmyra, for instance, has been the scene of multiple takeovers by ISIS and the Syrian army. There is a DMZ cutting through the center of Cyprus, and multiple locations there have seen combat. These kinds of locations - as well as singular targets, of course - provide for an interesting target setup.