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Bozon

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Everything posted by Bozon

  1. https://store.heatblur.com/blogs/news/of-delays-and-silence To Heatblur, I appreciate the sincerity of the post. It sounds like you really put your best effort into it, but sh!t does happens sometimes. I also appreciate perfectionism and the aspiration to deliver a perfect product. Please go ahead and deliver us the best Phantom sim ever.
  2. It is possible that the tail wheel collapsed during taxi? Happened to me once - didn’t happen again, but I didn’t try to break the tail wheel on purpose for such a test.
  3. That would be great. It can even be FM-2 so it would be contemporary with the F6F and F4U.
  4. A helicopter dangling a huge pole with multiple giant rotating saw blades between trees and power lines? What can possibly go wrong?
  5. That is actually quite a tiny dispersion - less than 1/6 of a degree. The platform vibrations in-flight are probably on that scale (a guess).
  6. I think I mentioned this somewhere on the forum before - the USAF considered the use of the F-4E in the anti-ship role, but came to the conclusion that ships are extremely difficult to sink on land.
  7. 80% of the complexity was modeling the pilot’s “Olds” style mustache and its response to G effects. The F-14 pilot is clean shaven - that’s easy.
  8. I love sticking my head out the window and let my tongue and ears flap in the wind. I also bark at passing planes. I agree, it’s a bit annoying and an easy fix I suppose.
  9. @zerO_crash, if you again read my post above you will notice that I explicitly state that the climb rates are not real and are simply different units for power/weight ratios. This is because 478kw/2495kg says nothing to most people. The question was “how nimble” so this was a very simplified way to give numbers that are remotely relevant to the question. If you can give us better insight into the relative performance of these helicopters, by all means do! But all you did was to rehash in many words that the climb rates are not physical which we already knew, and update some numbers (which we appreciate) without providing any new insights into the “how nimble” question.
  10. Awwww… there does my phantastic phantom phantasy of loading her up with 21 SUU-11… and just let it rip!
  11. With enough runway you can simply drive to your target
  12. Israeli pilots talk about their Mirages much like RAF pilots talk about their Spitfires - they say it was a joy to fly. They praise it for being very responsive and intuitive. It just “felt right” and leading ace Giora Epstein repeatedly stated that it was much more fun to fly than his F-16A (in spite of the latter being far more capable). He actually stated that the F-16A was not fun enough for him… I can relate to that because the F-4E will most likely be the most modern module I will ever buy in DCS (except Kfir which is about equal). I don’t like modern jets that are more of a flying systems package held together by an aircraft. F-4E was far more capable than the Mirage in every aspect except close dogfights, where they were about equal or a slight advantage to the Mirage. This is the opinion of many ace pilots who flew both into combat, and flew dissimilar dogfights in training using both against each other. I have never heard any one of them who claimed the opposite that the F-4E was a better dogfighter.
  13. Why do you think that this is how I want to see them? I didn’t say they were bad fighters. They had a more important role to fill that no other plane could perform nearly as well and that was not holding defensive patrols - Mirages were more than adequate for that. Phantoms did shoot down Migs over enemy territory during deep strike operations. They were also used in a few aerial ambushes operations because… they were considered very good fighters as well! Plus their radar was actually useful as opposed to the Mirage’s. In 1973 Mirages and Neshers already got their Shafrir II missiles and were still considered top dogfighters. There was still little faith in radar missiles and much faith in the cannons. Mirages performed most of the combat patrols and got more kills than the Phantoms (Mosty the Neshers did IIRC). When IAF’s chief test pilot Dani Shapira first tested the Phantom in the US (probably a B), after they got out of the plane the American instructor asked what he thought of the Phantom. According to his autobiography Dani tactlessly replied: “in a dogfight, I’d rather be in a Mirage”… I can’t blame Dani - he also said that after his wife his loves were his Mirage III and his Spitfire IX that he couldn’t choose between.
  14. The dedicated strike types were the A-4 and Sa’ar (Super Mystere upgraded by Israel with license built J-52, the A-4’s engine). Phantoms were immediately recognized as the best fighter-bombers in the roster and were used mostly for deep strikes. The Mirage III & Nesher were considered better dogfighters and significantly inferior fighter-bombers, so during 1973 war they were tasked with air defense freeing the phantoms to focus on strikes. Iftach Spector, 107 sq. commander in 1973 said he had to “suppress the Mirage pilot” within his pilots (most of which transitioned from Mirages) so they stop chasing Migs and focus on their primary mission, which was to strike and get out. Of course he was unable to suppress his own inner Mirage pilot and went after Migs - including one incident where he sent his 7 formation members to RTB and he stayed to duel a Mig 21 in a crazy 0 altitude stall competition.
  15. Thanks. Regardless of historical practice, if the bomb was to be equipped with a nose instantaneous fuse and a tail delayed fuse, the pilot could have in principle select between instantaneous and delayed detonation by selecting which fuse to arm - not so?
  16. Why do we have a nose/tail fusing selector in the panel?
  17. How about making our navigator sound like Groucho Marx? ”Lost?! What do you mean I am lost? This is an outrage! There will be a harsh letter in the Times about this tomorrow!” On second thought… this is a bad idea…
  18. Great story! I can only try to imagine how it looked… I wonder how fast they were going…
  19. I have no argument about the significance of the Wildcat and SBD, I absolutely agree, and the SBD is probably my favorite ”unlikely hero” of all time. Back on track, there was never an argument whether to keep the Wildcat or get Hellcats/Corsairs. The latter two on the other hand were contemporaries and direct competitors. I consider the F4U a strong contender to the title of best land-based fighter of WWII. It just seems like Vought built the best fighter they could - and then tried to force it to qualify for carriers. Grumman on the other hand built a masterpiece of design-for-purpose, a perfect balance of performance vs. requirements that included carriers operations at its core. Giving the Hellcat to the Navy and Corsair to the Marines was the best decision to get the best out of both - in the grand scheme of things.
  20. @AG-51_Razor Sure, 1 vs 1 the Corsair was superior, no doubt. But here is the difference beween winning a duel to winning a war - Hellcats did not fight Corsairs, they both fought zeros. Once your fighter is superior to the enemy's you don't need an even more superior fighter - you need a larger number of fighters. Hellcats cost about 2/3 as much as a Corsair and Vought were unable to produce Corsairs as fast as Grumman were producing Hellcats. So, it was easier to acquire Hellcats. When folded, Hellcats take less hangar space than Corsairs. Hellcats had less down hours than Corsairs, and were less prone to damage from deck operations that takes a lot of repair hours (or a complete write off). On a carrier the number of operational fighters at any given moment is absolutely critical - you can't get more mid ocean to replace write-offs, you can't call reinforcement from another base. What you have available at the moement is what flies into battle. A Corsair is better than a Hellcat, but are 2 available Corsairs better than 3 available Hellcats when they are about to face Zeros? What about a Corsair + F4F Wildcat vs two Hellcats because you didn't get enough Corsairs to replace all your Wildcats before leaving? Given enough time, especially post-WWII the Navy could equip the entire force with Corsairs. As I argued in the post above, Grumman have abandoned the F6F in favor of the F8F, so when F4U-4 & F4U-5 arrived the F6F-5 was left far behind, performace wise. F8F was a stellar performer, but a one dimentional interceptor, with no fighter-bomber capabilities. So post WWII and towards Korea F6F was obsolete and F8F was quickly made irrelevant. Douglas on the other hand had the right idea of the role that prop carrier planes could still perform in the early jet age, and Skyraider continued well into the jet age from Korea to Vietnam, with what was basically late WWII technology.
  21. The reason for the above is that Grumman made the mistake of abandoning the F6F in favor of the F8 Bearcat. F6F served till the end of the war with only two day variants, the latter of which F6F-5 was not much different than the original 1943 one, performance wise. The bearcat on the other hand completely neglected fighter-bomber capabilities, which meant that after the war it quickly became obsolete as a fighter with no other roles to justify its continued service. F6F was better than the Corsair in what mattered the most: being there when the battle happened! While the Corsair was still struggling to qualify for carriers and Vought were producing them slowly, Grumman were pumping out 600 carrier-capable Hellcats per month from a single factory to replace the F4F Wildcat as the primary USN fighter. The down side of that is that you don’t stop the production line for upgrades. Pumping out more Hellcats was more important than better Hellcats. In the end, it doesn’t matter how fast you fly or how tight your turn is when the battle happens without you.
  22. If it were an A-4 I bet it could land inside
  23. After playing Reflected’s “V for Victory” campaign I was impressed by the huge difference his scripted navigator made for immersion. The voice really made me feel like I have a crewman with me. Following that I set up VoiceSttack with voice replies to some of my commands - my “navigator” now operates the undercarriage, flaps, feathers the props, fire extinguishers and arms the bombs on my voice commands and confirms the action by his (rather robotic unfortunately) voice. Some of that could be easily done by an AI navigator. Now, I don’t mean that it should tell jokes, but keep it practical and “professional” only. Here is a list of some simple actions I would like my AI navigator to be able to do. Whenever it is a non verbal action I would like him to confirm by voice that he performed it. 1. Read out speeds on take off. 2. Call out when fuel in inner/outer tanks reaches 50%, 25%, and 5 gallons left. 3. Upon request estimate flight time left for the current fuel state and engine settings. 4. Call out engine fire when it starts. 5. Warn when I exceed speed limits with undercarriage or flaps extended. 6. Warn if oxygen is low and we are above 10,000 feet. 7. Upon request take a drift reading (while I keep the aircraft stable). Then tell me my ground speed, and what is the course correction to compensate for drift at my current speed. 8. Upon request give heading back to takeoff base. 9. Upon request fire a Very flare (when we get one). 10 Upon request start/stop fuel transfer from the drop tanks. 11. Call out when fuel transfer from the drop tanks has finished.
  24. Was that an AI Gazelle? The damage model for the AI in DCS is different than for a player units.
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