Mercury LLTV

Hi!

The Mercury LLTV is way to dark, nearly useless. In daylight conditions gives normal image. In 1.5 was no problem. Has anybody the same problem?

looks completely fine on your screenshot, what else do you want ?

Turn the Shkval on at night and you’ll appreciate the Mercury after that

I'll give it a test on thefraternitysim night ops this Thursday see how it goes.

On the runway is a M1A2 from aprox 20km. On the Mercury at night it's way to hard to find it! On the video from DCS 1.5 the ground textures is much lighter so you can identify the airfield easier.

While it is hard to see, it's 1980s lowlight amplification, not thermal, so it's not likely to be very good anyway. What are your ambient light levels? Based on your screenshots it looks like you're flying without any moonlight, or perhaps under an overcast? Try setting the date to one with a full moon, or reducing cloud cover and see if it's any better

While it is hard to see, it's 1980s lowlight amplification, not thermal, so it's not likely to be very good anyway. What are your ambient light levels? Based on your screenshots it looks like you're flying without any moonlight, or perhaps under an overcast? Try setting the date to one with a full moon, or reducing cloud cover and see if it's any better

Oh man, I didn't think about the light conditions. I set the date to a full moon night and I got what I expected earlier! Thank you, and I apologize about my ignorance :)

Had a good go at it last night. Definitely not the easiest to work with but useable. Managed to destroy a few targets using laser guided missiles but it takes time to acquire them due to the optical quality. As a chap mentions above, the era of this equipment probably makes this actually quite realistic for that time.

It's worth noting, even in the US true day/night interoperability is a relatively new thing. The first AV-8Bs were day fighters and they were late 80s. The Night Attack didn't even come around until the 90s.

Modern computer tech gives you goggles, and all kinds of sensors, etc. It took a giant pregnant belly box for the Frogfoot to have semi-usable night capability. In its era, even crappy night operability was an achievement.

The problem with the LLTV pod implementation is two-fold:

1. It's a low light amplification device, not FLIR. However, in-game it's being treated as a FLIR pod.

2. There's a very rudimentary and incorrect level adjustment filter getting applied to it.

Both LLTV and FLIR are light amplification devices, but LLTV amplifies visible light whereas FLIR amplifies IR light (as well as making it visible). In short, LLTV should look very similar to how it does with the naked eye, just brighter.

Let's see how DCS handles this. I loaded the Vikhr and LLTV training mission in both DCS 1.5.8 and 2.5, then slewed over to the tank sitting on the runway. This is how it looks like in 1.5.8 using just the IT-23:

It's very dark, but if you look closely enough, you can just make out the runway and the tank. I'd say that this is fairly realistic, as even on a moonless night it's never completely dark, and it matches what I see when hiking at night in unpopulated places.

Adjusting the brightness in Photoshop, we can get an idea of what it should look like with light amplification:

It's no surprise that it looks very similar to what it'd look like during day, as DCS simulates day/night by adjusting the brightness of the ambient light.

Now let's see what the actual LLTV image looks like:

It's incorrectly using the same fake IR rendering as the A10C, so the tank shows up brighter than the runway despite being the opposite in the visible light range.

Switching over to DCS 2.5.5, I won't bother with the night IT-23 image because it's no different than a completely black image. But here's the LLTV image of the same tank:

There aren't any shades, it's just completely white or completely black. If we take the 1.5.8 LLTV actual image, then apply a level adjust to it, we get an image similar to what we see in 2.5.5:

So I believe that DCS is using a similar technique.

In real life, nobody would make a low-light/IR pod that returned an image that looked like this because it's nearly useless. Also, night vision has been in development since the 60's, whereas the Su-25T entered service in the early 90's. It's had a long time to develop. The LLTV rendering in DCS is simply incorrect.