Sometimes You have to BehaveâŠin order to Misbehave at a later date
Itâs so good. Aerges has very much impressed me. Iâm REALLY looking forward to the M. Iâm also looking forward to @Chuck_Owl 's guide simply because I want to read the foreword about the airframeâs history and propagation.
This is a pretty important aircraft and a VERY flexible one for the mission maker. Think about how many nations flew the F.1 and how many of them have squared off against blufor and redfor? Yeah, this is an aircraft with universal appeal. Iâm loving it.
Hey Derby, check this out. Works great for me. I use the OpenXR Toolkit to get screen captures, but this edit filters the mask.
My âplayâ install (not the one I do mission on) is ~380Gb. Glad I went for a 1Tb SSD for it. Crazy.
So after 2 nights of flying, I like it. As far as ground pounding goes, itâs a far faster and slippery F-5. There isnât a lot besides flip a few switches, and dial in your sight depression. Itâs very easy to get way fast, way low, and way dead due to target fixation in the F1. I see why the tutorials use a 15 degree dive angle, it gives you a much better chance of not ending up a lawn dart while learning. I find myself reverting back to things I learned decades ago in the old Air Combat library over at the site which should not be named, particularly Andy Bushes articles. Using the top edge of the HUD glass as the roll center works well enough, peg the dive angle, and wait till the reticle crosses the target. Was getting some pretty good hits that way.
Also I am finding I need to be much better about my energy management on landing, my sink rate is usually way to high, resulting in either crunched gear, or touching down halfway down the runway when I arrest my sink.
I havenât spent much time A2A in it yet and havenât tried the radar at all really. The little bit of WVR dogfighting Iâve done have been interesting. Again itâs slippery so it picks up speed quick but doesnât bat turn like most of the other birds that have the ability to get smash quickly. I need to get back to basics with it in BFM, Iâve gotten lazy with off boresight missiles, and super maneuverability in the M2000 (canât say just Mirage any more) and the Hornet.
Well I couldnât wait to try the F1 on release day, so I ended up uninstalling the SA map in order to get the update down to a reasonable size. I think I will probably set aside the SA map for 6 month or so until it is more mature. I expect huge texture updates for the SA map will keep clogging DCS updates in the foreseeable future.
First I must say that I am extremely hyped about the F1. This is such a cool and beautiful aircraft and fits right in the most interesting air-air combat period. Now here are some of my initial impression after the first 3 play sessions:
-Cockpit is extremely dark and things are difficult to see in VR. I have heard that this is something that Aerges is actually working on to improve. DCS lightning is probably not working well with the true cockpit colors.
-HUD heading and alt numbers are very small and basically impossible to read in VR for me.
-Cockpit is very tight and actually a really cool experience in VR. The radar hood also fits nicely into VR.
-The radar stuff seems to be very basic still, with a lot still missing or not working correctly. No radar ranging for gun-sight. Boresight modes not working half of the time (no clutter on the radar screen means it isnât working). Switching targets in boresight modes does not work (C+M/SW button should have various functions to re-launch search depending how long it is pressed). No TWS lock. Clutter simulation seems to be extremely simplistic. Havenât tried the MTI function for look-down targets yet but wonder if this is already implemented.
-Controls still need a lot of work. Toggles and Warthog compatible options (On else Off) are badly needed. Right now you need a ton of buttons to turn things on and off separately.
-Take-off and landing feels great. Very smooth and controllable.
-I do wonder about the landing speed though. With some fuel left, approach speed is 180 kts and even when basically empty is still 160 kts. One of the big improvements of the F1 versus the Mirage III is supposed to be the greatly reduced landing speed.
-I made a number of dogfights against various AI enemies (for what this is worth it). MiG-23MLD is very easily defeated. MiG-21Bis BFM AI tends to keep just going up vertical, so no true dogfight was possible. F-5E was a very hard and even fight. This seems to be a very close match. F-14A is sitting behind you in no time and eats you for breakfast.
I didnât really notice this. Are you sure you are observing the aircraft nose (above the gunsight) and not the aircraft symbol on the gunsightâs pitch scale? Because the latter is so depressed, it will have a lot of pendulum effect when rolling (which can give the false impression of adverse yaw).
So far my impression is that rudder is only really needed when pegging the AOA (with the AOA horn sounding). In which case ailerons will cause adverse yaw that will lead to a departure.
In the landing config it seems to me that rolling works equally well with ailerons and rudder. A lot of aileron deflection seems to be required to hold a certain bank angle though (the aircraft wants to return to wings level badly). In this case I think making the turn with rudder is a lot more comfortable.
If you try to roll the aircraft quickly more than about 30 degrees youâll notice the adverse yaw - watch the ball (underneath the artificial horizon on the instrument panel). You can just let it yaw out, but your roll will be quicker and more precise if you correct with rudder (in my limited two flights experience anyway).
I donât find it terrible, but I feel itâs pretty natural to put in some rudder when rolling so maybe itâs just different expectations brought on by more modern FBW jets in some people?
Edit: it is a lot of rudder compared to the other jets in DCS as well⊠but it still seems pretty natural to me.
Yeah definitely at higher/faster banks. The rudder coordination itself feels natural, but compared to analog jets from the same era and the amount of rudder required it seems odd to me. The Tomcat and F-5 can be snapped into banks with little to no rudder and you wonât really notice much. The F1 on the otherhand will swing the nose way above the horizon.
Landing is really weird too. Throttle doesnât control descent and stick doesnât control AoA for me. If I reduce throttle I expect higher descent rate and increased AoA with aft stick. Instead it does the opposite: It balloons at idle throttle, reducing AoA and increasing speed. I also cannot stay above 7,000rpm per the book or Iâm 200+ kts on approach.
Some more observations.
She is pretty quick. On a 25°C day with two wingtip Magics I got her to 650 kts on the deck in military power, which is almost Mach 1. Then on the other hand, going full afterburner only upped it to 685 kts.
She seems to be a rather poor turner at slow speed. Interestingly she is reluctant to slow down though, as you lose the ability the generate lift/drag the slower you get. In that sense it is quite the opposite to a delta wing. Unless you do something radical she loves to stay turning at around Mach 0.7.
She also seems to do pretty poor in the vertical. Probably because of the poor T/W ratio but also because in the top half of a loop she suffers badly due to the poor slow speed turning ability. Lacking sufficient nose authority at slow speed, you have to be careful to get the nose around at the top and not end up in a tailslide (with subsequent compressor stall and spin),
I am having troubles to beat a rookie AI F-5E, and the Tiger is not a particularly good dogfighter to begin with. Sustained turns at high speed seem about the same and slowing down is not an option. I am doing a lot of draws here.
She is actually a worse dogfighter than I expected.
I havenât tried them in some time but the AI F5 was a F-16N in disguise, at any level. The Mig-23 was the best âtrainingâ AI to me - or at least is seemed the most plausible (I wouldnât really know). Maybe theyâve fixed this along with the AI ACM work theyâre doing?
The F1 felt similar to the F-5 to me during hard maneuvering, or in that ballpark. Wonder how representative it is of the real deal.
My baseline is always the F-14A, which beats the AI F-5E pretty easily. But than that might no be an entirely fair comparison, considering how far ahead the Tomcat was of its 1970s contemporaries.
SoâŠI found out you can attach the AAR probe just for looks. It doesnât function, obviously. Go to the livery folder of whichever skin you want to have the AAR probe, open default.lua, and change this line:
[70] = 0.701
To these depending on variant:
[70] = 0.438 (CT version AAR probe and chin pod)
[70] = 0.048 (CE version AAR probe no chin pod)
[70] = 0.365 (CR version AAR probe and chin pod)
I FINALLY got a ride. Spent an hour or so in short dogfighting agaist MiG- 19 and 21. Shes a winner! Once i figured out the Matra in Close combat, nothing escapes!!! The cannon is Me-262 lethal.
I think she goes like stink. Its blinding fast too. There seems to be a speed sweet spot. And she departs quickly if pushed at low speed. But who goes slow in a mirage. No FBW Here buddy! Damn good purchase. My only complaint is the dark pit witch is being addressed. Cant see Jack! Lights go on in the pit soon as i get in.
Side note: i copied all the countries found in the notes of the Aeges Blue skin. I added all the countries to the other skins in the Main DCS directory. Now i got AÄșl these skins available.
Im off to see my friends for the last time before they Jet out. My gal is flying all week and im off Tuesday⊠i know where im going to be.
Everyone is having fun with A2A while Iâm over here not able to hit squat in A2G. We only get tables for the M4 rockets and SAMP-250LD. Somethingâs a bit wonky with the bombs since I only get two craters when releasing four bombs.
Beautiful.
Are you using the OpenComposite ToolKit to capture those? I do the same, then crop usually to 16x9. They look awesome.