Can somebody break this down for me?

I don’t know how to read this.

  1. Is this a real chart? Or did some nerd fabricate it to further his own purposes?

  2. What does the pointy part by the red x mean and what configuration is that in?

I have no idea for what machine that chart is, might be a Tomcat? Looks legit to me, but I’m an outsider.

The pointy part indicates corner velocity. Peak turn rate. Its such a mad spike because wings forward and all the feathers are hanging out.

  1. This looks like an E-M-Diagram. Data seems to match what I can see in the game. You want to check the curvy lines plotted in bold, especially the one with Ps =0. Thats specific power and zero means you can sustain that turn rate without gain or loss of altitude/speed. It peaks at around .6 Mach at 16 degrees per second which is about corner speed in game.
  2. The red x doesn’t mark anything. The thin lines are just an overexposed grid to show turn radius (plots rising from bottom left to top right) and G load (top left to bottom right). Again you would want to refer to the bold plot to get these two values for a given speed and turn rate. E.g for corner speed thats around 5.2 G and 2100 feet turn radius.
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Well if 16 deg/sec is gonna be the F14’s max strt from here on out, say good bye F14B Tomcat and hello to the F14B trashcat/garbagecat.

If the F14 is gonna be like this, I want my GDMFin’ money back. For me it was formerly a good time that, after the last update turned into a fiery 3000 degree inferno of a burning dog turd.

  1. It is from a 1987 F-14A Plus NATOPS manual so likely real…there are however a large set of these EM diagrams. The A Plus being the F-14B basically.the F110-GE-400 is a clue.

Why are there a large set of these?

This chart only apples to an F-14A Plus at 5000ft, 55620 lbs weight, standard day Temp (so 15 degrees C at sea level but colder by 5000ft) with 4 x AIM-7 and 4 x AIM-9

If you change the weight, the temperature, the loadout, or altitude…the chart will usually change significantly.

The chart only represents an F-14 without Maneuver devices…there is another set that are different with Maneuver devices active.

  1. Well that apparently is the 7.5G lift line which should represent performance if it pulls a max 7.5G level horizontal turn. A max turn means say the pilot pulls 7.5G at M0.8 it will hit 16dps and lose speed quickly until it hits that peak of near 28dps for about a nanosecond before killing all your turn potential.

Unfortunately this F-14 has a structural limit of 6.5G so cannot say if the 7,5G line is accurate (probably not as above probably just a grid line) but can say pulling 7.5G is an over G…it may have been increased to 7.5G years later.

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I have no doubt that HB are going for an accurate performance simulation of the F-14…as stated before, the performance will vary greatly between the scenarios (altitude, weight etc.) and it can probably be expected that some of the sim performance will be tweaked along the way as the developers keep working on it.

I can’t say that my sim enjoyment has ever been dependant on a particular turn rate, but different folks different strokes, I guess.

The Tomcat is a big bird and while it can do surprisingly well in a turning fight, it’s primary mission certainly wasn’t a knife fight, so the E-M diagram looks right at a glance.

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Up until the last update to DCS the Tomcat was the best turn fighter in the game and absolutely throated every other module in that fight for whatever reason. Now it’s the absolute opposite.

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The su-27 and the f16 can run absolute rings around the tomcat.

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In DCS they certainly do now

They always have done from what I’ve seen in dcs.

Not my experience, but you do you

I must have lived in an alternate reality for the past year or 1.5 years and was just all the sudden reintroduced to whatever it is @Victork2 and everyone else exists in, if that’s the case.

I only have about 15 mins Tomcat time since the A was released so maybe they have changed some stuff and made it a more difficult to get the best out of.

I sense a disturbance in the Force.

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Just a smidge.

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A mere perturbation?

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Ach, someone is throwing their toys out of the pram over the flap jams heatblur added to the kitty last patch.

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Why so salty? This started as an interesting discussion…

The chart seems to be from a real manual and the game get’s close.

I haven’t seen any major changes in sustained turn rate for the Tomcat. Maybe you encountered someone who knew his game? The plane is only one part, especially when it comes to knife fighting. There’s always a bigger fish.

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Cue the flashbacks.
I was once outmatched in a turn fight with a P-38 while flying a Zero. (In IL-2 PF)
I thought it would be an easy fight because I knew the P-38 well (it is one of my favourite planes and I loved flying it). Turns out I was (and still am) bad at dogfighting. I couldn’t fly the Zero properly and lost against a plane that should not stand a chance on paper.

@topic:
The reason why relatively new planes are often unrealistically good is that their downsides aren’t implemented yet. Why would the F-14 be different there? If it is nimble enough to outturn a Su-27, F-15, MiG-29 or F-16 then it is wrong. Yes, it is nimble for a plane of its size and age. When flown clean. But it had its limitations in real life and should have them in a sim.

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