Great thread. I has having a lot of difficulty with bombing as well. It’s great to clarify the actual phisics and flying involved with delivery of A/G weapons. Sometimes we just spend too much time pressing buttons on that tiny computer…
What? Snakeeyes level at 200 ft AGL for me! Can’t see the pipper? Just go faster!
Real men RTB with leaves and branches stuck to their jet! 
5 Likes
Generally speaking being slow and pushing forward on the stick are to be avoided whenever possible in just about any swept wing aircraft that can reach the transonic.
For the former, being slow prolongs the period you are vulnerable to enemy fire, it reduces the accuracy of your bombs (slower bombs → more wobbly → longer flight time → greater chance of a miss), it reduces the range your weapons will go, which puts you deeper in the threat zone, and it reduces your ability maneuver defensively. The rule of thumb I’d shoot for is between a 25 or 45 degree dive with an entry speed of no less than 400 IAS.
For the latter, neither the jet nor the pilot are very well designed to handle negative G. Aerodynamic forces get weird, the Hornet engines tend to explode if kept at 0G for more than a few seconds, the fuel system doesn’t like it. For anything more than a minor adjustment, it’s always better to roll and pull rather than push.
1 Like
Plus if you drive too slow the dinosaur gets you.
Exactly
5 Likes
Correct me if I am mistaken…I was in an F-14 squadron when it was heresy to place a bomb within 10 feet of a Tomcat so all I learned about a2G was targeting stuff, not actual employment.
That said…from waaaaay to many hours in front of flight sims, I “learned” that a good way to drop slick bombs is:
-
Fly at altitude above AAA/MANPADs (usually >10K ft AGL) towards but offset to one side of the target. Since the throttles are on the left and most fighters have the stick in-between your legs (go ahead… get it out of your system), many pilots prefer to put the target off the left side of the aircraft. Either side will do.
-
When about abreast with target, (assume off the left side) roll left > 90º and pull back, putting your nose generally towards the target. You should now be heading “down hill” and towards the target without having put any neg Gs on the jet
-
Roll wings “level” with reference to your dive and at the previously determined dice angle…let’s call it 30º down - pull off throttle to keep the desired airspeed
Ideally if you did everything right the pipper will end up exactly on the target at exactly your preplanned pull out altitude…but only some of us are/were actual fighter pilots so it probably will not be…so use what controls you got (rudder is really effective sometimes…no idea if I’m supposed to do that or not) to get everything set up before the big X.
I’m pretty sure one of the important parts is rolling wings level with respect to the target…something about bombs coming off and hitting your tail…which is evidently not good.
1 Like
Good old TFX music, love it!
My preference is for 25kft or higher with a IAS of 250 or greater, fly over the target, pull up and over, then cut the throttles and deploy the speed brake. This has worked well against targets defended by low altitude systems, which seems to be the majority of air defenses used in most missions.
I grab high drag bombs if it’s the longer ranged systems like the SA-6, hug the deck and firewall the throttles for an attack on those, but I’d rather use the Harrier for that – until the Bug gets HARM at least.
The other thing is I stay off the rudder pedals, which is a habit from the IL2 days. The Bug especially doesn’t have a lot of rudder authority so there isn’t much reason to use them except in extreme cases anyways.
I grabbed that track from a Roland MIDI card video! It’s funny how the different devices made sound back then. As I was deaf at the time, it was difficult to discern the difference between one or another back then, but with my implant today I can readily pick out the “flavor” of each device.
Or telephone line wires… 
2 Likes
So after practicing some more I improved immensely in my bomb delivery. For the test mission I actually average around 70-80% accuracy after understanding the right way to do it. However I do have some questions. In that scenario where I have a group of small scattered ground units and must pick them up one by one. The way I approach that scenario is lining up for a dive, taking down one unit, getting back at 15000 waiting for around 6-8 NM turning around and doing it again, boringly, one by one.
However I imagine in a military engagement, when things shoot back at you, you probably must make an effort to dive as few times as possible, so that’s what all the programs allow you to do: set multiple bomb deliveries so at every run you can aim for more hits. Realistically, for moving units I imagine that programming is moot, because you will never have them in a correct formation, but for buildings you can actually make do.
So in the instant action mission, for instance, I could try to pluck several targets per run manually, which seems pretty dangerous, reckless and inaccurate or diving once for each target, as I am doing now.
In a realistic scenario, do pilots actually try to take more than one target per run? Am I bragging for a fair accuracy rate too soon?
Can’t speak for real life, but in the game it’s better to focus on one unit and take that out then to try and multitask and take out multiples in one pass. The only exception to this is if you’re using clusters or attacking light targets, not armored ones. You should focus on getting your accuracy per pass to as high as you possibly can. A saying in shooting: fast is fine, accuracy is final. That is to say, even if you only take out one target per pass, being accurate enough to do so with boring reliability is far more useful than a bunch of bombs in one pass that might take out two targets.
For the most part, as long as you’re above a certain altitude, you can pretty much bomb with impunity, if you’ve got the gas to hang around and make passes which is usually the problem. If the threats are a problem, that begs the question why you’re not taking them out first.
1 Like
Is this science fiction or is there some sort of cluster munition out there that opens up and then targets multiple individual vehicles with the bomblets through gps?
Not GPS, but there is the SFW (which the A-10 can employ in DCS):
3 Likes
The CBU-97 and the 105 kill process is waaaaaaaay cooler than just GPS 
2 Likes
Cool! Ima gonna jump into the A-10 and try it out! Does it work well in DCS?
From what I’ve seen online, brutally well.
Holy cr@p!
In this thread: People discover bombs have in fact progressed technologically past 1955.
Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and savior, the BK-90 Mjolnir?
6 Likes
Cough AGM-154B Cough
4 Likes
Wow!! I’m learning so much here. As far as real life bombing. “100 missions north” is a great account of how fighter bombers did it in Vietnam. Hair raising book. You will not attack a defended target alone. That’s suicide.