Thought that was SOP? Goodness, don’t take that gizmo away from me! 
Sometimes even DLC can’t save me 
The throttle range in the groove is what’s messing me up. In the B, my Warthog throttles are moving between 70~80% of their range of movement, while in the A they’re moving between IDLE and 30% of their range of movement. Just cruising at 22,000ft and 80%-ish RPM, my physical throttles are only two centimeters above the IDLE stop. It’s really weird.
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I am also getting thrown off by the generally low throttle and fuel flow settings.
I still think the Tomcat is pretty easy to land on the boat (in part because it is lacking any hook-deck/wheel-wire interactions and is catching wires no matter what). The A seems to be more difficult to land pretty than the B though. I don’t notice much difficulties with throttle response and ball control, but the AOA is a lot harder to keep stable. If I am trimmed out on-speed in the downwind, I almost always end up fast in the groove. I always strive for that solid green line for on-speed in the trap-sheet and while it is possible to get nice-ish approaches with the A every now and then, I haven’t really gotten any great ones yet.
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I must have achieved Zen or something, because today I got two 3-wires and a 2-wire with no waveoffs or bolters. I did, however, forget to reset my pitch trim before launch and went off the bow like a rocket.
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I’ve noticed one thing recently: after some passes in the -A my Hornet traps are always much better 
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I played through the new campaign over the last few days. I hate to be that guy again, but I think it was a pretty mediocre experience. A petty, because they clearly put a lot of effort into it.
Like many other campaigns for DCS, it suffers from being heavily scripted and over reliance on voice-overs. This seems to be some kind of quality feature that DCS campaigns strife towards, but I really don’t like it. The problem is, there are little to no tactical decisions to be made and you are basically along on a fixed theme park ride. This incapacitation culminated for example in a mission where I was approaching the second CAP waypoint and hesitated from turning around for fear of deviating from the script and breaking the mission. Promptly, a few second later I was told to turn back and I complied.
For me the gold standard for missions is still Falcon 4. There were no scripted events and no custom voice-overs. Standard AI doing standard missions using standard comms, dynamically interacting together in large numbers, which created unique and fascinating narratives during missions on its own. I really miss that.
While I enjoyed the overall campaign setting, I think it could have been implemented more realistically. Let’s disregard the feasibility of operating carriers in the Black Sea (which is basically a Soviet controlled lake), because it is needed for the campaign to happen. But I found it rather unrealistic that the CVBG operated so close to the coast and that strike packages orbited and assembled just a few miles from their targets and the Soviet seemed to be completely oblivious about it, sending a few fighters in response only once their stuff started to blow up. From an immersion perspective, this didn’t feel like Cold War gone hot at all but rather like some retaliatory strike against a 3rd world country.
I get how the last mission was an attack on the fleet from a dramatic point of view. But logically, striking an enemy fleet approaching their coast would have been the first thing the Soviets would do. In fact, the CVBG would not approach a coast as close as in this campaign until after the enemy’s strike capabilities have been neutralized
I also found it curious that the cruisers in the fleet are repeatedly described as further approaching to 100 NM of the coast to launch Tomahawk strikes, which is completely unnecessary considering the 1350 NM range of the missile. In the mission it then became clear that this was set up so the player can see the missile launches when he flies over the ships (more theme park action).
Another nitpick I have is that the strike Hornets were using modern weapons such as GBUs, Mavericks and JSOWs. At the time of the campaign (1990), USN Hornets have only used unguided weapons, HARM and Walleye. I know most people won’t notice things like this, but for me these details are important.
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I’m hip. I’m building a campaign right now and have observed up front that it will be limited by the points you bring out. That and its target audience are those, like me, with ‘average’ systems.
I might argue that a PC system from the future, if you can even buy the parts, as the DCS engine stands, will not allow the number of units required for two large forces to do, well, actual air combat. Then, again as you point out, the DCS maps are too small.
Seems the DCS engine tends to steer campaigns more towards ‘theatre’. That’s fine, just not so much for me.
One of the beauties of Falcon 4 was you didn’t have to take the “deep strike”, complex, mission; you could jump in on any number of ‘edge’ missions (or, gasp!, the dreaded BAR CAP) if you just wanted to fly but didn’t have the mental energy for the hairy stuff.
I probably got this from somewhere way back when but, Falcon 4 was a Realtime Strategy Game wrapped in a Flight Sim.
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Falcon is best described by its two iconic sentences:
There’s a huge war going on. Someone put you in charge of an F-16.
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I gamed the F out of that campaign by taking the BARCAP, spending the required two minutes on station and then zooming off to drop a stick or two of durandals down the reds’ runway. Offence always was and is the best defence 
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So I’m not experiencing the finickiness of the TF30 engines. I’m being pretty rough on throttle manipulation and AOA, but I’m not seeing anything terrible. It does sound like I’m getting some thuds of compressor stalls…but should I be seeing flameouts and damage?
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I haven’t managed to get compressor stalls either in normal operation but I managed to get some when slowing down from Mach 1.2 through the transonic regime while I was in a slight bank and dive. As soon as I pulled on the stick just a little bit, it started to make trouble.
A squadron mate managed a compressor stall with a flamout while he was hooked up to the tanker but I haven’t managed anything like that so far.
€dit: clarification
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Haven’t flown it in a few weeks but I was able to get a CS on the first flight. Or at least the CS noises. Was doing decidedly abnormal things though; if I recall, high alt, high AOA, hard rudder. Went into a spin that took me about 15k feet to get out of.
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I’ve seen it in a dogfight. High AoA as I tried to pull some lead to get a guns solution while throttling back due to high closure and passing the jet wash of the close bandit.
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So basically Topgun
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Exactly. I didn’t enter a spin though and Jester survived
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Did he bail out? 
Not this time.
In another mission I took battle damage and lost one engine. I didn’t notice and stayed in the fight, pushing agressively. I tried to climb to another bandit uphill, high AoA, lowspeed, one engine in full AB, the other inop. I stalled and entered a flat spin. Jester chickened out at 1000 ft AGL. I didn’t blame him. I did take it personally, that he left me to die and I had to punch out myself.
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Testing the A against the B for some background article info and found this interesting. I set up a test mission with both an A and B at MTOW (74,349 lbs.) and did time and distance acceleration and takeoff tests.
A: 3,618’ to 150 knots - total liftoff distance = 4,602’
B: 2,004’ to 150 knots - total liftoff distance = 2,829’
Guess those F110s really do provide a lot more oomph…
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