As others have said. recording conversations will be the easiest. Even if at the end of it you ‘only’ have a couple of hundred hours of you and your dad having a chat… you will have a couple of hundred hours of you and your dad having a chat.
I wish I had done that with my grandfather when I had the chance. But my mother and aunts and uncles always said ‘your pop never talks about the war’ and I got the impression he was both proud and disappointed that I had joined the army. As well as being a stereotypical dour Scotsman whose volcabulary consisted mainly of grunts
Maybe it wasn’t because he never wanted to? Maybe he was just waiting for someone to ask?
I’ll never know, and now I am trying to piece together his service in WWII, including four years as a PW in Stalag 18A, from snippets of information I can find online and via official records.
I have now completely read through the present manual and I must say I am very impressed and excited. There are so many interesting modes and capabilities.
For bombing there seem to be two sides in the aircraft. One side is an old mechanical bombing computer which seems to be mostly inhertited from nuclear weapon delivery. It offers timing and pitch steering commands for delivery profiles such as loft, over-the-shoulder and low angle drouge. The other side is an early digital system that uses the INS, the radar and even the Pave Spike targeting pod for steering commands and automated release.
Interestingly only one delivery mode (Dive Toss, some sort of radar supported CCRP) seems to actually use dynamic weapon ballistics calculations. All the other modes still use a preset weapon range input taken from a table. So even if the computer and INS will guide you to the precise point in space for automatic weapon release, that release point will only result in a weapon on target if you arrive there at the correct speed, alititude and attitute for the chosen profile.
Fortunately Heatblur has included a bombing calculator, so we can get all the necessary values for all the profiles without having to skim through binders full of tables. This is a fantastic feature from Heatblur!
The INS is still very primitive. It can only store two points at a time and has a drift of about 3 NM per hour. So it is sufficient for navigation but not accurate enough to lead you to a target for a weapons release on its own. Instead almost all bombing modes rely on designating a point (either by overflying or the radar) with a known offset from the target. So you input that your IP is X ft N/S and Y ft W/E of the target into the computer. You visually overfly the IP and hold down the pickle button, and the INS then has the sufficient precision to guide you for X/Y ft to the weapon relase point on the target.
All those bombing modes are super cool. But I also have the impression that manual (direct) depressible pipper bombing will remain a main mode. It will be interesting to see how they compare in precision.
I must say I am very happy with Heatblur’s choice of initially an early/mid 1970s DSCG aircraft and later an additional late 70s DMAS variant. The Phantom stands right at the transition from analog to digital and I think having both variants will really show this change.
Also an interesting observation when reading about the Phantoms capabilities: Considering that in the 70s the F-4E was the mainstay of USAF airpower, it nicely illustrates what an air-ground quantum-leap the A-7E was when being sent to Vietnam in 1970 already!
And no [excess +/-] G on the aircraft if I recall. That book I mentioned above was just talking about this.
I always enjoy a casual jaunt in, say, the Hornet/Viper/Hog and doing CCIP bombing but compared to this [what you describe] it is still ‘cheating’.
Bombing in this era (good point about the A-7) seems just a half step above (cus you do have a sight you can set) dropping a bomb in a Sopwith Camel. Just a lot faster. Will take a lot more practice to be/remain proficient.
The IP is much under appreciated in sims in general. Until GPS in the early ‘90s, updating your “system” (whether that was your INS or your brain) over the IP was fairly instrumental for successfully finding and attacking your target.
Btw if you set the mission date to something like 1996 you will not have GPS in the Strike Eagle and doing a nav fix before attacking a target becomes very important if you want to hit what you’re aiming at.
You can precisely hit targets from 20000ft using auto delivery modes with dumb bombs but your INS has to be on point. For example I have managed to destroy an SA-15 from 25.000ft with six Mk82s
I don’t think so. At least if the date is far enough in the past. I believe GPS becomes available sometime in the late 90ies (in DCS). If you want to run missions in the early 2000s and want to disable GPS then yes, you have to disable sat nav.
A couple from dad’s ‘68 Da Nang tour with the Gunfighters. Mom’s name is on this Phantom. It’s hard to see but are those Roceyes outboard and a gun pod on the centerline? Probably a fuel tank. Not sure what the red nose cap is.
I see a fuel pod on the centerline and a bunch of mighty mouse rocket launchers on the station closest to the cam. On the far wing I see an empty TER and what seems to be the nose of a Mk-117.
The Pave Spike TV pod seems to be quite a bit more sophisticated than I anticipated (in use since 1974). It interfaces with the jet’s INS and has space stabilized tracking. But the INS has a drift of about 3 NM, which is about 300 ft per minute or the lenght of a tank every 3-4 seconds. The way I understand it, this will directly translate to the tracking of the pod. And this assumes a perfect laser slant range is available. Wrong range would induce additional error as the pod tracks a point in space ahead or behind the target. I guess it will require a constant effort by the WSO to keep Pave Spike pointed at the target. Interesting
