F-22 Total Air War / Air Dominance Fighters

Rapier · October 16, 2024, 10:24am

It’s been a while since I posted a new topic. Recently we flew 2 missions in the far best Digital Image Design (DID) game ever, that means in their magnum opus title, respectively F22 TAW 2.30 modification which contains full games: F-22 ADF + its extension Red Sea Operation (RSO), and F-22 TAW with their 10 original realtime dynamic campaign which unfortunately doesn’t support coop like a Falcon 4.0/AF/BMS.

Despite that a player can play coop all canned ADF missions and RSO missions which are still partly dynamic, not as in older games where everything is almost static or used the efficient tool TAWBC (Total Air War Battle Commander) where a player can make its owns mission as wish.

The group of virtual pilots who love old games are currently part of a Discord channel Air Dominance Project (ADP) and here are report AAR from two ADF missions which we flew with 2 and 3 teammates coop.

This game is still fantastic despite the old graphic presentation and other things that I wish to have there. The flying model is now of course outdated but still fun. Since 2017, I have been flying almost only the BMS coop campaigns so I’m capable compare.

The ADF first mission: Prelude
We finished the armed recon mission with 100% success on medium difficulty. Keeping the low-level flight (between 30-300 ft) with EMCON 1 was the key point here to pass waypoints 6/8 and to avoid being hit by SAMs or enemy CAP 2x Su-27 Flanker. We switched to Push 2 and chose the AIM-9X (capable fire at the EMCON 1) and always kept our eyes on Flankers if they closing or not. We saw on ours defend MFDs the range of powerful Flanker radar searching targets but because of emission control level 1 they were not capable found us (fortunately).
At waypoint 11 we were high altitude (32 000 ft) but despite that SAM (two SA-6) fired at least twice at Goblin and at least 3 times at me. Luckily we were defensive using maneuvering, chaff, and flares without being hit by SAMs. It was my mistake as a flight leader because I thought we were safe at 32,000 feet. We weren’t. Fortunately, we survived that incident without being hit.

Note: EMCON 1 = Emission Control level 1, which means: the radar is off, almost all active electronic systems are off, unable to fire Mavericks, HARMS, LGBs, or the most important AMRAAMs.

2 in positon

Keeping our attention (eyes) on Flankers (CAP role)

Made sure that we passed the right waypoints

SA-6 is firing at us, we are defending

On the route back

2 in position

Goblin Maverick moment. Yes, Ma’am because I was inverted.

Egyptian monuments

Finals

Mission completed

The engines are off, the canopy is opened

Debriefing report
No kills but it was not a goal of our mission. Remember: Armed reconnaissance mission.

The ADF second mission: Sudan Strike
That mission was much easier for us because no one threatened us when we flew over the target and there were 2 flights of Eurofighter Typhon, each with 4 planes in ESCORT and Wild Weasel (WW) role. Our STRIKE mission started almost 20 min., after flights (two EF, one F-22) which got the clearance to taxi and take off before us. Rush traffic on the big airfield like on the highway in peak hour. It looks like the Alpha Strike, 16 planes took off step by step.
Of course, we finally shot down a package of enemy MiG-21 and Su-27 as well as a transport flight close to the target because of the enemy airfield.
To use dumb bombs to hit targets in CCIP mode was a challenge for us, the most of the builds require to be hit more than 2 bombs to be finally destroyed.

Lead