Got the Viggen on sale, would totally buy it for full price if they told me I needed to tomorrow. It’s an amazing jet in terms of what it can do, and how it does it. It has plenty of depth, but not an overwhelming amount of complexity. Being able to do stuff is easy, being able to do it well is going to keep you busy for a long while.
You want to do anti ship work, recon, level bombing, dive bombing, rocket attacks, gun runs, A2A, etc? All available. You want to do radar bombing via offset? You want to rip through the terrain at 50m AGL in the dead of night in a thunderstorm? You want to do that and have a chance to make it back to base? Heck, you want to do carrier ops? You can even do that too, but you don’t have a hook, so you better be spot on.
So, ran through the startup, taxi, and takeoff missions, and I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, but I think I’m having fun doing it. Time to crack open the Chuck’s Guide and start (I guess) learning some Swedish.
I bought the Viggen at release, but it sat unused for a year.
A few months ago, I dusted it off and started going through the tutorials. Wow, was I surprised. Although the HUD symbology was weird to me, its a blast flying at low level with the radar.
I asked for a F-111 style skin for it, but it wasnt taken on.
I hope future updates includes more of the switches to be bound to the Warthog HOTAS. Most cannot be.
What I don’t get is why Heatblur doesn’t add 2-stage trigger support for for the radar trigger. What would be more logical than to map the 2-stage radar trigger to the actual 2-stage trigger of your joystick? I used to add the functionality in LUA myself, but since the files are reverted with every update (so basically every 2 weeks or so) I eventually gave up. It may sound stupid, but this little hassle is one of the reasons why I basically stopped flying the Viggen.
Well, if you ever get the itch for something different, Vark skins would be great.
BTW, I use the Recce skins when I’m just flying low and fast on a “recce run”.
That would be neat. A two part (or more) mission set where the Viggens (with CAP) have to do a ‘so fast my face hurts’ pop-up recce and we then try to record the SAM threats. Part Deux+ would be using that info to build up a strike mission. Get Dungeon Mastering @Andrew116!
Could be a good one for a fly in…A mission on like a Friday night where Viggens recon an area, then use the data from that recon the next night on the same mission and see if other players could use the data. Or the lead off to a Wednesday night…?
Even if the Viggen could get a smallish box from the ELINT pod, that would provide a good search area for an A-10C, F-18C or AV-8B where would could input coordinates into the systems of those and use the eventual targeting pods to search a limited area. Could also translate into a great low-level strike from other Viggens but that would depend on their ability to adjust to those coordinates. It’s a very cool idea.
Apparently you can narrow the search box from the elint pod by gathering data from different directions. But that involves moving about the emissions and that can be hazardous to your health
I think a nice arc to keep out of range, as in get lots of ‘nails’ but zoom along in a scaredy rabbit kind of way. The Viggen can shift.
One idea would be to use the F10 map as a satellite view once a rough box has been established. I think a lot of the time that sort of tasking happens in reality. In some ways it’s a shame the DCS F10 map is so good, in that wouldn’t it be cool if it could add random cloud cover or be a little less accurate? A kind of ‘fog of war’ setting to be able to use the map for rough intel but not all the answers.
Of course, with a decent ELINT mission, we’d have a set of coordinates to try tossing some bombs in the F/A-18C then.
Step 1. Fit a U22.A Jammer on your Viggen.
Step 2. Right console, Jammer mode selector to ‘A’, Jammer channel to ‘K’. Bork Bork!
Step 3. Fly around and pick up signals, but don’t die. Go Fast Mr Rabbit!
Step 4. Land. System into ‘BER’. Open up kneeboard and the ELINT page shows the Lat/Long boxes.
There should be a file in DCS AJS37 folder ELINT.info that contains all the text info, with emitter number, the frequency detected (so you can tell what it is), how long you heard it and the ‘box’ coords.
To plot it nicely on a map, a bit of code, e.g.
Example ELINT line from video:
NW 43,32,10 040,07,39 SE 43,12,12 040,24,40 (two sets of degrees, minutes and seconds).
So that’s 43.53611111, -40.1275 by 43.20333333, -40.41111111 decimal for our box (top left, bottom right).
It either works or I spend my time with other things that do work.
Could be a good one for a fly in…A mission on like a Friday night where Viggens recon an area, then use the data from that recon the next night on the same mission and see if other players could use the data. Or the lead off to a Wednesday night…?
