So my understanding is the Tomcat can trap aboard with the 6x0x2 loadout, it’s just you don’t want to do so if you can avoid it. A full up Tomcat in that configuration with empty bags weighs about 50,500 pounds. Max trap for an F-14A is 51,800 lbs gross. It’s doable, that’s just an extremely uncomfortable margin of error.
Which is why I’m intrigued by the stories CVW-11 was running 500nm intercepts with the 6x loadout semi regularly in the early/mid 80s. Apparently the CAG thought that if war broke out, he was gonna kill himself some bombers, and he aimed to train for the war he expected.
As for Cold War Tomcattery, HB have are committed to delivering an '86-ish vintage F-14A once they sort out the B. Really the issue is we don’t have proper maps for running those sorts of intercepts. You fly 200 miles from any ocean we have currently, and you’re going to be very land locked. Hopefully Heatblur fires up their map team at some point so we can get a proper naval map in the proper hemisphere.
Hell, if they released instructions on how to make a map, I’ve got a 3DS Max license, I can make a flat polygon. I will happily develop DCS: “It’s moist, fam” for free.
As a former “Cold Warrior”, I’d like to see the Norwegian Sea and southern Barents Sea - from off the Lofotens (Vestfjord area), around North Cape to the Kola Peninsula.
Well, you see my friend, there is no where else to go in the caucuses water wise. They’ve got the whole Black Sea in there, you can’t really fit carriers in the Caspian, which leaves only the Aegean and Eastern Med, which is more than a bit out of scope (currently).
I don’t think there is a limit to the size of a DCS map (beyond hard drive disk), but there Wag’s mentioned that practical hardware limitations mean they currently have a soft limit of 350NM by 350NM. However, my impression was that was a restraint due to memory and object count. Speaking from a place of near total ignorance, I would imagine a ginormous water map would be the most feasible for that size class currently.
The problem is that you will never see a US carrier in the Black Sea due to the Montreux Convention which states:
Article 14.
The maximum aggregate tonnage of all foreign naval forces which may be in course of transit through the Straits shall not exceed 15.000 tons,…
“Foreign”, in this case means non-Black Sea nations, i.e. any country not bordering the Black Sea.
“the Straits” means the Turkish Straits, the only way into the Black Sea.
A Nimitz-class carrier displaces 100,000–104,000 long tons…a smidge over the limit.
Which means a US carrier in the Caucasus region theater is highly, highly unlikely. (The Russian carrier is OK-Russia is a Black Sea nation) So the Persian Gulf theater is the only theater where one could reasonably see a US carrier.
But that’s the great the great thing about DCS World! You can make just about anything happen! Just ask my virtual Georgian Air Force Viggen pilots!
The problem with the pure water map is that not having a base for the inevitable bombers to RTB to, screws up the DCS AI. So you would need to have at least some land with an airbase. And then the “easy” map already involves some real work.
I had hoped that the Persian Gulf map would extend far into the Arabian Sea to have a lot of room for a carrier in a permissive environment. Unfortunately only the Gulf of Oman is usable, which is merely about 200x100 NM.
That would also be my favorite theater. That or Kamchatka-Aleutians (a lot easier to make and with more water than you could ever wish for).
So it looks like the SA-3 (Lowblow) radar signal plotted on the AN/ALR-67 threat screen moves as the elevons move since the AN/ALR-67 antennas are on the elevons…not optimal at best.
The geometry is essentialy a triangle with the Lowblow at its apex. As the elevons move, the distance of the movement forms the base of the triangle. (To simplify things, thin of it as an equilateral triangle with the two positions of the elevon as the two points of its base.)
However, the AN/ALR-67 is plotting a direct LOS to the Lowblow, so it to it–not knowing the elevon has moved the antenna–it sees the radar at a different LOS and shows it as moved.
The question is how far away was the Lowblow radar from the aircraft? If just a couple hundred meters, that movement of the elevon may make a enough of a “triangle base” to be noticeable…as the video shows.
The farther away the threat radar is…i.e. we are measuring the distance in several Nm not meters/yards…that movement of the antenna should not effect things–the length of the triangle base it makes is negligible compared to the length of the two other sides of the triangle, therefor the angle between those two legs is minuscule and the AN/ALR-67 week essentially the same LOS to the radar–the threat symbol should show accurately on the screen.
(This is essentially the same principle that allows you to “bock out the full moon with your thumb” as Tom Hanks did in Apollo 13…but I digress)
Of course if you come back and tell me that the Lowblow was 13 Nm away…all that triangle stuff goes out the window. In that case I simply have to say, “Well, that’s weird.”
For the F-14’s ALR-67 (-B) and ALR-45 (-A), we’re working on a new, in-depth simulation of RWR antennas and how they’re affected by various factors. This also includes recreating the way the cockpit systems interpret and process the data received by the system.
AN/ALR-67 is the radar warning receiver (RWR) system used in the F-14B. The eyes of the system are four spiral high-band wide-field-of-view antennas looking front right (45°), back right (135°), back left (225°), and front left (315°). The two front antennas are located on the sides of the air intakes, and the two rear antennas are attached to the horizontal stabilisers. When the aircraft is pictured by a radar beam, the RWR antennas receive the emission. The closer the beam direction is to the antenna centre of the view, the stronger the registered signal is. The AN/ALR-67 electronics compares signal amplitudes from the antennas and uses the strongest two to reconstruct the incoming signal direction.
In the video, the simulated radar location is to the aircraft rear and below. When the left stabiliser rotates and moves the trailing edge up, the antenna rotates up too, and the incoming radar signal shifts away from its centre of view - thus the registered signal becomes weaker. At the same time, the signal in the front left antenna doesn’t change. The electronics don’t know about the horizontal stabiliser deflection and interpret the change as the emitter moving away from the rear left antenna field of view.
Heatblur AN/ALR-67 will simulate: radar wave attenuation, signal reception for each antenna independently, antenna condition (damage), signal amplification and threat direction reconstruction from the received signal amplitudes. Just as a real unit does, no faking or RWR-magic.
Here’s a quick video from the Chromecat branch showing how the location of the RWR antennaes influences signal processing and display in the F-14.
Radar warning receivers of this type are simple devices regarding direction finding. There are four antennas. For each radar pulse received, the amplitude of the signal received by each antenna is measured. Then the results are compared, and the two strongest signals are used to reconstruct the direction. Effectively, out of that, you can only reconstruct the total signal strength and one angle - you can’t even tell if the pulse came from above or from below. That is also why applying stabiliser position correction doesn’t even make any sense, because instead of improving direction reconstruction accuracy, you can make it worse under certain conditions. Finally, even with fixed antennas, a typical error in direction finding for this type of RWR is 5-10° root mean square. Hence for most of the time, the stabiliser-induced error is much less significant than the other types of errors.
We simulate different effects leading to those errors. Nevertheless, the impact of the moving stabiliser was the easiest to show and the most spectacular one .
Regarding the performance - the RWR computations aren’t CPU heavy. Of course, we are monitoring the impact of each system on the overall performance. However, optimisation and profiling is a vast topic, so this topic is not a right place to discuss it
Huh? I realize that I am not an aviator and only spent 2.5 years in an F-14 squadron, but I never heard of stabilize induced error…I must have missed that training.
Now I’m really confused…if stabilizer error is much less significant than other errors, then how is it the most spectacular?
Not dramatically raising my expectations for this project.
At the end of the day, the indicated threat direction of the RWR is not that high in resolution
Because of #1, the real life design team of the F-14/RWR deemed it not worth the calories to feed the RWR information about antenna orientation in order to correct it to get a more accurate directional reading.
Despite #1 and #2, moving the flippers at the rear of the F-14 is a great demonstration of the RWR model Heatblur is creating because you get visual feedback (the stabilator is moving in physical space with the antennae moving around) that you can reference to system feedback (the SA-6 icon moving on the display).
