I’ve been flying it extensively and have some similar views as Mbot, as well as some differing views. I also feel like it doesn’t have a whole lot to offer the single-player except for its intended low-level strike role or bomb-truck roles a la OIR. I find its systems flow for LGBs and markpoints to be clunky, and WVR is best avoided. Lack of datalink and IFF at the moment really hurts SA, and the TEWS page is pretty bad in terms of usefulness. The radar symbology is way more complex than it needs to be for someone coming from the Viper and Hornet.
What I do like about it, though, is that it’s bloody fast, it handles extremely well in the FL300-400 range, and it carries so much gas you worry less about getting home and more about stopping before the end of the runway. Iron bombing is great. Doing it with NAVFLIR is even better. I can employ actual BVR tactics–or some semblance of them–with 30nm shots going pitbull at around 20nm of separation, so I have breathing room to make another BVR shot. In the Viper and Hornet I’m stuck with 20nm shots, frequent dropped locks from arcadish look-down or notch penalties, and pitbull at 10nm or less separation where I have to decide if I want to run or take my chances with a knife fight.
For single-player, I think that’s where it shines: Nighttime with NAVFLIR, pop-up strikes with dumb bombs, and BVR. I can see the PGM bomb truck style of play enjoyable as part of a larger coordinated package over multi-player, but in single-player it definitely gets stale pretty quick. I’d rather fly the Hornet so the carrier ops can break up the monotony of lasing GBUs.
Still, it’s going on my 4-ship rotation of modern jets I regularly fly: Tomcat, Hornet, Viper, Mudhen.
I haven’t flown as much as Mbot and Clutch obviously have, but I’d tend to agree with the impressions. Remarkable stable and nice to fly (watch the pitch change when configuring for landing - get your external lighting set up beforehand!), but very heavy and draggy for an Eagle. It’s nice to have a jet where I feel comfortable with how much fuel I have.
In other fora I’ve compared it to the Viggen, but I do agree with Mbot’s comment about it feeling very sterile compared to the Tomcat (and Viggen!) in handling. This may actually be a design philosophy thing - the Razbam Harrier also feels a bit sterile to me, but it’s far easier to understand with the Eagle which is reported to be a very stable platform. Of course, having a cockpit and display design philosophy that is from the same era as the F-16 and F-18 makes it much easier to jump between those three than F-16 to Viggen, for example.
I’m a VR diehard, and the in-cockpit virtual pilot is probably the best in DCS at the moment, IMO. This makes a big difference to me personally, and I’m very happy to see an early access product launch with this feature in place.
Admittedly that is pretty much all I have done and similarly until now the only jets I have been flying are the Tomcat (A2A only) and Viper (A2G/SEAD only)… I don’t have the Hornet but yeah this module has so far been a worthy ‘out of the box’ offering.
I also agree it seems to be begging for a WSO (AI or otherwise), but I am having a lot of fun. It took me a bit to get my head around some of the workflows and this never gets old:
Anyone know if we are going to get MER’s for the wing pylons, or if they were a thing IRL? I have seen a Pig lay down 24 of these bad boys in a single pass and I sure would like to replicate that.
I have been toying around with the low level strike mission. Here is a low level night attack against the Iraqi H3 air base during Desert Storm. The target is a pre-planned Hardened Aircraft Shelter. The air base is defended by Shilka, radar guided S-60 AAA and a SA-8 (IR threats no factor at night). The year is 1991, so there is no GPS. The aircraft is set up with 45 minutes worth of INS drift.
First I update the INS velocities using the A/G radar. At around 40 miles to target I turn right and climb to map the target with the radar, performing an INS update using offset points. After turning left towards the IP I do a second INS update with the radar to have a tight solution for the upcoming loft. I then loft two GBU-10 towards the target point. Once settled the for the designation maneuver, I acquire the target with the TGP and lase it for the last 10 seconds until bomb impact.
Frankly this doesn’t really work alone. The pilot just doesn’t have the mental capacity to work the radar while flying at low level (as was to be expected). Perhaps later autopilot-TFR will ease this a little bit. But until then I fear that this mission isn’t really feasible for single player. At least for pre-GPS missions. With GPS you don’t really need the radar or the WSO anymore for any pre-planned target. Working the TGP isn’t that big of a deal for the pilot if you already have a solid target designation beforehand.
I’m rereading Strike Eagle: Flying the F-15E in the Gulf War and it’s interesting how often the WSO mentions “getting a good map” on different landmarks during a sortie. I assume that he’s correcting INS drift. The A/G crew contract seems to be WSO handles navigation and marks targets, while the pilot flies the airplane and releases weapons.
Had a funny thing happen to me last night flying the Mudhen. I was working on a minimal quick startup checklist and when it was done, decided to give it a test flight to debug.
It seemed to go well, except for when I released brakes for takeoff roll, it accelerated very sluggishly. I had plenty of runway and it finally reached VR. I eased her in the air, pulling up the gear, but waited until 250 kts to bring in the boards. She just didn’t want to climb like I thought that she should, but eventually got to 300 kts. It was an air to ground mission and loaded heavily, although not at max takeoff weight. In between steerpoints 1 and 2 I began troubleshooting why such a pig. I looked at air temp, speedbrake position, etc. Was a pitot tube cover on? It seemed like I needed afterburner for what should be a routine climb.
Then dummy me finally looks at fuel flow, something that I should have done before releasing brakes. Oh, number one is still showing 26%. I never lit the damn thing! What an utter dufus. It my haste to depart hastily, I had missed and awfully big item, not to mention hadn’t looked at the annunciator panel during runup.
Still, baby is so powerful that I might have been able to complete the mission on one engine, lol. Baby got powah!
I had a similar dummy moment last night. In the break, configuring for downwind, and my fingers bumped the switch I had set to the finger lifts for my starboard engine. My first single engine landing was smoother than any of my normal landings
Sometimes I’m surprised at the power. Sometimes a bit skeptical too, though. With 12x Mk82 I can supercruise slightly above Mach 1 at MIL power.
If i’m not mistaken, the body of the F-15 generates a ton of lift. So it would make sense, at least in my mind, that the flaps would disrupt airflow enough to slow it down.
I to am starting to wonder. My normal climb out is around 15 degrees until .95 Mach and then I pitch up to 20 degrees and level off between 20 and 30K depending on mission.
I think we have the -229 engines but even they aren’t that powerful.
I’m not surprised, but hadn’t given it any though honestly. It does have a large wing area, and unlike both the Hornet and the Viper, does not have leading edge devices (slats). These increase the camber of the wing at low speeds, and I would assume are what’s most responsible for the large increase in lift that can be seen in both of those aircraft (more so than the flaps, but don’t take that to the bank, just talking out of my hind quarters).
In general, simple trailing edge flaps like the F-15 have don’t typically provide a great increase in lift, but do increase drag. Seems like it’s what I would expect, but I’ve obviously never flown anything close to a fighter jet.
F-15 wing camber design is described by MacAir as like having a fixed extended LEF optimised for high altitude sustained G - presumably that is the leading edge lip when you look at photos.
Ultimately its a simple fixed wing with a large wing area which provides low wing loading in a more traditional sense.
Although the extra ~9000 lbs weight of the F-15E structure and CFTs over the F-15C (Less CFTs) significantly increases the loading and reduces subsonic lower speed turn performance in some areas which the bigger engines cannot make up for.
Have no data on what the flap effect would be though.
F-16 takes a very different approach regarding lift:
Blended wing body (higher Lift/Drag) with blended fore strakes (LEX) that are shaped to provide a lot of vortex lift.
As you said cambered wing with LEFs but these can significantly affect turn performance and are scheduled to do so. Initially the LEF scheduling had to be changed temporarily which reduced turn performance - the LEF motor couldn’t take the loading on the flaps above M0.8 but that was later fixed.
Being unstable the tail is lifting under some circumstances so more lift and less trim drag which also increases range/endurance.
The result of all that extra lift is not something anyone includes in a typical wing loading comparison - but basically you end up with a low wing loaded aircraft another way.
Sadly most of that innovation cannot make up for the fact that the Block 50 is like the F-15E a much heavier variant built for lugging large AG loads and miles away from what it was actually designed to be. So subsonic performance suffers in areas especially lower speeds but Transonic / supersonic performance is increased in some areas.
F-15E Flaps
IME (not RL) on a normal takeoff, the gear and flap retraction happens so fast as to not bust flap retraction speed (V3) that the pilot almost acts reflexively. Rotate, positive rate, gear up, flaps up. I would bet that usually they are fully retracted by 220 kts.
However, the trees were getting bigger and I didn’t want to lose any lift, even at the expense of airspeed. I didn’t know V3 or VF, but I thought that VFE was 250. So, I waited until getting there, which coincidentally put me well over the trees and still accelerating, albeit slowly. Thinking back to flying lessons and getting my hand slapped to taking out flaps too soon.
Military ATIS
It appears that The Air Warfare Group is experimenting with an ATIS MOOSE script.
One of the Mirage campaigns had a scripted semi ATIS thing in it years back - must have taken a lot of work.
The available dash-1s say the flaps (when down) are protected from structural damage by a blow up airspeed switch. The switch is set to automatically retract the flaps at 250 knots maximum.
Well said! I knew about the fixed LEF but didn’t know what AOA or speed it was optimized for. Love reading stuff like this.
That sounds accurate to RL. I read somewhere that the early F-15 squadrons were having gear overspeeds on takeoff almost every week from the incredible acceleration through VLO/VLE.
