DCS 2.5 and AMRAAMs?

The purpose of this thread is asking you the following:

- Are AMRAAM missiles improved in DCS 2.5?

I'm asking this because I'm yet to upgrade to DCS 2.5. I still have and play DCS 1.5 (updated to the latest version) and the reason is simple: I wary the 16GB of RAM as a minimum requirement for missions with lots of objects (even because DCS 1.5 is already quite demanding on my system) and as such I'm wary of "making the jump" towards DCS 2.5
The only reason that would lead me to upgrade to DCS 2.5 "right away" would be if the AMRAAM missiles are (considerably/greatly) improved with DCS 2.5 (since one of the planes that I play the most in DCS is the F-15C from FC3). So I would appreciate an honest reply regarding this. Thanks in advance for replies...

made that question like a week ago and from my understanding armraam real improvements has not been deployed yet. By real improvements i mean being to hit anything from +15nm instead of the ludicrous close distance required by the current implementation.

Yes, that's exactly my point as well!
So the short answer is NO, right?

it seems so....i didn't even bother to reinstall everything to test it myself. I don't have the guts to do it.....once i see official aim-120 improvement on stable version then i will give DCS one more chance.
I remember one of the F-15 mission where you have to take down a AEW escorted by two su-27, well you would think that for a target that slow all you have to do is sneak between mountains, get to a really deadly distance for a slow mover and fire.....nah......not only you have to actually be extremely close for a slow target but also there is a huge chance that the missile hit will not be enough to take it down but might happen that it stays flyable enough to allow the ai to land anyway.....to add on that the designer thought why not send only two flights in enemy territory, air superiority are for pussies......

Ohhh the top notch real life missions in DCS, always providing a huge feel of realism like deploying A10 to take down air defenses.......so realistic

it was thanks to the AMRAAM that I moved on in Lock On FC 1.1 to the Su-25T, those two years I spent making missions and flying it were great fun, unfortunately they sort of simplified the Su-25T in FC2 and the fun was gone, but it was great while it lasted.

Indeed! DCS in "its best"

To make things worse, DCS has the most ridiculously short view/spotting distance ever made in a Combat Flight Simulation! According to what I've read on Reddit this is even more ridiculous since ED actually came up with a solution that minimized this "view/spotting distance" (and there was indeed a version - can't remember which - where this issue was indeed minimized/improved) but the DCS fan(atics) complained about it and then ED decided to remove it on further version/patches

"Frigging" fan(atics)! Can't they realize that it's them who are trashing our hobby (PC Combat Flight Simulations)???

P.S - I have a 24'' monitor with a resolution of 1920x1080, so the problem is not having a "too small" monitor which doesn't allow me to see small pixels at longer distances.

I don't know now, but the best missile in FC 1.1 was the R-27T, I always loaded it and a couple of R73 and left everything else out.

Which shouldn't be. The "theoretical performance" of the R-27 (AA-10 NATO name) should be similar to the AIM-7 Sparrow. In reality and in real combat (namely in the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict in 2000) the R-27 performance was proven to be even worse than the Sparrow during the Vietnam War. Again the DCS "uber realism" in its best but hey, I digress...

By the way and speaking of the R-27T, now with FC3 you can only carry two of them (R-27T, the IR guided version of the R-27/AA-10) on the two inboard under-wing pylons, this on the Su-27 and on all other pylons you can only carry the radar guided version of the R-27, except for the outboard under-wing pylons where you can only carry the R-73/AA-11.

I edited the pylons

I started on the F-15C went to the A-10A and then to the Su-25T, I did some A-A using guns which were quite good, the Vikhr was a lot of fun as well.

that is all FC 1.1 ...

Except this was never the case. The Sparrow out-ranges the R-27 ... the R-27ER on the other hand, has significant specific advantages over sparrow.



Nothing was proven. The record keeping was poor and all you have is some basic unecdotal Pk without details of application; it is also known that the weapons used were old export models (by old, I mean they had been sitting on the shelf for a while) - namely R-27R1. No one seriously uses the E-E conflict as an indicator of the R-27's performance.

There are significant improvements to missile guidance. It isn't perfect, and right now there's a bug that prevents us from taking advantage of them - as soon as that's squashed certain missiles (currently PATRIOT, AMRAAM and Sparrow) will retain a lot more energy at range.
There is definitely work (that I'd like to see) to be done still, but it's already a step in the right direction.

As for 'why you have to be close for a slow target' ... that should be obvious from missile flight mechanics. Your target isn't covering a lot of distance by itself, so it shortens the range you can launch from - you're shooting low-to-high, which further shortens that range. As for the warhead - it wouldn't be the first missile to have trouble with taking down a large aircraft in one shot.

On the other hand a slammer should be hit-to-kill on that with catastrophic damage ... but there are limits to simulation. At minimum it would be nice if the aircraft was considered a mission kill by the game.



... like you have some sort of monopoly on realism

Yeah with that kind of analysis skills no one will ever be happy as they'd be grasping at straws.

That being said, the missile dynamics are clearly not near what they should be. Even the R-27ER in the latest patches are practically worthless. Good luck hitting anything at 10 KM with them.

To the OP, the AIM-120 is essentially how it has been for the last few years.

I have nothing to judge the R-27 performance against save for a few official DLZs, which is achieves according to some interpretation. It's ability to resist chaff is another matter and it's more of a global issue than an R-27 issue.

LOL, so REAL COMBAT and the effectiveness of the weapons systems in real combat is not an evidence about the REAL EFFECTIVENESS of those same weapon systems (WOW, this must be a first in the annals of military history!) but your "babbling" should be "more evidence" than actual and real FACTS. Or resuming, NO EVIDENCE is "more evidence" than EVIDENCE ITSELF according to yourself! WOW, this post of yours should be the winner of the "SimHQ most pathetic post of the year", really...

Your "weapons used were old export models" argument is also comical. Yeah, just forget that the FACT that those R-27 missiles used in the Eritrea-Ethiopia were "only" 20-30 years NEWER TECHNOLOGY than the Sparrows in Vietnam but yet they had worse performance those 20-30 years older technology.
Oh, and you also keep "forgetting" that there is NO SUCH THING as an "export variant" of the R-27. Here are the R-27 variant/models list:
https://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/r-27-aa-10-alamo-guided-medium-range-air-missile/

Also forget the FACT that the US seeker and electronics technology was and is decades ahead of its Russian counterpart.

But who am I to say this?? After researching a LOT about the military aviation subject (actually and basically since pubic hair grew on me. this decades ago) from LOTS of different sources I can only reach the conclusion that this was a totally useless exercise since I should just asked the owners of the "truth" which apparently are ED and above all it's minions such as yourself, instead

And with this, I rest my case about the fan(atics)! Or perhaps "minions" should be a better term....





No, that title should also be awarded to yourself

Oh, I see



Yes, indeed. IMO the strongest point of DCS is by far the A2G. The Ka-50 with Vikhrs and all other weapons and systems is very good indeed. I also agree that the Su-25T is very nice indeed and the A-10C is also very good.

About the A2A using guns I don't have quite the same opinion but this is due and only due to the very poor and short spotting distance in DCS (which I previous mentioned on one of my previous posts in this thread) - due to this, gun combat is IMO even more "limited" (the accurate term would probably be "poor") compared to missile combat (specially with the help of an A2A radar).

I over simplified my feedback. No matter what approach i took (even from 40 angels, full burn, aloft...bla bla bla) the result was the same....ranges short af and missiles easy to defeat..... it is a known problem (that has been denied like hell in ED forums in the past) which i'm not simply making up. Surely i'm no real world pilot, like many here, and my only experience are sims, readings and chat with real world pilots (civilian and military). My impression is that, AMRAAMS wise, has always been way off to every sort of feedback input i got, so let's avoid the 'let's flip and blame the victim' situation like if i'm always doing something wrong ortherwise i'll start to call you steve jobs




Never claimed such but c'mon let's not deny that typical DCS campaign missions lean way to much too be arcade af, at least those who i bought or had included in the aircraft pack. Not saying that they are 100% unrealistic but definitely extremely far from being 100% realistic and i'm not referring to airframe but the combat environment and deployment which is DCS weakest point since i bought it like in 2011.

I kept the labels on

Vikhrs worked very well in ripple firing and I discovered how much fun all those other A-G Russian weapons could be to use, you could even do realistic SEAD missions with the Su-25T, I was just looking at the dates and the last time I flew was 2009, afterwards I did some A-10C while it was in Beta but sort of never really spend much more time flying it.

I can call you names too (or threaten to), it probably won't get us anywhere useful. I'm not going to go into what ED denies, or doesn't or what and why, that's a separate bunch of info that I can talk about, but it's not relevant here I think.

Yep, missiles have (for a variety of reasons, mainly guidance and drag) a problem with retaining energy at range. The current guidance tweaks will help with this a lot - like I said, even with those there would be a lot of work to do, and what there is there now is hampered by a bug (IMHO, but pretty sure I'm correct). Once that bug is squashed the missiles will perform better against longer ranged, maneuvering targets. It should diminish things like snaking/barrel rolling tactics at long range significantly as well.
I don't know if the 120 drag has been touched (I can check later), though I know that thanks to more recent data, the 7 has been adjusted.
I'd like to see more out of guidance personally, but I don't get to dictate what features they should or shouldn't include.

Countermeasure rejection is not being worked on AFAIK, which is a different (but also important) issue that affects missile performance, right along with the seeker's ability to track a target and what the guidance does with interruptions. IMHO the model for how CMs are rejected should change completely - but that by itself is a deep subject




Yes sure, loads of missions are not terribly realistic, I won't disagree. DCS sometimes makes it hard to make them realistic as well - it can get in its own way. The onus is on the mission creator and it's tedious - but if you're willing to put in the time you can get a lot out of it. Likewise, dynamic combat frameworks have popped up.
That's not to say things couldn't be better - a lot better, even. I know ED is working on it. It's the ED pace and there's nothing we can do about it

I've resurrected DCS because i feel that things are really starting to move and deep inside me i'm optimistic, that's why i'm trying to understand what it is being fixed/implemented patch after patch. I know it is just a matter of time, not even a long time, that the aim-120 gets completely fixed with only minor issues.

Regarding the steve jobs joke...was a joke mate.

I was aware of the CMS issue but one problem at time.

Missions wise i bet the sooner or later things will get sorted out, or at least i really hope, but i guess it will take time. IMO, the problem is not the mission editor but the base product that lacks automatic war environment mechanics that automatically drive/guide the AI behavior.

So regarding missile details - there are two important items. One is that the missiles will be using APN guidance. That's neat, it helps the missile use less energy against a maneuvering target when terminal.
The other, and more important thing to me, is that you can scale the proportional navigation constant based on distance to target now. This means that you can constrain the missile's maneuvering (ie. pull fewer gs) until it is relatively close to the target. That's where the bug (IMHO) exists: The PN constant 'unlocks' at a certain distance, ignoring the specific programming - in other words, it allows the missile to maneuver violently too early.

With the above in mind, however, it has already been tested that it preserves almost an entire mach number against a snaking target ... squash the bug and that missile will get close with a lot more smash than today.



Unfortunately my sense of humor is well - you saw for yourself



Have you checked out combatflite? (It's not about driving the war or anything...it's mission planning software that integrates with DCS).

Yes, I'm also using labels right now. Or more precisely a modified variant of the labels which displays a dot at longer distances (while they disappear at close distances). The problem that I had was that these labels appear on the lower side of the object instead right on the center of objects. In the meanwhile I found a modified label posted by someone which shows the labels right on the center of the object and I'm currently testing this label when playing DCS.
Anyway and IMO, DCS is only "playable" in terms of air-to-air combat (and sometimes even air-to-ground combat) with some sort of labels enabled.



Indeed, one of best things about DCS is that you can learn quite a lot about the Soviet/Russian "philosophy" in terms of avionics and weapons which and although I find such "philosophy" a bit "retarded" sometimes, it's indeed a very good learning experience.

The A-10C module is very good indeed. IMO the best two DCS modules are (and by far) the Ka-50 and the A-10C (I can't decide which one is "better"). The Huey module IMO wins the second place for the "best module" of DCS.

I made a mod back then that made the labels a kind of HMD display ...

the Su-25T was to me an eye opener and I learned to appreciate how capable an aircraft it was, the A-10C was a bit frustrating at first and had I stayed a bit longer I probably would have liked it more, but that was the time when I started making skins for FSX and because of that I did not have the free time for the A-10C.

Version 2.5 I would stick my neck out and say is likely a lot better in terms of view distance for Air targets ................fighters appear at over 10 miles as a dot at least (if you know where to look)

This is 1080p (24" display) at low settings and Nevada running the F-5 AFM and BFM campaigns a while back (F-5 to F-14 size ) I could always see them on the horizon as long as you can keep tally close in.

For what's worth I found the Su-25T campaign a bit "more fun" (but not necessarily more realistic) compared to the A-10C campaign. This IMO is because the enemy air defenses (both ground and air based) in A-10C campaign are quite more powerful which means that you'll have far less "tactical options" in this campaign compared to the Su-25T campaign, specially considering that we're flying an aircraft (A-10C) which has extremely limited capabilities against enemy air defenses (air and ground).

Interesting indeed. And that's without any sort of labels right?

By way I have two questions for you:
- Can you have both DCS 1.5 and DCS 2.5 installed at the same time? (This probably has been asked a "zillion" of times but I take this opportunity to ask this if you don't mind)
- Do you notice a big performance (FPS) impact between DCS 1.5 and DCS 2.5, namely on "stock" missions?

I have never used the labels in DCS.

There is a big difference in resource required - DCS 1.5 (the old one) I could run on fairly high settings.

DCS 2.5 I can only run on pretty much the stock low settings which is fine performance wise but doesn't look as good obviously. Recent upgrades have given me a stutter although this might be a case of requiring different gfx drivers etc that I have not sorted out yet.

Pretty sure you can run both as separate installs because people seem to comment they do this on the ED forums but have never done it myself.

Thanks for the reply MigBuster.

yes you are able to have both1.5 and 2.5 installed

Thanks bisher.

ricnunes
You need to use this wonderful program by Skatezilla.

https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=160053

But , but where is ICE ??

Forums feels diffrent

I was wondering the same, i hope he is fine and just wanted to take some time off.

I believe he has lost his simHQ posting privilages

Correct.

for good?

Yes, he had a disagreement with one of the mods in the PWEC section......you can bring up the posts and see how pathetic it was, together with the reaction in the Community forum. Ice is not bothered about creating an alternative account and returning. It's also worth saying there were quite a few people who post within the DCS forums who were asking that he was removed from the forums, along with suggesting some other users who post in the DCS area are banned too!....but that's not likely to come as a shock to anyone.

it is a pity that he left - thanks to him we had a more lively forum and I could sort of keep up with DCS progress.

It's sad to learn what happened to Ice.
He is a nice chap and not only gave live to this DCS sub-forum but also to the Falcon BMS sub-forum here in the SimHQ forums.
His views and discussions were for the most part "spot-on" which is the main reason why I was a bit "shocked" to learn that he was banned here from SimHQ...