Landing I found to be easy enough with the exception of the Fulcrum and Flanker which have buggy HUD airspeed indicators (a known issue) and, on the Flanker, the IR sensor impedes the forward view of the runway. In addition, slow engine spool rates for these 2 jets mean you got to plan ahead or leave the speed brakes open to keep engine RPMs higher. Make no mistake: the Crane is a big jet and flies like a pig at low speeds. The F-15, while roughly the same size, handled with more finesse and grace at minimum speeds, though to be fair, the Eagle was designed as a BVR/Dogfighter while the Flanker was mainly intended to be an interceptor, so this may be modeled correctly IMHO. All of the jets, of course, have different ideal landing speeds which will fluctuate with weight so I find it best to play the AOA indexer in the HUD where-ever possible, rather than try to figure out what the current ideal dynamic landing speed is given the aircraft’s current weight. One method that George has suggested, which I have tried with success, is to enable the auto throttle and ride the ILS beam down to the threshold and then disengage the auto throttle. It works but you sacrifice realism and bypass the heavy pilot workload that comes with landing a high-performance jet. Now let’s talk carrier ops with the Flanker Delta for a moment: I never really mastered them in JF18 so I didn’t figure I would in LOMAC either without some work. Mind you, it was correctly pointed out to me that the ILS for the carrier is incorrectly set too low which may explain my repeated ramp strikes or stalls short. Just call me “ramp roast” for now…heh…maybe someday I’ll have time to master that. GRADE ON FLIGHT MODELS: A.
(10) The Jets.
Flying the Hog is great because it really puts your head in the flight envelope with some old fashioned stick and rudder work. (I flew the A-10 in OIR too but of course we’ll never see THAT Hog now.) As a Hog fan I am happy to see the Mavericks (D-laser and K-tv guided versions) as well as clusters -- though I would prefer more weapon settings options (e.g., burst altitude and arming delay) to allow for mission profile and delivery options). What are conspicuously absent however are snake-eye high drag demolition bombs for low altitude delivery – just as well I suppose considering the HUD doesn’t seem to have cues for low altitude delivery such that even if low-drag bombs were an option, you’d risk fragging yourself. Rockets are present but largely inaccurate and ineffectual and so a waste of time. Of course the REAL weapon of choice with the Hog though is the GAU 30mm cannon which spews firey death from above upon your foes. A very stable gun platform, it’s been a wicked joy squeezing the trigger and watching a cloud of gun gasses and tracers spew forth, walking the slugs to my deserving victims. One thing that did surprise me though is that despite its renowned armor plating, FCS redundancy and rugged engines sitting high off the fuselage, the Hog seems remarkably vulnerable to ground fire…not quite as robust as I had thought. Mind you the A-10 in another recent sim was very similar in its relative fragility. Anyhow, I was excited to see phosphorus rockets for the Hog (2.75) and Flogger (S-8) -- though you cannot set the salvo # -- for the FAC role. I haaven’t tried it online but it looks very cool…mind you how you actually locate the targets as a FAC is a mystery really since you will have to fly or near them or else weasel out and use labels to spot them (life is rough without A2G radar…heh).
The Su-25 is a real workhorse though relatively simplistic from an avionics perspective…even more so than the Hog, which is saying a lot. Note however that due to its relative simplicity the cockpit is easier to learn and keep a grip on. It’s a no-nonsense platform that will carry just about any CAS mud store in the Russian arsenal. Good solid and steady gun platform too. Of course the downside (as in the Hog) is that you’re basically a low-and-slow airborne target for everybody – much fortitude required. Of particular interest and utility are the Kh-25MP and Kh-58 antiradar missiles for quasi-SEAD tasking, AFAIK the only aircraft in the sim that can carry them and so making the Frogfoot a very valuable asset.
The venerable F-15C is the US “long-arm”, air superiority fighter and is fun to fly top cover with online for an A-10 strike flight. The radar, an earlier model AN/APG-63, is well modeled, surpassed in fidelity by only Falcon/SP3 and Janes F18, has the expected RWS and TWS and ACM auto lock modes. The “flood” mode is handy but dangerous: best used in a free-fire zone where no freindlies are known to be. One engagement option that I’ve missed since Fleet Defender is back: the ability to assign multiple slammers to multiple airborne targets, ripple fire them and data-link support them to activation. Falcon has that in TWS but is limited to supporting 2 slammers at once. HOJ is of course supported as well with the AIM-7 (AKA “The Great White Hope”) and the Slammer, thereby necessitating judicial use of ECM. NCTR and IFF are present and will lower blue-on-blue accidents…I wish Falcon had IFF modeled. The TEWS (Tactical Electronic Warfare System) is big and easy to glean crucial info from quickly.
The Flanker…ahhh the Flanker. Cut my teeth on ED’s Flanker 1 through 2.5…wicked bird she is, if unforgiving of the ham-fisted driver. Big, heavy with a hell of a lot fuel and lots of weapon mounts, it’s a pure-bread interceptor with a close-in sting provided by its excellent low-speed handling and high AOA maneuvering. And its EOS sensor mode (which tracks IR sigs from between 15-50 km (~10-35 miles) depending upon target aspect, Helmet Mounted Site, combined with the deadly off bore-sight R-73 Archer, give it a devastating stealthy first strike capability and lethal close-in engagement abilities. Its long-rifle, the R-27, will give its natural adversary, the F-15, a serious F-Pole equation to resolve at BVR. Though on that note, the sort of “auto IFF” mode of the DVB-Ob3 might also give the Flanker a marked advantage at BVR for getting the targets sorted quicker and missiles off the rails. Something for the Eagle Driver to worry about while trying to avoid fratricide…even with AWACS support, it is too time-consuming to ask for positive id on one target after another. Seconds count at BVR.
The MiG-29 variants are more nimble rough equivalents to the US F-16. Honestly I haven’t spent enough time with this jet to give a fair appraisal so I’m pretty much skipping it.
GRADE ON THE JETS’ MODELLING/WEAPONS COLLECTIVELY: A
(11) GAMEPLAY: One thing I have noticed is that no matter which side or jet you fly, the AI opponents seem to have better AI, they seem to engage earlier or from further away than I think they should be able to, say, track me at BVR. Even close up in proverbial phone booth though, the AI seems to have an uncanny knack at dodging heaters or jinking out of my cannon funnels, or even picking up a tally on me from low six o’clock. My guess, given the consistency of this behavior, is that this is a design decision to help balance things for the single player. Falcon is known to have done something similar at one time, though it’s said to have been modded out by now AFAIK. I am of mixed emotions about this: on the one hand as a Realism purist I hate to see such concessions, but then for those who mainly indulge in single player offline action (which Carl may rightly believe compose a majority of LOMAC fans), this might be necessity for re-playability. The AI isn’t all bad though, it does exhibit realistic and intelligent behaviour: enemy bandits will notch radar missiles, they might crank after themselves launching a radar missile, they may try to pince or flank you on the merge, for example.
After the first few minutes I disabled labels and never turned back. Anytime you have labels on you are missing out on a prime source of anxiety for RL fighter and attack pilots: fratricide…is that a Blue or Red target? Unless you live under the constant fear of committing (v) fratricide, you are getting off easy IMHO. How am I doing without labels? Not too well; spotting ground targets is relatively easy but sorting them is definitely not. Of great help would have been a FLOT/FEBA indicator on the MFD to delineate where the baddies were (or should be). I have heard that there is a way to assign targets in the brief and have them indicated on your HUD with a diamond or such, but haven’t seen or tried that myself I admit and mobile targets move . That seems to me to be an unrealistic work-around for jets that have no A2G radar, roughly simulating the CCRP mode. Regardless, I still find the best A2G CAS method to avoid fratricide is to swing in behind the FLOT from the flank or through a valley and start your run from an IP behind them, egressing over friendly troops and, ideally, heading for home plate – one pass, haul ass. Heh. Speaking of tactics, I was gratified to see that line-of-sight seems to work with respect to weapons: you can dodge missiles by skirting behind intervening terrain etc. Though I have noticed that ground pounders seem to engage in LOS battles with intervening terrain so there are obviously still some kinks there to work out. For their part, SAMs and AAA seem to operate intelligently and the units themselves are well-modeled in that the radars are separate entities from the launchers: knock out a bar lock or straight flush and the launchers are essentially “mission killed” for your sortie. ECM appears to work and, from what I’ve read, does lower the Pk and may move the Doppler tracking gates enough to drop a red radar lock – though I do wish that stand-off jamming had been implemented (as Falcon’s RP5 did) to improve package survivability.
Интересный обзор LO от опытного вирпила, поклонника F4 (английский)
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