Hello, my name is Sidekick and I’m here to help.
Well, maybe that requires a bit of explanation.
Some of you may know me from my You Tube channel. My interests, and the channel’s content are mostly about Digital Combat Simulator and mostly about “Iron Bombing” by which I mean air to ground attack in the age before precision guided munitions. I have followed Karon and this page for a while and I have made use of his excellent content while I was trying to learn how to turn the F-14 from a TomCat into a BombCat. He and I were discussing the “impending” release of the F-4E and how it is going to be very different than modern jets in how it handles ground attack. I don’t know exactly what it will look like, but it won’t be like sitting in and F-18 or and F-16 – I know that.
At any rate, during that discussion Karon offered me the opportunity to write some contributions to this website and I leapt at the chance. I haven’t decided exactly what I will write, but I think a lot of it will be about the history of ground attack and how we got where we are today. I already do a podcast about this topic and I think it’s one that will be of use for anyone who wants to get the most out of the F-4E when it arrives – or anyone who is interested in the “Cold-War” era in general and in flying cold war era jets in DCS.
You see, it seems to me that a lot of players in DCS kind of come at this subject in reverse. Or at least they come at it in a direction that is the reverse of the way real pilots do. By that I mean that real pilots start with simple aircraft with simple systems and very little automation. They learn to fly before they move on to learning how to operate the complex weapons systems that are jets like the F-18 and F-16. A lot of DCS pilots come at it the other way around. They start with jets like the F-18 or the F-16 – because they are popular, well supported, and who wouldn’t want the chance to fly one – even in simulation?
But, after spending some time in the modern jets, players looking for new challenges often migrate backward in time to cold war era jets. What many players may not realize is that the jets of the 60’s and 70’s are quite different than moden jets for reasons that have nothing to do with how fast they fly or what weapons they carry. The experience can be a little jarring if you are not ready for it. These jets are simpler – that’s true – they do not have the complex sensors and systems that modern jets do. But, they also don’t have the modern avionics that automate many of the basic processes in modern jets. So, flying these jets can mean learning some “new” skills in order to get the most out of them – or even to enjoy flying them, frankly.
It was this challenge that intrigued me. DCS provides a nearly unique “sandbox” in which to experiment with air combat for most of the past 70 years. A lot has changed. A lot of the changes having nothing to do with the things that are simulated in the game. I realized that if I didn’t know why things are they way they are in the cockpit, then I wouldn’t really understand how to get the most out of the aircraft I was flying. I mean, you don’t have to fly the aircraft the way pilots of the era did. But those aircraft were designed for the environment of the time, using the technology of the time, and designed for pilots of the time. I realized that getting the most out of the experience of flying them in DCS would mean understanding the history of the aircraft and the forces that shaped them. So that’s what I set out to do. And that’s mainly what I will share here.
I expect that I will cover many of the topics that I have already discussed in my History of Iron Bombing podcast – since I already have spent the time to do that research and write it up. If there are any topics you would particularly like to me explore please let me know. Feel free to drop by my Discord channel any time to join the conversation.
You can find my You Tube videos here https://www.youtube.com/@Sidekick65
Or drop by my Discord here.
FlyAndWire 
Assembling quite the team here. Love to see it
LikeLike