Video
At the beginning of 2024, I wrote about the status of DCS, its issues and what is coming in the future. The greatest issue highlighted was the inability of the game to make me feel part of a real conflict for many reasons. One of them severely handicaps any 3rd gen and Cold War scenario, and it is the status of airborne and ground controllers, which makes creating perfect Situational Awareness too easy, removing the “uncertainty” factor so common in that period.
Rather than a lengthy discussion about the capabilities of radars during the Cold War, a brief extract from a book I have just finished reading could convey the message more effectively.
The book I am talking about is “The MiG Diaries: Fighter pilot memoirs & accounts of Cuban, SAAF and Angolan air combat in Southern African skies”. In the described situation, the SAAF, or South African Air Force, wanted to engage the superior Cuban MiG-23s. The plan was to sneak a section of Mirage F1CZ at a very low altitude, pop up and engage the Cuban MiG-23s. This plan relied massively on the capabilities of the Ground Controller. However, things did not go as expected.
“After we had pitched up and levelled off, we struggled to get accurate updates on where the MiGs were”.
“The Rodent radar antenna could be set to paint the target every six or ten seconds; at the six-seconds setting, the antenna turns faster and you lose out on range. We were at the extreme range of the system, so the sweeps were every ten seconds. If then there is just one missed paint, it means at least twenty seconds before the next positive position update. At the combined speed of the opponents, the distance travelled in that time is frightening. As luck would have it, our ground radar system started missing paints, and we no longer had a clear picture of how far ahead of us the MiGs were.”
If the range was causing issues, altitude was not immune either:
“Executing these sorties created a few concerns for us. What we needed was a truly mobile forward radar, because our radar coverage of the combat zone only started from about 19,000 ft or 20,000 ft and above. With no radar coverage below 19,000 ft, it was a little like we were headed to a dark hole. There was a distinct possibility that the enemy could keep some MiGs lurking at low level, who could then suddenly pop up and engage us after our pitch-up. Our Mirage F1s did have an airborne intercept radar, but being notoriously unreliable and requiring constant tuning, it was not much use at all.”
Even more common operations, such as reconnaissance missions performed by the veteran English Electric Canberra, were affected by the performance of the radars:
For the Canberras, the area to be photographed was right at the edge of SAAF radar range, with any target below 20,000ft undetectable. This zone, in which your aircraft can be seen by enemy radar but their aircraft cannot be seen by yours, was termed “Red Radar”. In this instance, however, radio intercepts alerted the South Africans that MiGs had been scrambled, though they were yet to appear on SAAF radar.
These extracts paint an unnerving situation for the SAAF aeroplanes: poor situational awareness against a superior opponent because of the unreliability of their ground controllers’ radars. However, in DCS, this situation simply does not exist: either a target is within range of a radar or not, and the updates from an AI controller are limited only by how fast the “bogey dope” request is spammed. The data provided perfectly nail the bearing and range below a certain threshold, but at least some terrain features block it. After reading the passages above and considering that the Cold War is probably the only period that can be replicated adequately in DCS, we can’t but wonder why the situation is not addressed as soon as possible by introducing at least delays and imprecisions on the angles. Then, the same technology being developed for the Fighting Falcon and the Hornet, with their probability of detection mechanics, could be applied to AIC and GCI.
With the F-4E Phantom II and its GCI-dependent APQ-120 close to launch, the MiG-23 (hopefully), and later a wide variety of aircraft spanning from the Corsair II to the Tornado and the Intruder being developed, it is really a shame that this essential aspect of the game is left in such a status.
This video recaps some of the tests and observations about the current status of DCS Controllers. It is quite long and boring, and for this reason, I have separated from the video containing the discussion (linked above).
FlyAndWire 