Accounts
In primis, here are additional accounts about strike fighters and not, having to jettison ordnance and/or fuel tanks to increase their odds of survival.
In DCS, we tend not to care much, as players can simply respawn, and only rare custom-made campaigns track players’ lives. Real life is, of course, a whole different thing.
“They had had a couple of close calls with Roland launches… Jez Griggs had jettisoned tanks and taken evasive action.”
“In the Number 2 aircraft, Sqn Ldr Niven commented that: ‘it’s fair to say that my one sortie in the vicinity of Belgrade exposed me to the most spectacular firework display I will ever witness, with triple-A tracer everywhere. SAMs as well, possibly, but so far I didn’t see any too close to us. We lined up in trail, the target a storage site. Soon, our leader was calling “chaff, flare,” the action call for defensive measures to be deployed… then “tanks”. Again an action call for the ‘man-in-back’ to jettison the almost-full fuel tanks and bomb load in response to a severe and imminent threat, thus shedding a great deal of weight and permitting greater manoeuvre.”
“The MiGs had been pretty quiet since we knocked the shit out of them in January, but they came up hard again in late April. They started hammering away at the Thuds, who had to jettison bombs to avoid being shot down. Thuds were lost, three in one day.”
“While we could look with pride at the relative lack of success the North Vietnamese pilots had against our airplanes—even the heavily laden Thuds and A-7s—we could not overlook the effectiveness that their mere presence had in disrupting attacks. The excited call of enemy aircraft airborne in a certain sector was often sufficient to cause flights to jettison ordnance and wheel in anticipation of an attack.”
“At such times they would be loaded with bombs and determined to ignore all threats as they pressed on to the target. This was certainly not fertile ground for aces, yet F-4 crews still managed to down MiGs. But when they did, it was often at the expense of a successful attack. If a pilot had to jettison ordnance target-bound to survive, even a kill could not disguise the fact that the MiGs had achieved their objective.”
“On 7 October, the attacking Kurnass force and the defending MiG-21s clashed during attacks on Gianclis and Mansura. At Gianclis, the trailing Kurnass pair jettisoned their bomb loads to engage defending MiGs.”
“‘We flew very low. The windscreen was covered with insects and visibility worsened. I kept on looking for the MiGs but didn’t dare look behind as we were flying so low. Then I saw a MiG. I could judge by his behaviour that he’d seen us, and was targeting “Bed 1” (Israel Krieger). I shouted “break” using the wrong call sign, but Krieger understood and broke. I pushed the “panic” button to jettison everything and clean the aircraft of external stores.”
“‘The first F-4E, IRIAF serial 3-6570, flown by Dowran, was hit as soon as it came within range of a Roland 2 SAM site, and before the crew could react.[…] In the remaining F-4E, Eskandari was forced to jettison his bombs to evade SAMs.”
“Then two MiG-23s appeared behind us. I warned everybody to jettison drop tanks and engage afterburners. It was too late, the Iraqis caught Zabihi, hit his plane and killed him.”
Goal
These accounts include episodes from different parts of the world, and cover different eras, from Israel and Iraq to Vietnam. The importance of the improvements pushed by ED is explained in a couple of lines by Rober Shaw:
“Merely disrupting and delaying the enemy formation, or forcing fighter-bombers to jettison their air-to-ground ordnance to defend themselves, may accomplish the attackers’ purpose.”
Therefore, engaging a strike formation should be a valid way to hinder their task and prevent them from fulfilling their mission without necessarily scoring a “hard kill”. Before the patch discussed in this and previous videos and articles, there was no way to force a formation to defend without targeting each and every single element.
This is a significant first step, but more can be done.
Besides AI improvements, missiles in DCS either track or are defeated or out of energy. There is no such thing as a missile going stupid on its own due to malfunctions or seeker or guiding radar issues.
A word with SMEs
After some discussion with SMEs and active and former crews from the game’s perspective, one point was immediately raised: the reaction introduced by the patch is often exaggerated. In the example shown in the original video, the formation can identify the missiles both via Mk I Eyeballs and thanks to the EW Thunderchiefs. At that point, it is more a matter of visually tracking the missile and the part of the formation possibly affected would react. For instance, a missile on a collision course would not change, or barely change, its relative position. Ergo, the reaction should not be instantaneous, a point I have already raised in a recent article about AI improvements, but after the situation is assessed.
On the other hand, the weather is also a factor. If the missile cannot be identified, more aggressive defence mechanisms should be put in place. Otherwise, it may be too late to manoeuvre. Something similar happened to an F-14 Tomcat downed by an SA-2 during Desert Storm.
I honestly do not know whether an additional layer of reactions can be applied without overhauling the AI. However, a check “tally” / “no joy” on the missile before any reaction would make the current implementation even more compelling. Nevertheless, I think the changes applied in August, although they required some actions from Mission Designers, were a great first step. If Eagle Dynamics can continue on this path of minor adjustments to the AI, the overall experience can be vastly improved without requiring a tabula rasa of the AI logic.
FlyAndWire 