S1E12: Storytime Collection

Stories from Falcon BMS.

Episode Transcript

(00:08):
You've tuned into the Tactical Frequency,a podcast centered around all things Falcon BMS.
Welcome once again to the Tactical Frequency. We've reached episode twelve. Now,
now, this episode is going tobe a little bit different, but

(00:30):
I trust that it's going to beone worthy of this first season. Greetings.
My call sign is Bible Clinger,and this is an hour of stories
in Falcon b MS, experiences thatI and others around me have had in
this flight sim of choice. Sothe first story I think I'll share is

(00:56):
a general story. All right,So I'm flying Falcon BMS and I'm separated
from my wingman. My wingman somehowgets himself merged. He's fighting for his
life. Okay, I'm coming.I'm going to try to help him.
I assess the situation. I havea solution. I can kill the hostel,

(01:19):
but it's too close to fire.I could possibly kill my wingman,
or I could kill the enemy.I don't know what's going to happen,
and I don't like that. Butat the same time, my wingman is
a little bit He's not necessarily winning. So I have an idea. I
tell my wingmen to flow away fromthe fight. I give him a directive

(01:42):
where to fly. He starts tofollow. I fire the amram am Ram
comes off the rails. It's goingfor the bad guy, but my wingman
doesn't listen. He turns back.Now he's got the upper hand against a
bad guy and he kills. Butthere's just one problem. My missile is

(02:02):
not its way right over there,and splash. I shoot down my wingmen.
Now this is a sad enough story, but what's even sadder is that
this happened to me twice, withsome variation in each story. One time
I shot my number two and onetime I shot my lead. So the

(02:25):
lesson that I learned, let thewingman die unless you have a better shot.
Of course I speak a little bittongue in cheek there, but in
general it really is important to havea better shot than just a fifty fifty
guess you need that clear avenue offire. Now, similar to that picture,

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this we're in Kto on the falconlounge. We managed to get a
package together and it was pretty sizeableif a cap. We've got some ground
flights now. One of our pilotswas named Exo Light, and in this

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sorty we're going deep into North Korearelatively deep. We're going near their capitol.
It's a night mission. We've gotlots of Triple A out there.
Now we're starting to tangle with someMiGs and our cap flight is coming in
to save the day, or sothey thought. The cap flight actually has
a green pilot in there, andhe gets a little too excited. He

(03:35):
launches a missile and he hits ourfriendly and shoots down poor Exo. Now,
the poor cap guy felt so badon the way back home that you
could hear the remorse in his voice. And he felt bad because this is
one of his first flights in multiplayerand he does that. But the lesson

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was learned and he became a reallygood Falcon BMA pilot. Now Exo,
on the other hand, he hadejected and he landed in the middle of
enemy territories, surrounded by bad guys. The tack view to us was hilarious
at the time. Now he's justsurrounded in this sea of red as this
little pilot is coming down hitting theground. Now we had a little bit

(04:19):
of fun with this idea. Wehad been thinking at the time about how
we could maybe turn this into abigger story, So we had this whole
funny storyline and idea about us goingback to rescue Exo Light. We'd record
a new flight where we go backto North Korea that same location, make

(04:41):
it a dramatic storytelling event where wego in there, bomb the area,
maybe even bring some helicopters in,and storyline in that we're rescuing him out
of a prisoner of war camp fromPyongyang. Now we can't actually do that
in BMS. You can send thehelicopter, send the jets, you can,
there's no real rescue mission to saveI'm out of a POW camp.
But it would be a role playingthing, would kind of be like a

(05:03):
machinima made in Falcon BMS. Itwould just require a little bit of video
editing skills and so imagination. Andthen of course we were realizing there'd be
a little bit of continuity issues withExolite being part of the operation to rescue
himself. So we had this ideawhere we would joke in the video that

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the unrealistic has happened and the twinbrother of Exolite, who also happens to
be an F sixteen pilot, hasjoined in the rescue effort to help save
his brother. Now, that wasour sense of humor at the time,
and unfortunately we never did this followup flight. Maybe we will need to
do it sometime in the future.Now, on the same vein of friendly

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fire, Old Craig and I weretesting other aircraft like the F twenty two.
So we're trying runs in the dogfight module, and because we were
flying overpowered aircraft, we decided totry some insane odds like we were doing
two verses twelve and other things likethat. We were trying different variations and

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so sometimes when we're doing these things, our strategy would be to maybe split
to get a lot of missiles off, quickly reassess, and then get another
way of the missiles off. Well, during one of these runs where we're
doing these dog fight tests, Iended up doing a ray gun call in
the radio. Now, for thosewho don't know, when you call ray
gun on the radio, you're supposedto give some sort of bullseye or description

(06:38):
something that everybody listening on that frequencycan understand are you talking about me?
And then they're supposed to get onthe radio and say to not fire.
Well, in this case, Craigresponds in the negative, it's just the
two of us in this test thathe knows I'm checking to see if fits
him, and he's saying no,No, his RWR isn't giving him any
warning. I'm clear to fire.Well, the rookie stake that I made

(07:00):
was not hard locking Craig. Thatis, I didn't go into STT mode
on the radar, so I wasn'tsending enough radar energy to send Craig's RWR
into a panic mode, so hewouldn't have gotten a warning whether I locked
him up or not in the modethat I had chosen. So I smoked
poor Craig. And for the record, he's got a great story of shooting

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me down that I hope we'll getto share some time on the tactical frequency
on another episode now. Sadly,in a separate incident, I also managed
a friendly fire where I was firingin TWS mode, and let's just say

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I cycled a little too happily andaggressively and eagerly, and I managed to
also shoot my lead who is wayoff somewhere on the side. And it's
funny because I haven't really done thatmany shootdowns compared to the flights that I've
had. Friendly fire incidents are rarefor me, but you remember the ones

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that you do. So those arejust a small sampling of stories about things
not going so well in Falcon BMS. Don't go anywhere. We've got more
stories here on the tactical frequency.Please keep listening. Your support means a

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lot. What are some of theprerequisites to learn Falcon BMS. You're just
a sample. First, you needself motivation and time. BMS is a
study sim You need a personal commitmentto learn, one that doesn't rely on
others. Second, you need tofly regularly. You won't get better unless
you're learning new things and solidifying whatyou've already learned. Third, you need

(08:58):
some hardware. A throttling stick aregreatly recommended, particularly a pair with a
lot of hat switches. Can youfly with a keyboard and a mouse?
Yes, painfully, it's billy notrecommended. Fourth, head tracking or VR
get one or the other. Thegold standard for head tracking is track IR,

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but other cheap alternatives will do justfine. Fifth, you need to
buy a copy of Falcon four pointzero. It goes for about five U
S dollars on Steam. Falcon ba mess itself is free, but its
license is a mod for Falcon fourpoint zero for legal reasons, Package two

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five zero roll call on the TacticalFrequency. Welcome back to the Tactical Frequency.
We're doing a stories episode where I'mjust sharing stories of things that happened
in Falcon BMS. Let's talk aboutwhen things actually go right. And in

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the same vein of wingmen helping wingmen, getting into problems and all of that,
I'll tell this one. I'm followinga friendly human F sixteen, and
this was a while ago. Icannot remember if he was my wingman or
my lead, or maybe even fromanother flight, but I know he's a
friendly part of in this flight,and I'm following him on egress. And

(10:30):
suddenly, as I'm we're on engress, everything seems really quiet. I begin
to realize that I'm MAG twenty threeis closing in behind him. So I
get on the radio and I lethim know I'm watching the MiG on the
targeting pod and I'm trying to catchup. Now I'm not close enough to
get a good shot, but theMiG is just screaming in right behind him.

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The MiG is getting really close.Now he decides to turn around with
the MiG on his six and tryto drag him towards me so that I
can delouse him. So now they'reboth flying directly towards me, and suddenly
I'm able to see the missile launch. So I'm on the radio screaming break

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missile. The F sixteen breaks,so now it's my turn. I let
the missile go free. The MiGblows up and we got out of there
safely. But that was a questionableshot that I took then as well.
This is back when I was takingmore dangerous shots. Apparently, now,
if you're on the tactical frequency discord, we should be posting the gift image

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of this. So it's a shortlittle sign, a little clip that you
can see of that engagement from tackfuel, and we'll be posting others as
well. And yes, I knowtechnically everybody argues that should be pronounced Jeff,
but just chock it up to dialectand we'll just move on. Another

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example of things that act go well. I'm flying with Max Waldworf from the
Falcon Lounge. We are in atwo ship oka strike flight within a larger
package. Our tasking is to blowup the enemy runway and we'll be doing
it with a low level attack.The others in the package are doing other

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taskings like covering us from air threats, cap and things like that. So
Max and I end up very lowlevel. We're enee, we're right over
the ground. Max is a leadand he's in front of me. I'm
watching from behind him since I'm intrail. So we're getting ready to do
the bombing run. We're very close. We get lined up, so now

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the bombing runs right about to happen, and suddenly I see it. I
see an enemy aircraft taking off.Now Max is pretty close to the runway
at this point. I'm not exactlysure how close he is. I don't
even remember the exact details. Iwas kind of fixated on the MiG at
the time. So I let Xno I'm on the radio, like,

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hey, they're scrambling, and hereplies, essentially, I can't deal with
it. I'm literally in the middleof my bombing run. I just have
to get the bombs off, andhe's already committed. And you don't want
to abort over the runway, especiallyif you've got triple A and manpads.
You just want to do it onetime, get in there, get out.
But I'm not over the runway justyet. I swapped a dog fight

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mode, lock up the MiG twentyfive that's now suddenly coming in between me
and Max, and I'm foxing nowat least, and I fired a Fox
two, which is a heat seekingmissile, and I slam what I seem
to recall is a MiG twenty five. But now I'm coming up to the
threshold. I swapped back to airto ground, drop my bombs, and

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we get out of their successful runand all of that. But later on
I discovered that a second MiG hadbeen taking off, and I can't remember
if he was destroyed, perhaps byMax's bombs or something else had got him,
but I believe we escaped unharmed andunaware of him until we watched the
ACME. All right, Another story, now, this one was one that

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happened quite a while ago in myFalcon BMS experience. This one is actually
starring Ripper, the founder of theSix. Now, back when I was
relatively new at the Six, wewere flying Josh Kto. It was a
KTO variant theater where North Korea wassupposed to be more modern and have a

(14:35):
better air force. Now Ripper wasnot paying attention to what was happening during
this flight. He was one ofthe air to ground flights, and I
think he was waiting for a dooropen call. So he's not really near
the action. Nothing dangerous is supposedto be happening. He's listening on the
radio and he's taking care of littlethings in his jet, just paying attention

(15:01):
to the cockpit. Now, it'simportant to know that the weather was incredibly
bad in this flight. There areclouds everywhere. They are thick. There
are thick, thick clouds where youcan't see the ground, you can't see
the sky, you can't really seeanything. You're in this soup. Well,
what's fascinating about this is that hemanages to lose his bearings in the

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clouds, I mean completely. Hehas no idea where he is or where
he's flying. He thinks he's flyingat least somewhat, maybe in a turn.
Maybe he's turning around in a circleand holding an orbit, or maybe
he thinks he's flying level. Butyou could watch his instruments in the video

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and they show he's beginning to dive. He doesn't even realize it. He's
increasing his speed and he's still notrealizing it. Suddenly he bursts through the
clouds at some ridiculous speed. Theground is right in front of him.
He suddenly realizes he's coming out ofthe clouds. He pulls up really hard

(16:07):
bens The jet breaks the bombs,but he recovers. Now, it was
terrifying watching it. Is that.I am sure that some real life scenarios
have played out somewhat similar to that, where real life pilots have not been
quite aware of what was going onif they weren't rated for whatever night flying

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or bad weather or something like that. It's amazing what can be simulated in
the modern era. Now for anotherstory. One time, after a large
multiplayer mission, we were watching theattack view of the mission and we became
aware of a very strange phenomenon.Two AI controlled hornets, unbeknownst to us

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during the mission, decided to attacktwo enemy helicopters. Now, the helicopters
were downed pretty easily, but thehornets refused to wave off, They refused
to pull away. They chased thehelicopters pretty hard as the helicopters are going
on the way down. But theangle that the hornets had decided to attack

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from was very awkward, to saythe least. Now I think I appieced
together what happened. It's either oneof two possibilities from what I can tell
looking at the replay of the events. Either first option is that the helicopters

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had been finally fragged at the momentand spawned into three D and took off
right at that moment, right underneaththe hornets, and that's what led the
hornets to suddenly detect them an attack. The second option has to do with
aggregation and daggregation. For those thatare familiar with the BMS engine, if

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something is deaggregated, it actually isflying in the three D world. It
has an AI, it has amodel, it's actually flying. If it
is aggregated, then it is justbeing simulated at a much more abstract level.
Well, things become deaggregated the closera human gets them. That means

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if there are hundreds of AI fightingon the other end of the map,
they can all be aggregated and youdon't have to worry about all that CPU
power going into modeling a detailed AIand flight model for each single aircraft.
This lets you have a much biggerexperience. That's WHYBMS runs so well yet
has so much going on in thebackground. So in this second possibility,

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the hornets were deaggregated, but thehelicopters were aggregated and became deaggregated when the
hornets were on top of them.So the hornets are flying around and all
of a sudden are like, oh, they're there. And the next thing
you know, the hornets are actuallylosing control in this bizarre dive that they

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pulled. They couldn't recover. Nextthing you know, they're in some sort
of a spin, and that's howwe lost two hornets in exchange for two
enemy helicopters. It was actually amote. We spent some time laughing about
that, but it was very strange. I'm sure it's one of those things
that the developers weren't really envisioning wewere going to find that day. I

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have another story involving a very largemultiplayer package. The theater was Polar Vortex.
I remember I was flying with apilot named Woody. I believe he
may have been the lead in thisflight, but I am not sure.
I believe it was just the twoof us in the flight. We finished

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our mission and we are headed backhome. Suddenly we're being alerted over the
tactical frequency that our home base hadbeen bombed while we were out doing our
mission. Okay, Touche read four. We need to go to the alternate
airport right now. Something odd happenedin that flight. Others in the package

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went to the alternate's teerpoint and therewas no airbase. Something was wrong with
our flight plan. Woodie and Inoticed that we were low on fuel.
We could either help in the searchto find the alternate air base, or

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we could go refuel. Now,in this group, there was not a
lot of air to air refueling.It wasn't something that this group advocated for
a lot. It was something thatwas just considered too difficult to plan in
a lot of missions. There weresome exceptions, but for the most part,
you just didn't get to do it. But this made perfect sense.

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We couldn't fly home, we didn'tknow where our new home was. So
He's thought, yeah, this isperfect, let's go hit the tanker.
So we're asking AOX where the tankeris, we find out, we get
the tanker information, and we didjust that. We hit the tanker and
did some air to air refueling.Now, to me, that was an
incredibly cool experience to use air toair refueling skills right then and there in

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a large multiplayer mission where it wasan impromptu thing, and by the time
we were done, the package hadfound our alternate airport and had broadcast correct
coordinates for everyone to find. Now, some memories in Falcon bms are little

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hazy, and some of these Idon't always remember very well, but I
do remember a number of these werewe are flying n OE, those little
fragments I seem to remember a lot. It's just something exciting about getting on
the deck, flying low, flyingfast, knowing that if you get too

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high into the air, you're goingto be shot at by an say ten
or an Essay six, or maybeeven an say two or an say three,
And you have to keep going.And maybe you're scanning the ground looking
for man pads. Now, inone case, I believe the theater was
Polar Vortex, which by the way, is a beautiful theater in winter.

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Please if you fly either Nordic orPolar Vortex in four point three seven,
please remember to fly them in winter. They just look beautiful. And I
remember so many good flights, justbits and pieces of those events. Well,
during this one time, I'm flyingNOE and I'm noticing something on the

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horizon. It's flying across the horizon. Mind you, I'm flying very low.
This is NOE. What could thisbe? It's got to be helicopter.
So what are the odds We're aboutthe cross paths with a helicopter right
in front of us. Now,it's pretty fun Falcon BMS day where you
can either shoot down or gun downa helicopter that presents itself to you as

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a fantastic target of opportunity. It'sactually quite interesting how many times this can
happen when you're doing an NAE runtowards a busy airport. Now, also
in the vein of hazy memories,I remember some crazy deed missions against say
tens. Now back in the day, the SA ten couldn't target more than

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one thing in Falcon BMS. Infour point three seven, however, that
is not the case. It's abit more dangerous to tackle one of those.
Not only that, the SA tencould not shoot down harms, which
now in four point three seven itcan now Our strategy back in the day

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was to have seed flights chucking harmsat say tens. Well, deed flights
would go into n OE and performaloft right on top of the SAY ten.
It was pretty wild because if youwere the deed flight, you had
to get captured somehow. The SAten is mobile, so you couldn't really
one hundred percent of your GPS coordinates. So picture this. You're the lead

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of the deed flight. You're flyingin low, You've got your steerpoints selected
where you think the SAY ten is, and you've got these coordinates from the
recon screen in two D. Soyou're flying. You're flying, you're flying,
you're getting close enough, maybe youcan get a lock, but you're
looking at your targeting pod, you'relooking at your talking about and finally you
see that and it's like, waita minute, that's not quite the radar.

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So now you have to slew thetargeting pod back and forth to try
to find that radar. Once you'vegot it, now you lock that up
and you go for the attack.And when you're popping up, you're completely
vulnerable. The one thing you gotto remember is drop those countermeasures on your
way up, and maybe drop somemore on the way down, because getting

(25:07):
shot by one of those is it'snot fun. So I have many fragmented
memories of different variants of this samekind of mission, going for an essay
ten, going for the loft anddropping bombs, just to be ducking down
quickly as Triple A as going off. I mean, one in particular I
remember was a night mission. Somebodyhad actually cut footage of the whole thing

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and put it together, and itsounded really cool because we're all in the
radio, you know, one's intwos, in three's in fours and all
that kind of thing. I thinkhe mixed his footage from his point of
view in the flight sim with thetack view, and he had our calms
overlaid on top of a tack viewfootage as well, So it was pretty
good. It was. The transitionswere really nice and seamless. Another one

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I remember is going for the coastline. There were targets on the coastline protected
by a bunch of Sam's and TripleA, and as we're going in,
we can see the Triple A lightingup the sky ahead of us. As
the jets in front of us arecoming in for their first wave and we're

(26:17):
back, we're like the second wave, and we're watching all this it's just
like it's stunning. It's like thisis great, this is fantastic. Why
am I flying into this? Butyou know that's part of the fun.
So you go in there, youdrop your bombs. You got to trying
to get out, and don't stickaround. That's the thing that'll get you
killed. But stick around here atthe technical frequency for more stories of Falcon

(26:41):
bms. We'll be right back afterthis break. Stay with us. Have
you heard a wax or GCI mentionedbullseye and bra These are different ways of
giving locations in a way that pilotscan understand. Bulls eye is an arbitrary

(27:03):
position agreed upon by all parties.Locations are given relative to this fixed location.
For example, zero nine or zerofifty is fifty miles due east of
Bull's eye. BRA, on theother hand, stands for bearing, range,
altitude, and aspect. BRA isrelative not to a fixed location,

(27:26):
but to the aircraft involved in theradio conversation, such as your aircraft.
Bullseye has a number of benefits,one of which is that all aircraft listening
in on the transmission can understand theinformation presented if they are using the same
Bull's eye. BRA is easier forthe aircraft that is being referenced, but
much more difficult for other aircraft todecipher BMS. Lets you customize awax to

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speak always in bra, but youshould really learn bullseye from multiplayer. It's
two five four zero roll call onthe tactical frequency. Welcome back to the

(28:15):
tact too frequency again. My callsign is Bible Clinger and we're covering stories
of Falcon BMS. Now I wantedto include a slightly controversial story. The
story itself isn't controversial, but thedebriefing was a little controversial, so I
won't mention the group. But thiswas a large package flight, and I

(28:37):
think the mission was a large castmission. I think we were attacking a
bunch of enemy vehicles. It wassome variant. Maybe it was AI,
maybe CAST. It was something likethat. But in all honestly, I
forgot most of the details. WhatI remembered was the mishap. Now we're
out there doing our thing, enemymakes are intercepting the package. Now one

(29:00):
air to ground flight sends his numberthree to engage the enemy MiGs. So
he used to break off from attackingthe tanks or whatever it is he's doing
and to fly out there and attackthe MiGs. Now, the enemy MiGs
are about to jump a second airto ground flight. The cap flight ends

(29:22):
up shooting down the number three,that is the number three of the first
air to ground flight. Now,usually in debriefing, a shootdown is almost
always the fault of the person shootingthe missile ninety nine percent of the time.
It's just that's the way it is. Everybody kind of accepts it,
and if newbies aren't always as clearabout that. Usually this some veteran our

(29:47):
down goes, yeah, you knowthat was you know, kind of you
made a mistake there, right.But this case was interesting because the shooter
was making a decent argument that themissile went a bit wacky in going too
far off its course to kill thefriendly and he's also arguing he had to
make this decision to try to savethe second air ground flight. Now,

(30:10):
this led to a bit of aheated debrief because others didn't like his argument,
and I think there were other factorsthat influenced some of the decision making
that was going on in this debrief. Now, not everybody thought the shot
was bad. Some people actually thoughtit was a decent shot and it just

(30:33):
didn't work out. It was veryfascinating because this is almost never the opinion
of pretty much anybody in an experiencedFalcon BMS debriefing. This was the first
time it actually split people on whetherthis was the right call or not.
Now, the lesson that I hadlearned is that I think the real problem

(30:55):
was that the first air to groundflight should not have been in the way.
It's important to keep your lanes clearso that the cap flights can do
their job. If they don't havea clear avenue of fire, then they
really can only launch at you orjust leave you high and dry. And
I'll take a little bit of timehere to talk about this. I think

(31:15):
this is one of the biggest mistakesI think newbies when they get into an
area engagement. First of all,I think probably your biggest mistake is firing
way too early or firing way toolate, like just not understanding when you
should be firing. But let's sayyou're past that point. You know you
kind of figure out how to canyou can read the HUD, you know

(31:37):
what's going on with the AMRAB,you can at least get the shot off.
The next biggest problem that newbies makeis the heat they don't like to
turn off. They don't have theconcept of pumping. They don't have the
concept of firing the missile, turningaway and then coming back in for a
later attack or letting another element doit. Now, some people, even

(32:01):
when you're in a grinder and you'vegot let's say, an element going forward,
they take their first shots. They'resupposed to leave, and you've got
the second element coming in and thesecond elements supposed to take over. They're
supposed to go hot, first elementgoes cold, and it's a simple way
of covering each other, and thenafter the second element fires, the first
eliment goes in hot. You'll noticethat somebody is relatively new to air day

(32:24):
air combat, or they're just notgetting it when they're always turning back in.
They don't follow the plan, they'renot sticking with their lead, or
they're not even understanding the idea ofOkay, I've fired in my missile,
it's time to go. Someone elseis supposed to take over this shot,
and I'm supposed to turn in later. And obviously training helps with that,

(32:50):
but I have had a number offlights where people have just gotten in the
way. It's see, it's notjust a matter of oh, you threw
off, you're timing and you're notwhere you should be. It's like that's
bad enough. But think about itlike this. You've got a number one
and a number two flying in andthey've got two mags they're going to shoot
at. So they each take aMiG, they each shoot, and they

(33:12):
turn away. Now three and fourcoming in to delouse them. But what
if two turns back in ahead oftime. Now two is in between three
and four in the one hand andthe two megs on the other. This
suddenly now causes three and four tosecond guess their shots. What do they
do? Well, you could justsay it's two's falled anyway, just shoot

(33:37):
anyway and hopefully maybe two managed tododge the flying amrams of death. But
on the other hand, a lotof times you'll say, no, no,
don't fire. It's just you don'tfire into a fur ball. You
just don't do that. Okay,what does that mean? Then? Well,
that means now three and four we'llprobably have to turn away without firing,

(34:01):
and one will be screaming at too, like, you know, rejoin,
get out of there, turn back. What are you doing? And
so let's say two say, oh, okay, I'll turn back now.
So now you've got three and fourwho have turned away, you've got two
behind them turned away, and nowyou've only got one who can turn back
hot and cover them. It's justI know it's a little bit to take

(34:24):
in if you're trying to follow meon this, but the point is you
have to do things in a properlycoordinated way. It's almost synchronized. It's
actually almost beautiful when you see aflight that actually does things. And that
leads me to actually another story aboutthis about caps and flights like that.
I was flying with a number ofpeople I was flying with. I believe

(34:46):
it was Cactus, Dusty, andVan, and there were other people too,
but they were in a separate flight, and it was super busy,
and we had fruities as GCI bythe way, So Fruit's is gc iing
and he's counting just a boatload ofenemy aircraft and we're flying as best we

(35:10):
can and taken as many as wecan out. Now. I think there
was some trouble in the flight.I think Cactus had to join a separate
flight and then come back and joinour Something went wrong with the aircraft or
the planning. There was something weirdgoing on. I don't remember the details,
so I just remember he was withus, but he wasn't in the
same flight as far as BMS wasconcerned, but we treated him as if

(35:31):
he was part of our flight.So there's four of us, and the
thing that impressed me about it isthat it was a night flight and all
of us from one to four werecoordinated. The radio were busy and we
were doing everything right, and threewas actually doing a lot of talking and
it wasn't wasted chatter. It wasactually decent talking. And if you're on

(35:52):
the discord, I'll try to getthat video of that flight. I think
it was from Dusty's perspective and I'llpost that because it was just it was
beautifully coordinated. It was just everyonewas doing what they needed to be doing.
We spent all of our missiles practically, and I don't know how long
we lasted, but we were runninglow on missiles before anything, and I

(36:13):
was like, okay, we gottaleave. And if I recall correctly,
the strike flight was like, nowwe're good, We'll stick around, and
we're like, we can't cover you. What do you you know? Are
you sure? And Strike's like,hey, yeah, I know, we're
fine. So we thought we're talkingthe way back out. Strike Flight's not
gonna do all. We don't knowwhat they're doing. They're gonna get smoked.

(36:34):
And the strike flight actually pulled itoff apparently. I don't know how
they had that much playtime, butthey just stayed past our time that we're
out there, fought more against theMiGs, broke through bomb, the targeting
came back. I know we thinnedout the enemy's for him, but they
showed they still had a lot morefight in them than that we thought they

(36:55):
had. So kudos to the strikeflight, and I think that was actually
led by Serpent. We'll be rightback. We'll be right back after this

(37:16):
break. Stay with us. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. You've probably heard
phrases like this in military movies.This is part of the NATO Phonetic alphabet.
It's a way of saying words thatrepresent letters. For example, Alpha
represents the letter A, Bravo representsthe letter B. You can probably already

(37:37):
guess that Charlie represents the letter C. These words are used in place of
letters because they are meant to beused over military radios. Radio transmissions are
not always clear, particularly when you'rein the middle of a war. It
also doesn't help that English has manyletters that all sound similar B, C,
D, E, G, P, t V, and even Z

(38:00):
if you're from America. There areeven some pronunciations that matter. Quebec is
the code for Q, but it'ssupposed to be pronounced K. Back.
Knowing all of this, you canspell any English word with this system.
Tangle foxtrot would be the initials ofthis podcast, The Tactical Frequency Drag that

(38:25):
one, low down, one callpodcast, The Tactical Frequency Welcome back to
the Tactical Frequency. We're just doingstory our here. We're just basically going
over stories of things that happened inFalcon b MS. Let's talk about close

(38:49):
calls. Now. I've got afew stories about close calls in Falcon BMS,
so let's take my favorite one rightaway. Here is that I decided
for some reason that a straping runon a heavily defended position was a good
idea. So I came in extremelylow level blazing right into enemy territory and

(39:19):
I'm just doing a gun straping runright on this enemy tank or whatever ground
vehicle I had chosen to assault thatday, and I turn off hard,
real hard, slice hard right,and I hit my slap switch. And
that's my biggest countermeasures program. Andso all this chap and flair are coming

(39:42):
flying out now from the perspective ofme in the moment, I don't see
anything wrong with that. I getout. I survived, nothing hit me.
I seem to be fine. Ican go home looking at it again
and attack to you. You cansee everybody and their brother took a shot
at me. There's like six missilesthat come flying out triple a fire,

(40:07):
and they don't hit me because thechaff and flare managed to do its job.
Now, a second story about closecalls would be one time when I
tried to attack an Essay six site. I came in right up through at
the ring, cross it just alittle bit, so I dropped my bombs

(40:30):
and I turn away, and asI'm heading away, the Essay six comes
alive and takes a shot at me. So I get the launch warning,
I know it's coming, drop mycountermeasures, drop all this chaff and flare,
break hard left, and the missilesales clean past me. I'm able
to immediately go back to running away. And I'm outside the threat ring.

(40:50):
There's nothing they can do about it. Another story. One time when I
was on Egress Now, I hadfelt my AI wingman was pretty much useless
because I'm asking him to clear mysix and he's not taking a shot at
this guy I know him being chasedby an enemy meig, which turned out
to be a MiG thirty one bythe way. Well, suddenly I get

(41:12):
that AI voice notice that tells methere's a missile inbound. Slap switch is
hit, break hard right, missilesales clean past me. The MiG now
changes his mind and wants to gofrom my wingman, which gives me a
perfect opportunity coming behind him and senda heater up the tailpipe. Now when

(41:34):
yet another story. I managed toget three different types of kills with the
AMRAM in one session. So thefirst kill I got was just a regular
run of the mill shot fired myAMRAM Fox three pretty close range. Though,

(41:55):
the second kill that I managed toget was a mad dog shot.
So a mad dog shot is whereyou tell the m RAM just go shoot
whatever's in front of you. Lockon and go go pit bull right off
the rails. It's meant to bea visual shot, you're supposed to see
the aircraft come right behind him andjust let the missile go. The third

(42:16):
type of kill that I got waswhere after I had finished my mad Dog
kill, I was jumped by moreaircraft and I didn't really have time to
properly reassess, so I just ranthrough tws and cycled through four of them
and fired the rest of my missilesat four of them, and I managed

(42:38):
to get three out of the four. The last meg is chasing me and
I'm out of missiles at this point, and it was Rapper actually I was
flying with at the time, whocomes in and delouses me and takes the
sixth guy off of me that wastrying to chase me down. Now,
one time a group of us weresitting around and we were talking about VRP

(43:01):
and VIP and they're different ways ofmarking way points on your way to your
steer points. So an easy wayto think about this is picture. You
don't have the best coordinates, Youdon't really know exactly where your target is,
but you kind of know where youon offset, and you're going to

(43:22):
do a pop up attack, Soyou're gonna come in low, You're gonna
pop up, But this is nota loft attack. You're not just gonna
come up straight up and drop thebomb. You're actually going to pop up
at an offset so that as youcome up you can look out to your
side, to your nine or yourthree, spot the target, roll over,
and then bomb the target. Thisis a way of getting very close

(43:45):
to the targets, finding it visually, and then going for the kill.
So a group of us are discussingthis, how does this work? What
do we do? BMS has theability to do this, but it's very
hard to calculate, manu. Andthis is where Weapons Delivery Planner comes in.
Weapons Delivery Planner is a piece ofsoftware you can download separately from Falcon

(44:09):
BMS that, as I mentioned before, it helps you plan your flights.
Okay, well what does it do? Well? It helps you set up
these steer points, these alternate offsets. There are a whole bunch of dials
and controls. Well, I don'tknow what I'm doing in this, but
somebody else has done it before,so he's going to show us how to
do it. So we get allthe dials and everything said, we're doing

(44:30):
it. We get everything corn it. Okay, we've got our flight plan.
We go out there and we're comingup for the attack. We do
our pop up, and oh boy, did we make some mistakes. We
didn't come up at the right time. I think we weren't reading the HUD
correctly. We're just all kind oflost. I think we took a hit.
I think we lost somebody in thefirst engagement. As soon as I

(44:52):
think the first one guy went upthe lead I think was hit and the
rest of us and we went outthere. We had to look. We're
looking for the t right. Wedon't know where anything is rolling over And
I mean it taught yous a lot, Like we realized where we made our
mistakes, and I'm like, Okay, we gotta practice this. And it's
one thing I regret not practicing more. It's kind of cool. The problem

(45:13):
is that it's just not really yourbest choice, and so you almost have
to have a contrived circumstance where youneed to use it, at least in
a more modern era. Because inFalcon b a mass you reacon a building,
you know exactly where it is,it's stored in coordinates. It's perfect.
Just go on and loft or justsay up very high at you know
twenty five thousand feet and just dropa bomb and then go home. But

(45:37):
VRP and VIP that kind of thingwould probably work out better in let's say
a nineteen eighties styled theater, wheremaybe you don't have all that perfect information
and you're gonna be flying enow anyway, and maybe your escort is gonna have
to merge anyway. Now, shareanother story that I believe I shared in

(46:01):
a previous episode, but it wasjust such a good story I think I
should share it again during Team versusTeam twenty twenty one. Now, at
this particular moment, on this particularday, we're running low on numbers,
we're not able to make it work, and I ask a pilot can you

(46:22):
turn back in and do something?And he's like, he's scotsh he's out
of am rams, he can't doanything. Well, there's somebody running away
and he's not able to get away. Looks like he's going to be losing.
The enemy's closing in on our poorlittle F sixteen. So I ask
the pilot with no weapons, canyou do something for me? Can you
fake it? Go in as ifyou're going to engage to everything the same

(46:45):
way. Just don't fire the missile. So you got a picture this he's
flying in against the enemy, locksup the enemy F sixteen. So this
is human versus human and it's duringa campaign, so this is not a
contrived circumstance. This is just dynamichow it is. The enemy of sixteen
is coming in for the kill,and then our guy with no am rams

(47:05):
locks him up hard. So nowthe enemy of sixteen is suddenly getting spiked
and he's way walla wait a minute. And now if he looks down on
his radar, unlocks his target andstarts looking scanning, he's going to see
our F sixteen, the one thathas no am rams left, coming flying
at him, just as if he'sready to engage. And then if our

(47:27):
guy starts to crank at around thetime he should have a decent shot,
then all of a sudden the enemyis thinking, oh, well he's cranking,
he must have fired, and thenhe might fire at him and turn
away. And so our F sixteenthat had no weapons actually got the enemy

(47:50):
F sixteen to break off the pursuit. Now, sadly that story doesn't have
a happy ending for the pilot whodid that, because he himself was not
able to get away, and therewas nobody left to scramble to save him
in time. But the tactic itselfworked just fine. Another story from Team

(48:12):
Versus Team, but not that Teamversus Team, but from a different one,
involves a human pilot, and thathuman pilot he really knew how to
fly the F sixteen. He hada little bit of fun with this.
So the enemy was doing these hitand run tactics where they'd come screaming in
at thirty thousand feet mock whatever ashigh as they could go, fire all

(48:37):
their missiles, and then just flyhome. And so this guy decided he
was going to pay them back,and he did the same thing against them,
except he chased them down hard.They're all on egress. He chases
right after them like mock two,practically fires all his missiles, gets on
and then just comes fly home.He did the same thing now that pilot

(49:02):
also now go back to Team VersusTeam twenty twenty one. That pilot,
while I was gciing, he askedme to help him out doing a particular
tactic. It turns off his radarso that the enemy won't see any sign
of him on the RWR. They'vegot to spot him manually or hear it

(49:22):
from their GCI or their AWAX.So he turns off his radar and he's
asking me for updates, and soI'm giving him updates and where everybody is
as his radar off. He hashis radar off, and he say,
let me know when they get tothis distance. Okay, they're at this
Suddenly, when he's like thirty milesaway, his radar comes on, locks
on the guy and that's his chanceto pounce. It was really fun being

(49:46):
a GCI and watching things like thatgo down. It was really fun watching
good pilots that knew what they weredoing. And it seemed back then the
pilots that knew what they were doing, they knew a particular brevity word,
and that word was judy. Andfor those who don't know, judy means

(50:07):
a wax. You can be quiet. I got this. We'll be right
back after this break, stay withus. What are some of the prerequisites

(50:28):
to learn Falcon BMS. You arejust a sample. First, you need
self motivation and time. BMS isa study sim You need a personal commitment
to learn, one that doesn't relyon others. Second, you need to
fly regularly. You won't get betterunless you're learning new things and solidifying what
you've already learned. Third, youneed some hardware. A throttle and stick

(50:51):
are greatly recommended, particularly a pairwith a lot of hat switches. Can
you fly with a keyboard and amouse? Yes, painfully, it's really
not recommended. Fourth, head trackingor VR get one or the other.
The gold standard for head tracking istrack IR, but other cheap alternatives will
do just fine. Fifth, youneed to buy a copy of Falcon four

(51:15):
point zero. It goes for aboutfive U S. Dollars on Steam.
Falcon b a mess itself is free, but its license is a mon for
Falcon four point zero for legal reasons. Package two five four zero roll call
on the tactical frequency. Another episodeis almost over. This, as I

(51:52):
said, is episode twelve. We'rehalfway done the first season, or at
least that's my goal twenty four episodesfor season one, and this is a
halfway mark. I'm actually really happythat we made it this far, and
I hope that will finish the othertwelve after this. So how are we

(52:12):
doing? Please let me know.In fact, I'm going to advertise the
Discord server. If you're on Discord, you can join the Tactical Frequency Discord
server quite easily. You would justclick on the plus button, the giant
plus button on the left on thebottom to add another server. The invitation

(52:34):
code that you would need is andfirst I'll read it letter by letter.
It's capital r C nine S nineby p WUK in the NATO phonetic alphabet.
It's capital Romeo, lowercase, CharlieNiner, Sierra Niner, Bravo,

(52:59):
Yankee, Papa, Whiskey, Kilo. Just type in that code in there
and you'll be able to join theTactical Frequency Discord. And if you do
join that discord, it's the bestway currently of getting ideas to me directly.
If I post a poll, itshould be there. If I ask
your feedback, it should be there. If I think an episode may or

(53:21):
may not be on time, orif you're going to do something different,
you'll have the information. If you'dlike to be a participant as maybe calling
in on the show, or ifyou'd like to be a guest maybe as
part of our Meet the Community initiativewhere we interview people who fly foulcon vms,
this could be your chance let meknow. The discord is a way

(53:43):
to do it. We currently haveone hundred and forty members on the discord
right now. In terms of thepodcast, we've surpassed the two thousand downland
mark already and we're actually on ourway. Really, we're to four thousands
of this recording, so we're wellover the three thousand mark really, and

(54:07):
that's really nice. I appreciate thatvery much. I appreciate all the support,
and I know that we want FalconBMS to succeed and we wanted to
do well. And I appreciate forthose of you that listen. I know
some of you listen very regularly andyou listen as right as soon as the
episode comes out, and that actuallymeans a lot. I really appreciate that

(54:29):
sort of stuff. It's it's reallyweird being on this side of a production.
I'm usually used to being the guythat's sitting around watching waiting for something
to come out, and you wantit to come out and you watch it
right away or you listen right away, and it's just weird when you're the
one producing the content and it's goingout there and there are people excited to
see what you're producing, and it'sit's a nice feeling, but i'd like

(54:53):
to throw in a bonus story.And I call it a bonus story because
this is not a can be mS story. Now, I was flying
in DCS. Hold your booze fora second. This is a decent story.
But I was flying in the Ffourteen, and I was actually not

(55:14):
the pilot. I was the Rioin this case. So my pilot is
flying us around and doing all ofthe stuff that the pilot does, and
I'm sitting in the backseat doing thestuff that the Rio does, flipping switches,
poking at the radar, running ifand looking around. Now, we
ended up getting into some trouble,naturally, I believe from what I can

(55:36):
remember this, we were trying toget close to an Essay ten site to
prosecute a target. I don't reallyremember all that much about the mission,
but at some point we were gettingjust way too close to the enemy.
Bad things were happening, and ourRWR was going insane. It was beeping.
I know enough to know that itwasn't good. So I'm craning my

(55:58):
neck in the backseat and suddenly Ijust say over the intercom, with complete
surprise and shock, I can seethe missile. Now, my pilot wasn't
so amused because a split second laterwe were hit like the words barely finished
coming out of my mouth and he'sgoing right into the water. Great final

(56:19):
words right by the way. Ifyou're still upset that I threw in a
DCS story, tell the BMS devs, we need multi crew, we need
other avionics, likely at fourteen,get that stuff in FALCONVMS, and then
we can tell these kind of greatstories in the Falcon BMS universe. In
all seriousness, I am hopeful thatfeatures like this will eventually make their way

(56:45):
into Falcon BMS at some point,so we can remain hopeful that that will
be in the future. Now,on a more somber note, I wasn't
feeling very well this week. Forthose of you that already know I have
not been feeling well, let's sayit's been almost two years now. But

(57:09):
thankfully I'm doing quite well now.But this week was rather difficult and about
I don't know ten hours ago,I wasn't feeling so well and I didn't
think I would be able to getthe episode done. I actually thought I
might even be in the hospital.But things turned around for the better,
so I can seriously say thank godfor that. Now, on another note,

(57:35):
I'm also in the middle of swappingover to a new computer. I'd
like to redo the audio settings getthings sounding a little bit better. These
are things I still have to donow. I would like to say I
did get a lot of good supporton the discord today, so I'd like
to thank people for that. ButI mentioned on the Tactical Frequency Discord what
the situation was and how I maynot be able to get this episode done.

(57:58):
I got some really nice feedback frompeople like Nitro Viper, Haggis Hero,
and Quasi Stellar, So thank youto those people and to others that
if you send me a kind word, I appreciate it. I had some
trouble organizing this episode, I willsay, but Nitro Viper seconded the idea
of a stories episode, so Ihope this episode lived up to everyone's expectation.

(58:23):
Now, last episode we shared storiesabout Team versus Team twenty twenty one,
and that was a war involving twosides, greefour and Yell four.
So I'd like to offer a shortlittle poem on that subject. There were
two sides in the war, greefourand Yell four were sore nineteen days they

(58:45):
fought, victory they sought. Twoyears later they want more. Hopefully we
will get another team versus team,and hopefully it lives up to the expectations
built from that war that occurred twoyears ago. In the Falcon b MS
community, it's actually hard to believein some ways that it was two years

(59:08):
ago in fact, but here weare, some of us still talking about
it, still remembering it well.Once again, it is time to sign
off. My call sign is BibleClinger and I've been your host for this

(59:29):
hour. I hope that you willjoin me again in another two weeks for
another episode of the Tactical Frequency.Be well and godless, Falcon one Dragnet

(59:57):
one, you are now leaving theTactical Frequency