S1E13: Flying Red Air in Falcon BMS

OldCraig joins the Tactical Frequency to discuss flying Red Air in Falcon BMS. Join us as we explore some stories behind flying the Su-30MKK in 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. My call sign is Bible Clinger
and joining me today will be OldCraig. We're going to be talking about
flying red air in Falcon BMS,so for today's episode, put aside the

(00:33):
F sixteen, even though that isthe main point of flying Falcon BMS.
We're going to be exploring other aircraft. So, as I said, joining
me today is Old Craig, andof course Mike call sign is Bible Clinger.
Craig. Thank you for joining metoday. Thank you for having me
moment. Now, I will prefaceyou just got back from vacation. Your

(00:56):
computer is all packed up, andyou're talking literally on your cell phone right
right here today. Is that correct? Yeah? This is trect. This
is probably officially the first call ininterview that you're going to have done,
and I appreciate that you're taking thetime to do this. To be clear,
we had a recording that we didbefore and when we re listened to

(01:19):
it, I didn't like the qualityof the audio. We're still kind of
fiddling with some settings here and Iswitched to a new computer, got new
audio settings going, and it's notquite where I wanted it to be.
So I took some time to cleanit up, and we're recording this episode
properly and hopefully the quality will beapparent to everyone. So let's get started.

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Let's talk about flying red air first. What do we mean by that?
What do we mean by flying redair? By flying red air,
we're talking about flying basically non NATOaircraft, any aircraft that NATO might come
up against in a conflicts, soRussian, Chinese, North Korean, in

(02:04):
any of these other play toys thatare out there. And of course we
settled on the SOU thirty MKK aircraftas our choice. That is not the
only red aircraft in Falcon BMS.There's the Mid twenty one, the mid
twenty three, the mid twenty nine, the Su thirty three. Why did
we choose the Su thirty to flyin Falcon BMS. That's actually a hard

(02:30):
question. I think it was themost overall capable aircraft that we could come
up with. That there was.The thirty three is a naval variant.
You can't fly the twenty one,it's old, can't fly the twenty three
it's old. The thirty was kindof that golden the golden spot where we

(02:52):
could haves in a semi modern Russianaircraft. From my memory, when we
tried to fly the Sue thirty threeyears ago, when we first began to
experiment, we had trouble getting theSue thirty three off the carrier. Somewhere
along the line in BMS in theupdates, they broke the Russian carrier and

(03:16):
you couldn't get off that sort ofski jump right there. The aircraft would
somehow clip into the carrier, getdestroyed nine of the ten times, and
never get off the carrier. Andthat was only if a human was flying
it. So we could fly it, but we didn't even get the fun
of the takeoff from the carrier.So I think that was one reason why

(03:38):
I personally didn't want to fly Suethirty three. From what I understand,
that has been fixed, but bythat point we had already pretty much appreciated
what the sooth thorty can do.Now correct me if I'm wrong. The
only thing the South thirty really can'tdo that would be nice to have is
it can't air to air refue uelein Falcon bms, at least not as

(04:02):
a human flying it, is thatcorrect? So that and then there was
it didn't have a targeting pod.It had beautiful laser guided bombs, but
it didn't have a targeting pod,so they kind of became useless. Also,
now I'm thinking back on it,we did a bunch of testing with
that thirty three on the carrier,and you'll remember we were able to make

(04:25):
it work, but you had totake off with like twenty five percent gas.
So that was an interesting quirk ofthe game. So let's talk about
how we fly these aircraft. We'reflying the SOW thirty and instead of going
up against other red aircraft, we'renow positioning ourselves to fight NATO aircraft.
So we're going up as SU thirtiesagainst F fifteen's against F sixteens, against

(04:50):
hornets and other NATO aircraft. Howdo we set this up? So obviously
we could just fly a dogfight modulesession, right, We could just get
in there and fly that, butthat's not where all the fun is.
We were editing campaigns and we dida number of these. Can you mention
which of the campaigns we were flyingand which one was your favorite? We

(05:13):
did KTO to start off with.Obviously it's the easiest database to modify and
play with, but we had aPanama one which was allowed us to do
shorter hops, closer, closer engagements. It really gave some diversity as to
what we were doing because there wasa lot of over ocean flying, so

(05:35):
you could really if you got ina fight, you could take it down
to the deck and have a lotof fun down there. I think I
have to agree that I appreciated Panamafor some of the some of the differences
that it gave us. It wasa much closer quarters of war. The
enemy was much closer to you.You were closer to the enemy, and
yet it still seemed manageable. AndI also agree with you with all the

(05:57):
water around, you weren't always surroundedair defenses. You could fly around.
You could get away from the groundwar and just fight a pure air war,
and it really did feel different.The KTO one, in my opinion,
was I think of that had tobe my favorite after a while because
it was just so chaotic. Andwe'll get into the stories about this later,

(06:18):
but I think the chaos of theRed KTO campaign we flew was just
fantastic. Now, for those outthere that would like to do this kind
of thing what we did, it'sa little technical, but if you do
your own missions on a server,it's not that hard. What you need
to do is start a campaign.Pick a campaign, any campaign, any
theater. Just start it and saveit right away. In Falcon BMS,

(06:41):
just save a campaign under whatever nameyou want. Then take that save file
and open that in Mission commander.Then go to the side that you want.
In our case, we would beadding it on the North Korean side,
for example in Kto, or onwhatever side in Panama or whatever the
or you're flying. Just add asquadron at the airbase that you would like

(07:04):
to be at, and maybe evenadd we would add a second squadron because
the sou thirty is for the reasonI think they only came with eighteen aircraft
in a squadron, and sometimes Icould get a little hard to frag packages
when you needed to have more aircraft. So we'd give ourselves extra squadrons for
reserve aircraft. And that's about assimple as that. Save it in Mission

(07:27):
commander. Lode the campaign in FalconBMS just as you normally would, and
you're good to go. So let'stalk a little bit now about the weirdness
of the sou thirty. The southirty doesn't fly like a realistic aircraft because
it doesn't have the correct flight model. Let's just talk briefly about what are

(07:51):
the differences in flight models. Whatdo we talk about INNBMS, We talk
about an advanced flight model or asimplified flight model. Okay, so you've
two file types. With BMS,you have a DAT I don't know what
the acronym stands for, and it'sit's what's called the simplified flight model.
It doesn't take in the extra hundredvariables that the second document which you referred

(08:16):
to, which was the AFM theAdvanced flight model has, which if you
want to go have a good time, go try and look at those documents
and understand what the heck is goingon. It's just it's just a big
table of indecipherable numbers that says,hey, this one flies in different mannerisms
or it has different mannerisms than otheraircraft. And when you get into red

(08:39):
aircraft, you get into we'll callit quirks, some some peculiarities. It
would be a good word for itlike if you just happened to slam your
stick forward and try and nose over. Let's say you're climbing out and you're
like, oh, yeah, Ineed to stop my climb, And if

(09:00):
you didn't roll the aircraft on itsback and then pull back and then level
out, you could just have atotal engine shut down. And it came
with like two tenths of a GLike, you didn't have to go try
and throw three or four g's atthe aircraft to shut the engines off.
You just barely nosed over the aircraftand spoilert. You'd hear a nice spooling

(09:24):
down effect of your engines as thingsgot real quiet for you. My understanding
is that in Falcon BMS they addedthe advanced flight models because eventually they got
more accurate data for the F sixteenthat they can actually put into BMS.
Simplified flight models didn't allow them totake advantage of all this real life,

(09:46):
real public data that they had,and that's how the advanced flight model was
born. Unfortunately, we don't havethe same amount of public data on all
these other aircraft. A lot ofaircraft and BMS can only be simulated up
to the point that we are familiarwith how they work. And I'm sure

(10:07):
I think some people have talked aboutthis, that there are certain educated guesses
that people can make with regard tomissiles or aircraft, how they perform,
how the aerodynamics work, and thenthere are other things that are just not
as clear, maybe they're classified ormaybe they're just not public. When it
comes to aviation, particularly military aviation, of course, and so in a

(10:30):
simulator Falcon BMS, you've got tomake educated guesses, right, And it
sounds like when it comes to certainaircraft like the SU thirty, they didn't
really make that effort to be entirelyaccurate with it. And that's hard to
say why, right, did theynot have the data or was this just
an older flight model that just happento be here for, you know,

(10:54):
as a placeholder for all these years. And I think that's probably the more
likely explanation, that this wasn't designedto be flable, No, one hundred
percent out almost everything we fly outsidethe F sixteen, there's a couple of
aircraft MiG twenty nine, F eighteen, Harrier A ten, and with the

(11:18):
coming iteration of U three, wewill have an F fifteen that's fliable.
All those have been designed to beflown. But everything else you might hear
us talk about, whether it's thethirty thirty three, thirty one, twenty
three, any of those, they'renot really intended to be flown by humans.

(11:41):
And if you do fly them,let's let's put a massive disclaimer out
there so Max won't shoot me overthis one. These aircraft aren't meant to
be flown. We did it becausewe between you and I, we have
I don't know, fifteen hundred hoursin the F sixteen or board of it.
We wanted something different. There's there'sthe reason that we went off and

(12:03):
did these kinds of things. Andwe're weird. Let's be honest, But
these aircraft really weren't intended to beflown. They don't have that AFM.
They only have the bare bones,basic pieces of information that the simulator needs
to allow the AI to fly these. So if you do go fly them

(12:26):
and you do see weird quirks ormaybe have a less than stellar experience,
like on the s U thirty,if you decide that, oh, I've
flown into a bad situation. Igot a bunch of bombs on my wings,
Like oh, I'm defensive. It'sit's time to drop the bombs with

(12:48):
an emergency stores jettison, which onthe F sixteen is gonna it's gonna drop
your bombs, it's gonna drop yourtanks, and you're gonna fly away.
Well, on the red aircraft,it dumps everything off the jet, missiles,
bombs, fuel, you name it. You're now in a clean jet
with no capability to defend yourself,which we found out in the heat of

(13:11):
a mission without a clue that thatwas going to happen. I was flying
and I was getting chased by anF fifteen, and I was like,
okay, fine, time to abortthe ground pounding and switch it to air
to air roll And when you pressI went and I pressed the O button.

(13:33):
It's the zero button to watch allthe stuff fall off the jet.
Well, I watched all my missilesfall off, and it was very defenseless
and or TV at that point.We'll be right back after this. We're
just getting started. We'll be backsoon after this message. The BMS experience

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can be improved with additional software.In no particular order, here are four
programs that, while not strictly necessary, are incredibly useful. One Weapons Delivery
Planner. This lets you set ingame knee boards and helps you plan your
missions to a much greater degree.Two Mission Commander. This is useful for

(14:18):
editing campaign saves, adding new aircraft, deleting squadrons, basically allowing you to
customize your campaign saves. Three VoiceAttack. This program lets you speak to
the AI, including your wingman,a wax, the tanker, and ATC.
You'll need a voice profile for it, however, there is a free

(14:39):
version with limitations. Four Tackview.This lets you watch the replays of your
flight. This is a must forthorough debriefs. There is a free version
and there are paid versions. Theseprograms don't come with Falcon bms, so
you'll need to download them from theirrespective websites. File Conva Natasha continue to

(15:05):
monitors the techegro frecordsy Welcome back tothe Technical Frequency. We have a new
voice for the Alax to mark thatwe're doing a red Air episode to discuss

(15:26):
red aircraft in falcony ms, flyingit in PvP, PvE and just having
fun with a different set of parameters. So we started to talk a little
bit about how the aircraft plays alittle bit differently, flies differently behaves differently.
I am in front of me thebriefings that we used to use during

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our Panama campaign, and I gotthe dates on these. These are from
June of twenty twenty one, Sowe were doing this a couple of years
ago, and we had to briefpeople before they got in all the things
that were different about this aircraft.So let's go through this list and then

(16:08):
we'll talk about how we could takethis to our advantage or avoid a disadvantage.
So the first thing here I've gotis that to know that the aircraft
is a twin engine aircraft. Andobviously the significance of that is that we've
got more power in the SU thirtythen you get in the F sixteen.
This means you can get out ofa jam maybe through just you know,

(16:30):
brute force of just slamming in thethrottle where you need to go and outfly
your danger. And then I thinkyou were bringing up in a previous discussion
you were talking about how in BMSa second engine can be sort of like
a second life, that sometimes whenyou get hit with a missile, it

(16:51):
only damages one engine and not theother one. So I guess that's worth
noting you might be able to limpback after you take missile hit. Maybe
no, it very much did.We've you'll see in in campaigns, and
it's more geared towards the AI survivabilitythan human survivability. But many times you'll

(17:15):
see if you go shoot a SUtwenty seven that's twin engine aircraft versus MiG
twenty one, that mid twenty oneis almost always going to die. Just
call it ninety nine out of onehundred. Where that SU twenty seven it
sits in like the sixty forty rangeor seventy thirty, whatever issue it is,

(17:37):
where they get to limp the jetback home with one engine smoking,
which is kind of annoying to behonest. You know, it's interesting.
The Sue thirty doesn't seem to havethis problem in BMS, but I've noticed
in other aircraft. The Hornet andI believe the Sue thirty three both have
an issue that if one of theengines goes out. I think if it

(17:59):
flames out for whatever reason, youcan't restart it, and your jets starts
smoking and you get some bad sideeffects from it, and I think you
might even lose after burner on theone engine. It's very weird. It's
just suddenly your jet is like permanentlydisabled. And I don't know if that
was by design or not. Iwould assume it was not, but I
don't know enough about these aircraft.Yeah, I'm not too sure about that

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one, all right. The nextpoint, I've got no targeting pod and
no laser, and I know youdiscussed that a little bit earlier, and
this led us to theorize maybe nowthat the South thirty three is fixed,
we could fly a complex set emissionswhere the Sooth thirty comes up with all
the bombs as a bomb truck becausethey have a large amount of stores for

(18:44):
bombs. It's actually scary how manybombs I could bring. And maybe the
South thirty three could find the targetswith the targeting pod and hook up with
the South thorties and sort of sendsome mark points over and guide them in
and talk them in on the bombingrun. So that might be something for
a future mission. We never reallydid get to do integration of multiple aircraft

(19:07):
in that capacity. I think lifeforgotten the way before we got to do
those, But it always seemed likea really really interesting idea because that's that's
a huge piece of combined arms inmilitary warfare is that you don't you don't
always just have one asset out thereby itself. You have multiple things,

(19:30):
especially in today's age where you haveF thirty five that can do everything from
lazing naval vessels for naval vessels,to being able to laze for a tens
to to be able to again combineall your arms into one effective fighting piece.

(19:51):
That always seems like a really funidea. Now you'll love this one.
We talked about this one also.But I've got in my notes here
beware of negative gs, and thenin parentheses, I've got minus zero point
three is too much bms uh innon F sixteen aircraft. It just there's
a bug that I don't think hasever been figured out where if you decide

(20:17):
to push that nose over just likeyou said, literally three tenths of a
g, you'll be flying and allof a sudden, you'll you'll hear your
engines getting much quieter, and you'llyou'll notice your RPM gauges are slowly working
their way to zero, which Iremember I was doing. I was defensive

(20:37):
again, it's in F fifteen,and I pushed the nose over a little
bit. Engines started dying, andI'm trying to serpentine away from a missile
while also trying to keep my speedup so that I can spool the engines
enough to relight them. And Ithink you came in and saved me to
the point where I was able torelight the engines and we were able to

(20:59):
limp way back home. Even knowingthis, I still have occasionally cut my
engines a couple times, and I'vehad other people do it too. They've
come to fly with us and nextthing you know, they're off the radio
and we're like, hey, areyou okay? What's going on? And
then all of a sudden they comeback on the data links active and they're
like, yeah, I had torestart my engines. I'm climbing in a
two thousand feet or whatever. Justbecause you know you're not supposed to do

(21:22):
something when you're when you're in themiddle of a combat scenario, like what
you're not supposed to do isn't alwaysin the forefront of your mind. Sometimes
you're trying to think through where's mywingman at, what am I doing?
What do I need to be doing? What needs to happen, and then
all of a sudden you just pushyour stick a little bit for it,
and you're like, oh, wellthat was a mistake exactly all right.
My next point here, exceed onethousand knots at your own risk. I

(21:48):
don't know if anyone's actually done thatin the sea thirty, but we've done
it in a couple of other nonF sixteen aircraft, and we've had some
weird behavior of the aircraft begins toshake violently, it doesn't seem to be
flying quite right. And it's justinteresting that you can even do that in
some aircraft, because I think athousand knots is a little excessive for certain
aircraft. Yeah, I remember it. It messes up your flight control systems

(22:15):
and you just become a very largemoving missile waiting to impact the ground at
some point. This is when you, like all my notes, just say,
here is broken autopilot. Yeah,we figured that out. Who knows
what we were doing. We werefiguring it out, but one of us

(22:37):
was probably leading, and we werebored of hand flying, so like,
hey, two, I'm going togo on to autopilot. And I don't
remember which one of us it was, but the moment that got turned on,
the jet just pulls itself up intothe vertical and you're just like,
hey, buddy, I don't knowwhere you're going, but that's not where
you're supposed to be. It's it'svery strange because sometimes it seems to do

(23:02):
nothing. You turn on the autopilotand it's just flying straight, just as
if you just let go of thestick. And in other times it seems
like it wants to actively kill you. So I don't understand what's going on
there with the autopilot, but itjust I don't know. The last time
I tried it, it didn't seemto be working, you know. Honestly,
I wonder if that's an AFM valuesthat are needed to make it work,

(23:25):
because I'm kind of running through myhead. It doesn't work on B
one, B, it doesn't workon B two. There's a bunch of
other aircraft that doesn't work on andall of those are non advanced flight model
aircraft. So I wonder if it'smissing data that it can't process or does
or something. This one we talkedabout before emergency stores jettison will jettison your

(23:47):
AA weapons as well. I stillremember the shock I still remember the shock
of when you're on the radio saying, yeah, we got our TV.
I'm done. It's like, whatdo you mean you'd why are you going
home? And you're like, Idon't have any weapons? Like how don't
you have any weapons? Because Iwatched them fall off the jet. Like

(24:10):
anytime I pressed the emergency stores jettisonbutton, I like to hit the zero
on the keyboard because it's fun towatch your stuff fall away. And I
expected you alluded earlier the thirties.A bomb truck you can throw ten or
fifteen bombs on the aircraft. It'sit's a very large number, and I
wanted to watch them all fall andhit the ocean. And I kind of

(24:30):
looked down and it's like, wait, those are pole shaped bombs that happened
to look a lot like my missiles. And you twist your twist your mouse
and you look up at the bottomof the jet and it's like, wait
a second, there's nothing there.And of course at that point it's like,

(24:51):
well, I don't need to questionthis anymore. All I need to
do is go home. It's timeto go drink some beers. Last two
points here, I'll read the gainThe other first one is no separate canopy
clothes and lock well plus sess squealsclose plus lock. This is because this
one, this feature was added laterafter the Sue thirty was already in here,

(25:11):
and nobody bothered to update the Suethirty to have a special locking feature
and all that sort of stuff.The other one is no taxi lights in
first person, but they work inthird person. Use landing lights again,
same problem. These are features thatwere added for the F sixteen but not
added for other aircraft. And then, of course my last note here is

(25:36):
difficulty rating hard. These are nottech sessions, come prepared because we opened
these flights up to the public orpeople at the Falcon Lounge, and you
can get people who might be okayat flying the F sixteen, you know,
you give them the parameters, yougive them their ideas, and we'd
be fine if they'd fly. Butwe didn't want people to come in not

(26:00):
knowing how anything worked on the Fsixteen and then being totally shocked when they
get in here and realize they're noteven flying in F sixteen. They're flying
something as all these different requirements justto not break the jet on takeoff and
flying and landing, let alone actualcombat. Let's talk a little bit about
the weapons. So the F sixteenobviously has the AIM one twenty am RAM,

(26:29):
and that is the best missile inFalcon BMS air air missile that the
F sixteen has in your typical campaign. So let's talk what's the Russian equivalent?
You affectionately called it the R seventyseven am rams ski. Yeah,
I even have that in my notes. I see them right here. And

(26:51):
the AA twelve is how NATO callsit. Are seventy seven is how the
Russians called it. Now my noteshere, I still I'm still looking at
the briefing here, and we werebriefing with these three points. Number one,
the range is significantly less than thatof an am ram. Point number
two. It does not loft.Point number three it's a short pickle press.

(27:12):
So let's go through these real quick. The range is significantly less than
that of an am ram. Whyis that important? Well, because BVR
is going to be much harder foryou. So how do we offset that?
What do we do? Something wekind of haven't alluded to discuss yet
is that because the thirty was atwin engine fighter, it has much larger

(27:33):
thrust away bracehoe well, at leastthe way it's written in the game,
so we could we could fly aroundat what mock one point three just at
millpower. You didn't even have tobe an after burner. In fact,
after burner really didn't do a lot. It didn't get you much more.
So a lot of our game planwas to fly about as high as we

(27:55):
can, as fast as we can, and try and cut down because when
we talk about a difference, wherewith an aim one twenty, what is
saying in a nice environment you canfire it twenty five, twenty six,

(28:17):
twenty four miles in that range atyour RMX, But with the with the
Ambramski, we were shooting at twentymiles at times. It's just just just
what it took to get into range, which means that you know, think
how long it takes to cross fivesix seven miles. Well guess what,

(28:41):
as you're crossing that five six sevenmiles to get closer to that NATO aircraft,
their missiles already in the air.So you're flying towards it, it's
flying to you. You haven't evenshot yet, let alone turning cold and
running away from it. So wetry and get up as eigh as possible.
We'd try and get as fast aspossible, and then we'd try and

(29:04):
hope that the developers made a mistakein the coating and that we could find
something exploitable, which spoiler, itdoesn't happen. Well until that one update
where the air to ground flights wouldcompletely ignore us and we could come in
and ambush them from the side.There was always that that was great.
There was that. Yeah, therewas that one thing where I don't think

(29:26):
they're paying attention to I don't thinktheir cap flight and they're coming in trying
to bomb something and we would justcome in and smoke them. But yeah,
So the BBR aspect to this isthat we had to come in and
obviously there's trade offs. You can'tcome in at fifty thousand feet or something,
right. You need to, likeyou were alluding to, we need
to keep our speed up. Andone of the things I forgot to put

(29:47):
in these notes I think I hadthem to a later edition, was stay
out of after burner because, forwhatever reason, in this implementation of the
two thirty, after Bernard drains allthe fuel, I remember thinking I had
like five thousand pounds and I justblink and I'm like pretty much out of
gas. But on the flip side, mal power in the Suite thirty is

(30:07):
better than after burner in the Fsixteen, So go figure, please keep
listening. Your support means a lot. What are some of the prerequisites to
learn Falcon BMS. Here are justa sample. First, you need self

(30:30):
motivation and time. BMS is astudy sim You need a personal commitment to
learn, one that doesn't rely onothers. Second, you need to fly
regularly. You won't get better unlessyou're learning new things and solidifying what you've
already learned. Third, you needsome hardware. A throttle and stick are
greatly recommended, particularly a pair witha lot of had switches. Can you

(30:55):
fly with a keyboard and a mouse? Yes, painfully, it's really not
recommended. Fourth, head tracking orVR get one or the other. The
gold standard for head tracking is trackIR, but other cheap alternatives will do
just fine. Fifth, you needto buy a copy of Falcon four point
zero. It goes for about fiveUS dollars on Steam. Falcon BMS itself

(31:19):
is free, but its licenses amode for Falcon four point zero for legal
reasons. Falcon one Natasha continue tomonitors the texagra frecurrency. Welcome once again

(31:47):
to the tactical frequency. I'm chattinghere with old Craig about red Air,
our experiences of flying the sou thirtyMKK in Falcon BMS. Craig, let's
switch gears a little bit. We'lltalk about campaigns. We alluded to what
we did before. We talked aboutflying in kt O red Air, we
talked about flying in Panama, wetalked about all different things like that.

(32:10):
Let's talk about specifics. So onetime we're flying at the six because they
needed us to fill in as redAir, and we had been practicing flying
the SU thirties, and so wesaid, okay, this is great,
let's do this. We flew onthe red side and we happened to experience
a bug during that flight that justmade everything kind of wacky. So the

(32:35):
flight was a little bit of awash in that sense. Had nothing to
do with red Air, by theway. It was just that was the
bug where somehow you could possess anotheraircraft and it was kind of like multi
crew without being multi crew, andit was a very bizarre experience. But
during that time we had an interestingthing happen. I think you know the

(32:55):
story I'm alluding to. Is thisthe one where a sham murdered you and
lied to your face? You gotit? Okay? So this I think
if you and I had to talkabout all of our we've We've literally flown
hundreds of hours together. It's noteven funny how much time we spent together.

(33:16):
I think we would both agree thisis this is one of the better
funnier stories that we have. So, like Bible said, we were doing
a fight with the sixth which isour group of friends, our virtual squadron
call it that, and we hadbeen employed to defend an area that the
whole point was. It was anend of a training exercise or into a

(33:38):
trading iteration, and we were justsupposed to be an annoyance to them and
went all south. I was upin the air. All of a sudden,
I lost control of my jack.The thing just starts flying in the

(34:00):
I'm moving my sticks left, right, up, down, just no response.
Somebody something had possessed my jet andit ran me straight into the ground.
So I'm dead. You're up inthe air kind of flying alone.
And we had already we had alreadyforeseen this happen, So we had other
flights that I could just go hopinto and then figure out a way to
get myself airborne and back into thefight. And I get up there,

(34:23):
and by then they've the F sixteen'sare in the AO and things are starting
to become a bit of an airwar. And I take off, I
climb out nicely, get up thirtyeight thousand feet high up there, and

(34:44):
I found an F sixteen on myradar when he was tracking in my nose
from left to right, and hecrossed under me, and he did some
maneuvering where I lost track of him. I just couldn't see him. There's
cloud coverage and other stuff like that. So I start trying to maneuver my
jet trying to get a picture ofhim, and all of a sudden I

(35:07):
find this aircraft. I was like, and this aircraft was in about the
right area where I thought the Fsixteen would have flown two. So I
walk it up. I throw aFox three in the air, and I
don't remember if you said you justshoot at me or or what happened,

(35:29):
But what I do remember is onceyou started to turn into a smoking fireball
after my missile hit me. Youjust asked me, did you just shoot
me? And I zoomed in.I very vividly remember it, vividly remember
it. I zoomed in on youraircraft. I saw this massive, burning

(35:55):
piece of metal flying through the air. And you have to remember, like
we said earlier, there's no TGPon the SU thirty, so everything we're
doing is with the good old markone eyeball. And you asked me,
did you shoot me? Nope,love with me somebody else. And I
just went about to go try andfind the F sixteen that I was supposed

(36:17):
to be killing. And yeah,needless to say, a shamelessly laid to
your face, without without any regretor guilt, and I'd do it again.
Well, the thing that was funnyfor me is that when you said
no, you said it so convincinglythat I thought you were actually denying it.

(36:37):
And then you showed me the videoand in the video you come,
I don't know if it's through theclouds or something, but also you get
a perfect view of my aircraft goingdown to the ground and you look right
at it. It's clear as day. You guys got to remember the F
sixteen is very gray in BMS unlessyou're flying like one of the let's say
the Israeli ones that have a specialdesert camo or some other air craft like

(37:00):
that. These American F sixteens arevery very gray, and the South thirties
are splotchy black and white camo,stark dark black and bright white camo.
So it's very clear, and they'reobviously the different shapes and everything, but
with the camo and everything, it'sjust so obvious when you're that close,
that zoomed in looking right at it, you knew full well what you were

(37:22):
looking at, and you're like,no, no, I didn't. I
didn't shoot you down, and Iwas just looking at it. It suddenly
hit me you knew full well.I'm pretty sure once I once I threw
the missile in the air, Iwas kind of man, I should probably
like, you know, try andid what I'm shooting at. And I

(37:43):
saw it was you, and Iknew it was about to happen. So
had I had two or three secondsto figure out whether I would be an
honorable human being and just be like, yeah, I made a mistake,
or whether I would just to employthe uh glowm our responsive. I can
neither confirm nor deny what happened,and apparently my moral compass does not point

(38:09):
towards north but points towards south.Well, I think part of the issue
in that flight was that, ifI'm not mistaken, I think AX wasn't
working. So right away we're alreadyhaving trouble iding targets. And obviously in
a real war you would, youknow, like an encampaign, we'd have
a different plan involved. But becausethis is already set up for the Blue

(38:29):
guys and we're supposed to just beRed Air, and it's like, okay,
we're going to make do with whatwe got, so we're gonna fly
it this way. So we weretrying to do iding and then when your
aircraft kind of went kind of wonkyand you had to respond in we weren't
part of the same package, Ibelieve, or if we were, you
still had to edit some stuff toget, you know, on my frequency.
So everything was already going to pieces. We didn't have the cohesion we

(38:52):
should have, and a lot ofthese things just added together until we ended
up with that shootdown. Now,to be fair, Blue Side had a
much worse time because one of ouraircraft became decinct. One of our AI
aircraft became decinct from the rest,became invisible, and was spawning missiles out
of nowhere shooting down Blue aircraft.So suddenly a missile would come out of

(39:15):
nowhere, come out there and slaminto the blue aircraft, and the Blues
had no idea, They couldn't seeit, they couldn't tell what's going on.
So they lost their package lead,I think due to you know,
sneaky IV in there getting in behindthem. So it we had problems on
every side there. Let's talk alittle bit about the famous story in Panama

(39:39):
with Batman, you and me.I'll start it off. So I'm flying
and I forgive my cost some whetherI think it was Hopper or something,
and I'm flying with you know myflight. Of these are our cap flight.
So I got four sou thirties meand those under my control were flying

(40:00):
out there. We're going to tryto go around the main fighting in Panama,
come around so that you and Batmancan do an air to ground attack.
You guys are coming in behind us, and we've got other flights too
that are supposed to do air toair, and so we want the AI
air to air flight to go inand fight first, and then my flight's

(40:21):
going to be more of like theclose escort. So we think all was
going well. We're trying to monitorit with AX. We're listening to what's
going on with the AI cooms.Everything sounds like the plan is working,
and then I started to do alittle bit of checking with AX and I
get a strange sense that something's notright about that bullseye. Call about that

(40:44):
one group and go ahead and takeit from here. So we're bomb trucks,
so we're loaded down, We're twentymiles behind you. There was another
engagement off to our left that washappening, and we kind of thought that
everything had been taken care of.But one of the F fifteens had figured
a number one. The jet wasWittenchester, so it didn't have any missiles,

(41:06):
which makes the story all the bitbetter. But this jet, out
of the corner of my eye andon my rw R, I seen you
F fifteen. It's like, that'skind of weird, like you shouldn't be
back there. So I'm on victoryto Batman, I'm like, homie,
look at your RWR, like,what's that is that F fifteen? And

(41:30):
within a second a second and ahalf. You you pipe up on a
microphone, you're like, hey,guys, thinking of fifteen's behind you.
Then all of a sudden, Batmanor I got hard locked and it's like,
oh shit, we really do havean F fifteen, And again a
second later, like dude, youreally haven't F fifteen. I get time

(41:52):
to do some shit, and soI don't even remember if I called it,
but Batman and Batman and I wereso caught off guard that I kind
of just rolled the jet over andstarted into a dive, and Batman kind
of, for some reason, decidedto pull up high into the vertical,

(42:15):
and the F fifteen decides that he'sgoing to target me, so he starts
to follow me down right as Batmanrolls over and gets on this guy's six,
and we're we're doing seventy eighty ninetydegrees down towards the water, and

(42:35):
I mean we're up at twenty twotwenty six thousand feet something like that,
So if you go straight down,it doesn't take very long to eat up
that altitude, to say the least. So as I dive to the ground,
Batman pulls right in behind him andgets off a great aim nine shot
but whatever the Russian one is.And the problem is Batman decides to keep

(43:04):
following this guy because he's to becomeso target fixated. He's stopped paying attention
to his altitude, he stopped payingattention to what's going on outside the cockpit.
He's just trying to work instruments andget a missile shot off. And
you're sitting in the back, ornot the back, but you're sitting off
to the side kind of watching allthis, and you're like, hey,
Batman, you might want to pullup, buddy, which I'm paraphrasing the

(43:28):
situation, but it's like, homie, you might want to pull up.
And he had, he had gonefull target fixation. He was about to
follow that F fifteen just directly intothe water and just take her on home
and call it a night. Yeah, it was the strangest thing. It's
you flying to the deck and Ffifteen right on your six and Batman right

(43:52):
on the sixth of the F fifteen, and from what I remember, his
first missile missus second missile hits.But in Batman's line, the fifteen is
still flying, so it's not over. So I got to go in for
guns or something, because I thinkthat was it. I think he only
had two heat seeking missiles and afterthat, now he's thinking it's a gun's

(44:15):
run, and I think he wentin for the guns run. And if
I'm not mistaken, in the videothat you had, you could see Batman's
bullets hitting the water. That's howclose he was to the ground. And
I'm telling him to put yeah,Like I remember telling him pull up because
I'm thinking there's no way he's hit. He's coming down, and even if
not, I've got a shot.Now. I just can't take the shot

(44:35):
like this, you know, ifeveryone's this close, all merged, and
it's like I could take a shotif he suddenly recovers. And Batman was
so intent on going, but helistened. He listened to the call,
and he's like, yeah, okay, he's breaking off and he just manages
to skim the water and he's outand the F fifteen goes right into the
water and I'm watching the whole thing. I just can't believe it. Batman

(44:57):
didn't even realize how close he wasto the water until after he watched attack
few and you know, it wasamazing. Within seconds of death, I
mean with the one or two secondslater on on you making that call and
he hits the water, so it'sit was very interesting how things timed out

(45:19):
perfectly. But the most funny thingthat's hard to that it's hard to impart
upon a podcast, was the echoingthat you were doing. I was saying
something to Batman on Victor and youwere on uniform like saying verbatim here,
verbatim exactly what I was saying.And it's like, Homie, you're not
being very helpful right now say thestuff before I realized, oh, video

(45:47):
is great, Yeah, I thinkthat's on the hard drive that's dead.
If I'm not mistaken, I thinkshe's gone. I thought you uploaded it
on streamable somewhere, so maybe maybethat's still a floating around somewhere. But
I remember it was weird watching itback where you're like, you know,
saying to bad I mean, Ithink there's an at fifteen hun or six,
and then right there on one uniformand going, hey, whatever your

(46:07):
call sign is, I think youguys haven't have sixteen coming in behind you.
So that happened like twice that Ijust repeated what you guys were saying.
It was it was pretty funny.It was two or three. It
was two or three calls where youwere. You were on the We were
thinking the exact same thing at theexact same moment. You were just a

(46:28):
second or two behind, because you'retwenty miles away trying to figure things out.
Let's talk a little bit about ourRed Kto campaign. So we decided
on that campaign, we're going tofly on the North Korean side. We
invented a sort of pseudo story thatyou know, it's not really North Korea
ever, kind of some other forcehere or something, and this is our
story. We got to hold outagainst South Korea for whatever reason. And

(46:52):
we decided we're going to put oursuit thirties somewhere close relatively to the flot
We thought, this is pretty good. It seems kind of quiet. Kitchia
won't be that noisy, it won'tbe a lot of aircraft. And we
totally miscalculated our first mission. Wetried to do some sort of complicated package.
We're flying off to the coastline,coming down and bombing something, and

(47:13):
we didn't even get out to ourtarget. We're fighting, and I think
it was I think it was thesecond mission that we were flying that it
turned into a massive scramble. Itseemed like the entire Blue Air Force was
flying overhead, and so as we'retaking off, we've got pilots engaging in
combat right over the airbase, firingour seventy sevens, firing the heaters.

(47:37):
Just like or whatever it is thatwe could get. We were just fighting.
People were getting shot down. Itwas the most chaotic I think that
I've ever had on a from aRed Actually it might've been one of my
most chaotic flights ever. And whatwas more striking about is that we weren't
getting shot down. The AI forBlue, in my opinion, was handling

(47:59):
this veryly because they came in thereto fight us, but they were coming
in within our weapons range and soas a result, yes they were taking
us out, we were taking themout. So at the end of the
day, they lost half their aircraftcoming in, I believe, and we
lost half our aircraft that went up, maybe even more, but they took

(48:19):
heavy losses for you know, NATOaircraft, because you know, NATO is
not supposed to lose that many aircraftin a fight, and they lost a
lot. So we decided we're goingto try to hold out. We couldn't
really do this, And so wehad this brilliant idea. And this is
the part of you know BMS wherewe start doing you know, a little
bit of role playing and ideas.And we started thinking, you know what

(48:40):
if we take the squadron that wehave are and we move them. We
moved them to another air base becausethat's the only way we can really fly.
We need to have some level ofroom to ingress. And so we
could have just done that. Wecould have just opened mission commander, moved
the airbase and we're done. Butwe decided, let's have some fun with
this. Let's have another bit offun. We kind of survive the worst
of the wave that Blue could throwat us. So we scripted a move

(49:06):
where we're going to actually move theaircraft ourselves. Now, obviously BMS doesn't
have this feature for us to do, you know, in our way,
but we were doing it ourselves.So we're going to brag the mission and
told everyone flying with us, ourmission is to break through from our airbase,
fly back north into friendly territory,and land there and if we make
it back, then we will missioncommander our aircraft back there. And I

(49:30):
thought that was an interesting idea.For me, I thought that was kind
of fun. Oh. Absolutely,Getting eating away from the normal mission sets
is what at the end of theday. It can be very very exciting
stuff. Is there anything in theRed Kto campaign that you remember vividly,
any good moments from there? I'mnot gonna lie, I really don't.

(49:55):
We're now pushing upon So we're goingon down here. Two years doing a
bit years, the missions have allkind of blended together. I just what
I can remember is just how muchof a challenge and how much brain power

(50:16):
it took for you and I towork our way through combat with lesser weapons.
It's a really good way to testyourself. We're just getting started.
We'll be back soon after this message. Falcon BMS comes with a lot of

(50:40):
manuals. If you're new to BMS, where should you start? The first
manual you want to use is probablythe training manual. This is meant to
be used when you fly through thetactical engagement training missions. These training missions
come with Falcon BMS and are therefor you to learn various subjects, from
starting the jet to operating the radiosto employing weapons. But the training manual

(51:04):
is how you know what to doevery step of the way while you fly
these missions. You should have thetraining manual ANDY on another monitor or on
another electronic device. The other sideare the DASH one and the DASH three
four. They're called this because theyhave DASH one and DASH three four in
their very long names. If you'relooking for a reference on how to fly

(51:27):
the F sixteen or use any ofits systems, you'll want the DASH one.
If you're looking for information specifically onweapons employment, you'll want the DASH
three four. File Con one Natashacontinue to monitors the textiicro frecurrency. Welcome

(52:00):
back to the Tactical Frequency again.We've been chatting with Old Craig about red
air, and let's ask a fundamentalquestion that we haven't really talked about.
Why why do we fly red airin Falcon bms? Why should other people
fly red air in Falcon bms?The challenge you're you're you're not in a

(52:22):
near peer aircraft. You're you're ata disadvantage by by significant amounts from many
different aspects off you guys, I'veheard us allude to in this this part
in this podcast, So it's it'ssomething different if you're new, if you're
in your first two three years ofBMS. It might not appeal to you

(52:44):
as much, but when you havetwelve years of combined flight experience ten years
between the two of us, youkind of want to do something else other
than just fly in F sixteen.Yeah, I agree with that. I'm
looking at my notes that we includedfor the briefing and I put in as

(53:05):
our explanation, why are we doingthis to better understand the Soviet slash Russian
jet and weapon designs, to betterunderstand the am RAM advantage, and to
better understand BMS's implementation of the Suethirty and MKK, sorry Sue thirty MKK.
And then I also have some otherreasons to improve in BBR tactics with

(53:27):
a distinct disadvantage in missile range,which is what you were saying. And
then to perform our missions with theleast losses as possible. And then,
of course the last two reasons totry something new and to have fun.
And I have to admit, eventhough I love flying the F sixteen,
I love flying the big package missionsand everything, every now and then,
I just love the idea of flyingthe SU thirty or some Red Air or

(53:52):
even sometimes some offbeat blue air thatBMS doesn't really support as well. Every
now and then I'll try to loadup and F fourteen and see if I
can kind of get it to Fwhy without killing me. And sometimes it
works, and sometimes, you know, the aircraft we choose is a little
bit, you know, a littlebit yanky, doesn't quite work as well.
But it's why we do it.And i'd have to admit there's a

(54:13):
lot of fun. And I takeit you have a lot of fun with
this as well, of course.Oh it's yes, it's it's beyond,
it's beyond an exhilarating experience. Whenwhen you go two on four with a
group of F sixteen's and you're theones getting to fly away, there's there's
a very strong satisfaction that, fine, we're flying against AI, but we're

(54:42):
still flying against a pretty pretty wellcoded simulator that takes a little bit more
thought process than the average that theaverage flight would take to put it together.
So, with our purpose in mindas to why we fly, is
there a future for red Air andFalcon BMS. I mean, obviously I

(55:04):
would say yes, these reasons aren'tgoing away, But what is that future?
What does that future look like?Enigma suggested who I had on the
podcast earlier. He suggested in hisinterview that BMS needs a properly implemented red
air aircraft such as the Make twentynine. Now. We also noted during
that interview that BMS doesn't have otheravionics except right now they're doing a work

(55:30):
in progress of adding F fifteen avionics. That means every other aircraft under the
hood is an F sixteen. Youhave an SMS page like the F sixteen,
you have a weapons page like theF sixteen. You have then FCR
like the F sixteen, just withslightly different parameters, like the radars will
be more powerful or weak er ofdifferent ranges, but the avionics themselves are
F sixteen. In fact, inthe Soux thirty, our cockpit is the

(55:52):
F sixteen's cockpit. So Enigma thinksBMS would be very much benefited from this,
and one of the developers, MABJP, was quoted at the Falcon Lounge
as saying that BMS needs to havea red aircraft as well. One of

(56:15):
the quotes I was looking at iswhere he said micropros understood it with Falcon
three they made mid twenty nine extension, and then he also said, this
is when we need a true redopponent. So it sounds to me,
if I understood the context of theconversation correctly, that the BMS devs intend
to come out with red aircraft eventually, And of course it probably depends on

(56:36):
how successful the F fifteen C implementationis. All this maybe the obstacles they
meet along the way, and youknow, if they can get past all
the difficulties, then from what Iunderstand, adding another aircraft is going to
be much easier than what they've donewith just adding the F fifteen C.

(57:00):
So my question is, would morerealistic writer be a good thing and how
would you use it? Yeah,it would definitely be a good thing because
anytime that you get more high fidelityassets in the game, it gives you
a larger horizon to play with.But we don't do a lot of team

(57:23):
versus team environments, so a lotof head on clash between a MiG twenty
nine and F sixteen. I don'tfeel it would be it would be a
main staple of the game. Itwould probably still be a lot of all
the humans are on the Blue teamflying against the Red team, but the
times win we at the sixth oreven TVT which might be coming up even

(57:53):
but they don't like to do blueverse red. They like to call it
green versus yellow, to take awaythat gnomer. Anytime you give yourself more
things to play with, it's alwaysgood. Would it change Falcon all that
much? I don't really think so. I think people are so infatuated with
F sixteen that it would still takea couple weird ohs to really utilize the

(58:17):
aircraft. It's just it might makeit easier for us to convince some of
the other weirdos to come play.I guess the question would be is that
if you make a more accurate redaircraft, would that encourage more people to
fly it? And if he answersyes, then maybe that's the first step
that's needed. On the other hand, you could look at it from the

(58:38):
perspective of that because the sou thirtyis so close to the F sixteen now
and its implementation, that's why wecan fly it, that's why we can
encourage other people to fly it,and that once you change that, you're
taking away the easy access for peopleto fly red air. So it's an
interesting idea. And then the otherquestion is balance implement red air accurately in

(59:01):
our sims. Then can we properlyhave a team versus team environment. You
know, there are questions that needto be asked in the future for this
kind of thing, but I haveto think. I think overall it's a
good thing one Like I said,having more play toys that is never a
bad thing. Craig, I wantto thank you for joining me for this

(59:23):
episode. It's been fantastic to allof you out there. My call sign
is Bible Clinger and I've been yourhost for this hour. I hope that
another episode will be out here soonin another two weeks. Catch you guys
later, See you guys. Falconone Dragnet one, you are now leaving

(59:58):
the tactical frequency