Two Weeks In | F-4E Phantom II | DCS World

Support the channel by becoming a member for perks:
/ @bullet4myenemy
Join the Discord4MyFriends:
/ discord
The Channel is now an affiliate of AirModels! Use my affiliate link to help support the channel: airmodels.net/?aff=97
Timestamps:
00:00 - Excuses for my long absence
00:50 - The plan/SITREP
01:35 - Start-up with cartridges
02:54 - Alignment tip: RWR
03:17 - Gun pipper tip
03:43 - Corr Reset/Sync
04:28 - General front panel stuff
05:11 - Alignment complete: final checks & Jettison prep
05:31 - Jettison set up & example clip
06:19 - Mirage F1 Merge/Dogfight (Jettison demo)
07:44 - Wheel chocks, back up ADI, radios, pitot heat, slats & flaps
09:00 - Take-off
10:03 - Fuel feed and external tank management
11:59 - So how is the Phantom, then?
13:44 - How's the dogfight performance?
14:24 - Mirage F1 Merge
14:51 - My Primary struggles (other than Jester)
15:28 - Approaching the AO: SA/EWR SITREP
15:56 - Closing in, Jester behaves!
17:38 - Tanks jettison & locking Fishbed
18:23 - Jester misbehaves (MiG-15s close)
19:10 - Fox-1! Fishbed, 5 miles, 18k feet
19:50 - Fulcrum close, run!
20:50 - MiG-15 engagement 1
22:22 - Jester behaving again! Fox-1!
22:50 - MiG-15 engagement 2: Bless him
24:01 - "Textbook landing!" & future video plans
26:53 - Members' Shoutout, Outro & Links
Fin
If you're new to WarThunder, use my referral link for a starting bonus:
warthunder.com/en/registration...
PC Specs:
Motherboard: N7 650E
CPU: 7800X3D
GPU: 4070ti
RAM: 64gb DDR5 6000mhz
Resolution: 2560 x 1440, 75Hz
Sim gear:
Warthog HOTAS
TrackIR5
TFRP T.Flight pedals

[@Spifire999]

"WE'VE GOT A *insert mig 15 picture* 11 O'CLOCK LOW, 6 MILES" that killed me lmao

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

KZbin probably wouldn’t actually care… But just to be sure lol

[@joseblanco3873]

First time Jester called that out I just about lost it lol 💀

[@Wierdhappenings]

Glad I’m not the only one having issues with Jester, sometimes he’ll see targets, but regardless of conditions I’ll get the “no can do” when I tell him to lock them

[@theflyinggasmask]

You can disable mouse control for the Jester wheel in the "Special" settings menu, It'll make the Jester wheel react right away with head tracking.

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

Ah nice, I’ll give that a go - thought the delay was a bug, honestly

[@TheGate1310]

I had to do the same thing, fixed the delay for me.

[@Jubedy]

Good to see there's hope for the sparrows, I cant get jester to see a damn thing

[@chukuma4760]

I heard it was a bug in multiplayer right now, cant get jester to see anything in mp but in singleplayer he spots stuff 25 miles away

[@lukalekov1530]

for the fuel tanks i do the same in sabre you only need 1 button :D nice video man loved it

[@Bubbletrolllol]

I loved the edit for mig15 callout. Had me laughing.

[@Sovereign_UK]

The KZbin Gods granted you those locks 🤣

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

Honestly so typical of my luck that everything flips when I’m recording live. Bodge the take off and then Jester makes me out to be a liar by suddenly finding a target for the first time ever, and then the cage mode working at low alt for the first time ever…

[@PeterMatthess]

this echoes my own experience so far. When the Phantom is not glitching out and giving me 2fps on the cold war server, if I manage to get within range of an enemy, jester all of a sudden says 'oh theres a fishbed 2 miles away' and then I die, could Jester lock it up?? hell no

[@TakoInkling]

Great to see a phantom vid from you..hope everything gets sorted out in your end pretty smoothly cheers..

[@guitargamery777]

lolol about the cat, i have to do the same, breaks my heart but ends up falling asleep

[@NuclearFalcon146]

I fly WSO with my GF and a human WSO is just better than Jester. It is even more pronounced with a human WSO in an F-4 than a human RIO in the F-14. I'm not even that good of a WSO either and we end up close range and using cage quite a bit. And the editing for the MiG-15's reporting name was hilarious! If you know, you know!

[@soleenzo893]

Nice video. i had to lookup the Nato reporting name of the 15 but had a hunch it would be something like that. hilarious edit. Also, gotta say the F4 is looking great but honestly it's just making me want to get the mirage F1 even more./ especially kjnowing the F1M is coming at some poitnand my beloved 2000 is in danger of dying, that one module might just pick up the flame and is great in cold war servers

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

The F1 is superb, and I’ve had the easiest time using it to clap Phantoms for whatever reason as well. It’s a weird one because most people don’t use it for dogfighting, but against Phantoms it’s actually a very nice match in terms of performance. Definitely the best bang for buck Cold War module by a long way - I’m equal parts hyped for the M variant and mourning the loss of the 2000, which was my first love in DCS ☹️

[@soleenzo893]

@@Bullet4MyEnemy i'd love to see you do more F1 VS phantom content when the F4 is more established and most of the playerbase know what they're doing. it's an interesting matchup. and stop selling it to me goddamit! ahah i've sworn to not give ED any more money until all this bullshit is resilved and it seems worth it to keep investing in the DCS platform. but yeah sexy f1

[@timothymorgan8254]

lovely

[@marswor]

if you're bringing aa loadout and tanks, I guess it's easier to just hit the emergency jettison button (the yellow one to the right of trim gauge) kinda like in the f16, it'll only drop the tanks and not aa weapons

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

Yeah, found that out earlier today - guess the giant “nuclear” sticker put me off pressing it 😅

[@marswor]

@@Bullet4MyEnemy haha the nuclear one is for weapon delivery selection tho, the jettison one is a bit further to the left :D don't want to make that mistake while carrying the nukes ^^

[@maxmaxmaxmax647]

I honestly only use the Phantom for AG , where it out carries almost everything 😅

[@guitargamery777]

the jester wheel just untick the head movement like i did and use the mouse, is much better, the good news is, you can bind all those ground commands to the keyboard, is way better

[@TheSisi37]

Thanks for the video and apologize to the cat for me.

[@gungriffen]

Are you using Jesters secondary contextual button and the Sparrow 5 mile auto lock?

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

Yeah, that’s how I got the first one clipped in during start up, and the second in the actual sortie; first one against the 21 is the only time he’s ever found anything himself - which is typical after me saying he never finds anything 🙄 Haven’t managed to get any others since though, so 3 total over 2 weeks now, I feel like this video makes it seem like I was exaggerating how bad he is because I get 2 in one sortie but it just somehow worked on those occasions 😅

[@Bearrug]

WOO HOO! LETS GOOOOO.

[@ACG_Jaydog]

Good stuff.... I can't fly Enigma right now since the F-4 came along...It's a stuttering/laggy mess right now with 20 fps on the ground in VR for me and the Jester wheel was pretty laggy too. Maybe in a patch or two i'll be back.

[@FlameHazeVT]

Jester, Radar and Sparrows are the biggest funblockers for me in the F-4. I just cannot get any of them to work for the life of me.

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

Honestly feel that this video gave an unrealistic picture of my experience because even now I have literally 3 Sparrow kills to my name over the course of a fortnight and 2 of them happened within 5 minutes in this sortie 😅 Honestly have had better success with the gun.

[@FlameHazeVT]

@@Bullet4MyEnemy While this might be true it also shows that there is something to them. Maybe someday we get the info that things are performance worse than they should, if we are lucky?

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

@@FlameHazeVT There is a patch due tomorrow with a rather comprehensive list of adjustments, many involving Jester and the radar, but mostly in relation to performance. But maybe we’ll see an improvement/change by association Fingers crossed 🤞🏼

[@FlameHazeVT]

@@Bullet4MyEnemy "Radar: Improved CAA lock reliability" let's hope this stops the radar from picking up a pigeon or dirt of speck 30 miles next to the target right in front of you.

[@TazziedoesWT]

Got the streagle refunded due to the ongoing dispute.... and now the aircraft that got me the streagle, i'll be getting lol. Will be holding off till after exams, so these videos shall suffice my cravings. I'd suggest using the RAAF camo ;} I will say, Jester isnt as lively or funny as he is in the Tomcat, its a shame, sounds like his wifes left him while on deployment and resorted to heavy drinking.

[@planespottingfargo1174]

I got to agree with you about jester. Only useful thing is when you merge and he tells you where the bandit is. Ive gotten around his lack of competence by just using the boresight type method of launching sparrows. Ive got loads more kills like that that when he locks up bandits.

[@jeremyhao5001]

Nice to see some Phantom contents coming on! Regarding Sparrow empoyment, one way of doing it is ditching the whole BVR thing completely. It's of course up to you to try out but my friends kinda have relatively good results with it. APQ-120 is really bad at searching anything further than 15-20nm, with the Jester as status quo it is even more unreliable as you've mentioned. I would suggest you to use that thing more or less like the good old Air Interception radars on Mosquito and Beaufighter night fightgers of WWII, as a pure tool of firecontrol, guiding the weapons during their last mile towards the target. That means using the ACM modes, but the CAA in its current state is terrible, as the lock can float onto literally anything that reflects radar signals such as ground clutter and even clouds. The latest patch note from HB today does mention CAA mode should have better reliability after the patch tonight but I'm not so sure how much. The most reliable mode would still be the boresight mode, or BST, but the caveat is that it needs manual tweaking of the aspect knob from the WSO seat to feed the correct doppler info to the missile, which in fact tells the missile the closure rate of the target so that it can differentiate the target from clutters and other stuff. You would also have to point the aircraft towards the target to use BST. The worst thing is for the time being player cannot fumble with the aspect knob from the pilot seat, that keybind is only available for the WSO... so you may still need someone to sit at the back in order to make that work after all. But if that can be done it's pretty straightforward: you judge the aspect of the target and its speed then tells the WSO to select the correct speed gate (a total of four of them I think) with the aspect knob. The Sparrow would track pretty reliabily

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

Yeah, I’ve had the most luck using boresight and asking Jester to lock them up, fingers crossed on the CAA update today. Aware of the aspect nob too but like everything else, it boils down to Jester being the weakest component of the module. I don’t know whether he does anything with the finer controls or if he can just see past those settings regardless, the gamification of having an AI needed for the radar functions is such a shame in an aircraft of such high levels of fidelity. Really feels like the accuracy of the modelling is actually a huge weakness in PvP when fighting things that don’t have the same limitations.

[@jeremyhao5001]

@@Bullet4MyEnemy Yeah I agree that Jester is somewhat in the way for the system to perform satisfactorily. For one part what we have now is a Jester 2.0 completely re-written from scratch so I assume there are issues that caused by its early state. However I do notice that comparing to the F-14, with its AWG-9 radar, the APQ-120 really needs a lot of manual house-keeping to be properly operated, let alone driving its full potential. I wonder if a Jester AI similiar to the one we have on the F-14 (even after being upgraded) really can manage such meticulous and continous work at the back seat... I would say maybe HB should consider adding some options through the UI or keybinds to enable the player to override Jester when necessary, for example when using that aspect knob. I really hope Jester would become more capable over time though, not just sitting at the back asking how low we are going to fly and making comments on my terrible landings lol

[@agidotexe7167]

you can just use the emergency jettison button if you are doing an air to air loadout, it will only ditch the tanks

[@sychowitisssues]

MORE! MORE! MORE!

[@jpatty5473]

Im gonna try the gunsight tip, got my first gun kill tonight

[@Inv1ns1bl]

in my experience its generally better to use the Cage button and using its gunsight mode

[@dev1360]

I have the same issues with Jester. Someone on the ECW chat told me I was lying and he was OP. He's worthless, and finds nothing.

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

Yup, yet he ironically seems to visually detect things that would be impossible to see. Like Stinger launches from underneath you, or air contacts 180 miles away which I’ve had him reel off lists of like he’s been possessed by the in game AWACS

[@kizvy]

Does dcs model the difference between cw and monopulse seekers on the srh missiles or is it like wt where everything is modeled as a monopulse seeker

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

I’m 99% certain WarThunder model the seeker differences because the 530F and D have notable behaviour differences with regard to chaff working to decoy locks. In DCS everything is basically Sauron and can see everything and the coding of the game essentially hides things from view that the sensor shouldn’t be able to see, so it’s very flawed. Heatblur have really gone to town on the radar of the Phantom though, everything is as legit as possible, instead reading the environment rather than hiding things it shouldn’t be able to see. Hard to speak on the missile seekers though, I’d guess the differences aren’t modelled by maybe the radar modelling is made to somehow account for it. It’s such a bastard to get a good launch with them that I only have 3 frames of reference since it launched so I don’t have much of an info pool to take from.

[@Spicysauced]

You're selling your house? Literally searching for one right now 😀 Good luck with the sale, I know how much stress that is.

[@NyteStalker89]

USAF Phantoms didn't get a Desert livery I don't think. They were SEA like the one you chose, or green/grey or just grey. There might have been Asia minor schemed Phantoms, but we'll need the skinners and template to drop forthat one

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

I’m pretty sure there is actually an Asia Minor scheme, kinda looks like the Iranian ones if memory serves.

[@shadowfax9861]

At last!!!

[@Majima_Nowhere]

I have an easier time locking enemies in the Tiger than I do in any condition in the Phantom. I know the Phantom has no look down shoot down and the sparrows are basically meant only for hunting bombers, but still. I'll see Jester hovering over a target and tell him to lock, he'll acknowledge but very rarely ever do it.

[@remcodendulk4699]

How is the f4 against the mirrage f1 ?

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

It’s kind of hard to say at this stage; on launch day I flew the F1 a fair bit and was styling on Phantoms no problem, since then I’ve been flying the Phantom more or less exclusively and the F1 hasn’t really caused me much trouble because most people don’t tend to use it for dogfighting. Flown well I think they’re probably the most closely matched Cold War modules in terms of performance, but I need to fly the F1 more since the F-4 pilots have got better to assess it properly. Actually have a video going up tomorrow that will cover my current thought on it.

[@Nyxx2115]

For the amount of shit I've heard about the radar and the sparrows you still got some pretty damn good kills using them

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

Yeah, but it’s the inconsistency, don’t forget how long it took and how I wasn’t changing anything about the approach or set up - 99% of the time everything looked just as good but they didn’t track off the rail, lock an air molecule rather than the bandit, or just straight up never even see them.

[@gungriffen]

​@Bullet4MyEnemy That's probably realistic unfortunately. The early Sparrow regularly blasted off into the void. Unfortunately the F4E is so realistic that's its at a disadvantage against other aircraft that had their capabilities smugged.

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

Yeah, I say as much at the end and am actually planning a video that covers it in more depth. The better modelled something is, the more of a disadvantage it has because good modelling means the bad aspects of the real thing get included too.

[@ElGringo21]

More Mirage F1EE

[@GrmlZGaming]

On the forums HB said that jester is at the moment pretty bad at distinguishing between a real lock and a locked sidelobe and that this should improve in the future. As for the radar, well i am new to it, like everyone, but sofar i found that when jester cant find a bogey, i cant find him either on the radar screen. When i do see a bogey on the screen, jester sees him too. So i would say the difficulty is more with the radar itself than jester. Though on high altidude i got some success with it.

[@HentiSenpai]

Wow haven't heard from you in a while, hope you're doing well. Loved your videos back in the day.

[@Cjredwards]

You should try voice attack, I use mine to talk to jester, the crew chief, and a lot more. Using only my microphone.

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

Yeah, keep getting no end of recommendations for it

[@theaveragejoe9385]

How are you getting more than 25 FPS on ECW? I can get 60-100 fps in the F4 in all other Multiplayer servers, like Grayflag etc, but not ECW. I haven’t been able to dive into ECW because of it

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

I’ve heard that from a bunch of people, I can only assume it’s a hardware issue - I upgraded my PC the day before the F-4 dropped and I’m thankful I did it then because otherwise I’d probably be unable to fly it too.

[@theaveragejoe9385]

@@Bullet4MyEnemy I have a 11900k and 3090, 32GB RAM, Good internet. It’s weird. Lol

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

@@theaveragejoe9385 Could be the RAM, I have 64gb DDR5 at 6k mhz, upgraded from 32 3200mhz and can’t tell whether the CPU or the RAM has made the bigger difference. Getting around 200fps generally, but locking it to 75 for my monitor’s output.

[@theaveragejoe9385]

@@Bullet4MyEnemy hmm. I’ll look into that, thank you!

[@theaveragejoe9385]

@@Bullet4MyEnemy yeah. I have 64gb ram. Idk what’s going on. I love PC Gaming. But, shit like this is what annoys me. Lol

[@alpenfoxvideo7255]

I did got several sparrow kills on enigma, more than with the sidewinders, but for the love of god seems like I can’t hit anything with the gun! edit: 2 sparrow kills at altitude with proper lock, one at low altitude with AAM, 4 with flood mode

[@Murrence90]

Dunno why you've been complaining about Jester and the Fox 1s, that looks dead easy to do 🤓🤓🤓

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

[@travissgrey]

I’m ruining my life, i can’t stop flying this thing. Help me

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

Me neither, been enjoying it a little more in A/A since ECW went back to the 60s rotation, actually had a chance to see how it fairs in dogfights that aren’t ended prematurely because of missiles.

[@TheDAWinz]

This is why I hate Jester in general, besides just being annoying, it isn’t lost on me he’s a handholding feature yet makes things worse 😂

[@MrGluGlu]

Why would he be a hand holding feature? I don’t think they had WSOs sitting in the back doing nothing IRL. Try operating that radar while also piloting.

[@TheDAWinz]

@@MrGluGlu You mean like in every other module/part of the game? Because it only applies for the F-4E and F-14, and DCS players are dogwater enough to need it.

[@MrGluGlu]

@@TheDAWinz you must have not watched this video… bullet even mentions how the phantom is almost at a disadvantage against other jets in DCS because of how good the simulation is. Is this just cope because you got shot down too many times by phantom pilots?

[@Bullet4MyEnemy]

Tbh I do reckon you could control the radar and the plane with enough practice, and I can see where you’re both coming from. There are actually key binds for slewing the TDC and adjusting the elevation from the pilot seat iirc, which I should really bind up tbh but I kinda shot myself in the foot by getting used to using my radar usual radar HATs for Jester, weapon jettison and controlling the guided weapons. But yeah - It’s hand holding because they’ve given you an AI to do a job a person ought to be doing, so it lets you fly solo if you don’t have anyone to buddy up with. But it’s also not hand holding because it’s so complex that such a thing is warranted. Thing is though, in reality pilots/WSOs rarely surpass 3k hours on an airframe over their entire career time associated with it, and how many of those would be getting the thing in the air and into a situation/location where learning the complexities of the radar could even take place? Vs us in a sim where we can spawn in the air or be in combat within 5 minutes, despite us not being trained the potential to understand it and get good is far more readily available because it doesn’t take half a day of set up to get to learning. We can also bind the controls up however we want, making it possible to have the controls from the back seat readily available in the front too; whereas the crew of the jet are kinda stuck with how McDonnell Douglas decided it should be. Got my fingers crossed the patch tomorrow has Jester working on target refinement a little better, his implementation feels very “gamey” atm.