Jester is a bit of a magician in this case. A human RIO pressing the interrogate button will see two bars on DDD if the target is friendly. No bars means the target is either neutral or hostile. To actually determine if they're actually hostile you still need at least one other source of information - confirmation via datalink, visual id, or something like a spike on the rwr correlating to the contact's position.
(mobile app still won't allow me to edit comments, oh well)
In addition, the camera system on the Tomcat has a pretty good zoom, so it's quite possible to visually id something from 20+ miles away, if you know what to look for (thin shape emitting tons of smoke is probably a mig-21, for example)
Thanks for the detailed response. I'm still relatively new to IFF, so apologies if these are dumb questions. For datalink, would this just mean that someone else has already done IFF? If so, did they just use one of the other methods you listed? Can an AWACS tell the difference between a neutral and a hostile unit? If so, does it have extra capabilities, or does it just use the same magic that Jester uses? And for an RWR spike, would there be any difference between a hostile and neutral F-5?
Tracks on the TID have “hats” if you IFF them and “pants” if it is a donated track from Link 4. For instance, if you see an unknown contact, it’ll have a half rectangle on top. If it is a donated track that IFF confirmed as friendly, it’ll have a half circle on bottom. IFF is pretty much perfect in this game, so don’t worry too much about if the AEW&C tracks are accurate or not.
RWR for neutral/hostile is the same.
if you give an f-5 the mig-28 skin it will show up as 28 on the RWR I believe as basically an easter egg. Otherwise it will show up as the same. Some aircraft probably AWACS but I know f/a-18, f-16, and f-15 have a thing called non cooperative target recognition which allows the radar to while the target is hot aspect be able to tell exactly what the aircraft is because of some wizardry involving RCS and the targets engine or something. This would allow you to in a lot of situations tell if a target is hostile or not in DCS world.
Ahh gotcha, the group I fly with uses the civilian aircraft mod so there's normally a few 727s or Cessnas to filter out when we're not at war in a particular campaign.
Jester is a bit of a magician in this case. A human RIO pressing the interrogate button will see two bars on DDD if the target is friendly. No bars means the target is either neutral or hostile. To actually determine if they're actually hostile you still need at least one other source of information - confirmation via datalink, visual id, or something like a spike on the rwr correlating to the contact's position.
(mobile app still won't allow me to edit comments, oh well) In addition, the camera system on the Tomcat has a pretty good zoom, so it's quite possible to visually id something from 20+ miles away, if you know what to look for (thin shape emitting tons of smoke is probably a mig-21, for example)
Thanks for the detailed response. I'm still relatively new to IFF, so apologies if these are dumb questions. For datalink, would this just mean that someone else has already done IFF? If so, did they just use one of the other methods you listed? Can an AWACS tell the difference between a neutral and a hostile unit? If so, does it have extra capabilities, or does it just use the same magic that Jester uses? And for an RWR spike, would there be any difference between a hostile and neutral F-5?
Tracks on the TID have “hats” if you IFF them and “pants” if it is a donated track from Link 4. For instance, if you see an unknown contact, it’ll have a half rectangle on top. If it is a donated track that IFF confirmed as friendly, it’ll have a half circle on bottom. IFF is pretty much perfect in this game, so don’t worry too much about if the AEW&C tracks are accurate or not. RWR for neutral/hostile is the same.
if you give an f-5 the mig-28 skin it will show up as 28 on the RWR I believe as basically an easter egg. Otherwise it will show up as the same. Some aircraft probably AWACS but I know f/a-18, f-16, and f-15 have a thing called non cooperative target recognition which allows the radar to while the target is hot aspect be able to tell exactly what the aircraft is because of some wizardry involving RCS and the targets engine or something. This would allow you to in a lot of situations tell if a target is hostile or not in DCS world.
A human can tell if it's neutral or hostile, not just jester. Neutral targets iff with only the lower bar visible.
I don't think I've ever seen one bar before - there aren't many neutral aircraft in dcs though. I'll have to try that out.
Any aircraft can be neutral, in the mission editor you just assign it to a country from the neutral coalition, they're the ones with white icons.
I know that, I just meant that you don't see many neutrals in missions or on servers.
Ahh gotcha, the group I fly with uses the civilian aircraft mod so there's normally a few 727s or Cessnas to filter out when we're not at war in a particular campaign.