brianacooper11 Member



Join Date: Apr 2016 Location: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Posts: 128

Update Here is a small update, mainly just saying work continues.



Schnelli posed an interesting question about the licensing from the manufacturer. I work on a second project (and that is all I will say for now) in parallel to the Tu-22M3 where a license from the manufacturer is indeed needed, and we are doing the project in a way to satisfy them.



However, I do not think a license of the Tu-22M3, of the era (USSR) we are using, is needed. That opinion comes from some reading, plus a few personal experiences. The USSR didn't 'license' anything, as everything was the property of the state. When the chaos began in 1989, a 'grabfest' began when everybody, the design bureaus, the numbered production factories, even different nations, all claimed rights to the intellectual property of 'their' aircraft, systems, etc. A situation developed where multiple entities 'owned' the same 'IP', and sometimes different developments of the same aircraft or engines, progressed from the early 90's.



Personal example: some friends owned Sukhoi Su-29, Yak-52 aircraft, both nominally powered by the "Vedeneyev" M14P engine. Although originally "designed" by the Vedeneyev Machine Plant (doubling as design and manufacturing concerns), the Voronezh Machine plant also manufactured them, and they claimed the engine's IP, ALONG with someone claiming to be the predecessor of Ivchenko, who now manufactures the engine in Romania. For a while you could get M14P-derived engines from two places, Romania and Russia. Then a US company started making heir own improved version just using an original core. So, 3-4 entities, across the countries of Russia, Ukraine, Romania and the States. My head spins, and I'm sure I don't completely understand what happened.



Similar events occured with aircraft. Sukhoi and Tuypolev design bureau's were separate from manufacturing plants in Nizhny-Novgorod, Novosibirsk, and Komsomolsk-on-Amur, and the manufacturers were claiming the IP to whatever was on their shop floor. Export recipient countries claimed IP too. The design bureaus, not directly manufacturing aircraft, where left without a nominal source of income, though the manufacturers weren't really doing any better.



Fast forward to the 2000's, the various concerns had tried co-existing as separate capitalist entities, and it wasn't working. Putin and company united all the remnants of manufacturing plants, design bureaus, etc into what is now United Aircraft Corporation, and things are starting to function again.



My view is that an aircraft, dating from the soviet period, AND NO LATER, doesn't have strong IP protections, if any, at least none with precedence. The chaos of the 90's severely clouds who owns what, and from when. That said, if UAC found out about the project and came knocking, I'd love to make a deal that included helpful data. In short, we aren't going to UAC asking for a license, but if somehow they decide we matter and they come to us saying there is a problem, we're definitely going to try to make things work out. I personally just have two business rules: Don't be evil, and don't be a jerk. I don't think Oleg or Dimitri feel differently.



FYI, we don't have РЛЭ, and we're not really going after it. The consensus is that crosses a line. But we have tons of ancillary documentation, identical systems with descriptions from other aircraft with open documentation, crew training aids, plus crewmembers themselves. We are avoiding hot topics, like sensitive comms and anything nuclear, but I don't think those detract from gameplay in DCS. As I have said before, the cockpits are very analog and substantially self explanatory, at least with some engineering and aviation background. What is not self explanatory is explained by crewmembers. You're not going to notice anything missing. This airplane introduces new disciplines of navigation science and systems, radar interpretation, and electronic warfare to DCS. We may not know things like 'true' radar detection ranges vs what is published, if they are different, but we know the "switch-ology" of the systems and radar science, for example. The radar is a surface search radar, not an air-to-air radar that processes information for you. We are doing our best to deliver you a display of correctly processed reflected surface radar energy, noise and all. You are going to have to learn the art of radar scope interpretation, to match what you know of where you are, the radar return vs. what maps show, and sort through the clutter and designate a target. We can deliver that experience without the РЛЭ, but with established science, crewmember input, and what documentation we have. Similar circumstances exist for other new systems to DCS. As time pulls back the curtain around the Backfire-C (and it will), we will keep the simulation updated, but I strongly expect that the core experience will not change, and will be timeless within DCS, and whatever the future may bring.



I never really did much of a post about either the trip to Ukraine, nor research about the aircraft, survivors, etc. It is true that Ukraine destroyed most of their Tu-22M and Tu-160 with the USA's help, but they certainly didn't get them all. I think there is one example of the M0 left (Monino), two each of the M1 and M2 (Monino and Kiev have both), and several of the M3 all over the place, thank the Lord. I have a picture somewhere taken from the top of the Tu-22M3 in Kiev, looking across the tops of the M2 and M1 with a setting sun. It was a beautiful shot of the variants, hope I can dig it up someday. I also learned that the Ukrainians love the Tu-22M3 as much as the Russians. You can almost taste the disgust dripping off them when they recall the planes being chopped up. The crews loved them. They want the plane's story told.



The Tu-22M3 in Kiev is our primary source of cockpit documentation. Systems were removed in the avionics bay, but the cockpit was very intact, and very beautiful. The nuclear blast shields had been closed, so the sun had not done it's thing to the interior. Just a couple of instruments were removed, but I had pictures of them, and understood their functionality, so no loss. Our goal is a late Soviet era cockpit, and that plane nailed it. There is a lot of variation between Tu-22M3 manufacturing batches, stuff in different places, but that plane in Kiev is probably going to be the representative in DCS, with minor tweaks.



This is easily the bomber best suited to DCS: you've got all the gameplay elements that make a bomber and will be unique within DCS, performance unmatched, and it's all done with just 4 seats. We (the DCS community) will have the greatest instrument with which to learn the art of the bombardier-navigator. Nobody can pick another bomber from any country or era to simulate that will be as great overall in DCS as the Backfire. Get your little buddies to establish air superiority, then go pound earth and carrier groups...



PS: We do not have a license from ED yet, so stuff that sounds "forward looking" comes with that asterisk. We are gunning for that license hard. Last edited by brianacooper11; 05-29-2017 at 01:18 AM .