Forum: Air Power

JoeSambor wrote:

Gums,

Way, way, back when I was a newbie two-striper I remember seeing the EM display in my training materials and on the HUD. It did disappear with Block 25, some of our pilots told me it was unusable and distracting. Do you know the real reason it disappeared?

Best Regards,

Hi Joe,
I used to teach the EM stuff to FMS customers. The EM displays on the HUD would indicate energy states based on burner thrust for the first 12 seconds of display, if the throttle wasn't in burner after the 12 seconds, all the energy states were reset to indicate MIL power.

We did have some USAF pilots tell us that Combat Energy Management cluttered the display rather than providing useful guidance. As one stated, if a guy is gonna throw a left hook at me, I'm not looking at some display to know if I'm hit, I'm gonna DUCK!

The processing time required for calculations and display was needed for more useful functions. That's why it got removed.
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Salute!

The EM display mode was useless, except for one thing that could have been displayed whenever guns or missiles were selected.

The EM display was some weird representation of the EM charts and nobody could figure out what the display was telling you, except for one thing.

THE ONE THING!

A small tadpole doofer over on the right side by the altitude bar showed if you were gaining , maintaining or losing energy.

If you climbed and kept that doofer level, then you approximated the Rutowski climb schedule.

Maybe Roscoe or his instructor invented the thing, heh heh.

Bottomline was that the display used processing bytes/ subroutines, and our system memory was limited. So the international cockpit review committee vetoed the display to allow other goodies to be implemented.

For you yutes that are used to gigabytes of memory and gigahertz processors. Go look at the original boxes we worked with back then.

The Cockpit Review Committee would recommend to USAF and GD that 200 or 300 byte subroutines be deleted or replaced with something else. The IAF sat in, but had no vote. They worked directly with GD, to which USAF had abdicated sftwe development , despite the great work that the A-7D/E and F-18 folks had done at China lake ( lots cheaper, and more responsive to the users).

For all you newbies.........

Think about 1 megahertz 16-bit CPU's with minimal RAM.

Forget C+++ and think about Jovial.

Imagine when RAM went to 256K versus 64K.

Think about multi-tasking code that shared various tasks according to a priority determined by mission requirements. And thank the Lord that we didn't have pop-up BS from a Viagra vendor, heh heh.

We got to the Moon with those capabilities, and the Sluf and initial Vipers worked with those limitations, or capabilities. And they done good. Actually, better than good.

Gums sends ....

Spot on as always, Gums!

One minor correction, JOVIAL is an acronym for the programming language. I'll leave the question on what it stands for as a take home assignment for the "yutes"! haha
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See -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOVIAL

Forum: Air Power

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