I knew I wouldn't get away with just a generic critique of the sims, and good on ya for wanting details. Because I don't want to spend forever writing this up, here is a list, in no special order of my gripes with the sims. Some of them are Beaufort specific. All of them are Hornet specific.
-There are always glitches with the niche weapons (LMAV, SLAM-ER, Harpoon, HARM, etc) that don't act quite like they (or their CATMs) do in real life
-The LPOD doesn't really work the same, and for a long time there were issues when the gen 4 pods came out.
-You learn so much more about the gear and the jet when you actually fly. We discovered some issues with the hardware on the gen 4 LPOD 9 months after it came out because we were flying it in a unique climate.
-Comms aren't realistic, especially with HQ, Secure or Mids
-The sims take forever to get linked up, even when you do the propper coordination ahead of time.
-Sims routinely cancelled for maintenance (WTF?) or because training objectives couldn't be achieved (i.e. div lead flew with only one wingman because the other 2 sims went down)
-Red air not doing what its supposed to do, even with an experienced operator. In real life even if the red air screws up the setup, at least it will do something tactical, not just fly in circles at 30 degrees angle of bank like an idiot.
-SAMS not doing what they are supposed to do many times. ("dash two disregard, you aren't spiked I don't know what's wrong with the system right now)
-DTED only being funded for the area right around the main F-18 bases and Yuma airfield. If you do a CAS sim anywhere that isn't completely flat your laser handoffs will be kilometers off because of the difference between DTED and the visuals.
-shitty visuals, expecially in CAS (targets jumping up and down 100' in the air)
-SACT is stupid in the Sim
-The way EA is presented in the sim sucks compared to having real life EA with your red air
-Makes us sloppy with admin/tac admin because in the sim often you just jump straight into the tactical portion with that already set up
-Less experience troubleshooting the combat systems in the jet because they always work in the sim
There are ranges with real life emitters that are great training. Hell, they will even launch "smoky sams" up at you. They just won't actually guide on you. For that kind of training, the best thing is a having an IP simulate the missile with his aircraft, using dumps and burner. That is much better training than defending against a blip on the screen.
Again, I am not against sim training. In fact, I think we should have more sim training. What I am proposing is that we endeavor to make sim time cheaper and less "realistic" because its not all that realistic anyways (except for NATOPS and INST checks). With cheaper sim time, we can fly the same hours and still be saving money. For 90% of my sims I can get the same training value with a realistic stick and throttle and touch screens to simulate my DDIs. I would argue that for newer aircraft like the F-35 with even less switches, this is even more true. Moreover, these sims would be deployable too, so if we actually had to do a strike somewhere, the mission commander could practice it 2 or 3 times with different contingencies in the "cheaper" sim, before doing it for real. Kinda like how the SEALs built a replica of Bin Laden's compound and practiced assaulting it several times before doing the mission for real.
In reality the big expensive sims are a sunk cost, so they will continue to throw money at them to make the training marginally better and cut flight hours at the same time.
