kalvasflam

Couple of names on WWII ace, don't remember any others right now. Dave McCampbell, USN Saburo Sakai, IJN two great aces, Sakai had a great autobiography (?) "Samurai" it was a great book.

Noyhauser, Good point, I don't know much about the Swedes to be honest... never looked much at the Grippen and its sales around the world. From what I know of the Brits, and I suppose if you look at the Tornado (the European consortium) in general, it's tough to tell whether its country specific restrictions or just a matter of not having the right capabilities for countries. Besides the Europeans, the Saudis have Tornados, I don't recall who the other exports were though, but I thought at least one other non-European country uses Tornados. The French tend to sell Mirages all over the place, Israelis, Iraqis, etc.... as long as there is decent money to be made. and now, entertainment of the day.... You may want to watch it there Kavasflam,. You might have offended some people of direct European decent with that comment you made unless you were joking with them. 391147[/snapback] My goodness, such sensitivity.... please don't get the ACLU on my case regarding my uhhhh... uhhhhh... "comment" there. Phalanx, I recall you're young, so, let me give you a little bit of advice, if you go through life worrying about offending everyone and being offended by every little comment made by someone else or hell, worrying about one party offending another at every turn, well, it's not a happy life that you're going to lead. But then again, it is your life... do whatever pleases you. PEACE. But just in case I offended those warmongering psychopaths out there with that last statement.... Just to keep it fair and balanced. WAR

Two words: WINGED WHALE

I'm not sure I would say the Russians are a "friendly" nation. 390865[/snapback] Hmmm, it's more accurate to say that the U.S. military is the best friend of the Russian armament industry, especially its aircraft industry. Since every few years, little tin pot dictators around the world need to buy new Russian planes for the Americans to shot down a few years later. If I were a Russian industrialist, I'd be publicly saying my military hardware rocked, privately cheering the U.S. military to go out and deplete the existing stock in the arsenal of any potential customers. Did I also forget to mention, that the Russians love the U.S. government because it prevents sales of truly advanced weaponary, and the unit cost of even the downgraded versions typically are higher than those of "equivalent" Russian design. The French, the Swedish, and the entire bloody European consortisum on the other hand are much hated, the bastards will sell just about any advanced weapons to anyone who has a buck... don't those SOBs have any morales? So says the Russian military industry.

Just an opinion, but somehow, I don't think SecDef is long for this world. They said that Vince Flynn had a hand in this season. Comparing this to his novels, I am starting to see some similarities, I hope they bring Flynn back in again.

The funny thing is NASA just seem so screwed up from the outside, part of me wonders if it's just Congress slowing things up, or if it's in fact NASA that's bungling the job. The shuttle is going on 25 years at this point, and they have managed to do endless studies without having an actual replacement. Then they have all these little patches for the current shuttle. The stupid ISS is still draining money like crazy, if NASA was a business, it would be bankrupt by now. I wish they end up with one or the other of the proposed new shuttle design and just move onto the next generation already. Right now, what they have is so inefficient and ineffective, that it's nothing more than a joke.

Interesting stuff... hmmm, almost makes me wonder if they could've mounted a pair of GAU-8 on it. If it's good enough for a Hog, it might be good enough for a -130. I suppose though that the 25mm is probably sufficient to kill most armored vehicles. I wonder what is the upper limitation on the type of cannon that can be loaded. Too bad, you couldn't load up a AC-130 with all the guns and a MOAB to boot. Heh heh heh heh. But I know it would be kind of a waste.

I missed it... what is the release schedule for Stargazer? Heh heh, I keep thinking starblazer instead.

For gunships, I'm not too enthusiastic about using hellfire missiles. According to some of what I've read, hellfires can take up to a minute for lock on to occur. Then you have that inevitable time frame of vulnerability where your hellfires has to track the laser beam you put on target. At which point, the firing platform needs to be tracking target (i.e. minimal movement), and becomes fairly vulnerable to AAA. This is part of the reason why you have Kiowa type scouts, they do independent lasing for you. Heck, if all you need is a launch platform, a UH-60 will be just as good. There had been modifications along those routes. For gunships, I like the idea of having a couple of gatling guns, a howizter, may be an intermediate solution would be a high speed grenade launcher of some type. Missiles and rockets aren't the type of armament for the AC-130 types. But gunships typically operate in a lower threat environment, where there might be MANPADS, but not lots of SAMs and radar guided AAA.

KC747.... Yummmm, juicy target. Is it innie or outie? I can imagine it now, fighter pilot drives over: "KC747, you will refuel us now, or we will kill you, in fact, fuel our whole squadron." After refuel, Pilot: "geez, thank, you have fuel left right? Well, I'm asking because I wanna see a nice fireball." The question on tankers is how much does it cost to operate a KC747 for example, versus a KC-10 or a KC-135. The benefit of smaller tankers is of course, not having all your eggs in one basket, in case an accident does happen.

Amazing if somebody managed to put down three migs with one phoenix, those migs must've been flying in very close formation. May be green pilots that didn't know they were getting attacked. But again, the Iranian Tomcats are kind of a joke in my estimation, they may be able to scare Afghanistan, and may put some concerns nto their neighbors, but against AWACS controlled fighters attacking from BVR, those -14s will be in trouble. In a fight against the U.S., they probably won't even get off the ground.

You want to hunt me down? Ok, Knight26, you're history, I just retasked the orbital hyper kinetic cannon to your bio signature. The headlines tonight will read: "tragedy, local man struck dead by small meteorite." Buh-bye... And besides, I didn't tell people anything about Fred Flintstone or Dino.... Uh never mind, pretend none of you heard that.

"F-19, what F-19? We don't have an F-19 at all. We decided to skip that designation. " So said the USAF spokesman. All of which is true, and then all the nutjobs and psychos rush out and start pontificating about how the USAF is lying and there must be an F-19. Then when the truth comes out... the USAF lied, and denied there was an F-19, they deliberately misled us with the truth. We really wanted to know about the F-117, which we didn't know about at the time. Heh, funny stuff. But it is entertaining how myths and fantasies from almost two decades ago still pull people in today. Heh heh, actually, the truth is, the F-19 does exist, it is built on UFO technology, and is truly stealthy in the visible spectrum. The base weapons system is also alien in origin, it is a high powered energy weapon with range in excess of 5000 km in the atmosphere. The aircraft is space capable, and can attain escape velocity without aid of boosters. It is a two man aircraft, and has been operational since 1997. The -A variant also carries hyperkinetic muntions, but currently, a -V variant is being tested with the capability of transforming into a humanoid form. The unit is a part of the black budget costing the American tax-payers roughly $20 billion a year, with the ultimate goal of fighting against giant space aliens. The project is top secret, and has a monthly rotating code name, one of which happened to be Aurora, but other code names also included Borealis, Northern Lights, Southern Lights, and Barney Rubble (who was incidentally the name of one of the original test pilot recruited from the town of Bedrock, and yes, he has a wife named Betty) There will be a special on this top secret military program on the Discovery channel in 2008, check your local listings. Yes, the last paragraph is a joke. Really, I swear, it's a joke.... not the truth... as far as you know it.

Yeah, the Comanches were probably a replacements for the Kiowas, and to a lesser extent the Cobras. But I thought the Marines would've been better off with Apaches. I never thought Longbows were scouts though, the radar has its advantages... the issue with Apaches was always where you'd use them. In desert storm, Apaches were sent in deep against second echelons of Iraqi armor after it was decided that tanks were doing a faster job than the choppers. But in Iraqi Freedom, the Apaches got caught with lots of small arms fire and suffer significant damages. The role against armor is now somewhat less relevant than it had been at the height of the cold war.

Oh, I just read the article... talk about handicapped, they should've just asked for F-14s driven by Iranian pilots. Ha ha ha ha. Did the -15Cs even have AWACS support? Didn't seem to be the case. Meh, the interesting stuff is that the IAF was calling audibles trying to change tactics along the way, easy enough to do when you don't have live missiles coming at you from BVR. It shows adaptability, but a red flag exercise would be interesting. This was not exactly the best test case. BTW, what's wrong with the Longbows? Also, I do wish they brought back the Comanches. But I don't know enough about it to say one way or the other on what the capabilities were really like for that scout/attack. But a replacement for the Apaches should be somewhere on the drawing board.

In reality, all this dogfight BS is just pure fantasy against the USAF/USN right now. But especially the USAF. The aerial coverage is probably too good, and a majority of the kills will occur in BVR engagements, individually, the other side might have a chance, but as you say, the odds of that happening is close to zero. There were similar comments in WWII, ace Jap pilots such as Sakai were really good, and the general comments from those pilots were, the average American pilot wasn't really that good, but the problem was, the Americans excelled at teamwork, and that just killed the IJN air arm. It's the same comment about fighting wars, that's a team sport, and in that arena, currently the U.S. tend to be a bit better than most. Yeah, there might be one in fifty chance that a Flanker could smoke a -22 or even a few -15s in an actual war, but the kill ratio aren't gonna favor the guys flying the Flankers. By the way, loved the interesting comments about Sparrow and Phoenix, didn't know that was the case. What's the drop distance before ignition?

Did the -15s get AWACS support chopped from them too? The -15 is a good plane, dated compared to the Flankers, but the force multipliers come from having the AWACS to quarterback them, otherwise, they're just ok. But the slammers might have made a big difference also, especially if the other side has fire and forget AAM and the -15s were stuck with sparrows.

Nothing but the JSF... The Navy is either gonna be F/A-18E/F/G or F-35C, while the Corps will be all F-35B, even getting rid of the F/A-18Ds which suprises me a bit. I want to know what the Corps is going to do about the squadron it's tacking on to the carrier air wings when all the fighters go F-35B, on the other hand at least it should spread the deployments around for the MEU(SOC) cruises. 387585[/snapback] The emphasis on multirole is just a bit too scary, and a bit too reminescent of the Phantoms. I would think the navy should at least have one dedicated fighter, and one dedicated heavy attack....

The evil president... coooooool. "I'm so indecisive, I'm so helpless, please, tell me what to do, you guys are responsible, I don't want to do this.... Oh ok, I was just kidding, kill the bastard." Logan wins the actor of the year award, he is the mastermind. woohooo. Personally, I hope this 24 will do something the other season has failed to do. Move things into a second season with the same plot line. Oh, and Bauer needs to eat something, was watching season 1, and noticed that after he rescued his family, Bauer was in the interrogation room having microwaved lunch, damn bastard hasn't eaten since season 3.

There is no doubt that for now, and probably for the foreseeable future, guns are still necessary. However, BVR has come a long way, there was no AWACS tied in with the Phantoms in Vietnam, sure, they had sophisticated controls, but remember, in Vietnam, although cruise missiles existed, B-52s were still dropping conventional dumb bombs. Look at what a mere decade has wrought in terms of advanced weapons. In terms of bombs dropped, the Kuwaiti campaign was 80 to 90 percent dumb munitions, i.e. clusters and iron bombs. Contrast that to the Iraq campagin where a majority of the munitions were guided by laser, GPS, etc. The force structure was also quite different, consider the forces gathered for Desert Storm versus Iraqi Freedom, by every single measure, the Desert Storm force was significantly greater than that present in the Iraqi Freedom campagin. Yet, the forces operating in Iraqi Freedom proved even more effective in a far more difficult scenario. The point I'm trying to make is that technology is becoming more an enabling factor in the battle field, enabling better effectiveness with lower resources expended. Will cannons on planes go away? No, it would be unwise, because cannons does have other roles even if it isn't air to air, but it is not the primary air to air weapon any more. BVR engagements in the 70s is nothing like BVR engagements today. It has become far less about individuals than it is about team fighting. In WWII, kill distance were measured in hundreds of yards on average, by Vietnam era, they moved to over several miles, and now the numbers are going to shift again. No human pilot, however good, will be able to dodge something that he doesn't know for sure is coming. For example, if you put David McCampbell, the navy's greatest WWII ace in the cockpit of a Flanker today, and have him try to dogfight a couple of F-15s guided by AWACS, he'd lose. His dogfighting skill will be largely irrelevant. It would have been largely negated by technology. The point is, that the human factor while still there is not as relevant as it was 20 or even 10 years ago. On the WWII stuff, Lightning, ah... what a sentimental favorite, even though gradually, I'm starting to like the Hellcats a little more. and who could forget the Corsairs popularized by the Black Sheeps.

I wonder how well Flankers will stack up against the -22s. One has to remember that the -15s were conceived and developed in the 70s, and as was pointed out the Fulcrums and Flankers were both designed specifically to fight against these threats. But how has much the situation changed in the past 20 years. The question is really, how relevant is it to have the best dogfighter these days. After all, aerial combat has evolved over time. While the focus is still centered around identifying the other guy and then achieving firing position first, things have changed quite a bit in 100 years. Through WWI and most of WWII, aerial dogfights were conducted visually, the guy with the better eyeball and faster reflex won. Toward the middle of WWII, radar became important in vectoring planes out to the right places so that pilots could find their enemies... hopefully completely defenseless bombers, but reflex and eyeball still counted for a lot. It really wasn't until the 60s when BVR engagements became possible. Even then, people went through dogfights a lot, because the weapon systems were just not that reliable to always achieve BVR kills. Then a further refinement of in the 70s and 80s evolved combat aircraft into managed systems where their actions more often than not (especially in the case of the US) involved management by airborne radar. At which point, BVR engagements became much more realistic. Meaning, good eye sight didn't mean as much as it used to, same with reflexes. The next evolution of this though is the introduction of stealth, it's kind of hard to kill a guy if your sensors can't see him that well. Oh, there is still a tendency to think about dogfights as a necessity, and well, no one wants to be caught flatfooted, after all, if a mig-21 happens to catch an F-117 in visual range, the latter can't really dogfight very well. It was one of the supposed reason why the YF-23 lost out to the YF-22. The former focused more on stealth and BVR engagements, while the latter was supposed to be more balanced with a better ability to engage in dogfights. The point I'm making is in the eyes of the Americans at least, aerial combat is graudally shifting away from dogfights and moving further into the realm of BVR engagements and taking some of the human factor such as ability to withstand G forces out of the equation. Yes, a couple of cannon bursts could destroy a -15 or any other modern combat aircraft with exception of may be the A-10 and the SU-25. I have to wonder how relevant that comment will be in the next 30 years or so. No doubt, it will still happen on occasion, but it will likely be the exception. And now, with advent of UCAVs, I wonder how long it will be before human driven fighters become obsoleted. After all, a human will become pulp long before a machine experience a similar failure.

WWII, now that was some history that aviation buffs can sink their teeth into. The nighttime bombing raids at that time was real tricky business. I don't think most of those planes had radars in the early days, and they did it entirely by compass and timing at first, before going to radar. Back then, blackouts actually meant something. But then after a while, both sides started countering with night time fighters, some times guided by radars on the ground, others I believe had radars of their own. The good old days, I just read a book about the Marianas Turkey shoot, it was very interesting history. The largest carrier battle ever, and for all that, it was a complete whiff in terms of actual tonnage sunk. Heck, subs did far more than carrier aircraft in that episode. Someday, sombody ought to make an anime about WWII Pacific campagin..... ha ha ha ha.

Yep, it would be a good idea to mount guns on the B-2s. I'm sure the designers of those aircraft were complete idiots, and never thought of this idea. Phalanx, you need to go and design some real life bombers, show those neophytes hows it's done. Pack it full of defensive guns, and see how well the USAF accept those planes. Historically, guns on bombers became obsolete a long time ago. The last time you really had action with turreted weapons en mass was during WWII. Bombers packed themselves in tight formation over Europe and Japan, and guess what, they still suffered horrible losses from fighters over enemy territory. Defensive firepower notwithstanding. The entire point of having an invisible bomber is to be invisible. No bomber can ever survive a straight up fight with a fighter. That sort of stuff usually happen in cartoons and fantasies.

It depends, are you fighting in space or fighting on a terrestial environment? If the former, non variable, if the latter, go with variables. If you have to do both, then it depends on the type of terrestial environment, on a place like the moon, probably a non variable, but near a real planet with real atmosphere, you take the variable mechan.

There is a good reason why stealth flies at night. You have to think back to when these things were developed and what their original missions were. The 117s were going to be used in special deep tactical strikes. The Spirits was the next evolution of SAC primary bomber, originally designed to seek out and destroy mobile ICBMs that the Soviets had developed, oh, not to mention the possibility of launching a nice decapitation strike against the Soviet command structure. Think of it, the start of a nuclear war would be B83s delivered by B-2 (117s don't have the range) dropped directly on the Kremlin. What were they (stealth) faced against? The design requirements said that they were faced with the most formidable air defense system in the world that combined SAM belts backed by radar guided AAA, along with a massive number of fighter interceptors. Night mission would be ideal, you reduce the chance of a visible sighting dramatically. If you see just how big the B-2 really is, you'd know that visual detection is one of its biggest problems, once seen, a plane can simply drive on over and paste it with its cannons. Why bother wasting a missile. B-2 and the F-117 are as manueverable as a pig, and they're subsonic. The motto of the stealth community is always "we own the night," why? Because they could never last against a real fighter once sighted visually. And when you're talking about a billion dollar plane going to drop a nuke on someone, you don't take the chance on something like a novice flying a Mig-21 seeing you visually and then filling your plane full of holes with his machine guns.