cheezit

That's when it's fast and not super high - the F110 is like a stroker and the TF30 is more like a peaky high-strung thing that benefits more from the ram air effect*. Eg. at sea level, the F110 in full blower starts with about 23500 lbf installed at zero airspeed and gets up to 30500 lbf installed at mach 0.9, then tails off above that, whereas the TF30 starts out at about 17500 lbf installed at zero airspeed, peaks at the same 30500 lbf at mach 0.9, but doesn't tail off as quickly at higher speeds. The higher you go, the bigger the gap becomes at low airspeeds (the F110 has dramatically better static suction) until "above 25000 feet and below 250 kias, all the TF30 does at mil power is turn JP5 into noise" as another once said. *Unsure how much of this is the design of the engine itself (turbine compression stages and bypass and afterburner) versus the design of the variable ramp intakes and the tuning or lack thereof that the intake ramp schedule got for each engine, any intake ramp changes that happened down the line for maintainability and reliability, etc.

If the most in-demand F-14D or F-14B(U) weren't the OIF/OIF II representative, DFCS wouldn't *need* to be a sticking point. Ditto modeling how the AIM-9X worked with the MIL-STD-1760-capable variants of the Tomcat.

Thanks for your contribution! I would say that all kill claims and reports of exploits need to be scrutinized, whether they come from Iran, Israel, the USAF, USN, etc. Circumstances matter and are non-trivial to account for, everybody honestly thinks they've destroyed more aircraft than they actually did at all times (even without taking purposeful overclaiming into account), aircraft are frequently misidentified, etc.

In your defense, sources about the AIM-54C's development/history that are broadly accessible are really muddled and don't generally agree with each other. If I could write a letter to somebody who was at the program office (Dave "Hey Joe" Parsons fits the bill and occasionally does interviews, but I'm not going to try to internet-detective his email address to harass him for answers) to clear up some questions raised by eg. the old Navy history of the missile.

How far off is the current MiG-21bis module from a realistic Vietnam configuration (MiG-21F-13)? It's got a bigger engine at a minimum, right?

I think this is true for the Hornet and the Viper, but not the Eagle. The Eagle was probably 75% of the maintenance problem that the F-14A was (somewhat fewer hydraulic problems and many fewer electronics problems) - while the Air Force doesn't publish maintenance hours per flight hour numbers like the Navy and USMC do, it does publish costs per flight hour, and the Eagle is more expensive than other 4th gen jets by a mile; the exact numbers differ from annual report to annual report, but it's generally about 2x what the F-16 costs to run (circa $40k vs $20k/hour in recent years, with fuel costs making up only a small fraction of that difference). Even the projected target cost-per-flight-hour of the F-15EX (designed to be more maintainable) is still high compared to everything else 4th-gen that's still in the air, and that's a number coming from the manufacturer's sales & marketing department, not an observed figure. It's interesting to look at how the Air Force treated the F-15 versus how the Navy treated the F-14 in terms of upgrades over the common service life of both aircraft (roughly 1976-2006). Everybody knows about the boneheaded spares decision in the early 1980s (I had a copy of the appropriations hearing where that decision was made, but I can't find it now), but look at the original Grumman/Navy plan for F-14 development and it's similar to what the Air Force actually did with the F-15. Different program offices, budget priorities, etc. Nb. that there would be no F-15Cs in service in 2023 and no F-15EX if the original Raptor buy hadn't been repeatedly clipped until ending up at a quarter of what was originally intended. Similarly, there'd probably be no SuperHornet if the specific sequence of events in the early 90s hadn't played out about the way they did, with the A-6 upgrades being cancelled because the A-12 was in the works, then the A-12 being cancelled, then the F-117N proposals all being rejected, then the A-6 and S-3 in their entirety and the F-14 Block I Strike program and the AAAM program being killed for budget reasons after Desert Storm, then the F-14D buy being severely clipped because NATF was in the works, then NATF being cancelled, then the joint USMC/RN program to replace the Harrier becoming 'jointer' and then 'jointest' as it metastasized into the JSF program, then the legacy Hornet program executive office needing a few billion for the MLU and CBR programs, then finally SuperHornet winning over QuickStrike and all other "Super Tomcat" variants to be the stopgap until a 5th-gen flight deck was achieved - and there's plenty that I missed. At least we can say that the Superbug was a very good aircraft for the wars we actually ended up fighting during its service life. Further note that, despite both design improvements for enhanced maintainability and an extra two decades of experience maintaining the design, the F/A-18E/F has seen substantially worse availability than the legacy Hornet at the same point in its service life. Want to guess why? My two cents say the culprits are minimal manning, near-constant high op tempo, penny-wise/pound-foolish budget decisions (esp. during sequestration), and having killed their tankers and thus having to do a ton of buddy tanking. It's almost a blessing the Tomcat got spared most of these, and got to end on a high note as the "most capable strike fighter on the flight deck" with, comically, also the best availability and cost-per-flight-hour numbers for its last cruise (there are obviously some asterisks that belong on that figure).

I can't find the posts at the moment, but Disco here exemplifies a couple of quotes that Victory205 made on this forum to the effect that no F-15 pilot he encountered who talked about the F-14's ostensible wing speedometer could come close to telling him what the mach sweep schedule was, nor could any of them who pooh-poohed the Phoenix tell him anything about what its parameters were like (because they hadn't seen the relevant documents). The bits attempting to cosplay as an aeronautical engineer in explaining design philosophy of airframes he'd never flown were the icing on the cake. Listen, every pilot will have something to say about everything he's flown and everything he's flown against. You'd be even sillier to take this guy's words at face value than you would be to consider every Snort/Hoser/Flash story to be gospel - you've got to balance eg. Disco's comments about F-15C vs F-14A against what "Okie" Nance says about the same fight and against "Puck" Howe's and "Jungle" Jones's comments about F-14D vs F-15C fight. In conclusion,

Sorry to dredge an old topic, but did all these episodes disappear from YouTube? I can't find anything at the moment.

The Tomcat was introduced in 1974, and delivered to Iran from 1976-1978. In 1978, the Persian-British singer-songwriter Freddy Mercury released the single "Fat Bottom Girls".

Without getting into the lofting discussion from Karon earlier in this thread, I think you will find those parameters are in fact not great. The AIM-54 is a really wide missile, and as a result it likes altitude more than it likes speed; in this regard, it is very different from smaller-diameter and more 'slippery' missiles like the AIM-7 and the AIM-120. To make things concrete, I think you will find the launch parameters denoted as "B" on the following diagram to be better than "C", and I think you will also find "A" better than "D":

My guess: the combination of the following separate constraints - a) maintaining range safety, while the wind blows drones off course b) keeping the intercept timeline long enough that the aircrew can get shots off at every target c) letting the AWG-9 break everything out nicely d) keeping targets within a good TWS-A scan volume and above the minimum Vc throughout the intercept e) trying to keep any of the 54As from having a really unfavorable target aspect during the terminal phase etc. Like most multivariable constrained optimization problems, the solution is often at a boundary value for one or more variables

The nice thing for HB when it comes to their F-4(E?) is that at least the lift-and-drag part of the flight model won't take long to get right, as bricks are aerodynamically simple.

*pours one out for the later 'sealed' variants of the 54C*

Did you try 2x2x2 w/ 2 XTs in addition to 4x2x2 + 2, by chance? Because the former config has charts you can try to duplicate, at least: Incidentally, looking at the 1g specific excess power diagram, if you do for whatever reason want to end up at 35k feet and Going Pretty Fast, you may want to try a couple somewhat different strategies (please forgive the mspaint quality):

Is the rapid onset/more-of-a-step-than-a-ramp because the AoA is either a) high enough that the vortex created by the wing glove is hitting the tails or b) low enough that the vortex created by the wing glove doesn't hit the tails without much in between? If that's the case, do altitude, mach number, IAS, etc. affect the amplitude? Also: I hope Victory205 is well. It was great having him on the forum. Looking at his last post date I'm guessing he's probably been off the forums due to force majeure rather than (understandably) getting tired of dealing with us sim nitwits, though I don't want to derail the thread with speculation of that sort.