OutOnTheOP

Well.... not the best example- while 4:1 or 5:1 tracer is considered adequate mixing, in the case of tracers, they DO mix them with AP or ball ammo to prevent tracer residue from depositing in the barrel. Also, tracer rounds tend to have worse ballistics (they're much longer for the same weight, and tend to destabilize and tumble easier) and significantly worse terminal performance (at least, in small arms). HEI/AP in CM, though, that's all about mixing the effects for the expected target set. AP kinda sucks against unarmored vehicles and dismounts

Well, you could always have a higher caliber with lower rate of fire... and theoretically it IS possible to scale up the gun. Look at the Henschel Hs129B-3; they took an underpowered radial-engine driven WWII attack aircraft, and strapped a high-velocity 75mm tank cannon on it, and that worked. Not saying it's practical, and particularly not on today's battlefield; any role that kind of cannon could fill would probably better be filled by ATGMs.

A lot of P47s were bare aluminum, too. They found that they could save like 300-400 pounds on the plane by not painting it (I don't remember the exact amount, but it is HUNDREDS of pounds), and that it reduced drag, increasing the max airspeed slightly.

At this stage, I doubt RCS reduction is a major concern in the PAK-FA program; if it is, they have bigger fish to fry than just the geometry of their paint scheme- like the currently mounted traditional engine nozzle feathers, which I would imagine have an RCS roughly the size of a barn door.

He's not insulting you at all; he's questioning your logic- as do I. It's much, MUCH harder- in fact, nearly impossible- to conduct insurgent operations in the midst of a hostile population (and the US public may not like it's own government too much, but it HATES terrorists). The cell probably would never make it to its target. That aside, by your logic, the F-22 pilot and its associated support structure (of which there is much more than for the UASs) is equally vulnerable to destruction as the UAS control shed. I mean, stationary, 2-mile-long runways are even easier to hit than 10-meter-long UAS control sheds, right? There's perfectly good reasons to keep pilots in cockpits of combat aircraft, but the notion that UAS control shelters are somehow the weak point in the system is a bit silly.

I believe he was referring to the WWII Typhoon and it's great success in the BAI/ rhubarb-ing role, which would make the A-10 a spiritual successor, as a CAS plane.

No, it's true: I'm DoD, and one of the orders memoranda that we received in the past few days on budgetary guidance for dealing with the "fiscal uncertainty" stated that until the money issues are sorted, there will be NO demonstration flights authorized. Sole exception is for formation flights in support of military funerals.

Regarding the actions of convoys, it depends on the situation. Against a far ambush, you escape the kill zone as swiftly as possible. Against a near ambush, you escape the kill zone as swiftly as possible- but this often means assaulting through the ambushers, because your best chance of survival is to react with as much violence of action as possible. Of course, if the near ambush has no fixing element (IE, no obstacle or blocking force), it's not really near ambush. Drive on. Now, if you're talking about a tactical road movement (IE, combat troops in IFVs or APCs), the reaction to an ambush (and I can speak from experience in this, as an American soldier) is generally to assault the ambushing element. But a tactical road movement and a CLP (combat logistics patrol) are two different things, and a combat unit doing a tactical road movement is most certainly NOT a convoy. On the topic of response to air attack, as mentioned earlier, you disperse, hide as best you can, and if you're in a soft-skin vehicle, probably abandon the vehicle. Also worth mentioning is that if you keep driving, the 30 mph of movement doesn't really make you a significantly harder target for the pilot, but the bouncing around makes it a lot harder to effectively employ any AAMG (if you have one) against the aircraft. Basically, you're better off stationary.

I would assume the hand turning is also to distribute lubricant prior to start-up

I would disagree that it's a bad idea to add weapons that "only one aircraft can use". After all, the only (DCS) aircraft that uses the Vikr right now is the Black Shark, and the only one that uses Maverick is the A-10. The weapons will need to be built eventually, and that aside, many of them likely have very similar performance envelopes to existing weapons: I can't see it terribly difficult designing a new free-fall bomb, for example- you just tweak the drag and explosion power variables, throw on a new 3D model, and you're done. I can't imagine an R550 Magic performs much different from a Sidewinder- and even less so the Russian and Chinese reverse-engineered Sidewinders! At any rate, I agree Jaguar is a dead sexy airplane- and while it's role may be somewhat limited (light strike/ CAS), and French Jaguars did the SEAD role (I know enough folk around here have clamoured for a SEAD bird!). At any rate, it's certainly less role-limited than the KA50 or A-10! Also, the over-wing heater rails are dead sexy ;)

I think you missed my point: my point was that operation Praying Mantis was at best a small skirmish, but the Georgian naval engagements were smaller still. That's not to say the Georgians were incompetent, or that they didn't fight well (everything I've read indicates they made a good show, considering how outmatched they were); just that they (wisely) opted not to sortie out to face down the Russian fleet!

That still doesn't counter what Ripcord was saying; it hardly counts as a naval war; it was a single, one-sided encounter with what amounts to a coast guard cutter. If you want to consider that a naval war, then the US Navy engaged in seaborne armageddon in 1988: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Praying_Mantis Funny, though, for a major naval engagement, most people (even in the US) aren't even aware it happened!

Of course they'd do everything they could to get rid of the bombs, but sometimes battle damage would prevent the bombs from dropping, and in the case of the Ploesti raid (the topic of the specific work I was citing), the bombers were flying at 50-200 feet AGL; if they had to ditch, they might not have time (or altitude) to dump the bombs.

Different case, though. I'm not sure about the B25, but I know that in the B24, the bombardier or flight engineer manually removed the arming wires from the bombs before starting the bombing run. This meant the bombs were live before dropping, and if they had to crash land with bombs still aboard after pulling the pins, chances were excellent they'd detonate. (Reference the book Into the Fire, about the Ploesti raid). So these bombs could have gone off from something hitting the fuse, not neccessarily from cooking off.

Worth noting: the US Navy EOD team that worked with my Troop in Iraq carried an M14 sniper rifle for the explicit purpose of detonating artillery shell IEDs. Basically, all the kinetic energy of the impact is turned into a shockwave and heat; this in turn detonates the explosive filler. Generally, artillery shells have a thicker casing than an aerial bomb, as they need to withstand higher pressures and accellerations. That said, using the 7.62x51mm round to detonate artillery shells was iffy, especially beyond 100 meters, where the bullet lost too much velocity and didn't have the kinetic energy to get the job done. 7.62x51mm usually resulted in a "low-order" detonation, where the explosive burned off/ created a weak explosion. Sometimes it will fail to ignite the explosives at all, and simply destabilizes them, which just makes it more dangerous for EOD to approach the explosive to place a demolition charge. For this reason, shooting at IEDs was generally frowned upon. I can say from personal experience that the kinetic energy from a .50 cal WILL detonate artillery shells, and will almost always go "high-order". It's worth noting that this only pertains to KE penetrating rounds (standard bullets), not explosive cannon fire, which likely does not have adequate penetration to pierce the bomb casing with enough force to detonate the explosives (I mean, unless we're talking 100mm AA fire... but at that point, it probably doesn't matter if the bomb detonates or not; the aircraft is done). It should also be noted that anything less than a 12.7 or 14.5mm round is highly, HIGHLY unlikely to retain enough velocity after reaching the aircraft.

Let me reiterate: the Iraqi tanks HAD power traverse. They chose not to use it. To use power traverse, they would have had to turn their engines on. Turning their engines on made them targets. They decided that the benefits of concealment outweighed the detriment of using manual traverse and instead laid ambushes with cold, engines-off tanks. I would imagine that they started up their engines after firing the first volley.

And that wasn't due to a fault of the tank design, it's because the Iraqis realized that if they turned their engines on, they would generate heat and be easier to see on thermals, so they laid in reverse-slope ambushes with manual cranked turrets to minimize thermal and acoustic signature. Anyone who blames Iraqi tactics for their sound trouncing in the tank battles needs to read up on it a bit: the Iraqis were actually pretty clever about it, using reverse-slope defenses to force the US tank forces to engage at close ranges and piecemeal (a few at a time as the US tanks crested ridges), where the disadvantages were minimized. Granted, the Iraqi T72s weren't Russian-spec, but I doubt their armor package was as bad as some make it out to be: US KE rounds were transiting from one end of the tank to the other and out that end too: I strongly suspect they'd have little trouble penetrating just ONE side of the Russian-spec tanks.

I suspect the reason the USAF doesn't use the 19-rocket pods in real life is because they also don't get much use out of unguided rockets in real life. As far as I'm aware (granted, I wasn't a JTAC, but I was CAS controller-qualified), the A-10 pretty much only uses WP rockets, and then only to mark targets when used in the AFAC role.

addressing the comment that no helicopter pilot would dare go offensive against a fast mover, I beg to differ: the helo pilot has to know he'll never outrun the jet, and he'll never outmaneuver it, so in that situation, you have two options: 1) dive and try to hide in terrain, or 2) turn and fill the air with lead and hope the jet jockey decides you're too risky a target to take on. If caught over flat terrain, or surprised at close range and unable to hide, they have little choice but to fight. It's either that, or wait to die. ...but yes, the AI helo pilots are unnaturally good gunners, and spot you way, way before they really should. And this goes for the Russian attack helos in DCS as well.

I have never noticed ANY mission where I had to micromanage SEAD or CAP packages. Ever. Yes, you have to (in some missions) tell the CAP/ SEAD when to push from their IPs. That's about it. And yes, it is entirely realistic. Air Force missions are almost never flown as a single-flight mission, they're flown as packages. So in DCS: A-10, the package is tasked to CAS. SEAD and CAP flights are then attached to the primary flight (the one doing the CAS: the A-10s). YOU are the package commander, as the CAS flight lead. So yes, you DO have to order the CAP and SEAD assigned to your package. If it makes it easier to accept, think of it this way: when you use the F10 menu to call CAS and SEAD, you aren't actually getting on the radio and saying "hey, CAS, go attack enemy aircraft" and "hey, SEAD, blow up some SAMs". You are actually saying "this is Tusk 2-2, pushing waypoint 3." All you're doing is letting the rest of the package know you're in position and that they can start doing their assigned tasks.

*lol* S'all good, poor choice of words on my part: "concentrate" would have sufficed and been much harder to misconstrue

No, I meant focus as in "paying attention to", not "bringing rays of light into alignment". My bad.

My first suggestion would just be: use CCRP. It's much easier with the CBU97. However, I can certainly understand how CCIP is desirable in many circumstances (like taking a "snap" shot at a target of opportunity). The problem is that when the bomb reaches it's function altitude and disperses the submunitions, they basically stop in midair and just float under the parachutes- so instead of having a nice parabolic arc trajectory all the way to the ground, the trajectory is a parabolic arc that suddenly stops and drops straight down. This means that the fire control computer calculates the impact point much further back, and therefore it's off the bottom of your HUD. One way to get around this is to lower your function altitude. This will make the bomb follow a ballistic arc for a longer period of it's descent, and therefore the point of impact will be farther "forward". I know a lot of folk around here advocate very high function altitudes for CBU97, on the theory it gives the submunitions wider dispersion, but my experience has been that in DCS they tend to just fall in perfect formation- so higher function altitudes don't really result in more dispersion, just more wind drift. Try 1200 or 900 foot function altitudes and see how that works out for you- though I seem to recall 900 gives a pretty tight grouping of submunitions.

I would suggest you research the definition of "ad hominem". Clue: that's it right there. You have ceased addressing the flaws of the argument (not that you really, at any point, have), and have instead resorted to name-calling. I would suggest this means that your argument cannot stand on it's own, and you now just feel all butthurt that no one agrees with you. Also, the name is OutOnTheOP, as in OBSERVATION POST, as in I was a Fire Support Officer, and the OP was my office. Points lost for reading comprehension. But, like I said: brick wall. I will not be wasting any more of my time on you. Enjoy your stay in your isolated little reality. Must get lonely in there.

What, Strawman got lonely and decided to invite his friend Ad Hominem? Nice, but pointless: also, read THAT post again, and you'll find that I did NOT; if you read the LOS thickness chart, it is for an IS3, NOT a T72. Funny enough, no one has yet presented a LOS thickness chart for the side of a T72 turret to refute it. But you don't seem to need proof in this post, why would you in any other? Wow... you have a real hard-on for the notion of some arbitrary altitude at which SAMs suddenly "become" lethal, as if breaching that altitude for a microsecond guarantees death. Have you ever thought that the safe altitude increases when in complex (masking) terrain, or that lower pop-ups minimize the time one spends at detectable altitudes? If you only pop above the radar horizon for 10 seconds, but it takes 15 seconds for the missile to get there, what do you think the SARH or command-guided missile will do for the last five seconds of it's time of flight? I'll give you a hint: it's not "shoot you down" That was supposed to be "more or less accurate"; my mistake. It was late, I just had surgery, and I'm tired. Wah. You DON'T pass the time by formulating testable experiments to prove or disprove your theories? But I thought science was on your side? Yes, from 20,000 feet. Again, the musket and the sniper rifle. Not even going to address your "critiques" of the postulated scenarios in which a HDGP bomb would be useful; your Reality Deflector Shield is much too effective It's like playing cops and robbers with a kid: "I shot you!" "no you didn't!" "yes I did!" I think everyone ELSE understands the logic in those scenarios. Eddie's right; discourse with you is less productive than talking to a brick wall.