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Well not really, the toughest glass part is the one separating crew members - it's 1,75 inch thick, made to take a 23mm direct hit not killing both crew members (actually the gunner is pretty much screwed ;) ). The side acrylic panels are thin, something around half of inch thick, they have to be so thin for: a. do not bent the light, so a pilot can see through them without distortions b. for the emergency system to work - there is an detonation cord, that blew off all 4 side panels - so they can't bee to heavy - because that would need more explosives to blow them away - and more explosives may be a threat to the crew. Those side panels won't stop a rifle bullet, but have high chances of stopping low energy shrapnels from mortal grenades or missile fragmentation warheads. The main armor of the Apache cockpit are the ceramic plates in crew seats, floor, and some ballistic foam + Kevlar that the fuselage is filled with.

"Here comes the pins..." :music_whistling: Notice two interesting things on this AH-64DJP - 1. the new Arrowhead PNVS/TADS; and 2. the ATALs on wingtips. And Afghanistan:

That one wasn't so lucky

I'm from Poland, I know about it from stories etc. been living in rotorhead community my whole life (navy SAR and ASW).

No, we're not :smartass:

Welcome. It's great to have someone from Fort Rucker to visit this site, and to jab another pin into ED Voodoo doll, with words "Make us that God damn Apache, NOW!" :lol: The problem with Longbow is that there is not many reference material. As you probably know, all of the manuals regarding the Alpha Apache are available to the public free of charge. For the Delta there is non, a simple thing like representing pages of MFDs will be a pain in the butt, since there is so little data on that subject.

GGTharos, first - no glass is used in those sensors, the "windows" are made from artificially grown crystals. Second, those windows are mostly reaaaaally small, take a look at that picture representing PT-91 'Twardy' tank: Note those two vertical cylinders mounted in front of the turret - those are LWRs of 'Obra' self defense system.

Well Polish tanks have 'Obra' self defense system, that incorporates LWRs, so is the American AN/AAR-1, German LWS-300, Israeli LWS-2, Russian Shtora-1, etc. etc. etc. :smilewink:

Actually this might help, but remember you're in a helicopter... alone. You have to maintain hover probably in a tight spot with gusts of wind, watching for threats (no RWR or automated countermeasures). And you just don't have that much flexibility to manually control the sight. That's why Shkval is so automated, one person couldn't do all of this at once.

But it gives a lot of time for tank automated defenses to put a smoke/aerosol screen. Missile will miss, if launching-guiding platform will have to make a rapid move. The platform is always in LOS with the target - so it is detectable, and can be shot at in whole missile flight period of time. Etc Etc. That all summed up together make th Vikhr a good missile, only on quick and short strikes against targets without good defenses.

Actually ... all. The TADS suppose to have 15km engagement range, but that's purely theoretical. Humidity, earth curvature, air movement, fog, clouds, rain, etc. etc. all of these reduce the engagement range below 6km. I've seen some study on that material, and in central European environment (Germany, Poland, Czech, Slovakia, Hungary etc.) the engagement range for NV and IR based systems is as short as 4km for most the time of year, the punchline was to get hands on FCR based systems like W/AH-64Ds and AH-1Z.

No, actually the Vikhr can be 8 times cheaper :smilewink:. Hellfire costs around 47k USD, the Hellfire II costs around 64k USD, and the Longbow Hellfire is close to 100k USD (!). And the Vikhr costs only 12k USD :music_whistling: It's hard to compare both missiles though, the Vikhr was designed differently, it suppose to be cheap. The Hellfire supposed to be lethal, universal and independent from its launch platform. So the price tag represent it quite well.

The orders were changed many times, right now, the Mi-28 is the winner for the Russian attack helicopter, and the Mil is going to build 67 of them in next few years. The Ka-50 is actually halted - only those that production was started will be finished. And the Ka-52 is made by Kamov own money, exclusively for the foreign market (Ka-50-2 just lost in Turkey).

Exactly, T-72/80, M1, Challenger and Leclerc tanks armor was optimized against rounds fired by other tanks - not modern ATGMs

"Above" do not mean vertically, actually the trajectory was specially adapted to the T-72/80 family tanks, to be pretty much perpendicular to the tank turret armor curvature to achieve maximum performance. I modified a bit the diagram of LOBL trajectory, and it would look something like this: So yes, the LOAL are pretty flat... on maximum range !

Well take a closer look at those charts, the X and Y axes are not in the same scale.

The Hellfire have 9kg tandem shaped charge warhead, so it should do the same damage as Vikhr. Yet when fired in one of three* LOAL modes it will hit tank from above, the Vikhr, since it's a beam riding missile, will always fly to its target in straight line, like TOW or HOT. You can't fire Vikhr without locking on target, and firing your laser, so after launching missile, you pretty much have to sit in one place (or fly toward the target) for the whole missile flight time. When firing Hellfire, even in LOBL mode, you can do actually anything, as far as you don't brake TADS LOS. In LOAL you can fire few missiles for behind the cover, pop up and in last second aim them on few different targets. That's when we talk about the laser hellfires, the AGM-114L is a whole different story, actually each Apache can fire 16 L-Hellfires almost at once, each at different target, and that particular Apache don't even need to have the FCR - it can fire missiles at data-linked targets. Not even seeing them before. *LOAL have three submodes: LOAL-DIR, LOAL-LO and LOAL-HI

Hehehe, actually if you read Robart Manson's book "Chickenhawk" you would know that in Vietnam, they landed Hueys in a shallow river and let the kids from nearby town/village do that 'dirty' job :smilewink: BTW it's an excellent book, I highly recommend it to any rotorhead.

Well I keep finding things on my hard drive...

The problem with transport aircraft is... they actually can't work in environment where there are almost no troops, or the troops AI is nonexistent. To implement choppers like UH-60, Mi-171, OH-6, MH-53 etc. there has to be done troops AI, at least ArmA-type level. There is no point in flying BlackHawk from point A to point B just avoiding threats, there have to be deeper meaning to this, and some sort of gratification - let it be the sight of crowded LZ with troops realistically interacting with each other and helicopters. A lot of hard work, and then a lot of CPU power will have to be spend on doing this.

Well they probably should split into 3 teams - one making the engine modifications - that "ground work", and the two other would be responsible for the helicopters and fixed planes :D Well if done after the AH-64A, the Kiowa is not 9 months material, actually what should took longest amount of time should be the 3D modeling, all the data are available, even more then there is needed. Yet, most other choppers would be serious problem since they're so different, and also finding an opposite to Kiowa might be hard. From one point it should be an Ka-29, but it's not really in the same class. The problem probably is that Crimean conflict itself, if we move it somewhere else - let's say Africa, or South America, then we could throw other equipment, like Eurocopter Fennec.

I would :pilotfly: Nice, small, fast and very agile helicopter... and only one in ARMY (except SOARs MH-60s) which fly with ATAS on daily basis :music_whistling: Can you spell D-O-G-F-I-G-H-T ? :smartass:

Not much sense doing troop transport in flight sim, it would be just damn boring. The transport helos should be left to FPS games like ArmA where they truly belong.

In BS, from what I saw in videos and screenshots its really nicely made. Yet why is it black&white ? Every Russian NVG and NV scope I saw working (mostly gen. 1 and 2), was just like western - greenish. But in BS we have NVGs - the view point is the same, and is based on what pilot see anyway (only greenish and way brighter - that's the way NVG work). For PNVS - first the overlapping view is further away, and what it sees (IIR) is not rally what the game normally generates. Actually, for those that do have Flaming Cliffs. The IHADSS would be an image like that from Mercury FLIR Pod, but shaped similarly like the BS NVG, with all the stuff I mentioned earlier. And by the way I think that ED, when working on the new engine, should take special care of the IR image. It will need probably some sort of additional maps for objects - thermal maps, that would specify how things would look like in IR - which part should be hotter, which one should cool faster than other, plus visible in IR vapor and exhaust, etc. Just look on youtube for FLIR videos for what it should look like.