whiteladder

Been playing the DCS Mig 21 a lot recently, which was enough inspiration to make this.

I`m more than a little jealous!!! Should be a great day

Nothing new, I think they spend the summer offering the Taxi Rides to raise money and the winter doing more restoration work. They are also in the very early stages of rebuilding a Hampden, which was pretty interesting to see.

Visited the Museum at East Kirkby in Lincolnshire last week and got a couple of videos of them starting the engines of the Lancaster.

Scoggs and Elchacal thank you thats very kind of you to say. I have 3 weeks off work due to a knèe operation, i'm considering what to do next. I have a 1/ 32 f-18c hornet that would look good all weathered up. I also have a couple of fw 190, a D9 and F8 version.

You should definetely do it, I hadn`t built an aircraft for ages, mostly been painting figures. It was a lot of fun.

Cheers, tricky to say how long its been a bit of a stop start project. Not helped by me starting the paint scheme and then finding out the company that make the decals I was going to use no longer exists.

Finally got around to finishing this.

Their was a documentary on the UK forces channel recently that had Flt. Lt. R. Stewart and Flt. Lt. D. Waddington talking about their experiences of getting shot down in Tornado ZA396/GE, during the first gulf war. The ejection site has them being hit by a Sam 7, they were actually hit by a Roland fired at extremely short range. After the war the cockpit voice recorder was recovered, they play the audio on the program, pretty incredible stuff. Their high speed ejections cause multiple fractures/dislocations, and they had a pretty rough time at the hands of their interrogators. 2 Very Brave men.

Ditto:thumbup: If you need a navigator let me know.:matrix:

Maverick, do you use Track Ir? SA is one of the thing I struggle with.

Great find, I have only read the British chapter so far. Some of the facts are a little suspect though. It states in that chapter that the British were only able to operate 5 Wah-64 from HMS Ocean, because their foot print was too large and the AH64 doesn`t have folding blades. But British 64`s do have folding blades, and are designed for maritime operations with floation bags etc. The actual reason for the number is that 665 Squadron happened to be on HMS Ocean qualifying for full ship ops off Gibraltar and had 5 aircraft with them. Apache with rotor folded. This gives the Apache roughly the same Deck Footprint of a Folded Merlin helicopter or Sea King. The Apache is slightly longer (17.76 meters vs 16.9) and larger (5.5 against 5.2). The folding rotor speeds up and eases also air transportation within cargo planes such as the C17.

Dan Hampton also talks about MIDS-LVT(1) in his book "Viper Pilot" again there is certainly enough info from that source to infer how it is used in combat.

I agree there is plenty of open source info to make a good stab at it. In David Gledhill Tornado F3: A Navigator's Eye on Britain's Last Interceptor there is a good photo of the plan display with the JTIDS contacts

You know what I think you are probably right, especially landing lights, they would make a pretty good IR source( and probably heat the surrounding airframe too).

Airframe heating and earthshine(especially at low altitude) are more likely to provide the main source of IR radiation, especially in the 8-12um band. In fact Aluminium gallium Arsenide and Mercury Cadmium Telluride detectors are inherently immune to point sources.

Does anybody remember a documentary from the 1980`s about a guy called Bob Diemert. The main focus of it was him restoring a A6 zero for the Confederate Air Force, but also a project of his own to develop a low cost ground attack aircraft, the concept wasn`t a million miles from this. I don`t think it worked very well I think it was called "The Defender"

These are quite useful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEatUIZzO_o Especially the tip about looking for land marks only near the time you expect to see them.

This reminded me of a good point, although the simulations have improved beyond belief, the documentation (in general) has gotten worse. When most games started to be sold in DVD cases and not boxes, thick paper manuals disappeared. I still have the manuals for some of my old flight simulators, they are actually pretty good books in their own right. The falcon 4 manual is an excellent source for tactics.

One of the best games ever made! Durandal attacks on Airfields deep behind enemy lines happy days.:) The dynamic campaign was way ahead of its time, one of the first games where you could assign wingmen separate tasks with TOT. Persistent damage between missions. You could set the game up with 2 joystick, one for the control column and the other for the throttle, again way ahead of anything else at the time. Also one of the first flight sims with polygon graphic, when most still had vector. Digital Integrations finest hour.

This site has more details: http://www.vintagewings.ca/VintageNews/Stories/tabid/116/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/448/Biplane-Hurricane.aspx

Me too, although I had the zx81 version which was black and white!! I had to buy a 16K memory expansion to run it (the onboard memory was 1K which was good for about 100 lines of code)

1 That's kind of you to say. It's a Revell kit that I had in my stash for years, unfortunately it's not a easy build or very accurate. None of the main parts fit correctly, so there is lots of filling and sanding to be done. Also the kit is supposed to be a F-15E, but when Revell released it back in the 1980's the E was only a prototype. The production E was significantly different, so I built it as a F-15D. It's still not completely right, it has the E cockpit.

Just in the process of finishing a 1/32 F15 Aggressor. Have been running in oil paint wash into the panel line this afternoon . Have also been scratch building the tank, need to do a bit more filling.