Tirak

Yeah, it's really kind of sad to see one of the best modules slowly turn into a hanger queen. Hopefully she'll get past these problems soon.

Hate to bust your bubble here Sierra, but that is some Grade A bullshit right there. Shrinking military budgets in general given the lack of a credible hostile power lead to the truncation of the F-22 production line. The F-35 fills more roles, is cheaper to build, and cheaper to maintain. The F-35 isn't going anywhere. It's a multinational project and we're using it to replace our F-18s, AV-8Bs, F-15s, F-16s, and to your personal chagrin, the A-10. The F-22 only was slated to replace the F-15. Unless the Air Force is about to get a huge infusion of capital, the odds of seeing any real movement on this are poor at best, and even if it does go forward, it will not impact F-35 numbers, since without them, we don't have a tactical strike fleet, and you wouldn't want the grunts on the ground to suddenly find themselves without CAS now would you? :music_whistling:

Congress asking for a feasibility report means very little in the grand scheme of things. Supporting an expanded fighter fleet of aircraft that are not particularly maintenance light simply isn't in the budget moving forward. The Air Force already is suffering a personnel shortage thanks to meddling from Congress in its programs. In order to take on another few hundred airframes, they'll need to open the trough again and need several years lead in time to train personnel. It frankly makes more sense to either wait for the Gen6 Fighter, or invest in an F-35D, as it already is designed for easier maintenance, and maintains congruity in the fighter fleet. The line for that can much more easily be adapted and an upgraded version could come online far sooner than another F-22 could come out. The service that really needs financial attention is the Navy, not the Air Force, as much as it galls me to say that.

Budgets are set by congress, not the president, him changing will have little effect on what gets funded and what does not. The USAF already is being put under immense strain personnel and finance wise thanks to congress mandating military programs that were originally slated to end. The F-22 is already lagging in systems such as HMCS and the ability to use its Sidewinders off bore. So you're not just dusting things off, you're implementing an upgrade program too. And researching it. And certifying it. Congress won't foot the bill. The more cost effective route is to try to expedite the Bloc 5 F-35s, as it will give them the same BVR punch while also expanding the tactcal attack fleet.

Congress isn't ponying up the cash to support the current Air Force, why the hell do people think they'll pay for restarting the Raptor line? :doh:

RWR is hardly a magic bullet, it most certainly does not give you perfect knowledge about what's looking at you. After all, one of the reasons the AMRAAM is so effective is you don't get a warning until it goes pitbull. The Tomcat also uses the TWS mode, and will use it from an even greater range. I don't know about you, but I don't see a whole lot of people rolling and dodging while cruising out to the target.

Please, at least put some effort into dismissing the experiences of an entire air force who managed to generate such a fear of the Tomcat, that by the time we rolled around, Iraqi fighters would flee without engaging our own tomcats. Common tracts in this don't go after missile effectiveness, because even if we assume huge markups, we come to an intimidating weapon that was used successfully against fighters, but rather they point out that the aircraft being fired at lacked the standard warning devices commonly found on more modern aircraft, i.e. RWR. The miss was after a Sparrow and an AMRAAM had also been fired at the target and failed to connect. The firing probability on the aircraft, who had gone hard defensive at long range and was burning the hell out and forcing extreme angle shots, was so poor, any missile would have missed. To claim it is representative of the Phoenix's performance is laughable at best. The missile failing to fire was, as I already wrote, a mistake made by the maintenance personal, who failed to remove the arming pins prior to launch, not a problem with the missile at all. An interesting note as to your timeframe of course being that during Vietnam, the period where BVR use would have been most prolific, and the last major air war the US fought prior to ODS, pilots were prohibited from taking BVR shots without visually identifying the target, a rather interesting contradiction. This requirement remained as US SOP due to the lack of sufficient electronic ID equipment, and a lack of an all out shooting war, that would allow for free engagement at long range. The Gulf War saw with it the integration of AWACS, which allowed pilots to know who they were shooting prior to launch, finally opening up the BVR envelope, not because the missiles prior to then were incapable, but because their punch exceeded their sight. This is a problem with informational support, not an issue with the missile's effectiveness as a pure weapon. Several things here, first and foremost, the Phoenix and the Sparrow cover a near 30 year period of employment and upgrade, to claim they are contemporaries is correct to a point, but in terms of range and capability they are vastly different. Furthermore, you cite the often mentioned Vietnam accuracy numbers, which suffer from several major issues when talking about our current topic. 1. The AIM-54C (ECCM), which is the variant we should be using as by the point in time both Tomcat's we're getting this was the only version in use, is a late 80s derived missile, with advanced seeker heads compared to earlier generations, and is leagues above where the AIM-7E-2s, the ones used at the end of Vietnam, were at. Attempting to compare them is on par with calling the AIM-9B and AIM-9Ms contemporary weapons. 2. Despite improvements, especially on the Navy side of the fence, airman training for employment of these weapons was insufficient, especially for the Air Force. The great number of AIM-7 Sparrow shots were taken far outside their operational capability, and while the "dogfight" Sparrow gave greater reliability, the missiles in the 70s, a good decade and a half before when our AIM-54Cs were being used, suffered from reliability issues due to the poor climate. Again, the Navy suffered less from this, and their F-4Js, which lacked a gun, had superior kill ratios to the Air Force F-4Es which did, rather making it clear that training is better than equipment. 3. The AIM-7 Sparrow in its Vietnam iteration, was operated by F-4 Phantoms, an aircraft which lacked pilot aids to ensure an optimal launch. The only thing they had was an "In Range" light, which illuminated when the distance between the radar and the target was a certain mile distance away. It did not take into account maneuvering or relative velocities, so even if it had been possible to fire at BVR, the pilots had no way of knowing when they had a good shot or not. I'd like to again point out your remark about few "Verifiable" BVR kills. It's important to not the Verifiable part of that, as prior to use of AWACS and other more modern Battle Space Control elements, the primary means of verification was with your eyes, something impossible when operating at Beyond Visual Range. And finally, the AIM-54 proved in tests to be surprisingly maneuverable against active targets so long as its motor was still burning. When fired in this "dogfight mode", the long running motor burned all the way into target and could, because of having a still thrusting engine, make some fairly impressive turns. While maneuverability suffered at long range, when operating in those conditions, surprise was the key, as the Iranians demonstrated. Even if the missile is easy to dodge, that fact does you no good if you don't know it's coming in time.

The misfires were caused by maintenance problems, not because of an issue with the missile, The safety pins had not been removed, resulting in failed launches. Furthermore, the AIM-54 was demonstrated against maneuvering fighter sized target drones as well as non maneuvering targets, and were used to devastating effect in actual combat during the Iran/Iraq war.

Well if you wanted, you could roll with 6 sparrows, 4 on the belly, two on the wing gloves, and 2 sidewinders. I'll be interested to see though, if Phoenix's aren't banned from servers, if we'll see all Phoenix loadouts, or mixes like 4 PH 2SP 2SW, or 2PH 4SP 2SW.

We'll have to find a MiG-21 pilot to test it against since once the Tomcat goes live, i expect that'll be the only plane I fly :lol: I'm a little worried though as to LN's approach to weapons capabilities. All the test squadron weapons are out, but I wonder if the MER loadouts are out as well, and furthermore, if they're not, will we be able to roll in with more than just 4 GBUs? I'm afraid I've become a bit spoiled by BMS Israel's Sufa, so bringing only 4 GBUs or 2 GBUs and 2 CBUs feels a bit anemic for mud moving.

That's the whole point of these missions, it's to show off and pretend like you're attacking to say "We're not, but we could if we wanted to." The thing is, everyone involved knows they're playing the same game, so there's no real danger of weapons getting fired. You can tell by the Captain's remarks that he's not bothered by the runs themselves, he's annoyed that they interrupted his deck drill, something further reinforced by the quote by the retired captain, no one's scared here and this isn't really out of the ordinary, they're just irritated that the smooth running of drills has been interrupted.

I have to disagree with you concerning the Tomcat without LANTIRN and the MiG-21. The MiG can roll in and engage an entire column by bringing along with it rocket pods. It can go after enemy shipping with its Kh-66s, and has cluster munitions to boot. The Tomcat can only bring dumb bombs, and I don't believe I've ever seen it carry clusters. Without LANTIRN, and given the size of the map on which we play, anything the Tomcat can do in the strike role, the MiG can actually do better because it can pick the better weapon for the job. With LANTIRN, the Tomcat becomes more flexible as it opens up high altitude precision strike, and LGBs are better at hitting moving targets than anything the MiG can muster. However the Tomcat as far as I'm aware, could only carry 4 GBUs, as I have never seen the Tomcat in a configuration hauling a greater number of GBU-12s or 54s, which really restricts how much damage a Tomcat can do during a strike. I'm not even really certain if we'll see a Tomcat configuration in which it hauls as many Mk. 82s as it can, given that I don't believe that was ever actually used, and there is a vocal minority of rivet counters here who are adverse to... i'll be nice and say extrapolation.

At this point, we still don't know if LANTIRN will be included, so as of right now, the Tomcat is slated to be less multirole than that MiG-21, as the Tomcat can't carry air to ground missiles like the Kh-66, and can't use rockets.

A prediction creates expectation, and LN rather desperately needs to stop creating expectations it can't meet. They may want to target the end of year as a release date, but we're way too far out to make that kind of prediction. And given we're now 7 months behind on the Viggen announcement, managing expectations should be one of Cobra's primary goals, at least until he can start making his predictions with some accuracy and on a consistent basis.

No, the article does not explicitly link the two. While the phrasing "toward the end of the year and the inevitable release", does imply a link, the connecting article "and" does not require a link between two things when used like this in list form. (Ex, apples and nuclear weapons). While Cobra has stated in the past his hopes for specific release time windows, using this article to infer one wouldn't be technically correct.

Alright mate, put the tin hat away. The tomcat is what you might call very popular, announcing it as their next big project created a huge amount of buzz for LN, but it's also a way down the line project. The Viggen is not nearly as popular and was supposed to come out last year. As such, when they announced the Viggen, they wanted to do it with a lot of fanfare, videos, pictures, FAQs ect, because unlike the tomcat, who's name itself generates hype, the viggen was going to have to be sold to people. Delays in the project due to whatever reason have forced them to push back their schedule. They still want to do that big fanfare announcement, they're just not as ready as they thought they were, and since everyone already knows its the Viggen, they might as well wait for the announcement to be the big show they wanted it to be.

Seems like the guncross is gonna be pretty useless if it lags that badly.

I would caution them against that given how spectacularly the "I want to Believe" post by rudel blew up in their faces.

Don't ask. Officially the announcement was supposed to happen in August of 2015. They stopped giving ETA's a few months back, for the better. Sit back, relax, and be pleasently surprised when the announcement actually come. Only madness and rage lie in the direction of asking LN for ETAs.

Why would you think this? :huh:

Matra's are RAZBAM's missiles, the normal are ED. The ED ones are unrealistic bricks. Always choose the Matras.

A-1: Single Engine A-4: Single Engine A-5: Twin Engine A-6: Twin Engine A-7: Single Engine F-8: Single Engine F-4: Twin Engine F-14: Twin Engine F-18: Twin Engine F-35 Single Engine A list of navy attack and fighter aircraft since the Vietnam War. As you can see, the Navy hops back and forth between twin and single engines constantly. If we extend this list back to WWII, the number of single engine aircraft vastly outweighs multi engine. Even when engine reliability was suspect, the Navy had no problem trusting single engine aircraft, the operative requirement was power. Modern engines are vastly more reliable, and with the advanced monitoring and management systems on the F-35, engine reliability post testing phase is projected to be very good.