Nerd1000

Should be the same as the 9M only with a smokey motor and slightly less CM resistance, right?

As winter says, the Russian ships that are in-game do not have missiles capable of hitting land targets- they're exclusively designed to attack other ships. If you want the red side to attack a point with cruise missiles your best bet is a Tu-95 bomber. IIRC it can carry eight of them, and they have rather long range.

dedicated AAA (particularly radar guided AAA) actually does have better aim than APCs against air targets, however it is offset by the fact that BMPs are typically clustered together in large groups.

I'm pretty sure the top speed and acceleration were fixed when 1.5 came out. To get back on topic, I can understand why merges might be a thing of the past for conventional fighters but I suspect that the same might not be true for stealth aircraft, assuming that both sides are using them. I doubt that even really advanced fighter based radars can see stealth aircraft at the kind of distances where a merge can always be prevented with BVR missiles, and even assuming you can detect the target there's no guarantee that your AIM-120 (with its much smaller radar) is going to track on a stealthy enemy. Of course modern tech means that any merge that does happen isn't going to develop into a old-school dogfight. Missiles like the AIM-9X and ASRAAM make maneuvering to lock your target irrelevant because you can shoot him even if he's behind you, and they're essentially impossible to dodge or spoof with current countermeasures. It will probably come down to who can get a lock and let off a missile first.

All helicopters require constant adjustment to stay in the air. Modern ones seem more steady because they have stability augmentation systems in the controls that damp out most oscillations. That kind of tech is not present on our '70s era Huey. Its all up to the pilot.

You're silly. Compared to the AIM-9M the R-3R has just over half the effective range, inferior turning and requires that the launching aircraft maintain radar lock until impact. Its only merits are all-aspect capability and ludicrous chaff rejection abilities, both of which you can exceed with an AIM-120C while also getting better range and fire-and-forget.

I imagine you'd need to wait until the ball on the turn and slip indicator returned to the centre.

Another bit of in-game strangeness with the JDAM (at least the GBU-38 model) is that it doesn't gain speed as it falls- it actually decelerates.

I volunteered at the Queensland maritime museum for a while. Of all their staff, only the CEO and (IIRC) the operations manager were paid. The rest worked for free either because they liked the cause (I was one of them) or to qualify for unemployment benefits.

check that your flaps are down 25 degrees.

Looks that way:

looks like an oil leak. Is the smoke issuing from the radiator cowl flaps?

you could try checking the radar altimeter, or even better setting the 'pull up' warning to 10m. That way when you hear the low altitude warning tone you know you are 10m above the ground and you need to reduce VV to 1-2 m/s.

Indeed, however without the engine the MiG will lose speed fast if you don't put it into a dive. The important thing is keeping the plane in the target speed range for re-light. Edit: The reason for the speed range is that then engine needs to spin freely from the airflow in order to re-light, as the MiG-21's starter motor is useless once you're in the air. There is one other thing you should be careful of: The mid-air relight system uses a bottle of compressed oxygen that is sufficient for 2-4 re-start attempts, depending on how long you leave the switch in the on position. Once that oxygen supply is depleted you won't be able to re-start the engine, so try to conserve it.

I might give this a go once I've got my portable recorder working (gotta find somewhere quiet to record without background noise). Do you like Australian accents?

Its pretty simple. Put the aircraft into a dive such that the airspeed indicator is >500 km/h and your mach number is less that 0.8. Set the throttle to idle. now throw the 'in-air restart' switch on the left hand side of the cockpit, aft of and above the gear lever. You should hear a whistling sound and see the engine RPM gauges start to increase. Once you reach idle RPM, advance the throttle a bit and turn off the in air restart switch. Then you can throttle up and pull out of the dive.

'T5' is the brand name of ED's in-development procedural terrain tech, as announced in their newsletter.

At 1700m/s the missile will cover 14.4km in a little over 8 seconds, not 1/8 of a second. This ignores the fact that the AIM-54C will not be traveling at mach 5 after its motor burns out.

The 'Sabre dance' is a different phenomenon, namely the outer part of a highly swept wing stalling before the inner part, causing the Aerodynamic centre of pressure to move forward. This results in an uncontrollable pitch up. In the situation I'm describing the pilot still has control of the plane but the outcome of control inputs may be counter intuitive (for example: pitching up increases rate of descent). You can see what happens when things go wrong under those flight conditions in this video: The F/A-18 shares some of the high AoA characteristics of a delta thanks to its LERX surfaces, which is why it is able to perform the high AoA low speed pass in the video. In this case, however, the pilot was too low to recover by lowering the nose and his attempt to power out of the 'hole' using afterburner was foiled by an engine failure. The asymmetric thrust then sent the plane into an unrecoverable spin.

by default: Tab for view chat and CTRL+Tab for the full chat menu that allows you to type stuff.

Deltas don't stall like aircraft with straight wings- on a straight wing, exceeding critical AoA tends to result in a rapid decrease in lift and a equally rapid increase in drag. Deltas don't lose lift as quickly, but the drag increases dramatically like on other wings. This means that it is possible to get into what I call 'the hole' where the aircraft is still under control and producing lift but the wing is making vast amounts of drag, so much that you might find yourself needing to use full dry thrust (or maybe even more!) just to maintain your current speed. The only way to escape is to lower the nose and accelerate or use full afterburner to power out of it. You should also keep in mind that there is a delay between increasing throttle and getting extra thrust, as the engine must spool up. Turbine engines tend to have poor throttle response when running at low speed, so if you're throttled back for landing there may be a considerable delay between moving the throttle lever forward and getting the commanded level of thrust. The situation has improved with newer engines. Some older jets had such bad throttle response at low power that pilots used the airbrakes for the entire approach so that the engines could be operated at high RPM.

I doubt you'd see much. If they're that keen on keeping it secret then most stuff would be either in hangers or underground to keep it hidden from spy satellites.

This mentions a VSL (vertical scan lock-on) mode.

The falcon would indeed be interesting, but I wouldn't want to face down anything more capable than an F-86 with it. It was notoriously bad compared to the AIM-9.

I've had crashes from the CBU-97, but only when I kill lots of enemies at once. Beats me why.