Nerd1000

That isn't the full story. +25lbs boost significantly enhances performance below the original full throttle height but has little effect above the original FTH. This is why the +25lbs Spitfire's listed top speed isn't much higher than that of the +18lbs version. Closer examination will reveal that the +25lbs plane is able to achieve its top speed at significantly lower altitudes, which closes the gap with the K-4 pretty nicely in a low level dogfight. That said, the Mk IX is certainly no match for the K-4 at medium to high altitudes regardless of what fuel it is burning.

It's odd that nobody ever mentions the R-27 series's enormous smoke trail as a disadvantage in combat. A R-27 is certainly far more conspicuous than a AIM-9M or AIM-120 at close range...

The MiG already has a dedicated vodka tank (I believe it is labelled 'radar coolant' but that's obviously a cover for its real purpose).

The spitfire ED is making uses the merlin 66 with 18 lbs of boost, so its behaviour in terms of WEP should be almost identical to the Mustang. The spit does have a different radiator installation though. Would be nice to find out how the two differed in cooling performance in a dogfight.

Note the altitude and mach number. 0.9M is rather fast for a turning fight, don't you think? Makes me wonder whether it is relevant in the slightest.

So you're saying that the flanker might have reach, but the f-15 has flexibility?

Depends on conditions. It might well have a shorter detection range than the human eye (with caveats- see below) in broad daylight. I should note at this juncture that the human eye only has high-resolution imaging in the central 3 degrees or so of its field of view. Its resolution outside that narrow region is not good enough to read this post, which is why your eyes are scanning along this line from left to right instead of staying focused on the middle of the screen. There is also a blind spot (around 12 degrees to the side and 1.5 degrees below the centre of your FoV) corresponding to the place where the optic nerve passes through the retina (because the nerve cells that pick up signals from the retina are rather illogically positioned in front of the light sensitive cells). AFAIK you don't normally notice it because your brain 'fills in' the blind spot using information from the other eye.

Okay, here goes: Location: Brisbane, Australia (UTC +10) Language: Australian English Other languages: none Accent: General Australian. Experience: no VA experience, some experience in production of radio news material (including voice-over, sound design and writing). Recording equipment: Steelseries gaming headset with external sound card, Olympus VN-712PC portable voice recorder. Might be able to get temporary access to a sound booth and some professional gear (depends on university admin). Kind of voice: Male, mid-to-high pitch.

600-800 degrees C is for 'dry' exhaust. Light up the afterburner and you're looking at exhaust temperatures greater than 2000 degrees C. For this reason, afterburner designers go to great lengths to direct a portion of the exhaust from the back of the turbine into a perforated liner on the inside of the tailpipe. This liner distributes the gas around to cool and insulate the tailpipe and nozzle while the afterburner is running- otherwise those parts would melt in the heat of the afterburner flame. IRST isn't magic, but a jet engine is a really strong IR source. This is unavoidable because of the laws of thermodynamics. What saves you from being seen at massive BVR ranges is the fact that air absorbs IR radiation, particularly in certain parts of the spectrum.

You may be thinking of active cooling for electronic systems inside the jet. AFAIK this relies on the fuel system: essentially the aircraft uses the fuel tanks as heat sinks. From there the heat is dumped into the combustion chambers of the engine(s). This is necessary because it's pretty hard to cool your CPU with 800 km/h airflow. You can actively cool the surfaces of the jet if you want, but nothing will hide the plume of >800 degrees C exhaust gas that you're shooting out of your tailpipe. The only thing you can do is put something between the IR source and your enemy- hence the YF-23's exhaust trenches, intended to reduce its IR signature when viewed from below. I'm fairly certain that modern imaging IR sensors are good enough to see the plume expanding out behind your jet even if you are flying straight towards the sensor with your fuselage blocking line-of-sight to the exhaust itself- so sneaking up on the F-35 will be challenging, to say the least. That's not to say it won't happen, of course.

I dunno if it's since been fixed, but it used to affect the MiG-21. The tail fin would disappear beyond a certain distance, which greatly reduced the plane's profile from the side and made it much harder to see from those angles. I've noticed some other planes that have LoDs that are smaller or are a different shape from what they should be. A minor example is (IIRC) the F-15: beyond a certain distance the wing trailing edges become straight and the wingtips become parallel rather than their proper pointed shape. This makes it much harder to tell apart from something like a Flanker when viewed from above. Many planes will also apparently lose their weapons and change paint scheme at longer distances. An example of some related silliness: the B-52's long distance LoDs don't have damage states, which may cause a double take if you shoot a B-52's wing off and then the wing magically re-appears once you get further away. I suspect that this affects many fighters as well but because they are so tiny compared to a heavy bomber you don't normally notice.

I don't understand. What's wrong with using 100% of the engine power available to your plane when you need it? Should I dogfight in the F-15 without employing the afterburner? Should german fighters fly with mw50 tanks empty?

I'm curious as to how the C-3 injection worked. As I understand it the 801 already ran on C-3 fuel, so the only reason I can think of for injecting more of it would be that the engine is capable of burning more fuel than the original injection system could provide. Obviously the additional fuel would also carry some charge cooling effect, but that is useless if you end up making the mixture so rich that the engine loses power. Am I on the right track here?

25lbs can be used for as long as the pilot desires, but the longer it is used the higher the chance of overheating and/or engine failure (the Merlin 66 was designed to withstand making 1710hp, not 2000hp!). To conserve the lifespan of the engine, pilots were instructed to only use it for 5mins at a time. It's a similar story with the Bf109 K-4 and Fw190D-9's water methanol injection AFAIK. The manual says 5 or 10 minutes followed by some cooldown period (I'm sure Kurfurst knows the exact limit for each engine configuration), but there is no physical barrier to using MW50 injection continuously until the MW50 tank is empty- they just discourage this to avoid unduly wearing out the engine.

That tail warning radar is quite handy.

It should be pretty obvious how the charts work. They're cumulative graphs- each coloured band shows the production of a specific model, and the bands are 'stacked' on top of each other such that top of the highest band shows the combined production of all 2-stage Merlin Spitfires (except the Mk X and XI) or 109s for that unit time. Now in this case Kurfurst hasn't presented the data as well as he could have. There's no reason to believe that the rate of production of every model changed linearly between the measured time points, so a line type graph is a little deceptive in that it implies that he has data between the time points listed on the x-axis. A bar graph would have been better. In addition, the two graphs have different scales on both the X and Y axes, making it much more difficult to compare them to each other. A much bigger issue is the fact that Kurfurst did not include the photo-recon versions of the Spitfire (The photo-recon Bf109G-6/R2 and G-8 are by contrast included in the 109 graph) or any Griffon powered Spitfires, which makes a true comparison of Spitfire production vs. Bf109 production a little difficult to carry out using only the data presented. The omission of Griffons is rather like making a graph of Bf109 production 1939-1943 and not including the G models because they used the DB605 rather than the DB601.

Fighting AI I presume? Player planes can't get the R-60 to lock from the frontal aspect. I've used them against both A-10s and the FC3 fighters. Seems to be a one hit kill against the Flanker and the Eagle, but the A-10 can often absorb 2 or 3 before going down. I've not hit a Mirage with an R-60 yet, but a friend of mine did get a hit with a R-3R a while back. The Mirage lost his nose cone but was still able to fly back to base (he crash landed later). Mi-8 has silly levels of durability. I've seen it survive crashes that should have reduced it to a burning wreck with only broken landing gear and damage to the rotor blade tips. It's like the fuselage is made of rubber and just bounces off the ground if you crash.

They wouldn't stop flying the 109, they'd just dredge up every anecdote of a Spitfire breaking down they could find on the internet and 'make the case' that the spitfire's reliability should be reduced to 70%. Then Spitfire fans bring up the Nazi use of forced labor, Kurfurst appears to say something about the effects of 25lbs boost on Spitfire serviceability, and from there (via 15 pages of arguing) the thread somehow ends up being about the unreliability of the Panther Tank's transmission.

A head to head joust where he's got 8 BVR missiles and I've got 2 sidewinders with SARH heads? I'm dead anyway. Cranking just delays the inevitable- better to just burn in and hope he's preoccupied with something else for the time it takes to get into missile range. Naturally this would never work if AMRAAMs had realistic range and the average sim pilot had real fighter pilot level multitasking and SA. It doesn't work most of the time, particularly if there aren't any hills to hide behind. But here are the facts: if I burn straight in I die. If I crank I die. If I turn and run I die (F-15 and Flanker are both faster than me). Under those conditions the best choice I have is to roll the dice and hope my enemy screws up. And if this were real life? I wouldn't be taking off, because a) I'd just get shot down and b) chances are that a F-15E dropped a bunch of CBU-87s on the airfield and my plane is a burning wreck regardless.

I never crank... but I fly the MiG-21, so maximum closure to get my crappy little missiles in range is a priority.

I think you place the CCIP pipper on the target by entering a dive, then hold the bombs release button and pull up into level flight, still holding in the bombs release. The HUD will then give you cues on how to steer so that the bombs will land on the target, and when the time is right it will drop them automatically. You should check the manual to confirm that I've got it right, as I don't fly the Su-25T.

I think the first line is maximum range and the second line is effective range- the enemy needs to be closer than the second line for the missile to have a good chance of scoring a hit. Shots from further than the second line will only hit if your enemy is nice enough to keep on flying towards you, so they are more for scaring your opponent and forcing him to turn, potentially putting you in a better position for a follow up shot.

Assuming your target doesn't fly in a straight line after being fired upon, your missile will need to turn in order to get a reasonable miss distance, correct? A higher top speed is also good, of course, but the higher the speed the greater the proportion of your rocket's mass has to be fuel (this quickly gets out of hand). That's literally what I said. Sadly, rocket engines have mass that you need to account for. The SA-2 and SA-3 are throwbacks to the '60s and would have long since been replaced with smaller, more mobile systems if the countries that operated them could afford it. Of note is that in spite of its 200 kg warhead, the Guideline's average miss distance was greater than the lethal radius of its explosion. You can easily see the pattern even in your own examples: the missiles reduced in size until it was enough to get a 60-70 kg warhead to the desired range/altitude/speed with the available level of technology. More recent missiles are smaller and lighter again. Consider the RIM-162 Sea Sparrow: similar range to the SA-11, but less than half the total weight and a lighter 40kg warhead. If you want a huge warhead on your SAM, the MIM-14 Nike Hercules would be your best option: it weighs 4.8 tonnes, goes nearly mach 4, has a very long range and high ceiling and its payload is either a 500kg HE-frag or a 20kt nuclear bomb. The Americans, fools that they are, replaced it with the much smaller, lighter and more maneuverable Patriot. Why can't SAMs benefit from the same technological advances too?

Yes, the Tu-95 'bear'. It's roughly comparable to the B-52.

SACLOS as in optical tracking by a gunner looking through a scope? Or do you mean ACLOS guidance as seen in the likes of the 50 year old SA-2 or SA-3 systems? You can't solve every maneuverability problem by just adding a bigger warhead. The reason for this is pretty simple- the bigger the warhead, the bigger the missile you need to propel it to the target. Few armed forces would purchase a SAM that required a 20 tonne truck to transport and fire a single round, which is why you're not likely to see a SAM system with a missile the size of a Scud (a 1000kg warhead ought to solve all maneuver problems, yes?). YOu could scale this back a bit by replacing the traditional chemical explosive with a small nuclear bomb, but that's another can of worms.