arneh

That's not quite true, the seats have fairly thick kevlar armor along the sides up to about shoulder height. But the head is still exposed:

I really hope they model rain on the canopy. EECH does, and it is truely one of the most immersive effects in the sim. It's just so cool when the windows clog up and you have to use the wipers :) A tiny detail, but adds so much immersion! You can see EECH's rain at about 7:40 in this video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=fh8ue70sDXQ Edit: another EECH video with rain/wipers http://youtube.com/watch?v=TxXnnPz0adE

I'm pretty sure rotor RPM stays constant, and that it rather increases collective on one rotor and decrease on the other. That way one rotor will create more torque than the other and the helicopter will turn. Increasing/decreasing rotor RPM takes too long and makes for sluggish controls, it is much faster to change collective.

I would have to say modern avionics means basicly a 'glass cockpit', i.e. that it primarily uses MFDs and not so much analog gauges. So all the new aircraft you mentioned, do of course have modern avionics. But also older aircraft like the F-16, F/A-18 and Mirage 2000 may qualify (this is not a hard classification, there are degrees of "modernity". And I'm not going to get into an argument over exactly which aircraft are modern or not, these are just examples). Don't misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm not claiming ED should model only aircraft with modern avionics. Quite the contrary, I'm saying that they've always modeled aircraft with fairly old-style avionics, so the fact the the Hind doesn't have modern avionics is not in itself a reason why ED won't model it.

Then compare it to the Su-25, and tell me how much more modern it is compared to the Mi-24. Sorry, I just don't buy that ED has a policy of only modelling modern aircraft, and hence wouldn't even consider the Hind. Not that I think it's likely they will model the Hind, but it's not because of some "only modern aircraft" policy. And I wouldn't say the A-10A or AH-64A has modern avionics by any standard...

Looking at their history they certainly do model old stuff. Apart from the Ka-50 and Su-25T pretty much all aircraft they've model have been 20 years or older. AH-64A: early 80s A-10A: late 70s F-15C: late 70s Su-25: early 80s Mig-29: early 80s Su-27: mid 80s Having a Mi-24V or Mi-24P from the early 80s wouldn't be out of place among those aircraft.

That's not quite true, you can still autorotate normally without a tail rotor (well turning is going to be a bit harder). So shouldn't be much worse than losing all engine power, although that is of course also pretty bad, particulary at hover/slow speed and low altitude. But you can make a fairly smooth, none-crashy landing. And you're not just a passenger on the way to a crash landing which you seem to imply.

I had such great memories with the old DI sims, so I would like a simulated Tornado or Hind again! Not that I think it's likely I'll get my wish (well, the Hind I guess I can do myself, but the Tornado...).

Read the article. "The Shtora-1 system comprises four key components,[...] a laser warning system with precision and coarse heads"

From wikipedia: Shtora (Russian: Штора, ‘curtain’) is a Russian electro-optical active protection suite for tanks, designed to disrupt the laser target designation and rangefinders of incoming anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs). The system is mounted on the Russian T-80 and T-90 series tanks, the Ukrainian T-84, and the Serbian M-84AB1.

Those charts are pretty accurate (although they are for the A-model of the Hellfire, the later models use a flatter trajectory to help keep them out of clouds when there is low cloud cover). The Hellfire has a capability of climbing above a 1000 ft obstacle if fired from 1500 meters away in LOAL-HI mode, so that's not a very steep climb, just a little over 20% (which of course is still pretty steep, but maybe not as much as it looks like when viewed from behind where it looks like you're launching a satelite or somehing :) ). Relativly, but keep in mind that it is much steeper toward the end of the flight, as it dives toward the target. It hits the target in a fairly steep dive, which is significantly less armour to penetrate. We had some interesting discussion around this when I implemented the Hellfire flight trajectories for EECH last year, check this thread: http://www.simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=327386&fpart=1 Pay particulary attention to AlphaOneSix, he used to work on the AH-64A.