AndytotheD

To be fair, you can stall any plane at 400 knots if you pull hard enough and the plane doesn’t break on the way there

Now I don’t believe it’s as soon as the next month, or even two months out. But three to four months prior to marketing start, followed by another month of hype prior to release would vaguely follow the Viggen style marketing campaign. 6 months to release would be reasonable if they performed a longer marketing campaign like they did for the F-14. I’m beating a dead horse here, but there’s a couple of reasons I’m especially hesitant to accept the pessimistic/realistic delay expectations that project out into Q4: During its development, the F-14 was delayed so many times that, IIRC, Heatblur claimed they would avoid attaching dates to their modules, which they then subsequently did anyway for the F-4, when it was announced last January. Even as late as two months ago they were confident they’d have it out before the end of 2022, in spite of all the tragedy occurring in the world. They must have been pretty confident in their progress to make a statement like that with only two months left in the year. Something utterly disastrous would probably have needed to happen to tack on >8 months* to the development from that October statement, which is why I don’t really buy that it would end up being a Q3/Q4 release. Having said that, I will almost certainly be proven wrong *I’m going to note the length of time for the ED test period, but it’s hard to believe HB made timeline statements without taking that into account

Less than 6 months is anywhere between now and June. It’s too vague to make a definitive statement about Q3, unless you just assume it will be dead on 6 months.

I mean so did I, we knew it was coming for quite some time, but Heatblur were definitely hesitant to show it off in a big way prior to the add campaign. For example how it happened to appear as a distant speck in an early F-14 carrier landing vid. That’s not to say it appeared completely randomly, but more so to say it would be consistent with Heatblur’s past marketing for for the F-4 to be closer than we might expect because they made big show of the Viggen when it was finally ready. by that same virtue, they could very well be following their approach to the F-14 which was to be incredibly loud about it for the entirety of its development cycle.

My only argument to the contrare is to remind everyone how the Viggen kind of appeared out of nowhere

I feel like it’s a stretch to interpolate that it will be a Q4 release from that statement. I put a lot of stock in what Iron Mike said in October (almost certainly too much) but if he was confident they would release in 2022 (in spite of all that happened to HB) why would it suddenly be so far from release? Perhaps I’m being too optimistic?

That was excellent to see! Finally it sees the light of day. Did we see the cockpit at all?

Look at you being reasonable I think for many of us, it featuring in the video is news enough, though it would be nice if the devs said anything at all given the years worth of pent up hype.

I think it may come sooner that that; Heatblur we’re pretty quiet during the development of the AJS-37.

From ED Facebook

There was an interview in September with Enigma, where Cobra mentioned they might try and limit the variants they made. I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth but my understanding was that part of what is taking so long to finish the F-14 was that making a few variants was proving a lot more time consuming than expected. Worth noting that’s not a dig: the Tomcat released in a very feature complete state and is probably the gold standard.

As late as October they were pretty confident they would have it out this year (per Iron Mike). I don’t expect they’ll have it out this year, but, like another commenter said, I’m sure they have their noses to the grindstone right now and it may well be closer than we expect. All that said, I’m caging my expectations.

Discussion of the Longest Flight is not readily applicable to what our aircraft represents: modern aviation gasoline isn’t leaded anywhere near as heavily as WWII 100/130 fuel.

I’m vaguely reminded of the Viggen. I don’t know how delayed that was, if at all, but I very distinctly remember there was very little news and then suddenly boom, plenty of media and the jet was released very shortly thereafter. Cobra seems pretty confident they’ll have it out this year, in spite of delays, so I remain cautiously optimistic, in spite of my scepticism