vanir

From my ignorance as an outsider I have followed the conflict a bit and did draw some impressions over the years, open to correction. They weren't the bad guys initially, Tblisi but never stood a chance so didn't play it very smartly. This isn't the Crimea breaking from Ukraine here, Russia will take care of its strategic districts one way or another and nobody is really going to have much say in it. I think when the CIS refined its mission statement in the late 90s the game was up for Tblisi, join or else. I remember when the Russian parliament told its military not to make any moves whilst new diplomacy was being invited but they completely ignored the order, scary times. Tblisi was told one thing by Russian diplomats and then the military went and did the opposite, I think that was a good time to realise there was no way this was going to end well.

critical bill likes to play a joke on the groundcrew "you thought I was going to land at the base didn't you"

yeah default is an axis instead of the slider I have this stick and just clear the current, select add then move the slider manually, joy_slider1 shows up. don't forget to set some curvature in the edit axis tab for the pitch/roll/rudder axis it's actually a good stick because it has so many (12) buttons plus the hat, and you have the left and right keyboard modifiers so effectively have an almost unlimited amount of presets for a nearly HOTAS effect with relatively little keyboard juggling considering it's hundreds of dollars cheaper than a proper HOTAS flight control setup

anybody else having problems downloading from lockonfiles new site?

I don't get the MiG-29K showing up in my FC2 at all. I have the old 1.02 version 279KIAP mod on HDD so was wondering if I can adapt the oblomok and skins files of that somehow to get the K showing in game just as an AI a/c?

there were some at lockonfiles for older lomac versions, don't know if they're FC2 compatable. 1024x1024 and in three versions (standard and training-dummy markings for the RuAF and a fictional amraam style markings).

The MiG-29 can manage an overshoot onto grass near the runway without blowing up I've noticed (I had no brakes last flight), but the Su-25 serie is the only one specifically designed for rough independent operations from unpaved fields. The Su-25 carries its own service kit and APU internally, its engines can run on any available fuel type including diesel. You can land a Frogfoot on any flat strip with little preparation and meet it with a couple of trucks carrying munitions and siphon some diesel or pour some vodka and kerosine in the tanks and go do combat operations, it was designed for this. No kidding, there's a couple of civilian airliners/cargo haulers they make with similar capabilities, it's really unbelievably remarkable by western standards. Pretty much all other modern combat aircraft are designed to be operated from paved airbases, only a handful like the Fulcrum can manage a well prepared grass strip in emergencies. The "rough field capability" advertised for Russian birds really means just that they don't necessarily do a walk down the runway every morning to make sure there are no FOD to get sucked into the engine, they do operations with little or no preparation as soon as they climb out of bed and with the runway covered in snow, whilst modern Russian birds are all STOL so they can operate from smaller forward airbases that wouldn't support American models. The Germans said one of the remarkable things about the Fulcrum was that it could operate under conditions that would never support an F-16 (whilst Eagles need infamously large, well serviced bases with full support services). They still use paved runways though. Probably the closest western parallel to Russian birds are the Swedes with their STOL and rough field capable air force, designed to use roadways and mobile support services as ad hoc airbases in wartime.

Tomcat, I am having a problem with the skins of your efA mod add on models for the F4F and Harrier. Your Phantom has more skins inside the cdds file than I can access in game, I just get the one skin available (the camo one) for Germany, but in the cdds file I noticed there are several skins for Germany in various grey schemes (I like the grey ones). I just used ModMan to install your mod over efA but I wonder if I'm supposed to edit something so that more skins for the Germany nation Phantom are available? Also the German national markings and squadron markings don't appear. Is it possible to edit the German Phantom to use the Hornet radar and have Amraam's? I've double checked installation and I can't see the problem, all your files are installed correctly. Shouldn't there be something like three German paintschemes?

The AIM-9P uses an optical seeker in the later "smokeless" versions doesn't it? I used to see F-16s sporting both AIM-9L and AIM-9P and used to wonder about it, till I read about the seekers.

According to Janes 409 F-15C were delivered to the USAF (61 Ds). The last 43 (MSIP series) were fitted with the AN/APG-70 from the strike eagle. That would make about half the Eagle force with upgraded radars.

If Tom Cruise is doing a cameo then it's likely to be with the superbug. I'd say the only new direction they could take it in that case is concentrating more on operational missions, the battleground probably set in a fictional African republic for political correctness although the parallels with middle eastern/central asiatic activities will be clear, as typical heavily biased with Americentric themes and an "America is the World" troop morale speech. There'll probably be a Falklands style scene thrown in where a screening frigate is hit by an anti-shipping missile probably bought from the Ukrainians, which'll be a parallel with modern concerns about Iran. What would be far more interesting but unlikely is if Top Gun 2 was set on the Admiral Kuznetsov. This kind of balanced and inclusive device would be much too much of a shock to the American mind however I should think and would be far more likely of European filmakers. Considering Valkyrie was a very American film done simply in German uniforms with pasty two-dimensional characters, lacking any of the genuine development or humanity you see in something like the European films Downfall or the Black Book, I'm not expecting very much at all from McQuarrie but another hollywood stars and stripes masturbation banking on a two week box office profit margin. Depending on McQuarrie and Bruckheimer's political leanings, the screenplay will either serve to support a withdrawl from Iraq, or inflame animosity towards Iran.

The Leopard-2 is a nice tank, the Australian Army used them before we got some used Abrams. One of the most noted capabilities of the Leopard-2 is its mobility as an MBT. But then again I've watched footage of T-90s getting airborne leaping trenches. A Leopard won't do that.

Gawd. The Islamic world was never far ahead of the west, they maintained a closer connection to Greek scientific roots through the period of tremendous political disruption in the holy roman empire (ie. pretty much the entire time from the 10th to 15th centuries), which contrasts starkly with democratic presumptions the Islamic world was barbaric and scientifically degenerate compared to western intellects, a very popular 19th century eugenics assertion. Pretty much the single piece of technology often cited as an example of parity at the least is the astrolabe, which is a more effective means of sea navigation than was being widely practised in the west at the time, but is really not much different from what the Greeks used, really just a refinement and no cause to level an opposite extreme from intellectual barbarism to abject technological superiority, once again almost always a propaganda fiction. Algebra is an islamic word but it was a chinese invention which reached the west via the silk road, so was first encountered and named in asia minor. Conversely much of asiatic religious science (buddhist, taoist, etc.) is based quite directly on ancient Greek philosophy-science transmitted via the silk road and travelling through asia minor and central asia. Again Islamic medicine was influenced largely by Greek and Chinese practises, where western Europe had largely degenerated through the infamous dark ages, it's actually what gave the dark ages its name, the general academic degeneration of the west from the classical age. Basically Islamic doctors were discovering the medical benefits of locally occuring natural compounds much as the Mesopotamians and Egyptians had, whilst in Holland or Austria they were trying to exorcise illness demons out of patients with clubs and torture. This practise popped up in Belarus with some frequency through the 1990s by the way. The Islamic world at the time simply wasn't subject to the political infighting and corrupt and capitalist grabs for power that dominated western europe and the balkans for the next millennia, reshaping politics and philosophies as it went. At quite the other end of the spectrum much politics and philosophy defined economics and cultural views in the east, its effective scientific stagnancy was beneficial throughout the dark ages but unfortunately there's not a whole lot of difference between certain 12th century Islamic, or Chinese for that matter, active practises then and today. Traditional chinese medicine and Islamic justice systems are completely unchanged since mediaeval times and not much different then to what they were a few thousand years before that. You might say eastern and middle eastern cultural philosophies were quite disciplinarian, which has its benefits whilst western ones by comparison seemed to lack any concept of self discipline, we just make up new religions to suit whatever new piece of greed has become popular, want more wives, make up a new denomination, clergy getting in your way lately, want more land, more powers of state, make up a new denomination, it's what turned christianity into mammon, it's own predicted apocalypse. On the flipside of the coin a Japanese, or Chinese student is hardly concerned with saving anybody's face so much as social conscience, disrupting a class to tell the lecturer they made a mistake isn't necessarily the smartest objective approach, though it may certainly be very competitive. Social competition isn't really an element of eastern political or educational philosophies so much as it satisfies individual egos. Nevertheless Japanese academic standards are very highly regarded in the west, although there is a notable drop in standardised testing results following school years. Italian and Germanic scientific pioneers of the renaissance become fairly obvious when one looks at a simple map of the educational centres of the time, observatories and so forth, and considers political and economic regional climates. Brandenburg was a scientific centre, as was Rome, Paris, London, but there were quite a few observatories around Brandenburg which marks an inherent tradition to follow it on. Even in modern Germany Berliners are regarded as almost a culture unique to themselves. But the Germanic regions themselves had long since broken up into a series of principalities within states and all sorts of in-fighting between dominant dynasties and minor aristocrats, by the Hundred Years War Germans were notable as brutal mercinaries rather than educated. Shortly following that they fell under the spell of militarism and authoritarian rulership, becoming known as a major industrial power. On the one hand you've got the bickering Reichstag and on the other the domineering Prussians. At the opening of the 20th century the thing Germans were most famous for was selling very good guns to the highest bidder, whilst the French say had equivalent or better weapons but were far more selective about who they gave them to. As for the industrial revolution itself that was a British thing, although people like Krupp and Ford took the ideas of mass production to new heights, one to make consistent cannon barrels and the other to make affordable automobiles. In military circles the Prussians were very famous for reinventing the concept of command structures, their system was copied with little or no modification by every other power in the world and invented the whole concept of a General Staff, more merchant of death stuff than technological. Altogether I'm saying Moa that your views are a reasonable, if subjective generalisation in passing but won't stand up to detailed objective examination at length. They should certainly not become the central theme of any political philosophy or neo-eugenics assertion regarding cultural tendencies. Please take no offence, I sought to demonstrate increasing complication with detail rather than simply taking exception. Remember also that inventive scientific minds tend to contradict rather than promote regional cultural and political memes for the most part, Galilleo in prison, Kepler's entire first series publication being burned and his presses smashed, etc. They're not really representative of their cultures at the time.

Here's just what I've gathered from what I've been reading (open to correction). According to a Russian Foxbat pilot, with four missiles the Foxbat-A can reach 21000m for two minutes before stalling out. With two missiles it can reach 24000m for two minutes before stalling out, the R40 themselves were effective in air-intercept to 27000m. These are of course generalised guidelines as the atmosphere isn't static and has quite a bit of variation. I've read one of the books by an ex-Blackbird pilot (Richard Graham I think but it might've been Brian Shul, it was a while ago), in which he directly inferred the Blackbird exceeded 30000m during missions, not an impossibility when you consider the non-static atmosphere however at any rate these are cruise altitudes and this is part of the tremendous difference between something like a Blackbird and something like a Foxbat. 23000m or 30000m doesn't really make such a difference. Foxbat high mach cruise (2.35-2.8 mach) is at 11500-13500m. Go higher and you trade airspeed to get there and run out of puff at 21-24000m unless you're doing a zoom regime, in which case you'll undoubtedly exceed 30km in a Foxbat but you won't be targeting anything, you can't fire missiles anyway and you've got pretty much no pilot control of the aircraft you're just a passenger. Pretty much any aircraft is really losing the effects of traditional control surfaces from about 21000m, which is just about the altitude limit of even things like the U-2 or any other specialised high altitude bird, in level flight and full throttle the F-15 Eagle stalls out well before it gets this high. True the Foxhound is a much greater threat, its high mach cruise is 13500-17500m (meaning basically it can double the speed of an F-15 when both at 57000ft) and really is just a shade below the Blackbird up at those altitudes, the Foxhound kind of delivers what the Foxbat promised (pretty much due to dramatic engine improvement, max thrust limit of the D30F6 is up around 186kN apiece, st.sea level is around 152kN). Foxbat really uses a carefully directed zoom to get a 21000m intercept, most of the intercept course is going to be at around 13000m altitude where its got its best speed. At a carefully planned point it'll be guided to a climb regime designed to retain as much airspeed as possible when reaching the missile release point. The dangerous part about this for Blackbird crews is that they're not exactly going to be doing any immelmans trying to evade it. If they don't see the Foxbat on an intercept heading well before it gets to them they could be in big trouble from those big R40s which will definitely reach them. That would be if...the Foxbat can retain enough airspeed once it reaches the missile release point at some 21000m or so, before the Blackbird has left it in its wake. The Foxhound however is just about guaranteed to still be doing something like 2.5 mach at 21000m and quite happily in a level speed run (though it will be losing control and momentum). Much, much, much more dangerous.

I should reiterate science and technology isn't a national or cultural phenomenon, although the implementation of given technologies can be very political. Aside from a little pride in some quarters of Brandenburg's astronomical history, which is really no different to London there is no genuine difference between a German and a Frenchman or anyone else. If anything the oppressive undercurrent of rising nationalism throughout the 30s inhibited rather than promoted scientific developments. (and it was the British who invented the tank btw, the name tank was given to conceal the wartime project as being something to do with water tanks) The single greatest factor in promoting technological developments in Nazi Germany would be defence spending. Goering's "five year economic plan" was a colloquial for committing the nation to war, so defence spending consisted of promising three times more in funding that was actually available in raw materials, let alone purchasing power. In the wake of the Great Depression, quite simply no other nation could afford to keep up with Germany, Germany couldn't afford to keep up with Germany. Individual companies like Krupp and Rheinmetall were very experienced with cutting edge munitions industry, even so no particular technological superiority over Bofors, Sköda or British Royal Ordnance factories whom also built excellent machinery. Meanwhile several Soviet field weapons were considered the best in the world. The Nazis were more prepared to place very experimental technologies in the field, the V-1 was quite an achievement but the V-2 was a research project that represented psychological impact far more than effect, it was a dice roll to assume it would hit anywhere near a target region but it represented the future in a stark and impressive manner. Other projects like the revolver-cannon became the postwar Aden and DEFA guns, virtually direct copies of the design. Wire guided and other seeker missiles were being used in service by war's end. But some stupid ideas like Sonic-cannon AAA were also funded with ridiculous amounts of money that was desperately needed elsewhere. In part it was Germany's willingness to fund every crazy new project which helped bring them down, they had way too many loaves baking in the oven instead of just concentrating on a few achievable objectives, consolidating resources and then tabling a new series of objectives. So they weren't more advanced, just taking on a great deal more than other nations were willing to by compromising their own war making potential.

quite right, I'm mixing up my terminologies with a poor explanation, without visiting the link it was about the area and distance between centre of lift and centre of gravity (relating to stability of flight) which is a part of design engineering, so the issue is with centre of gravity but it is the centre of lift which moves.

Well it was really a case of speeding up development projects rather than stealing technology. With say, Russia's jet technology. At the very end of the war they had independently arrived at where Whittle was just before the war. Early Soviet indigenous jet development were piston engine planes fitted with rockets in the tail assembly for speed boosting. They developed a rocket powered interceptor not unlike the Me-163 back in 1941 and fitted ramjet engines to the wings of one prototype, testing that concept but ramjets require significant airspeed before they start working, so could only ever be a supplementary engine. They also prototyped a new fighter concept not unlike an unsuccessful Italian design, which was essentially a piston engine plane driving a hot area turbine in the tail for additional thrust, this airframe achieved speeds in excess of 700km/h during 1945 I believe, which was at the very least equivalent of the very latest front line fighters and not bad at all for any initial prototype (compare for example the Bell Airacomet's performance, well below contemporary piston fighters). Of course stumbling your way through a technology development independently, like all pioneers do takes time and resources, and a little bit of luck along the way. It is simply quicker and less expensive or troublesome to plagiarise. In 1945 the Russians were in the fortuitous position of actually occupying much of the areas of German special projects actual production sites, which were mostly east and northeast of Berlin. The allies tended to occupy much of the administrative and development centres for this industry, which was mostly west and southwest of Berlin. So as it turned out, in generalised terms the Russians got most of the surplus jet engines, BMW and Jumo, whilst western allies, particularly British and Americans got most of the design blueprints and plans for them, speaking very loosely here. Actual scientists were all over the place, a few more to the west but there were POW exchanges with the Soviets anyway, certain individuals traded for some surplus engines, scientists traded for Intelligence personnel and so on. It is no exaggeration that Germany became like a great big warehouse sale but it wasn't over "secret technologies" so much as Germany had overspent on defence through the 30s-40s to such an extent that their progress could simply save a lot of money and extra time for the very same projects other nations had been working on. So the Russians slotted Jumo engines into existing airframes, the Yak-3 to produce the Yak-15 jet fighter for example. They literally just bolted the German engine to them, but they did also trade some prisoners for design blueprints from the Americans and began remanufacturing them with more reliable peacetime component materials. They did the same thing with BMW engines and the MiG-9 jet interceptor, which was the first traditional jet fighter design and forerunner of the MiG-15. Actually I think it was the BMW engines they got the blueprints for and the Jumos were reverse-engineered. British and American jet engines were already developing at an accelerating pace with the Vampire and Shooting Star jet fighters but the British were becoming concerned about the US leaving behind all other nations with its combined industrial strength and technologies, they didn't feel comfortable about having a single superpower controlling world politics, aside from Churchill himself who was no longer in office they weren't as diametric to the Soviets as the Americans were becoming, so they made a decision to have limited technology sharing with the USSR. They gave them a few examples of their latest centrifugal engine for technology development but weren't entirely expecting the Soviets to start unlicensed production in short order, which they fitted to their new MiG-15 airframe. So again what we see mostly is really about timespans of development projects, expenditure in particular roads of development, but the base science of the projects is always common knowledge. Industrial espionage is again, more about a race to the finish line than how to run the race. The Soviets would've had MiG-15s in the air in 1947-48 whatever happened, but instead of a centrifugal rolls royce based engine it might've had a more developed version of the axial Jumo with associated performance differences. The Jumo had been undergoing continual redevelopment in the Yak-series, which were already up to the Yak-17 and 19 versions and it was becoming quite a powerful engine. It just didn't have the performance of the rolls royce at high altitude back then, but soon afterwards Soviet axial flow turbojets would overshadow the centrifugal types just like they did in the west, and it was undoubtedly the Jumo and BMW redevelopments which led to the mighty Soyuz-Tumanskies of the 1960s.

It was one of the things that apparently most impressed the west Germans about the Fulcrum, where its actual aerial performance has strengths and weaknesses, a lot of weaknesses compared to NATO contemporaries, the one thing frequently remarked on is that trick intake system for rough field operation. They said, when operating F-16s you have ground personnel and aircrews all walk down the runway line abreast to make sure there are no foreign objects on the runway before flight operations are allowed. With the Fulcrum you taxi straight out onto a very roughly maintained strip while everyone's still in bed and rest easy. According to the Germans this factor of Russian aircraft comprised a tactical advantage that helped even out east-west technological disparities. The Frogfoot doesn't even need any modern facilities, just a piece of flat ground and a couple of trucks with some diesel fuel will do just fine. It even has its own service kit in a cargo hatch for combat operation in forward areas without any ground facilities, just some flares laid out on a clearing and a truck with reloads. The engines will run on kerosine, diesel fuel, anything you can get your hands on. It's the whole famous thing about the Frogfoot, hard to represent in a flight sim but that was the thing that had western analysts really sit up and take notice of the Su-25.

Ah, the WW2 Luftwaffe system :P

The jet engine is a great example, being completely independently developed in Germany and England at roughly the same time. Germany got it in the air first because of government sponsorship. The roads to the development of the Whittle engine and the German ones were completely different. Whittle originally conceived of just a specialised high altitude piston engine, but the supercharger system eventually outgrew the piston engine and he had an epiphany, doing away with the piston engine completely. The German development concentrated on the hot area turbine replacing a piston engine from the very beginning (mind you even this was because the government was sponsoring several advanced engine projects, a concurrant one was using a piston engine to drive a massive supercharger stage that in turn fed two more supercharged engines that actually provided thrust, so this was all largely from a case of German defence overspending on several projects that gave such speed in jet development). The common catalyst here was the increasing capabilities of piston engine aircraft, the turbine engine was simply a natural evolutionary path anyone was bound to stumble upon one way or another, eventually and independently, once the environment for it existed.

It's a combination of the two, mig29. Technology is largely funded by more generalised or unrelated scientific studies and projects, combined with the industrial projects being funded at the time in the given nation. Everybody knew about radar in the 30s, but only Britain was making headway with small wavelengths and they were keeping that little piece of information top secret. Germany assumed small wavelength AI-radar was years away from development and relied largely on AAA-defence, other countries inhibited their industrial application of technology because of extreme conservatism in the military, shutting down development projects because of cost and spending the money building more ships or fortifications, or different technologies like advanced metallurgies. Most of the role of military Intelligence is in figuring out exactly what industries are being funded and what is being developed by the enemy rather than trying to steal it. It's also as much about counter-technologies than it is technology-equivalence. Industrial espionage is more about a race to the finish line than how to run the race. The most infamous example of genuine technological disparity in any recent time that wasn't just propaganda was the MiG Foxbat and it turned out to be a paranoid myth caused by US defence overspending. So pretty much at no time has there ever been any genuine technological disparity in terms of information awareness in any recent history all the way back to the Hundred Years War. It's just been a question of what your industry is producing and what you have immediate access to. It's the golden egg and the subject of political thrillers and much propaganda to actually have some technological Intelligence superiority than potential enemies, but it is fiction. Even if they don't know the specific details of a defence system or technology you're using, they know the physics it is depending on to work in the first place and could emulate it by trial and error in the very worst case scenario, but even this is rarely the case. Usually it's just about expenditure and present industry.

Max level speed for the Foxbat and Foxhound are at 11500 metres and 13500 metres respectively. The Foxbat for example can only manage to reach 21000m fully armed in level flight for two minutes before it drops under stall speed. It can't sustain altitudes like 20km with a war load, it has a hard enough time doing it clean and stripped. Most other fighters run into this problem at 15km or 18km. To get altitude, you trade airspeed. The main reason these two MiGs can go so fast is because it was never about going fast, it's all about reaching altitude. To do that you need to go fast, then you spend that speed climbing high. The Blackbird is an exception. Normal fighters don't act like that. to pre-empt a counterpoint, altitude records are set by cheating. You dip and top out an airframe speed then zoom climb. You do it over and over, dip and zoom, until you run out of fuel. A stripped and prepared Foxbat passed 37km altitude doing that, the standing record for an airbreather (in the 50s that would've qualified as spaceflight).

Su-17 advertised performance in western publication is most often for Su-22 Fitter-F and Fitter-J versions with the R29B series engine which is optimised for low altitude and can't manage much more than about 1.7 Mach at higher ones (this engine is almost identical to MiG-27 engine with two AB settings designed mostly for subsonic low alt operation with heavy ordnance). All Russian Su-17 and some exports use the Lyulka AL21F3 engine which has excellent high altitude performance, in fact so good the Egyptians and other nations used their Su-20 as ad hoc interceptors. It is an excellent engine with three position AB and fully modulated thrust control, so it is much more like a modern fighter engine than the R29BS. Sukhoi claims a max level speed clean of 2.09 Mach for the Fitter-K variants with the AL21 engine. Other sources claim a max level speed of Fitter-C (Su-17M or Su-20) early production models with the AL21 as 2.2 Mach. Max level speed on the deck is given the same as an F-16. Most notably the acceleration of R29 engine versions should be better at low alt whilst it should be much better at high alt for the AL21F, and its triple-flameholder afterburner. Considering the normal take off weight of the Su-17M-4 is far less than half that of an Su-24 which uses the same engines, one would expect its acceleration to be very strong. I think the common impression most people have about the Su-17/22 is from the export Su-22 using the R29BS engine. Versions with the AL21F engine are good enough to be used as an improvised interceptor in a small air force.

there you go, you can map additional keys in the options for the plane you want to fly. In most games I use the spacebar for pause (or wheel brakes). Alternative no.2 in the world of problem solving.

A new US-standard keyboard costs what, $15? I have an IBM keyboard, it's about 20yrs old and has the pause key, it's to the right of the scroll key. I've a third party gaming keyboard, has it. Naturally my microsoft keyboard is modern American-standard so that has it. I understand foreign keyboard layouts all have it. Your keyboard obviously doesn't have it marked and you're throwing a tantrum, but you probably have it. Even if you didn't, a brand new keyboard costs what, $15? Learn to problem solve. It will help your life.