D-Scythe

Also, parts of the tank (like the engines) would appear more bright (or dark, depending on whether it's B-HOT or W-HOT) than the rest of the tank. If you can get a look at how things look in thermals in Steel Beasts Pro, you'd sorta know what I mean. I like the first one the best though :)

You want them to waste time separating the reasonable requests from the unreasonable ones? The little time they have? Keep in mind, a V1.13 patch might not even be released - this is all just discussion of a possible patch, as far as I'm concerned. If ED does start work on it, it would have to be squeezed in between all the other products they're doing - products that they are ACTUALLY making money from.

Um, absolutely not. F-15s do NOT stall out at 40 000ft without the use of AB. High altitudes are where Eagle pilots play IRL.

IIRC, the Sovremenny-class destroyers were the most capable AAW assets in the Russian Navy (with the exception of maybe the Kirov battlecruiser). The Moscow/Slava-class has several limitations that prevent it from effectively engaging multi-directional inbound threats - in fact, it only has one tracking radar for the Rif system (Volna phased array, I think), that allows it to simultaneously engage only 6 targets incoming from a particular direction (+/- 45 degrees, I think, though I might be mistaken). Which doesn't really compare favorably to the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, with AEGIS, which has 4 separate SPG-62 illumination radars for terminal guidance and the SPY-1 PESA for mid-course guidance: working the numbers game, that's 8 missiles being guided in the end-game and over 20 missiles in mid-course flight, directed at up to 4 different directions.

Sounds like you're using the -65K bud - that, or you're not zooming in your AGM-65D seeker.

Since when was this "normalized"?

A 2000 lb bomb for CAS work?

Drag also varies with altitude - with less air to put up resistance, it is very possible for the AIM-120 to reach higher speeds. It really becomes a question of altitude. At the SR-71's cruise altitude (~80-90 000ft), I'd imagine the AMRAAM would easily exceed it's design limit of Mach 4. An AIM-120 could theoretically reach Mach 10+ if launched from the space shuttle in orbit.

You can never have too much thrust.

And such short-ranges are realistic weapon ranges for the F-15 right? ;) The velocity of the AIM-120 was reduced in Flaming Cliffs, hence the difference.

You don't even have to F-pole in Lock On, as GG mentioned. And why would an F-15 modelled properly necessarily rule the skies? If anything, it would encourage more teamwork since the Russian pilots actually do need to work as a team to overcome the AMRAAM/F-15 combination, and in turn F-15 pilots need to work as a team to counter the numercial superiority of the Russians. It's obviously a give and take thing. There are other means to achieve parity than throwing out the whole issue of realism just so things can be even.

Funny how you take one quote and put it completely out of context to "rest" your "case." I'll just take that as a sign of a weak argument, considering what we were INITIALLY discussing was the usefulness of guns in modern air combat. You know, how you were saying that the gun is important because it's in the F-22 and I destroyed that point by stating that, just because it's there, the gun isn't actually meant to be used by the Raptor, ever? My computer has a power button I can push whenever I want to forcibly turn it off (and risk frying my hard-drives in the process), but that doesn't mean I consider it a "feature" I'd use all the time. In fact, now that computers are less and less likely to freeze up on me, I'd actually say that this button is getting less and less important because I barely ever use it anymore. But I don't expect you to get that metaphor - if anything, you'd just chop it up and take from it only the bits you want to hear. True, to an extent. At typical gun employment ranges (a couple thousand feet), trigonometrically there really is no difference in wingspan between fighters of comparable size classes - for example, the 10 ft difference in wingspan between an F-15 and a F-16 is negligible from hundreds or thousands of feet away. Furthermore, cannons like the M61 Vulcan don't fire a pinpoint "line" of bullets, but rather disperses the bullets over a rather large/wide cone. Therefore, one can expect the EGGS gunsight to lose little effectiveness so long as the funnel can be adjusted even in a rudimentary fashion - e.g. a cone for small fighters (like the F-5/F-16), larger fighters (like the F/A-18 or Su-27) and another for bombers/transports. But yes, you'd be absolutely correct in saying that the EGGS sight alone would not be as accurate as others that incorporate a tracking radar solution of the target. The EGGS has other limitations that also degrade it's accuracy, like target aspect, etc.

For the legacy fighters, you're absolutely right. But nobody in their right minds is gonna risk an F-22 Raptor to MANPADs on a strafing run.

True, but most modern fighter jets have EGGS gunsights - the characteristic funnel-shaped symbology where the path of the bullets are displayed and to aim one simply has to visually align the funnel over the target's wings. No lock, or target tracking from the radar is required.

That logic is laughable. If the constant battle between missiles and their countermeasures was an even battle, then one would never expect the pK of a missile to ever be greater than 50%. Yet, if you look at successive generations of AAMs, pK has been steadily increasing. For example, the AMRAAM has a 0.6-0.7 pK, compared to the 0.3 pK of the AIM-7M a decade earlier, compared to the ~0.1 pK of the Vietnam-era AIM-7. And no, putting the M61A2 into the F-22 isn't a mistake - but it's not like it's a principle feature of the Raptor either. The gun is just there on the F-22 as a last resort when everything else hits the $hitter. For all intents and purposes, if you're going guns with a Raptor, your either one cocky pilot or you've f*cked up big time. Again, you're making an oak tree out of an acorn. Firstly, a gun on modern fighter planes is a last resort - a plan Z when plan A through Y fails - and secondly, most aircraft cannons are very reliable. It's not that hard to put "a gun that you can count on" into a fighter. No.

No, it's not relative nor is it subject for discussion. Missiles are getting deadlier, and engaging with missiles is easier and much faster than engaging with guns - it's just lock and shoot. And now, as SRAAMs are becoming more and more agile, have exponentially increasing MEZs and becoming more difficult to decoy with flares, guns ARE becoming less important - absolutely, not relatively. What does being jam-proof have anything to do with the longevity of a weapon? Air-to-air rockets were jam-proof as well, but they were replaced by AAMs in the 1950s. You can't jam unguided MK-82/84 bombs either, but they are virtually phased out in favor of the (jammable) JDAM.

The usefulness of low-speed/post-stall maneuvers in modern aerial warfare is limited at best. With the advent of modern BVR tactics (which emphasize going fast) and next-generation SRAAMs, chances are that the victor of a dogfight will be decided long before anyone gets anywhere close to approaching stall-speed. Personally, I can't see any pilot eagerly waiting for his chance to pull a Kulbit except in a one-vs-one guns fight.

New(er) Ace Combat Trailer: http://www.gametrailers.com/player/25203.html :thumbup:

Tflash, you have got to be kidding me. An altitude of 27460 meters is great, but only if you can actually fly that high. The MiG-29 cannot - it reached that altitude on a ballistic zoom climb. That means that the pilot basically went really fast than pulled the jet straight up and kept it there until the plane simply ran out of speed and dropped back down to a controllable altitude - like a manned rocket. Just because a plane can reach 90 000ft in a ballistic zoom climb doesn't mean it can fly at 90 000ft. The basic idea of a zoom climb is to go as fast and as high as possible at altitudes your plane *can* fly in so that you can pitch up and go as high as you can at altitudes you *cannot* fly in. Ninety thousand feet is nothing special. Again, the F-4 ranked in 8 000ft higher. Wow, reading into things much? Sure, taking a MiG to angels 90 may be an impressive feat for the PILOT, but Hadjuk was trying to attribute that impressiveness to the airframe and the RD33 engines. Nobody said anything bad about the pilot, so I have NO idea what you're trying to start here. Seriously, WHERE are you going with this?

What altitude record? You do know that the SR-71 can also ballistically propel itself higher than its ~70 000ft cruise altitude right? In fact, IIRC, the SR-71 can reach altitudes well in excess of 100 000ft flying that type of profile. Really, what the MiG-29/RD-33 did was NOTHING special - the F-4 Phantom likewise also had an absolute altitude record of ~98,500ft (30 000m). The MiG-29 is no better than an F-4 in this case. In fact, it's several thousand feet worse. But I'm not you. Nobody's going to hear me jump to the conclusion that "Those J79s are some engines!"

Um, that's not saying much. It doesn't take much to propel a fighter above the cruise altitude of an SR-71 - virtually all fighters can (ballistically) propel themselves above that.

No, MICA does not have two-way datalink. Meteor might - I'm thinking it most likely does, based on the Swedes extensive experience with datalinks.

Iraqi Hinds 10, Iranian Cobras 6.

Yup, that pretty much sums it up.

Who's Dave? Rule #4? You took that as a personal attack? Well, I'm sorry you feel that way. If anything, I would've thought it would've violated Rule #1...just trying to point out the sheer ridiculousness of this "Cold War" hype just because BBC used the word "chased"... Anyway, forget I said anything.