Bremspropeller

Good point! Tom Cooper (Wings of Iraq Vol.2, which includes IrAF up to 1980) says they did with the first Bis arriving in 1979. Those incidentally were refurbished SM and SMT airframes. It seems there also were some Bis in the SyAF for the '82 war.

In the Middle East, there were lots of Ms (a gutless pile of dung at those latitudes) and some MFs, but mostly PFs, FLs, PFMs and F-13/F-7 around. I think there were no bis at all until way after '73.

If we're talking from a standpoint of nearly unlimited cash, then that is certainly correct. Finding a mixed middle ground is always going to be better than artificially polarizing and deciding in favor of one option. Most countries won't be able to look through that lense, though, and it becomes a game of money-allocation and going down the way of the threat-path most likely to occur. Or even a question of what you can attain at all and at which (political) cost. That may turn out to having been an expensive bet 20 years down the line, when there's too much "Hi" in the mix or when circumstances fundamentally change. Like today. At the bottom line, your level of spending is basicly determined by the acceptable losses of a potential enemy. Turns out, you can beat a highly sophisticated coalition of forces (!) by just outlasting them while having no air force at all - *cough* Afghanistan */cough* - if the other side isn't willing to pay the high price required for a victory. I'm trying to look at it from the perspective of "Generic Air Force" rather than the USAF's perspective: If you need to train a greater number of maintainers to a higher level to make systems work, those ppl won't be available for other applications (opportunity cost) and industries and at some point you'll have to think about the value of throwing people towards a system that's too expensive to run in a possibly low intensity conflict with a neighbouring country that's in turn facing the same challenges. Suffering an insurgency? A mix with too many sophisticated jets won't do you any good, since the HCMT campaign has shown that neither dumb hi-tech (Arc Light "monkeybombing") nor smart hi-tech (Igloo White) approaches will lead to any meaningful long term success. The portugeese experience using G.91s wasn't all that bad in comparison - safe for the increasing threat by manpads later in the campaigns. Then of course, there's the polar opposite of air forces that mainly consist of said country's arristocracy and where the 3.5 serviceable fighters serve the sole purpose of looking good during the annual parade. The discussion is becoming pretty tangiental as to whether the F-4 is a useful dogfighter, but I find the topic to be fascinationg nonetheless.

Yeah, I think 2-2.5 secs is reasonable. Thanks a bunch for looking through the videos and finding good examples! @fausete pls gib

I was having a similar feeling. Please note, that a significant part of the sequence in the real jet video is masked by the air intake, so your timing may be off by a second. I think it's safe to say, nonetheless, that the in-game movement is around half the speed of the airbrake on the real jet.

Lighter also often means laden with less troublesome electronics that provide a marginal gain in capability at the cost of incresed MX effort and possibly a lower in commission rates. Think A-6A or early F-4Js. What jet is going to project more air power? The one with more powerful and complicated systems/missiles and more range that can be over the battleground once a day (or less, factoring in availability), or the jet that is less complicated, less capable but "up" all the time, flying two to three sorties a day? It's also interesting to see how that equation shifts with different theaters of operations. If you look at SEA, the MiG-21 was a pretty good aircraft for the defensive operations conducted by the VPAF. In the Middle East, where arab air forces were trying to establish larger scale offensive operations, the lack of an aircraft with similar capabilities of an F-4 greatly hurt them.

Neither the 21bis, nor the F-4E are the initial design iterations of the jets. Those would be the MiG-21F and F4H-1. The F4H-1 was designed to defend the carrier in anyweather and dropping some dumb bombs onto the target when neccessity arose. The -21F was essentially a MiG-19 with an engine that wouldn't explode every time you looked at it the wrong way. Well, not quite, as the R-11 also had it's fair share of teething troubles that needed resolving. The F-4 came to the fleet without any engine-trouble, as the F-104 had mostly solved those two years earlier. What's amazing about the initial F-4H-1 was it's capability of carrying eight (!) missiles from a carrier in all weather, possibly reaching Mach 2 and on the return trip land at ~120KIAS on the boat. That is a technological achievement that isn't credited enough today. People tend to look more at it's records (all with tweaked jets), which I believe isn't really the amazing part of the early Phantom-story.

I think the RF-4B wasn't employed all that much on the boat. First, it came to the party later then the RF-4C and when it did, there still were lots of RA-5Cs und especially RF-8Gs around. I did look for some evidence of the nose folding over, but I couldn't find any. What's interesting, though, is that it had a lot of mods from the F-4J right from the start, or introduced over time: - slotted stabilator - uplocked inboard droops - J79-10 engines were introduced during it's service, while the USAF's RF-4Cs stuck to their short-nozzeled motors (though export RF-4Es had the -17 motor) - ECM antennas on the intakes, similar to the late Js The RFs are pretty awesome jets and I do hope that we at least get to see them as AI assets. Now, it would be even more aresome if we could get one as a module, but I guess people aren't ready for a full-time recce platform just yet

The -21 wasn't meant by it's design team to be an air superiority fighter (neither was the F-4), so switchology is a result of that. Their thinking, which is more or less mirrored by your approach is "set switches at the right time and go on with the flow". That's a very GCI centered approach. Vietnam showed both sides, that this approach doesn't work, when you're jumped by an opponent out of the blue. If your first indication of a fight is a "BREAK!" call, or your buddy going way up in entropy, then going inside the pit to find a switch should not be number one on your priority list. I think (not sure, some Fishbed-priest probably knows, though) the bis and MF already did reflect some of the experiences in the field and had their switchology optimized to some degree. The F-4 also went through several cockpit mods and quality of life upgrades that came directly out of the SEA experiences.

In theory it is. If you're engaged in a fast developing situation, possibly dehydrated because you've sat in readyness for an hour or two, things are a little different. Especially if the neighboring switch that completely feels the same does something entirely different and possibly decisive in the opponent's favor. Things are different, when you can die for real. I know what both the F-4E and the -21PFM fwd view looks like, as I've sat in the former and stuck my face into the cockpit of the latter. The Phantom's the winner here. Albeit not exactly by a mile. The good news for the early -21 pilot is that nobody yet had the bright idea of installing a make-up mirror which would rob you of your view into the turn at the benefit of not seeing anything behind you, twice. Again, in theory it is. If it was no biggie, we'd not spent dozens of millions on human factor research in man-machine interfaces. The F-4 also went through a couple of field-fiddles where they'd put rubber-extensions onto important switches, so you actually could find them when needed and without looking inside. Actual guncam footage proves the opposite.

Clearly it is. It's so ergonomic, they passed on giving the pilot a view anywhere ahead, so he can focus on that switch. Somewhere. The FL was modified to four pylons at some time. The PFM and FL are my favourite 21s, but that cockpit is not. The gunsight protrudes very far into the cabin and you literally have to look around it. Even the "no frills" F-13 sports-model isn't much better and it's sight is just there so the aircraft doesn't look incomplete. I mean, it looks impressive... ...but the gyro tumbles at ridiculously low g values. Looking through the Arab accounts - some of those pilots had been trained by the RAF or some RAF syllabus - it seems that the weapon-performance was one of the biggest detriments and many a kill opportunity was just lost because of poor performance and reliability or inferior weapon-capability. That's a pretty important point as well - mainly the VPAF was pretty pragmatic abot that approach. Sometimes they'd bait the fighters into throwing their bombs away, or going MiG-shopping some obvious bait-MiGs and leving the hapless bombers alone. Bernard Fipp (USN A-4 guy) wrote on one of those occurances in "Triple Sticks": The fighter dudes were good at football, but bad at chess...

The contemporary 21s had a different cockpit setup. Here's a PFM: Similar to the FL: That's because they had different circumstances. Soviet style intercepts worked well against the Groundhog-Day route-planning of the USAF. The wars in the middle east were a lot more dynamic and hence less favouring the MiGs.

That's because they all have large wings to carry their large-a$$ payload around. With said payload, they're not much of a turning-wonder either. LWFs are cool, because they can achieve a high kill-ratio against suppsoedly superior fighters, when using the right tactics. Back in the day the tech-gap between a MiG-21 and an F-4E with four Sparrows was mostly a paper-thing, as the F-4E (given no external IFF capability is at hand or Combat Tree mod is installed) has zero SA as to the nature of what it has locked. So you're down to a V-ID pass and all you tech advantage just went down the sink. When flying low level your radar is going to be a royal pain in the butt and locking somebody co-altitude or even look-down is going to be frustrating. Say goodbye to Mr "Sparrow in ya Face". The nature of the fights of those CW jets is much different to the AMRAAM-fest at 20NM that TV-screen operators are used to. What's often forgotten when discussing the MiGs is their sh1tty armament and their narrow engagement-zones (WEZ) during the time of those wars we're usually taking for benchmarking them against western jets. Don't forget about those silly engine blocker-doors and the louvers inside the strakes. Nice idea, but useless. I'd rather take the amount of fuel that could have been installed. I'm not sure the 21 is a better dogfighter. It's easier to to fly in some aspects, but it's cockpit ergonomics are dog sh1t. Having a HOTAS system where you could map important functions on a stick that doesn't exist in the real jet mitigates that issue quite a lot. Also, the F1 is a much better mission oriented aircraft. Just ask the iraqi pilots that had to take salt-pills flying the MiG. Just having a decent air conditioning system in the F1 made the aircraft a lot more effective.

I'd like to second that

Ackshually, that's an F-4S. Also note the AIM-9L. Here's the extended nose-strut of the FG.1 next to the extended strut of the F-4J* *The FG.1's nose strut is an extension of the hydraulically extendable strut of the vanilla Navy-variants. I'm not sure if the strut of the vanilla naval birds is longer than those of the AF models, but I think the AF models have the same strut-length, but theirs just isn't hydraulically extendable. I think the A-6 was first.

Combat flaps will retract automaticly when going beyond the speed-limit, manual flaps won't.

Saw your screenshot in the F1 section. Comtat Venaissin pack inbound?

The FAA (Fleet Air Arm) stopped operating the HMS Ark Royal (the Audacious Class boat)in 1978 and hence lost it's long range strike capability (Phantom FG.1 and Buccaneer S.2). This most probably opened the door to the eventual war. The Phantoms only came to the Falklands after the war. First on an improvised aluminium-plank runway-retrofit at Port Stanley, later on the actual fast jet capable airfield at Mount Pleasant.

The RAAF did, though. What-if history galore.

Update: Seems to not be MP related. Might be a "hot start" vs "cold start" issue, though.

It all depends on your frame of reference. If all you've flown so far was a Viper or Hornet, then you'll be in for a world of pain. If you have "prepared" and started flying contemporary fighters (F1, F-5, MiG-19 and MiG-21) then you'll have a much easier transition and you'll probably have an idea of what you're doing and where to focus on to get better. It's one of the grudges I have with all the BFM-tutorial videos showing Vipers with HMS and AIM-9Xs. The F-4 has a pretty good package for it's time, but your SA will nonetheless be eroded down to a radar, the RWR and good ole Eyeball Mk.1* - better get used to that quick. ___ *Geeks may throw in the TISEO and Jester Mk 2. That brings up a question: Will TISEO only be available on the later E?

Just had this bug appear for the first time as well in MP. Seems to work fine in SP, though.

Then there'd be two options: Get somebody else's jet (which you'd fly 98% of the time anyway) or skip to the next mission. What would really blow, though, is when the jet you're in decides it hasn't had enough aborts lately just before you're going in country. But that could happen with a normal randomized wear and tear as well. So maybe there'd be a "no mission aborts" option. I think a campaign system like this is viable, if it's done well enough. We'll see how the wear and tear system is going to progress

I think you could introduce a squadron MX-board inside the dynamic campaign feature with "UP" and "DOWN" aircraft and with squawk-sheets attached to all aircraft, so you can see the individual writeups. I think this should be doable if the backend in the DCS framework is there. Certainly not an early access feature, but maybe a feature down the road. Imagine you'd be so deeply into dynamic campaigning that "69-7221" couldn't get it's engine-change performed last night because the transport with the new motor was stuck in Tan Son Nhut. Damned monsoon... It's alright, I get carried away sometimes

Agree with everything you said, including the whole B/N or J/S dilemma. Except for the "your jet" part, though. There is no your jet. You fly with what's up and what you got. That includes aircraft with "down" radars for CAPs and escorts. Certainly with the Navy and Marines. The Air Force might have had a better spare-ratio, better equipped shops and logistical support. Now, if a dynamic campaign had that feature spread across the entire squadron, well, that would be really awesome!