Oh yeah, F-104 is coming! Which one we are going to have?

[Bremspropeller]

Or intercepting F-14s at night, trying to hijack an aircraft during an international affair and telling them to go eff themselves.

[GUFA]

13 minutes ago, Bremspropeller said:

Or intercepting F-14s at night, trying to hijack an aircraft during an international affair and telling them to go eff themselves.

Do tell

 

[Steel Jaw]

AKA The Widomaker.

[Bremspropeller]

31 minutes ago, GUFA said:

Do tell

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achille_Lauro_hijacking

Scroll down to where the Egypt Air part starts.

[GUFA]

Completely forgot about about Achille Lauro Hijacking. I read a a fair bit of the article and couldn't help but feel that it came across as a b grade comedy (no offence intended). anyway thanks

[Dragon1-1]

On 8/26/2023 at 11:54 PM, LordOrion said:

unless you take them completely by surprise.

That's exactly how something like 90% of AA kills in WWII happened. Remember, jets of the time rarely had an RWR (and when they did, it was a crude tail warning system), and Mk1 eyeball was the primary means of detecting an attacker when outside friendly GCI radar range. The F-104, with its high speed and tiny frontal profile, could go from "too far to see" to "guns shot" to "moving away too fast to do anything about" in a really short time. It had Sidewinders, sure, but only four, and with their reliability being what it was, you'd want to shoot two at a single target.

Of course, don't expect boom and zoom to work on MiGs very well in DCS, unless ED puts in some serious work in AI SA. Right now, they're able to use the MiG-19's tail warning RWR (which only indicates if you're illuminated or not) to report the type of radar that's painting them, even from the front, to say nothing of their visual scan abilities.

[FlankerKiller]

Reading the gun vs no gun argument is always fun. It just depends on the decade. But we are DCS players. How many gun kills do you get? For me it isn’t zero in modern era, but it’s not something I bank on ether. If F-104 had B model winders only give me that gun. If anyone here wants to go try out the AIM-9B it’s in DCS. Go on Enigmas Cold War server and load out an F-5E with no guns and some B models. Good luck, you’re gonna need it. The Widow Maker is going to be cool because it’s cool. But is going to be what it is. I don’t think you’re really going to dogfight with it. What would be cool is if we could get some of the old school bombers to actually have something to intercept. As for sneaking up on Ai, I do it all the time. turn the radar off. So B&Z is definitely on the table in single player. I personally think no matter the variant the 104 will get most of its kills from low six with sidewinder, then run. Hopefully we can get multiple variants including the S. The pre and post Vietnam era is filling up. So one of these for ether would be awesome. I’m assuming the S had RWR, countermeasures, and BVR with the AIM-7. I suspect the 104 would have done well is the Fox-1 fight, radar depending of corse. But it has the kinematics to do a wicked F-pole. I’m assuming the G lacks RWR and countermeasures. The limiting factor i see in DCS is not the jet, but the lack of targets. We need more Ai bombers from the early Cold War. And we need more ground attack aircraft, particularly early Soviet, from that era. Speaking of that era this jet was meant to fill a requirement. It was expected that it would be intercepting bombers in a nuclear war. In that role is likely would have excelled, of course assuming GCI was intact. Go fast, hit hard, run away, land, rearm refuel, rinse, wash, and repeat. Do that over and over until you ether eliminate the threat, die, or your base becomes a glowing crater. Any other role is something the Widow Maker is being shoehorned into. And it would be doing something it wasn’t designed to do to begin with. So in conclusion. I would take one AIM-9M over a fully loaded gun any day, but any earlier and give me that gun. Hopefully we get and early and late model, I guess G and and S. We need more late fifties through early seventies Soviet ground attackers as Ai, at least at first, to go up against. It’s a boom and zoom fighter that will likely be effective if it has the element of surprise on its side. 

[Jeezmaster]

Il 5/9/2023 at 16:07, FlankerKiller ha scritto:

I’m assuming the S had RWR, countermeasures, and BVR with the AIM-7.

Il 5/9/2023 at 16:07, FlankerKiller ha scritto:

I’m assuming the G lacks RWR and countermeasures

Take this with a big grain of salt because I read it from a former pilot in a modeling forum years ago, but none of the fighter-interceptor S's in the ITAF had RWRs. A simple RWR was fitted to some fighter-bomber S's or some G's, and it was an in-helmet tone (maaaybe a single light, I'm not sure), with no directional indication, so something along the lines of the SPO-2 in the Mig-19. The ASA upgrade, that came later in the 80s, added some, in the form of the AN/ALQ-70/72 ECM system and AN/ALE-40 countermeasures dispenser, again only fitted to fighter-bomber squadrons I believe.

 

Il 5/9/2023 at 16:07, FlankerKiller ha scritto:

Hopefully we get and early and late model, I guess G and and S

I don't think the G and S are that far apart in terms of time, both were introduced in the 60s I believe, it would not be a night and day difference besides the Sparrows/gun compromise. The ASA upgrade, with IFF, PD radar, ECM and CM dispenser, monopulse seeker Aspide, and Aim-9Ls would be more 'late model' I guess.

 

 

[TLTeo]

Correct, the Italian S interceptors did not have ECM gear (except for the fighter bombers that were passed to interceptor squadrons as the Tornado came online) at any point of their careers - supposedly the reasoning is that they didn't need defensive gear in their role which is naive at best, but hey, that's the Italian Air Force in the 90s for you, they don't call those years "the crossing of the desert" for nothing.

The ASA upgrade did not feature a pulse-doppler radar, more of an MTI-type thing a-la Mirage F1 which was still pretty mediocre in look down. The jets that did have countermeasure dispensers were mostly the Gs that went to Desert Storm, I don't think even the fighter bomber ASA got them. As far as I know the only Starfighters to have a proper RWR like the ones we are used to in DCS were the F-104Cs in their second deployment to Vietnam, and CF-104s when they switched to conventional strike. The Dutch also had specific ECM gear, but I don't know whether it's a RWR antenna, some sort of jammer, or what else. In all 3 cases you can see the fairing under the nose.

[FlankerKiller]

Nice, thanks for the info. I’m sure we are getting a G which will be sweet. I think as the Gen2 jets start coming in they are going to be extremely popular. We need more Ai bombers and attackers from that era. I’m curious how this will do against MiG-19s and F-100s. I would definitely like to have more high-performance aircraft from the post-Korea pre-Vietnam War era. That part of the Cold War almost became not so cold a few times. 

[Ramstein]

here are few more photos I took of aircraft of the era