VIGGEN WITH SPARROWS?

[SOLIDKREATE]

Did the Viggen ever carry Sparrows?

 

 

[Otulf]

Hello Solidkreate!

 

The fighter version, JA 37 Viggen, were equipped with the European version of the AIM-7Sparrow that was called Sky flash.

In the Swedish air  force the Sky flash was called Rb 71.

The early verions of the JA 37 Viggen could carry two Rb 71 and four Sidewinders called Rb 24, Rb 24J and Rb74 depending on Sidewinder version.

The JA 37 Viggen also had one internal 30mm Oerlikon automatic cannon.

The latest and also last version of the JA 37 called JA 37 Di could carry four AIM-120 AMRAAM called Rb 99 and two Rb 24, Rb 24J and Rb74 depending on Sidewinder version.

JA stands for Jakt/attack wich means that the primary role is Jakt(Fighter) and Attack is obiously Attack.

In the attack-role the JA 37 could carry four arak-pods with attack rockets. 

 

I hope that was a answer to you question.

 

Best regards:

Otulf 

Edited March 1 by Otulf

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

Was it for JA-37 or AJS-37? Educated guess would be the former which some of us crave for.

[Otulf]

Hello widen76!

 

Great link!

 

Best regards:

Otulf

Hello Flight Guy in PJ Pants!

 

Correct! The JA 37!

Wouldn´t a JA 37 be great in DCS?

 

Best regards:

Otulf

Edited March 1 by Otulf

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

1 hour ago, Otulf said:

Wouldn´t a JA 37 be great in DCS?

Some of us have asked for this gem for -- I have lost count.

[SOLIDKREATE]

Yeah I'd like it too.

[Dragon1-1]

2 hours ago, widen76 said:

The AIM-7 Sparrow was used on the Viggen during its early years, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, as the aircraft's primary medium-range air-to-air missile. However, as newer weapons systems became available, the Viggen eventually transitioned to using more modern missiles, like the RB 71 and RB 99 (what, like wtf! )

One reason why it's a waste of time to ask AI anything. Rb71 is the Skyflash, Viggen never carried the US version of Sparrow. I wish people would stop posting AI "answers", because they'll come up in search results.

[PhantomHans]

21 hours ago, VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants said:

Some of us have asked for this gem for -- I have lost count.

It sounds like there simply isn't enough released information to do it authentically to Heatblur's standards.
I wouldn't mind seeing it done as an "FC3+" level release as it would be apparently the best we could really do right now.

With the Kola map, I'm hoping some day we'll get an A-6 Intruder and A-7 Corsair, and that someone will re-create the good old days of campaigns on the North Cape.
I want a JA-37 mostly for use as an AI jet.  Jaktviggens and MiG-21Bis circling over Neutral Sweden and Finland, ready to pounce upon stray fighters and bombers from either side while the Reds and NATO fight it out.

IYKYK.  I'm SO incredibly grateful that Heatblur finally did some justice to the Tomcat, the flight model in Microprose's rendition makes it feel quite chubby in a dogfight, but I'm still waiting for someone to recapture the feeling of a 1980's Cold War gone hot...  IN A VIDEO GAME!  Don't need that one on my 2025 bingo card...

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

1 hour ago, PhantomHans said:

It sounds like there simply isn't enough released information to do it authentically to Heatblur's standards.

I am told that some features on JA-37 are still being set as classified so HB refuses to make it, or may be it is not that popular as other bigger, more famous aircraft.

One of the many threads around:

 

[Rudel_chw]

2 hours ago, VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants said:

or may be it is not that popular as other bigger, more famous aircraft.

 

My guess is that this is the true reason.

 

Developing a new DCS module represents a big investment and you need to be certain that your sales will at the very least cover that investment. There are exceptions that explain the existence of less famous aircraft on DCS, for example the C-101 was the result of the love that its spanish developers have for it, same for the JF-17 and even the current Viggen is the result of the love a swedish group had for it, they developed it without much regard for if it would be profitable or not.

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

17 minutes ago, Rudel_chw said:

 

My guess is that this is the true reason.

 

Developing a new DCS module represents a big investment and you need to be certain that your sales will at the very least cover that investment. There are exceptions that explain the existence of less famous aircraft on DCS, for example the C-101 was the result of the love that its spanish developers have for it, same for the JF-17 and even the current Viggen is the result of the love a swedish group had for it, they developed it without much regard for if it would be profitable or not.

I would like to add MB-339A might be another exception. 

Yes, not much incentive to put out a plane very few heard about it. But Jaguar, dang it!

[Rudel_chw]

1 minute ago, VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants said:

I would like to add MB-339A might be another exception. 

 

Agree, sorry I forgot it  .. also on this list should be the I-16. My guess is that the upcoming La-7 and F-4U will sell well and are pretty well-known, so they do not belong to this Module category.

Cheers!

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

Yeah i have been off-topic too hard. 

[PhantomHans]

If the AJS-37 weren't already in game,  I'd have to think a JA-37 wouldn't make money.  But given that we have the AJS-37 I'd think you could sell an "FC3+" level module to go with it.

 

I know they'd have to make some stuff up F-35 style or frankenjet it like the existing F-5, F-16, F/A-18, etc, but I'd expect it to still get some love as long as they got the flight model done right.

[Silver_Dragon]

11 hours ago, PhantomHans said:

It sounds like there simply isn't enough released information to do it authentically to Heatblur's standards.
I wouldn't mind seeing it done as an "FC3+" level release as it would be apparently the best we could really do right now.

With the Kola map, I'm hoping some day we'll get an A-6 Intruder and A-7 Corsair, and that someone will re-create the good old days of campaigns on the North Cape.
I want a JA-37 mostly for use as an AI jet.  Jaktviggens and MiG-21Bis circling over Neutral Sweden and Finland, ready to pounce upon stray fighters and bombers from either side while the Reds and NATO fight it out.

IYKYK.  I'm SO incredibly grateful that Heatblur finally did some justice to the Tomcat, the flight model in Microprose's rendition makes it feel quite chubby in a dogfight, but I'm still waiting for someone to recapture the feeling of a 1980's Cold War gone hot...  IN A VIDEO GAME!  Don't need that one on my 2025 bingo card...

Do you remember the A-7E has on progress by flyying Iron Simulation 3rd party, and the A-6E has on progress by Heatblur, after the EFA?

[TOViper]

23 hours ago, PhantomHans said:

If the AJS-37 weren't already in game,  I'd have to think a JA-37 wouldn't make money.  But given that we have the AJS-37 I'd think you could sell an "FC3+" level module to go with it

Would be one of my "within 10 seconds instant buy actions". 0 seconds for thinking, 10 seconds for paying. Period.
Others hate this idea, but I would simply love it. I don't care if it is a 100% representation or not. I just want to fly a Viggen without compressor stalls when hunting MiG-21s

Edited March 3 by TOViper

[widen76]

On 3/1/2025 at 12:30 PM, Dragon1-1 said:

One reason why it's a waste of time to ask AI anything. Rb71 is the Skyflash, Viggen never carried the US version of Sparrow. I wish people would stop posting AI "answers", because they'll come up in search results.

My bad, I have removed the post. Even with AI tools the info needs to be evaluated for correctness. Agreed, incorrect info in search results may "poison the well" and that's not good for anyone.

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

53 minutes ago, TOViper said:

10 seconds for paying

In 10 seconds, what is that financial service used?

[Dragon1-1]

1 hour ago, widen76 said:

Even with AI tools the info needs to be evaluated for correctness.

In fact, you can safely cut the AI out of the picture, and just go straight to human written sources. AI is neither a search engine or a source of information. It's a text manipulation, text generation and pattern matching tool. These are valid uses for AI. If you want to rewrite your book blurb in corpospeak, or write the next episode of Seinfield, it'll do an OK job. If you start asking questions about reality, you'll find it pretty eager to spout BS.

[renhanxue]

On 3/2/2025 at 10:44 AM, VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants said:

I am told that some features on JA-37 are still being set as classified so HB refuses to make it, or may be it is not that popular as other bigger, more famous aircraft.

 

I'm not HB but here's the situation as far as I'm aware. As much as the JA 37 gets requested, there are two huge problems with it that make it unlikely to appear any time soon:

Problem one: it's not like the AJS 37

A lot of people assume (quite naturally) that since it's a Viggen, it must be similar to the AJ(S) 37 and so a lot of code and assets could be reused from the AJS 37 module. This is unfortunately not true at all. The JA 37 looks like an AJ 37 from the outside, but internally and functionally it's an entirely different aircraft. The engine is different (one extra low pressure compressor stage), the airframe is different (the JA 37 has a longer fuselage, different control surfaces, a different tailfin, a different drop tank, and the 30mm cannon in a conformal belly pod), the flight control system is different (the autopilot and its SPAK damping mode is entirely different), the central computer is different (entirely new hardware and a completely different software suite), the HUD is different, and all of the tactical and weaponry stuff is of course completely different.

The radar in particular has absolutely nothing in common with the AJS 37 radar. The PS-37/A on the AJ 37 is a mostly analog monopulse ground mapping radar that presents what is basically a raw video feed. The PS-46/A on the other hand is a fully digital, software controlled, TWS capable pulse-doppler contraption that is purely for air to air work. I don't think it even has a raw video output option; the presentation is fully digital too.

The two aircraft share mostly structural components and some basic steam gauge instruments, but not a whole lot else. They share no weapon systems other than the rocket pods and Sidewinders.

So, in conclusion, in terms of how much work is required to get a JA 37 in DCS, I think it'd basically be the equivalent of a completely new module from scratch.

Problem two: we don't actually know how it works

There is absolutely zero publicly available hard-facts documentation regarding how the JA 37's radar and tactical systems actually work in detail. Pilot anecdotes provide a few tantalizing glimpses, but they're understandably very vague. Then there's a few scattered pictures of the radar display and the tactical indicator screen, and the unclassified part of the flight manual has decent coverage of at least most of the nav mode stuff, but I'm pretty sure there isn't even a full symbology table for either display, much less any documentation about presentation in the many various different modes that are known to exist. There's an old article in Ericsson Review from the 80's that gets tossed around a lot, but while it's interesting, it doesn't actually say that much about the details of how to operate the thing. Essentially nothing is known about the tactical modes for the HUD either; there isn't even any good video footage of those modes that I'm aware of, only some glimpses in grainy amateur footage on YouTube (I say "modes" as if I know there's more than one, but I don't actually know how many there are).

That doesn't even touch on the data link, which was very tightly integrated into the aircraft. The general principles of how it operated are known, as well as some details about how an older version of it worked on the Draken, but essentially no practical details about its implementation in the JA 37 are known, at least not nearly to the extent required to model it in DCS. We sort of know (mostly based on pilot anecdotes) that it could be used to present targets on the radar screen with similar symbology as targets detected with the aircraft's own radar, I guess? But even that is sort of speculative, I'm not sure how what that actually looked like in practice.

Surely that is a solvable problem, though? I mean, the aircraft entered service in the early 1980's and was taken out of service about 20 years ago, it's pretty old tech. Documentation for at least the early versions should have passed the magical 40 year "shall-declassify" limit imposed by Swedish law. Still, there is no documentation out there, and there's a lot of internet mythology that attempts to explain why. For example, it's often claimed that the data link carried over to the Gripen and that's why a lot of documentation is still classified. I'm quite confident this is entirely baseless speculation, though.

The reason I'm so confident about that is that when I emailed the Swedish national military archives last year to ask them to get the declassification process started for part 2 of the SFI (the flight manual part that contains the classified parts of the technical systems description for the aircraft), they replied that they do not have this publication in their library. They have part 1 (which is unclassified) and part 4 (declassified in 2012, contains aerodynamic performance charts), but not part 2. I didn't ask about part 3, which would contain mostly procedures and operational stuff. Either way, it's not that they refuse to declassify it, it's that we can't request declassification of a publication that doesn't exist. It is possible that the air force HQ or a similar institution has retained a copy of the documentation, but for complex Swedish bureaucratic reasons that we don't need to dig into here, I'd consider it extremely difficult to get access to that (in fact, I'd rate the odds of even getting them to give a straight answer if they have it or not as fairly low).

The best bet for JA 37 documentation on this point I'd say is just straight up archival research. Go directly for the Defense Material Administration's classified project archives and start putting puzzle pieces together. Based on prior experience (I've done something at least vaguely similar for the strv 103) I'd say a conservative estimate would be that this should take at least a couple of years, if a decently competent researcher is on it on a regular basis. The main bottleneck is probably waiting for declassification of potentially-interesting document batches; the national archives has become extremely restrictive and careful in this regard in recent years, for reasons that are probably rather obvious.

Edited March 4 by renhanxue

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

Thanks, so basically there is no real hope of getting this done as real as possible, unless some one finds out there is a set of documentation one day hidden in the attic or something.

[renhanxue]

1 hour ago, VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants said:

Thanks, so basically there is no real hope of getting this done as real as possible, unless some one finds out there is a set of documentation one day hidden in the attic or something.

Unfortunately, yep. I'd call the odds for an "attic find" pretty low too though; as a classified publication, each copy would've been numbered and tracked in a centrally managed distribution list. If procedures were followed, a pilot who didn't need the classified flight manual anymore would've had to return it or report it as lost (triggering a lot of paperwork and general pain), and when the Viggen system was finally decommissioned in the late 00's all copies except a few archival ones should have been burned. In this case they seem to have forgotten to provide the national archives with the usual archive copy, unfortunately.  

Also, even if an attic find does turn up, it would be a crime ("unauthorized handling of classified information") for any unauthorized person to read it, possess it, copy it, distribute it or otherwise handle it in any way. I'm not sure if it would be technically illegal for a former pilot to possess it, but I think so? Still, if they did have it and turned it in to the national archives I can't imagine they'd be prosecuted, so that's about the best we could hope for.

Edited March 4 by renhanxue

[Machalot]

On 3/2/2025 at 12:02 AM, PhantomHans said:

IYKYK

Fleet Defender! 

[SOLIDKREATE]

It seems I opened a can of snakes