shift8

Since you asked, I will answer. Its quite simple. America has a tank in game that is a modestly upgraded M1A2SEPv2. This is a tank that actually exists, in large numbers. The upgrades to the tank in game are largely just fluff, such as the APS, ERA, and LWR. The armor, fire controls, sensors, and ammo are all IN SERVICE. As these are the factors that decide how it will perform vs a T-90, little would change by making it a pure IRL SEPv2. Furthermore, if you want to strip down the Abrams to the SEPv2 by all means do so. I fully expect that the Russians should be equivalently stepped down, since they have received the BULK of the fantasy gear. Fair is fair right? The effect of the fantasy gear in game is FAR more slanted to give the Russians a fighting chance. If we remove it all, the Americans will be MUCH more overpowered than they currently are. Lastly your comparison at the end is a horrendous false equivalency. 20 T-14s in prototype stage is NOT equivalent to the extremely prevalent M1A2SEPv2 in US service. Adding some extra gadgets to a common US tank is not the same as adding a entirely unique vehicles to the Russians, especially when it will probably never see the light of day in major service.

Another thing to point out when it comes to numbers is that the cost of Russian units, which is considerably lower, is not realistic. So any balance that "should" be done has already been done by making the Russian forces much cheaper compared to American units.

There appears to be a error in the function in the armored skirts on the sides of Panther tanks. Correctly, the side skirts on the Panzer 4 do not stop bazooka rockets from penetrating. For some reason however, the Panthers skirts seem to block every single one. I did about 100 tests using the M9 bazooka with zero degree's deflection and did not see even one rocket penetrate the side skirts. Rockets successfully penetrated the upper hull and lower hull, but never through the skirts. AFAIK, this is not historically accurate. The skirts on the German tanks were designed to stop attacks from anti-tank rifles, not shaped charges. Both American and German testing of shaped charge weapons against the skirts showed that they were not effective in stopping shaped charges.

I thought we were short on our smiley face and emote quota so I thought I'd chip in.

13bil Rub is not a number of missiles. It is a offer of how much the government is will to pay for a xxxx. How many would depend on which company offered the best price for providing the product. So no, it doesn't give a number. The Tender offer time span is now over yes, but we dont know the RESULTS of said tender, so we dont know how many actually were procured.

I never said there were not more than one version of the missile. When a person says "aim 120," it does not exclude the idea that there are more than one type. Also I never said that the missile didn't have other indicators of extremely recent service. I merely mentioned one of the cases that represents an example of it. The point is that over the last two decades the Russians have not had a active radar missile in any significant inventory, and while this is changing, it is still mostly the case. Your picture is actually indicative of this, as it is like most other images of Russian jets recently spotted with the R-77, in that they are usually still sporting large numbers of SARH missiles. Furthermore, the document you linked is NOT and order for the missiles. It is a call for companies to submit proposals for procurement. The degree to which that "order" was completed is not known. It also doesn't list how many missiles are to be procured. But this is entirely off topic.

In my opinion the issue here is the proportionality of the upgrades. The baseline force structure is the jump off point for any discussion of what "should" be in game. I think it makes complete sense to point out that the Russian tank in game, while apparently being exported, is not in service in the Russian army. If we discard entirely that actual force structure should have something to say about what nations "should" get in game, then we really have almost no basis to stand on. Russian export equipment is all over the place. For example, the R-77 missile has been exported, but the Russians themselves did not have the missile in inventory for most of the last 15+ years, and apparent inventories are token based on rare sightings in Syria. Same goes with the aircraft themselves. It would be hardly fair to assert that XXX number of 4gen+++ planes have been made if they have mainly been made for export. The same would be said, of the F-16's the united states made for the UAE, which are much more advanced than US F-16s. They don't exist in US inventory, and therefore can not be regarded when it comes to determining American gear for game. Now this is all predicated of course, on the idea that Combat Mission is a game whose intent is to be as realistic as possible. Part of making a game authentic goes beyond pure technical specifications and game mechanics. Composition of forces in important to this. If you wantonly add units to balance a game too much, you run the risk of eroding some of the thematic niche of the game. It stands to reason that if you are looking for a more realistic game, and that game is to be set up with real nations is semi-realistic situations, that there should be a certain degree of observance to real capabilities of the nations involved. Otherwise, proportional to the degree unrealistic units are added, you run the risk of dissolving any contextual realism. If a certain type of tank or plane was historically or currently superior generally speaking, it should be in game. Otherwise the context of the units is obliterated, and it is therefore a complete waste of time to make the units realistic. Unit capability means nothing if its out of context. That does not mean we should not consider some alterations to exact national inventories, but even those considerations should really follow lines governed by the real world capacity of the nations involved. In other words, upgrades and other assumptions should have some grounded basis. And it would seem to me that a nations that starts with better gear, has an army budget larger than the entire defense budget of the other nation, and an economy 6 times the size should at the very least retain much of its real life advantages. Anything else is pure fantasy, and destroys and purpose to modeling units as specifically as possible. A Panther tank isn't cool anymore if you put it up against an M-60A1. Given that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the way the in game Abrams performs, the alternative argument is to claim the Russians should get better gear to offset this. But that argument doesn't really fly based on what I said above. At least that is how I see it.

Regardless of the debate on who should have what tank etc. The bottom line is that there is nothing wrong with a tank that has better optics routinely out-spotting a tank with fewer less capable optics. Crew experience is not a magical force of mystical powers that can bore a hole through hard technology limits. Like I said before, the crew experience of the T-90AM is about as likely to equalize the optics disadvantage as the Abrams crew experience will somehow yield x-ray vision.

The in game tank is a SEPv2. Don't understand where this 3.5 stuff is coming from. Minus the APS and ERA, which dont mean much in the context of a tank v tank debate. Edit: Re-read post, saw that you appeared to be implying what I just stated. So never mind.

If anything the reasons for the failure of soviet gear during the gulf wars has been beaten like a dead horse. The only circles who view the performance of Iraqi armor as representative of soviet armor are people whose interest in it doesn't go beyond the history channel. The horse has been beaten so thoroughly that the grog-land perception is now the opposite extreme, with the assumption always being that every statement positive of American equipment being immediately regarded as either propaganda or uninformed. Make no mistake, the Russians are very competent and make very good stuff. But the sanctimonious vigor that its defenders have is getting quite old.

There is nothing to see here. The tank with the quantitative and qualitative advantage in optics spots the Russian vehicles first and wins, what a surprise....not. The alleged proof of extreme error in the modeling is the assumption that the crew expertise of the T-90AM would magically overcome technological advantage of the Abrams via some kind of magical proportional override, as if crew experience is some kind of mystical force that can offset real-world technical challenges to any extent that seems convenient. A T-90AM crewed entirely by Chuck Norris clones is about as likely to break even with the M1 in spotting as a M1 crewed by the same clones is likely to start seeing through walls and predicting the future.

Not that I know of, or I would have fixed alot of things in the game myself already...such as the games preposterous IRST modeling.

CMANO is a fun game. Clearly the best attempt at any such game so far. Although some of their modeling is preposterous. Some of that I dont mind due to the extreme scope of the game, so I would expect there to be quite a few errors. Although some of it is due to the autistic views of the devs. Things like the ludicrous modeling of IRST, or how the Su-35 comes with L-Band Radar it has never been fitted with for production. Or how an Amraam will somehow score a kill against a high energy target at 50nm, but miss a low energy target at 5nm due to the RNG nature of countermeasures which is entirely too powerful.

As you already mentioned, the processing capacity is readily available. I do not see it as a anti stealh silver bullet however. Improved detection would only occur in the areas of overlap, and while you would improve detection by incorporating returns from non-frontal angles, you would still have significantly worse detection if you were operating in higher frequency bands. Stealth is worse from the side, not horrible. As before, effectiveness is going to be limited by the angles between emitters etc. Where I think this would be of real use would be in the creating the ultimate LPI radar, enhancing stealth overall, not nullifying it.

This post is not directed at anyone specifically, it is especially has nothing to do with the conversation I was just in regarding L-Band specifics. The context for this goes back more than a week, and I have been deliberating on how to extol this for some time. I want to get rid of some of the mythology and misconceptions regarding BVR combat that have been mentioned several times already. Rinaldi and Panzerwerfer (omg that name is too long to type have already mentioned some of this. For starters, it is important to understand that the emphasis on BVR is not an American exclusive doctrine. Everyone is on board with BVR being the order of the day, more or less. This includes the Russians. Differences in expenditure on specific aircraft characteristics have much more do with how much money respective nations have to spend, and less to do with differing ideologies on what the "ideal" would be. The cutting edge tends to be expensive. If you have alot less cash to throw around, it is usually wise to spend that money perfecting aspects of your technology that are still within the realm of feasibility. Historically this is has always been case. Hence why some nations do not buy planes at all, or very nearly, but may possess a decent MBT. The first problem with understanding the BVR vs WVR debate is understanding that these terms mostly mean nothing. What really matters is whether or not existing tech limits merge possibilities. The debate between the two sides on this issue tends to revolve around (especially with the F-35) the idea that reliance on BVR is dangerous because aircraft designed exclusively for this at the expense of all else will not be able to "dogfight" effectively. There are many issues with this concept, but chief among them is the concept of "dogfight." Engagement geometry, of which range to target is a function, does affect tactics. However, until you "merge" the dog fighting performance of a airplane is more or less moot. Being smacking the face by a AMRAAM, R-77, or Sidewinder at 2-3nm is just as much not a dogfight as being love tapped by the same AAM at 25nm. Neither is a dogfight. Neither requires exceptional turn rate or radius etc. The age of the dogfight is dead. The age of the all aspect spear chucking contest has begun. In this battle the main deciders will be situational awareness, weapons performance, and lastly speed and altitude kinematics. Low RCS and powerful radar or ECM decide the first, and are prerequisite to the other two. Speed and altitude kinematics will augment the performance of weapons etc. So in other words, the hardest to spot plane that can find the enemy first, and can attach that to a combination of weapons or weapons augmented by kinematics has the best chance for winning for all practical purposes. So lets go through the hurdles you have to cross to even think about the possibility of a merged engagement involving BFM. Ill leave stealth out here, and let everyone use their imaginations as to how being extremely hard to detect would affect the following. I cant describe absolutely every facet of these, so try to forgive certain omissions because this is extremely complex. SO. You have two sets of planes, lets say 16 vs 16, trying to engage each other. Lets assume with is a ideal world and both groups manage to spot each other at the same time. Having similar kinematics, and being close enough to start, they increase throttle or altitude to achieve the best kinematic geometry to increase their missile performance to the max. Once within missile range, there are a few options depending on how conservative they desire to be with their weapons. Tactics would be dictated by relative speed, altitude, weapons performance etc. You get the idea. In many cases one group may decide to abort due to unacceptable odds. It just depends. But we will assume equivalent weapons and kinematics, and sensors etc. Both groups therefore begin cranking maneuvers, placing the other groups on their radar coverage limits. If the enemy were not to do the same, they would gain a range advantage though geometry, allowing them to push deeper into the enemy weapons envelope before firing. At some point one or both sides might start firing spoiler missiles at each other in order to disrupt the other sides maneuvers. Depending on range, these shots may force enemy aircraft to go defensive to avoid the shots. Given human nature to self preserve, and a non-omniscient knowledge of enemy weapons or even how far they fired from, these defenses will be less than perfect. Many pilots will defend too aggressively and surrender the initiative and their SA too early. Pilots who take too many risks will fly themselves into enemy AAMs. Either of these options is bad news. Most modern AAM's wont give you a launch warning, so you wont know how long a missile has been in the air per se until said weapon turns on its own radar. So at this crucial decision point, whether to defend or commit, sensors will be key. Etc etc. The next part will be chaos for the side with the least situational awareness. Some aircraft will have gone defensive, other will have been killed, and still others may be racing to close further with the enemy to follow up shots or going after different targets. There are so many conditions at this point it is hard for me to fit here. Planes still pressing the attack will be gambling that they know where relevant enemy threats are, how many missiles they have left, OR if there are already missiles en-route to them. The greater the engagement size, the harder this is. Planes that are defensive will be trying to defeat said threat. They have to positively determine the missile has been defeated, and then make a risky determination as to whether they can reengage or not. You could be turning yourself around only to find that an enemy aircraft was chasing you down, or a missile. Then there is everything in between. Tools that aide or disrupt situational awareness will be far more important than anything else. Period. The side that better understands the battlefield will be better able to make the above decisions. Making the wrong decision means death. But lets say you somehow get visual. You still are not in a dogfight. Two planes that see each other visually are likely to simply shoot each other, just at closer ranges. What is worse, at these ranges HOBS missiles are a problem. IR missiles will give no warning as to launch. They will be near impossible to defeat by maneuver in many cases, and in the case of something like the aim 9x flares will be useless. But lets say you merge, so to speak, and for some reason you are both mystically our of all aspect IR AAMS, Radar AAMS, etc. Just the guns. And for some reason you know for certain the enemy also doesnt have them, and decide to be Tom Cruise. If you spot the enemy first, you might very will decide the engagement by a blind bounce....which is again.....not a dogfight. Oh and I almost forgot, at any point some jerk 15nm away might decide to fire missiles into your red baron impression. Or several jerks, in the plural. Or a Sam. So in summary, a dogfight only happens when" You survive the missile exchange at long range (of which there will probably be several), suicidal or incidentally press aggressively enough to run the chance of visually spotting enemy fighters, then somehow not kill each other pre-merge, upon merging decide risk that your opponent doesn't have any missiles left, then neither of you manages to score a non-BFM guns kill.......now you have a ww1 style dogfight. And someone could at any time ruin your fun. And for some reason, you have the fuel to do all this. There were several engagements in desert storm that got close enough to be visual. Only one involved dog-fighting, and one of the planes flew into the ground. Enough said.

Detection yes, engagement with the same system, no. So it would seem we are on the same page. Albeit detection would still be hindered somewhat since the effectiveness of the system is going to affected by the layout of the separate emitters relative to the target...or targets. For example, the useful angles produced by separation of the emitters would be hindered by such things as terrain, setup time, etc. Which means that detection from direction would not be as effective as it would be from another, depending etc. You would also have a problem where the efficacy of the entire system would be threaten potentially even if only one of the emitters was jammed or eliminated. The only point I mean to make is that by being stealthy in the higher frequency ranges you complicate things for the defender such that the methods needed to work around it are increasingly difficult or impractical, and also generally easier to find holes in. Although it would seem as though we are on the same page so I might very well just be preaching to the choir.

My reference to tone was just my impression of the content of the post, that you could use computation to fix the problems of low frequency radars. Yes, the designs are optimized for certain frequency bands. All I am saying is that not being as stealthy in L-Band or VHF is really not all that important because those frequencies have inherent usefulness limits. As you appear to have mentioned, they cannot be used for target tracking or weapons employments. Depending on the array size, the data you get from one might just be azimuth, and not even altitude etc. No amount of computational wizardry can overcome the inherent limits of the actual radar beam.

No, if I am understanding the tone of this accurately. You cannot signal process your way around physics without limit. Increased computational power and other tricks still have to work within the confines of the real capabilities of the radar and geometry of the target and environment. Low frequency radar is limited by hard factors that force design requirements into the radar that are generally impractical, especially for airborne use. For this reason, low frequency radar are only useful for early warning or perhaps iff or jamming as the power and size requirements to make a useful FCR are too great. Hence the entire reason we use high frequency radar. Contrary to popular myth, the proponents of expensive stealth aircraft did not suddenly forget about ww2 era radar when designing stealth.

It is also considerably less necessary to be as stealthy in other wavelengths, due to the inherent problems that make said wavelengths less useful for practical use in the first place. It is also for this reason that any additional stealth in lower frequencies exacerbates the difficulties of using said frequencies

The issue here is concurrency. The F-35 is no more in development at the moment than any previous jet to have been declared IOC. The difference is the perception due to the concurrency method of procurement and the fact that this airplane is the first one subject to this kind of internet scrutiny. All you have to do is go back and look at the development of the F-15, 16, etc AFTER they were declared IOC to see that this is the case. The number of issues that got work through were rather large, but no one talks about them due to the fact that google didn't exist in 1980. And if you want a real eye opener, read about the development troubles of the Mig-29 or Su-27.

I think that it is you who misunderstands the purpose of an air force. The ground forces do not "win" the war any more than the air force does. All of the arms support each other, BUT to do that they must first achieve their intrinsic purpose. The purpose of a ship is to sink ships. The purpose of a tank is to kill tanks. And the purpose of a rifleman is to kill other rifleman. Only when they achieve mastery of these areas can they properly merge as a fighting unit. I will say this one last time for emphasis: Destruction of the enemy air force is the first and foremost mission of any air force. Period. The mentality of those pilots was absolutely correct, and the scenario only makes my point. Without said escort, we wouldnt even being discussing the IADs problem, because you never would have gotten their in the first place. And we wouldnt be arguing over the role of the fighters AFTER they successfully made sure the strike package arrived. It makes little sense for valuable fighter planes who have no weapons capable to engaging the SAMs to put themselves in range of the SAM's. Its senseless to risk aircraft for no purpose. Furthermore John, if you are going to reference something like War Is Boring as an example of "expert" opinion, I am afraid we have a rather large difference in perception when it comes to what that entails. When I was referring to "everyone and their grandmother" having and opinion on the F-35, I was specifically noting things like that site. The reason you had "horror" story after another was because like I said, you had a bunch of relatively ignorant journalists and enthusiasts writing articles about things they know nothing about or to promote what particular worldview they like. If they had been reporting every single design process of the F-15 in the 60s or 70, you would have had the exact same crap going on. As for the math... I stated that around 2/3s of the air to air kills in Vietnam were done with missiles. Not sure precisely how you see the numbers you gave as differing on that statement. You listed the total kills as 169. With 47 gun kills, we get a gun kill percentage of 28%......or less than a third. The rest of my figures were for specific aircraft. I also specifically stated that not having a gun was a mistake, but that the severity of this has been massively overstated.

There is a very good reason that the Air Force emphasizes the fighter community: this is the main job of an air force. An air force does not exist first and foremost to support ground troops. Before all else, it exists to maintain control of the skies. If you could do one thing ONLY with your air force and still meet its minimum justification for existence, it would be to control the sky.....or at least prevent the enemy from doing so. All other roles for the air force are ancillary to the air supremacy role. The only role that can be argued might be parallel to this is that of ISR. Once you contest or control the skies, your next task as a Air Force is to begin destroying ground based IADS. Only after you present the capability to control the sky and carve out corridors for strikes can you even begin to contemplate attacking ground targets. Your first targets will not be of the close air support types. The first targets will be either strategic or logistical. Factories, roads, bridges, supply lines etc. Not only do these targets have a far larger effect than direct battlefield intervention, it also is more practical since low level IR SAM's and radar AA are much more difficult to weed out. Therefore force that is majorly or even exclusively fighters of one form or the other is the most desirable since it maximizes utility while also guaranteeing that every highly expensive aircraft you purchase is capable of performing the critical air supremacy mission that facilitates all the other possible uses for your aircraft. John, the vast majority of "expert" opinions on the F-35 have been favorable. The opposition to this plane has been largely facilitated by very bad "pop" history combined with the first time a weapons system of this magnitude had the terrible misfortune of being judged by the general public. Google is a double edged sword. Combined with concurrency and the massive scale the project, it was only a matter of time before every person and their grandmother had an opinion on something they had little context to understand. Much has been made of the supposedly inordinate cost and huge number of development problems. Anyone who takes the time to read reports on the legacy fighters in their infancy will realize that the F-35s issues are nothing new. And besides that we have already gone into the fact that the F-35 is really not any more expensive than planes like the Super Hornet, if not outright cheaper, if would seem illogical to compare the cost and scale of a program to replace several different fighter types with any one program....something everyone likes to do. Your analysis of Vietnam is not precisely factual. During the Vietnam war the vast majority of kills were inflicted by missiles. On the order of about two thirds, even with aircraft that had cannon like the F-8. The F-4 Phantom scored the majority of the victories during the war, not the Corsair. Phantoms shot down 107 enemy planes to the F-8's 19...and only about 16 of the Phantoms kills were with guns. Even the F4E with its integral gun made 2/3'ds of its kills with missiles.....mainly the sparrow. AND the majority of F-8 A2A victories were with the sidewinder, not the gun. That is not to say that not having a gun was a mistake, but that the magnitude of the mistake has been grossly over exaggerated. Pk is also a horrendous method for analyzing the effectiveness of missiles. Remember that Pk is the number of launches vs number of kills. It is NOT launches were hits, which while everyone knows this, everyone seems to use the figure as if it is equivalent. Early Vietnam era weapons had their issues to be sure, but they were far more effective that they have been given credit for. They also were influenced by many factors that were not inherent problems with design, but rather tactical or logistical issues. For example, Vietnam aircraft had very crude systems compared with what is used to day to ensure that the launch aircraft was in proper parameters to fire. As a result alot of pilots fired weapons outside of parameters. Sometimes they did this on purpose, specifically to spoof enemy planes into thinking they were in position so that they could force them to break. Pilot training, which was lacking in Vietnam for a number of reasons, contributed greatly to out of parameter shots when combined with the simple missile cuing systems. Missiles were also frequently mishandled on the ground, unlike today, which lead to mechanical failures at a greater rate than should have occurred. For these reasons and others, some units actually made is SOP to fire several missiles at once, which guarantees a lower Pk even if every single missile finds its mark. On other words, training and tactics were the real problem........and the missiles STILL performed well enough to supersede all other forms of attack. Weird mystery that we still use missiles. Similar things are true for the BVR portion of the coin, mainly in that even when sufficient systems were in place to use BVR weapons, units were rarely allowed to use them in this fashion. More so because of over caution of commanders, and not actual risk. The F-35 is going to be a spectacular aircraft. The combination of stealth, sensors, and weapons is going to more or less game changing. There will be no loose end non-stealthy planes and the fusion of the F-35s sensors will allow it to act as a force multiplier for the whole battle space, not just the USAF.

The F-35 was always intended to assist the F-22 in the air to air role, just as the F-16 was to the F-15. Not being the flagship fighter does not in any way mean that it was ever intended to be bad at all things not strike. The F-35's niche in the air force is very much akin to the High-Low Mix that has been the standard for decades at this point. It also was not "defeated" by a F-16 in a dogfight. The report you are referring to was a test of the control laws of the F-35's fly-by-wire logic which was not finished at the time. The issues in that test were the result of the safety mechanisms of the airplanes computers artificially limiting the airplane too aggressively, which meant they needed further tuning. That is the whole point of doing such testing. Although really this is all rather secondary since visual range fights where BFM actually matters are almost non-existent at this point. BVR is the order of the day, and the rare occasions where aircraft engage visually will still not be dogfights in the traditional sense far more often than not. Your "math" regarding the cost of the Super Hornet isn't working because you apparently equate "new and shiny" to "expensive and inefficient" and dismiss all other metrics that affect the cost of a aircraft. You also seem to think that being technologically mature (another word for old) as a synonym to "effective." The F-18 is also about as hand built as my Honda, which is in and of itself a baffling comparison since things that are build by hand are generally much more expensive. People wanted this airplane canceled for the same reasons that people thought the battleship would forever be king of the seas.

Yes, well if anything all this shows is that 108 nations are retarded. Cluster Munitions are a weapon like anything else. There is nothing immoral about their use. Same goes for napalm, and everything else people like to irrationally attempt to ban because it makes them feel better. The real issue here is how Russia and Syria are using those weapons. Dropping them wantonly into civilian areas is the real issue here. Same as if would be if they dropped a single 1000lb dumb bomb. And the intentional indiscriminate use of those weapons IS a problem.

I think if you have to use "problems back home" as a caveat then my point is made. NATO, even the US by itself, has the numerical and qualitative advantages. In spades. And the economic advantage to sustain it to a almost silly degree. Casualties would obviously higher than something like the Gulf war no doubt, but it would be very unlikely for them to be high. The contest for the air is about as close as you can get militarily to a forgone conclusion.