Requiem762

Im so glad that this thread has been such a boon to battlefront! over a year since the last release! also the Battle for normandy release on steam has missed its release window 2 years in a row.

I too am interested in the future of combat mission content. There has been a lot of totally baseless speculation that hasnt done much to actually assess the situation on the ground or the future of the game.

The KA-50 is a bit of a interesting aircraft acquisitions wise, because it is both a victim of the collapse of the soviet union as well as as its own technical faults. The biggest problem the KA-50 had however was pilot task saturation, even with the advanced for the time autopilot system and a high degree of automation in its avionics, managing the combat systems, the flight controls as well as coordinating with other forces and observing for threats was too much for one pilot to handle, and significantly impacted the crews efficiency at performing all tasks. This, combined with cost issues as well as a high technical complexity and the impending collapse of the soviet union all meant that the KA-50 was doomed to a limited production run (sub 100 iirc) and was later supplanted by the twin seat KA-52, which struggled with adoption intially due to post soviet collapse issues but is now in service in numbers. IIRC the KA-50 is still technically in service but they are so few in number that their strategic relevance to other helos is minimal and its unlikely they would be deployed anywhere especially when there are other helicopters in the Russian inventory that are more capable and have more depth as far as in service airframes are considered.

Very good post! Happy to see black sea getting some love, can't wait to play with the new forces!

"Egypt became one of the first export customers when in 1974 bought eight MiG-23MS interceptors, eight MiG-23BN strikers and four MIG-23U trainers, concentrating them into a single regiment based at Mersa Matruh. By 1975 all Egyptian MiG-23s had been withdrawn from active duty and placed in storage due to the Egyptian foreign policy shifting towards the West and thus losing USSR support."

so I'm not going to spend too much time on this one. However its not nessisarcily correct to characterize the E model as "the ground support variant" the Strike Eagle was designed for and is used primarily as a deep strike aircraft similar to the F-111 that the strike eagle would go on to replace. The Strike Eagle is best employed striking command and control, infrastructure, muster points, ammunition and supply sites, ports, airfields... you get the picture. the closest the strike eagle will generally get to the battlefield is interdicting enemy units behind the line before they are able to reach the front it would be more accurate to say the reason that the E does not show up in CMSF is because battlefield support is not a role the strike eagle would undertake unless there is a broken arrow call and a strike eagle is in the area. The one exception to this rule is in the mid to late stages of Afghanistan where the Strike Eagle was valued for its high endurance enabled by the FAST packs extra fuel capacity as well as the the high speed of the strike eagle giving the aircraft the ability to respond to a CAS call rapidly. However this is a state of affairs that are only possible in a COIN environment, and in any other context employing the strike eagle in the battlefield support role is a inefficient use of resources. For these same reasons the strike eagle shouldn't be available in black sea either. also how does this have any bearing on the mig-23/27? Edit: just checked, the strike eagle IS in fact in shockforce 2.

The Mig-23 has a kill loss ratio of 25/102 even without the context of every encounter, that is abysmal. Additionally the results of every encounter between Angola and the SAAF is contested by both participants. The combat statistics for all the aircraft currently in use | MiGFlug.com Blog Your own source, aviation geek club, hosts multiple articles about the encounters between the mig23 that contradict each other, but the balance of information favors the South African accounts. Even if we take the Angolan and Cuban accounts at face value, as Cpt Miller himself said marginal performance does not negate broad trends and the balance of pilot and crew accounts, in every other conflict the Mig-23 was involved in it suffered abysmal combat performance relative to contemporary's weather they be french, american, british, or even soviet aircraft. The Mig-23 was notorious for its high maintenance requirements due to the mechanical complexity of the landing gear and wing sweep systems, poor radar performance, utter lack of situational awareness (a problem all soviet aircraft share until the advent of the Mig-29 and Su-27) Air crew often complained of stability issues relating to the need to operate the wing sweep manually. While the Mig-23 is a remarkable aircraft, it falls short of its contemporaries in almost all performance characteristics relevant to the era, had significant ergonomic and operational deficiencies that made its operational utility hard to justify. Perhaps the most significant thing the Mig-23 Represents is the general decline and stagnation of the soviet military industrial complex, and the State. the Mig23 and the technology that underpinned it are fundamentally backwards look and represent the beginning of the mid-70s technological Gap that the soviet union was never able to close. The Mig-23 is representative of design trends that were regarded as obscelenant and had already been abandoned in the west. The mig-23 would have been a serviceable aircraft had it entered service years earlier then it actually did, and by the time of the types actual entry into service, technology and counter tactics had been developed that rendered the threat posed by the mig-23 to be minimal. What Cuban paid you to make this post?