Typhoid

this is what I like about this place - the mods that come in are absolutely outstanding! Cool mod.

yes and no. Depends on how far away the target was. For routine peacetime ops around the boat they didn't use tanks all that much, but if they were "going downtown" they needed the fuel. Weapons load at 400nm rarely would exceed 4k lbs. Everything else was fuel.

the RWR displays using the Avionics70 rendition are VERY cool. Some of the later models using that are very realistic.

its real. Brazil has been working on an SSN for quite some time. Not surprising that this project is getting some visibility, but it is by no means a joke.

yes, there are mosquitos too! think of a terrain that is sort of blurry and moves - towards you - while a humming gets louder and louder........

which was exactly my point. but also bear in mind what I did post above, the strike package against an air capable threat would include top cover of Hornets flying strictly in the air to air role. An Alpha Strike package if you will. So the strike package would ingress in while the escort/Mig Cap clears the way and a SEAD package shuts down the GBAD. So not completely arrogant or stupid. but yes, we (the USN) I think desperately needs a carrier based air superiority package that is focused on what the next generation AFTER the Advanced Flankers might field.

I think the logic (or lack thereof) is that there won't be any fighter opposition that the Hornets tasked to sweep the skies won't have already taken care of. That works today, not sure it will always work in the future.

I think we should close the Colorado border to all these illegal immigrants from the East Coast for the weekend...... (grumble grumble)

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no, you have to get this straight. They are the Fighter and Attack GuyS............

supposedly OJ was sitting in the road with the traffic backed up because he wanted to shoot himself and the gun jammed. They started a collection to help him out - collected 10 cases of WD-40........

wow. words almost fail me. "I have never once heard the press in this country bad-mouthing our military." on what planet do you reside? think about this - several of us current and ex-military took offense at the tone of the article and cited innacuracies in the article. Isn't that enough?

no, they all serve on juries........

I've heard the term applied to several aircraft, quite likely that was too. Anything that's "pointy" and has a less than stellar flight safety record gets "interesting names" assigned to them.

everyone across the services, except for the Lawn Dart pilots and maintenance crews, calls them Lawn Darts. the article is kind of funny in that at one point they claim, wrongly, that the flight hours are down and then turn around and blame the stress of increased ops tempo due to combat. Typical Treasonous Press at work...... and the press hacks wonder why no one in the services trusts them.......

just a quick update. I double-checked the mk-46 and I do have the same issue. Not sure why I thought I didn't. I did notice that I was able to load a "Mk-46 T-5" which seemed more like a Mk-48.

we also called it Vector Logic and then morphed it all into "The Outer Air Battle". Quite a complex tactic and very challenging to sit out there and run the radar, data link and air battle management radio networks. Fun......

I didn't do anything. I have not noticed a problem with the MK46. It does kind act like a bomb though but a hit close to the periscope takes care of the sub. So does strafing the periscope oddly enough..... the paratrooper glitch seems to have fixed itself. Doesn't happen anymore (shrugs in AF Reserve Salute).

Well, the leadership of the USN was dead-set on doing that for the simple reason that that was all we could afford. There was a very vocal group within Naval Carrier Aviation that disagreed with that - we all now have "Retired" after our ranks..... The decision quite simply was based on $$$ and what was projected to be available in the years ahead. And that projection was BEFORE the Clinton years during which what is charitably called an "acquisition gap" occured. So it was the right decision based on affordability, even though we lost a lot of carrier based capabilities which we still are no where near regaining. But, having that said that, the move to precision guided weapons replaced the overall strike potential based on how many targets said reduced airwing could destroy. I don't know what other option we could have done and not cratered during program execution during the Clinton meat-axe approach to military budget drills. And please don't take that as a political comment - simply a fact of military procurement during those years. Had we gone the Tomcat 21 route, we'd have had a cancelled program and today would have no Super Hornets, only a handful of reworked C's and D's. wrt to some other questions - no, the Nimitz class cannot carry 127 Hornets. Now the explanation; The "deck multiple" is a figure used to measure the capacity of carrier and includes the hangar deck and flight deck. It used to be measured using the A-7 equal to one and then every other aircraft would be a multiple of that. I don't remember all of the numbers but for example the F-14 was somewhere around 1.7 and the F-4 was 1.4, the E-2 was 2 something. You added up your airwing multiples to find your airwing Deck Multiple and then compared that to the Deck Multiple of the carrier. I just don't recall what the deck multiple was of the classes, but even if a Nimitz could take 127, that didn't mean you could actually load that number of that plane on board. You would have to sacrifice all of the other capabilities that a balanced Carrier Air Wing brings to the fight. Since the A-7 is no longer relevant, the Navy not too long ago recalculated the deck multiple based on the F-18 (not the Super Hornet). I don't know what those new numbers are, I'll look them up though. But even if it is 127, the same comment applies - you cannot load 127 Hornets on board and go do something because you don't have the balanced capabilities of a modern Carrier Air Wing if you did that. I do know that the carriers are today operating at about 2/3 of their Deck Multiple simply because since that dark day in January some years ago, we have never bought enough planes to fill the decks. The F-14 could not bring back 6 Phoenix, it could bring back 4. Every plane does have a "max trap" weight which means you have to dump fuel or weapons or both to get down to max trap. Sea Story excursion - the EA-3 was so loaded down with electronic stuff and crew that its max trap left very little fuel margin. But they would have to tank many times to preserve their holding time and make their approach time, and then have to dump fuel on downwind and report "Bingo fuel" on the ball. Always fun to watch the Air Boss go through the overhead when that happened....... I don't know what the F-18 max trap is and how much they can bring aboard. I doubt they would have to dump their one bomb with empty external fuel tanks. one more comment on overall procurement. In order to stretch scarce military procurement dollars, the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) was established with the Joint Staff. They review the various service requirements and make the decision from the overall joint perspective of what tradeoffs to make to balance capabilities across the services while still meeting the theater commanders' requirements and budget constraints. Of relevance to this debate was the deliberate and concious decision by the JROC to drop the medium strike capability from the USN and assign those strike target coverage roles to the USAF heavy bomber force. So if you really want to know how the theater commander will hit a hard target deep in hostile territory - its called the B-52, B-1 and B-2 along with the cruise missile arsenal from ships and bombers. That contributed to the demise of the carrier based medium strike capability and the decision to go Hornets and cancel the strike Tomcat variants, A-6F and A-12. As a result, during Desert Fox, you had some F-14D hit some targets but many of the deep strikes were done with B-1's escorted by carrier based F-14s and HARM equiped F-18's. And later during the Afghanistan operations, carrier based F-18's were refueled by KC-135's. The joint solution is what has maintained our overall military capabilities. Typhoid former member of the Joint Staff and a JSO.

ok, I'll take some screen shots and post them after the weekend.

you are missing the point. payload at range is the issue. Any strike aircraft has a maximum payload that includes fuel. How much fuel it carries determines the range at which it can reach. You can add fuel in flight but your strike planning has to take into account how much fuel you can get airborne and trade off between the weapons payload. How many weapons stations are on a given airframe are completely irrelevant. Its how much weapons weight can be loaded on after you determine how much fuel you need to get to the target and back and how much of that fuel you can get airborne. (and don't forget max carrier launch weight) The F-14D could carry more weight in weapons payload because it carried WAY more fuel internal and had some flexibility in that trade off equation. The Hornet, even the Super Hornet, does not. In order to get to any target beyond about 100nm and back again it has to either load fuel tanks in place of weapons and/or take gas airborne in order to have a combat package of fuel over the target area. And since carriers generally like to not be at the water's edge...... As an example, over Afghanistan the F-18C's typically carried ONE 500lb lgb and everything else was fuel tanks, and they still would drain a KC-135 or an RAF Victor inbound and outbound. With the F-18E that goes up to 3 lgbs. I've done some of this strike planning for real. Trust me on this, the Bug carried half the bomb weight half the range as the F-14D or A-6E, and the Super Bug only brought that up to 2/3 at 2/3 the range. To go any further requires USAF tanker support. Within its range, the Hornet series are a fantastic aircraft and their sortie generation rate (based on maintenance manhours per flight hour) cannot be beat. Your comment about a Swiss Army knife and the greater variety of weapons are right on. But we lost range and payload. We made up payload to some extent by using all PGM to change the equation into target points destroyed rather than ordanance weight over the target. But the argument then becomes "how many target points could we have destroyed per sortie if we had a longer range, heavier payload strike aircraft such as the F-14D or A-6F or A-12?". The answer is we could have done a lot more. B-1's carrying 84 JDAMs for example. But the bottom line was $$$. There weren't enough $$$ in the budget to do anything more than field a 2/3 size airwing on our carriers using the lowest cost option which was the Hornet. Had we gone any other route, our airwings would today consist of 1/2 the number of aircraft that are presently on them, which in turn is 2/3 the number we used to have on them. It all boils down to $$$ in a Congressionally passed and Presidentially signed budget authorization. Lacking that........

the open architecture that allows people to develop mods of all types is what makes this an absolutely fantastic sim and what will keep it going. The third-party add-ons are absolutely fantastic in many cases. Some of the all-inclusive mods rival the stock releases (being dependent of course on the game engine and upgrades). the different teams working on aircraft and the add on terrains, campaigns, missions, etc. are generally first rate pieces of work. I predict that this will be around for a long, long time!right now, everyone is holding their breath for the next in the series. That is hardly a drought or loss of interest. those other guys sound like deranged political party or movement declaring that "the debate is over" long before it is...... HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

which problem? paratroopers on the hardpoints or MK46's? wrt to the Mk46, the note above on it being an arm tracks with how I used it. The periscope is also a radar emitter and I tracked in on it with the RWR. So that is entirely consistent. wrt to the paratroopers wanting to fly on strike aircraft - other than once to see what it looked like, I just don't load them. I haven't yet figured out what it was that I recently loaded that included these "hard-core paratroopers" into the weapons mix. They do, by the way, employ parachutes very nicely and float on down. They don't seem to do well against 37mm though......

the issue is one of fuel and range. The Hornets don't have it without plugging into a grunch of tankers or stealing a spare a KC-135 to pull them along (as they did over Afghanistan) The Super Bug is much better than the original, but it still only brings 2/3 the payload at 2/3 the range of what a Strike Kitty could do.

AH! that's because WoV ends before the F-14A+ comes in. you have to edit the years in the options file to open it up. http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=11833 that should do it for you.