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warhorse

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Posts posted by warhorse

    HC DB Question

    in Wardroom

    Posted

    In the aircraft annex, what is represented by the ATA and DATA ratings? In some cases it appears to track with the clean and loaded maneuver ratings from the paper rules, in other cases the ATA seems to be the offensive gun rating and DATA the loaded maneuver rating. Sometimes there's no apparent relation. Help?

    HELP on HC-gold

    in Wardroom

    Posted

    Running a scenario on HC-gold while waiting for HCE to come out. If you close one of the display windows - in this case the Unit window - HOW DO YOU OPEN IT UP AGAIN???? :( Seems to be no option anywhere.

    Yes it was accidental.

    Try looking in the Windows menu on the menu bar. There should be an item there for each display window.

    Harpoon Paper Rules

    in Wardroom

    Posted

    Does anybody know where online I could order a copy of the Harpoon paper rules (I think it's up to Harpoon 4.1 now)? I would prefer a vendor in Canada to avoid cross-border hassles, but this is not required. Thanks for any help you can offer ... :)

    HCCE b17 ?

    in Wardroom

    Posted

    There is a bit of humor on Matrix HCCE forum, my latest prognostication is mid January, the counter-prognistication there is mid February, only time will tell, only thing that is for sure is you won't see it ready tomorrow ;)

    Tony

    Thanks, Tony. I hope it's the earlier date, really looking forward to getting my hands on that puppy ... B) ... but I do concur that 'good later' is better than 'buggy now'. Thanks for all the hard work to everyone involved, I did enough testing on one of the earlier versions to know what a pain it can be. Merry Christmas (or whatever other mid-winter festival you may celebrate) to all! B)

    CV based AC strikes

    in Wardroom

    Posted

    What I used to do was launch the A/C as a patrol to a point within their weapons' range of most of the group, and either manually issue the attack order when they got there, or edit their course to replace the 'loiter' order with an 'attack' order. Every once in a while this got awkward if the AI put a long shooter way out on the threat axis and I failed to notice it, but that was my own stupid fault anyway ... :P

    USS Intrepid

    in Wardroom

    Posted

    Well, given that they waited for an "unusually high tide" to make the attempt, I have to figure that they were aware of the possibility. Probably they figured that dredging was so expensive that it was worth trying at fairly marginal odds. Sometimes you just get unlucky ... :(

    Retiring the Nighthawk

    in Wardroom

    Posted

    But if you believe the hype from the Office of USAF the new small diameter bomb (SDB) a bomb the shape and wieght of the old Mk81 250lb bomb will have the same explosive power as a Mk83 1000lb. :popcornsmilie:

    Well, given that the SDB would contain only about a fifth of the quantity of explosive as a Mk 83, that seems ... improbable ... :P I suppose that an unguided Mk 83 dropped by something with a really good bombsight might have comparable effectiveness, the larger warhead compensating for the poorer accuracy.

    The F-22: not what we were hoping for

    in Wardroom

    Posted

    China is exactly who I'm worried about.

    In an air campaign, China might prove our match because of weight of numbers. On the land, we're toast again because of numbers.

    On the sea, the U.S. is majorly dominant. No one or four comes close.

    In a conventional war, Iran, ROK, Syria, or any other boogie men can't touch us. Guerrilla warfare, we're goners because we love our children more than they love their's. They are willing to accept a 1:100 casuality ratio where we can't stomach 1:1.

    Unfortunately, guerilla wars are what we're most likely to fight for the immediate future. It doesn't take a gold plated F-22 to deliver 500 lbs JDAMs when a 25 year old F-16 does it nicely and is still as good as anything else flying.

    Ultimately, who is the F-22 going to fight in the next ten to fifteen years that a USAF F-16 or F-15 can't take? Even if Fulcrums, Flankers, Typhoons, or Rafales get into the bad guys' hands, are they going to train them, arm them, fight them in greater quantities than the USAF can handle?

    And if we do mix it up with China, I doubt it'll stay conventional for too long.

    I'm not so sure you're right about China ... The most likely scenario would be PRC vs RoC and US. On the PRC side, the PLAAF and PLANAF have on the order of 3700 combat and support aircraft between them, but most of them are old MiG-19 and -21 variants. Only about 300 of them are modern fighters, mostly Su-27 variants. If you figure about three quarters of the force would be available against Taiwan, that's about 2800 aircraft, including up to 250 modern fighters. On the Blue side, the RoC air force has about 330 modern fighters (F-16, Mirage 2000, and the Ching-Kuo indigenous fighter), plus about 60 old F-5 types. The USAF could probably drop 300 modern fighters into the area on short notice, with USN carriers providing another hundred or two. So we're looking at 2800 mostly obsolescent aircraft against 800-900 mostly modern types, which is only about 3.5 to 1 in the PRC's favour. That's not going to be much fun for the Blue side, but I wouldn't bet against them either, on those numbers.

    On land, I have to admit from raw numbers things look pretty bleak for the good guys. On the other hand, there's a very real question as to how well the PRC can deploy and support the necessary numbers of troops. It may very well prove that they can't concentrate enough force to get the job done, especially under hostile skies.

    Guerilla wars: you're right about our tolerance for casualties, but remember that we don't actually have to *win* the war, we just have to hang on long enough for the locals to take over the fight. That should usually be doable in the reign of a single American president, and is thus practical if not pretty. It's not a job you need F-22s for, but you don't need F-16s for it either. What you need is A-10s and Apaches.

    Future wars: 10 to 15 years is *way* too short a time frame. Try the next *50* years. Buying enough F-22s and other goodies to deter an opponent from trying something stupid is still going to be cheaper than even a small war, if Iraq is anything to judge by.

    Non-conventional: again, I'm not sure I can agree. Even one Chinese nuke going off in America would be political suicide for the reigning party, and American nuclear superiority over China is so vast that it would be suicidal for the Chinese to go that route. There's always the possibility, but the incentives are pretty high on both sides not to go there, even in a war.

    The F-22: not what we were hoping for

    in Wardroom

    Posted

    Lot of fat to chew, Calum.

    I never understoof the technical advantage to overcome attrition warfare. We won WWII by outnumbering the Axis in the sea, land, and air.

    The prove of the validity of this article will occur when the F-22 is put against a real opponent. Unfortunately, it'll be too late by then.

    Actually, at sea and in the air we had superior equipment as well as superior numbers in WWII. On land, against the Germans, we (counting the Soviets as part of 'we') had roughly comparable equipment and seriously superior numbers. Against everyone else, we had better gear, too. It's arguable that we may have gone too far down the "quality rather than quantity" path, though that is by no means proven as yet. OTOH, when three years of war in Iraq has yielded about as many deaths as were suffered on the day of D-day, and this is considered by many to be a disaster, we haven't had any choice. Attrition warfare is simply not politically sustainable in the West, and that drives equipment and strategy decisions.

    The only way we're going to find out how valid this article is, is in a full-scale war against a major oponent like China. Against anything less, US advantages in training, equipment and numbers will make it impossible to tell.

    The F-22: not what we were hoping for

    in Wardroom

    Posted

    Take a look at the blurb about the authors at the end of the article:

    "Pierre Sprey was one of three designers who conceived and shaped the F-16; he also led the technical side of the US Air Force's A-10 design concept team. James Stevenson is former editor of the Navy Fighter Weapons School's Topgun Journal and author of The Pentagon Paradox and The $5 Billion Misunderstanding."

    These are both guys whose concept of the fighter is diametrically opposite to that of the F-22, and they have a vested interest in slagging it. That doesn't mean they're wrong, but it does mean you should examine anything they say on the topic with great care. As an example, it seems rather unlikely that an F-22 with internal weapons carriage and a thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.17 should be unable in general to out-accellerate an F-16 with external weapons carriage and a thrust-to-weight ratio of only 0.898, though there is probably some specific combination of speed, altitude and load where this is true.

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