NS Military Realism Consultation Thread Vol. 11.0

[Vadia]

I doubt you would use a F-15, F-22, or F-14 as a trainer.

Like I said, read the Wikipedia articles or something. It's clear you don't know a lot about airplanes, otherwise you wouldn't be making silly analogies like these.

I'm asking questions in a place to ask questions and you're telling me to just stare at a page full of numbers, and instantly come to some kind of conclusion.

What is the point of that massive, glaring, eyesore a picture? Are you trying to tell me you can find watermarked images of interceptor aircraft?

[The Manticoran Empire]

None of this is really true, though. You should just look at the actual planes instead of trying to invent analogies. For example, Su-25 is a "trainer-turned-combat-aircraft" so it would actually, by analogy, be closest to F-5. Naturally, since analogy arguments are a starting point for dealing with the absolute unknown, rather than an ending point for the well-known, this doesn't tell you a lot about the plane or its performance. Since Su-25 is extremely well known, though, there is literally no reason you shouldn't be able to deal with it in its own terms rather than needing to make analogies, unless you don't know anything about planes at all.

In which case I would recommend reading their Wikipedia articles or something I guess as a starter.

The F-5 is a light fighter and the SU-25 is a ground attack craft or "heavy attack aircraft". Most trainer aircraft I know, are more about being nimble then speed, which is what ground attack craft and light fighters are typically like.

I doubt you would use a F-15, F-22, or F-14 as a trainer.

Another thing to factor in, is that trainers could just be simpler and cheaper aircraft, which ground attack craft and light fighters are.

The RPG-18 and LAW rocket are very similar, and both are very well known. Saying they are comparable would actually tell you a lot of things about how they both work, but I'm starting to suspect you would say otherwise.

A couple of points you made are ill-informed.
First, trainer aircraft are about just that: Training. They are built to train pilots. Basic flight skills are learned in prop driven planes. Fighter pilots then move onto the F-5 and similar aircraft. So yes, you could entirely use the F-15, F-22, and F-14 as a trainer, particularly if the pilot is going to be flying one of those planes.

Second, Ground Attack Craft are not built for speed. They are built to carry lots of bombs and rockets so that they can tear enemy forces and installations new assholes and then go home. Most attack aircraft are slow, ungainly beasts built to provide stable platforms from which to drop bombs. This, however, is changing with the rise of the Multi-Role fighter such as F-16, F-15, F-35, Typhoon, and others as well as Precision Guided Munitions.
Light Fighters, on the other hand, are built to be fast, maneuverable, and cheap. They often sacrifice pure firepower in favor of increased agility and, in a world where BVR missiles are becoming ever better, sacrificing missile capacity for more maneuverability is a worse trade than trading that missile capacity in for stealth technology.

Finally, while the RPG-18 and the M72 LAW are similar weapons, trainers, light fighters, and ground attack aircraft are not. Using two disposable RPGs from the 1970s to support your point indicates a lack of understanding of the differences between Trainers, Light Fighters, and Ground Attack Aircraft.

[Taihei Tengoku]

A good use of a certain type of aircraft is to train others in the use of its own type model.

Some analogies are good and some analogies are bad. The only way you can discern the two is to read a lot.

[Gallia-]

I'm asking questions in a place to ask questions and you're telling me to just stare at a page full of numbers, and instantly come to some kind of conclusion.

What is the point of that massive, glaring, eyesore a picture? Are you trying to tell me you can find watermarked images of interceptor aircraft?

No, I'm asking you to read about things that you're talking about before asking questions. You asked about comparing the Su-17 and F-5 earlier, got some answers, and didn't really follow up. Ask specific questions about specific planes and it might be more helpful, because vague questions based on weird analogies isn't helpful. If you want books or something to help you learn more about things like Su-17 and why they're nothing like F-5 you can ask people here or you can go on Google and find the things by Tony Buttler, which are good introductory texts to a lot of Cold War-era aircraft.

It's the training variant of the F-15. There's a guy in the backseat looking at a map and telling the pilot where to fly, because you aren't putting someone who doesn't know how to fly an F-15C in the jet without an instructor. In case the pilot fucks up, the instructor yells at him and recovers the aircraft, rather than losing a $120 mn airframe and 20-something pilot.

Because aircraft are so expensive nowadays (or perhaps, because militaries are seen as increasingly has-been by the richest economies) it's rather uneconomical to make two-seat training variants of frontline tactical aircraft, but this was the norm through the early 2000s. The A-10's two seat training variant died, was resurrected as a potential night attack aircraft, and then deferred in favor of A/F-16 and LANTIRN integration in a rather tumultuous couple of years in the mid-1980s. The F-15's training variants, F-15B and F-15D, were built to train new pilots to fly the tactical jet, while qualified pilots flew the F-15A/C, and the Israelis used the -B/-D as long range strike aircraft long before the F-15E (the F-15E was really more of a missionized F-15D than a truly new aircraft).

The idea that "training aircraft" "need to be" slow/cheap is fallacious. They only "need" to be slow/cheap in the modern world because there isn't much of a use (subjectively, not objectively, new aircraft are always a reasonable investment if only as a hedge against future threats, much like infrastructure or basic research investment their immediate economic uses are difficult to articulate because they rarely exist, but they pay their dividends after a period of time) of militaries these days.

Even F-22 was going to have a two-seat trainer (F-22B), but F-22 is likely to disappear from American service in the next 20 years (before B-52 and B-2) so it's a bit of a moot point talking about it now. F-35 likewise does not have a TF-35 variant, which is part of the reason why the training pipeline is so bottlenecked (you're essentially training all pilots as instructors, without help, which requires a lot of time spent doing basic flight maneuvers to learn the aircraft) for the F-35 equipped fighter wings. Without a conversion trainer there is no real way to replicate the flight mechanics besides simulator time, which is at best an approximation of the actual experience. A poor move, but one necessitated by the current view of world threats, rather than any realistic military need or advancement in technology.

Some analogies are good and some analogies are bad. The only way you can discern the two is to read a lot.

There was an operationalized definition of "good analogy" in some DTIC thing I read a while ago about the XB-70. I will look for it. The author tried to show that argument by analogy is ultimately what killed the XB-70 IIRC.

Basically, analogies are good for grappling with unknown unknowns, but if something is really well known (consider well understood things like tactical fighters, nuclear weapons, or machine guns), then it's better to use actual information because the analogy doesn't help add any new information, it just retreads old information that might be not understood or known by participants. Since no one here is on the bleeding edge of military science it's unlikely anything anyone comes up with will be particularly unique or advanced thinke, so arguments by analogy are sorta superfluous, it's much better to just say things as they are, and given that everyone here is talking about things that are extremely boring they can probably find the relevant information on Wikipedia or a few minutes spent Googling things and perusing info sites like Bulletpicker or DTIC.

[Vadia]

There are aircraft you train on, and then there are "trainer aircraft", which again, are typically configured more like a light fighter or ground attack craft.

Right now, the companies trying to make affordable ground attack craft, are also companies trying to sell these products as trainers, or they also make trainer aircraft.

Ground attack craft and light fighters are both cheap, they are also simpler, slower, and more nimble then "interceptors". The whole reason the F-16 exists, is because a group of people believed that a really fast blocky plane firing missiles that couldn't actually lock on, was worse than a more nimble and slower plane.

The F-22 was also chosen over another possible prototype, that was slower but more nimble.

On top of that, ground attack craft are sometimes used against other planes, and light fighters see a lot of use as the carriers of missiles or bombs for use against ground targets.

Considering that these two types of aircraft have so much in common, compared to other forms of aircraft, the fact that I see them as very much alike and sometimes hard to tell apart, is something that should be expected.

When that Iraqi crashed a plane in the US, that was an F-16. There is a reason it was an F-16 and not a F-22, F-14, or F-15.

I'm asking questions in a place to ask questions and you're telling me to just stare at a page full of numbers, and instantly come to some kind of conclusion.

What is the point of that massive, glaring, eyesore a picture? Are you trying to tell me you can find watermarked images of interceptor aircraft?

It's the training variant of the F-15. There's a guy in the backseat looking at a map and telling the pilot where to fly, because you aren't putting someone who doesn't know how to fly an F-15C in the jet without an instructor. In case the pilot fucks up, the instructor yells at him and recovers the aircraft, rather than losing a $120 mn airframe.

Because aircraft are so expensive nowadays (or perhaps, because militaries are seen as increasingly has-been by the richest economies) it's rather uneconomical to make two-seat training variants of frontline tactical aircraft, but this was the norm through the early 2000s. The A-10's two seat training variant died, was resurrected as a potential night attack aircraft, and then deferred in favor of A/F-16 and LANTIRN integration in a rather tumultuous couple of years in the mid-1980s. The F-15's training variants, F-15B and F-15D, were built to train new pilots to fly the tactical jet, while qualified pilots flew the F-15A/C, and the Israelis used the -B/-D as long range strike aircraft long before the F-15E (the F-15E was really more of a missionized F-15D than a truly new aircraft).

The idea that "training aircraft" "need to be" slow/cheap is fallacious. They only "need" to be slow/cheap in the modern world because there isn't much of a use (subjectively, not objectively, new aircraft are always a reasonable investment if only as a hedge against future threats, much like infrastructure or basic research investment their immediate economic uses are difficult to articulate because they rarely exist, but they pay their dividends after a period of time) of militaries these days.

Even F-22 was going to have a two-seat trainer (F-22B), but F-22 is likely to disappear from American service in the next 20 years (before B-52 and B-2) so it's a bit of a moot point talking about it now. F-35 likewise does not have a TF-35 variant, which is part of the reason why the training pipeline is so bottlenecked (you're essentially training all pilots as instructors, without help, which requires a lot of time spent doing basic flight maneuvers to learn the aircraft) for the F-35 equipped fighter wings. Without a conversion trainer there is no real way to replicate the flight mechanics besides simulator time, which is at best an approximation of the actual experience. A poor move, but one necessitated by the current view of world threats, rather than any realistic military need or advancement in technology.

The F-22 isn't the first plane a F-22 pilot flies, it's likely to be the third plane. From what I understand, it's a propeller plane or slower jet plane, then you at some point move to a two-seater config.

When I say trainer, I mean something where the unmodifed version is called a "trainer aircraft" or they just made such a craft more combat worthy.

When I say "trainer" I do not mean "An interceptor modified to teach you to fly an interceptor".

I think this is the root of the misunderstanding.

[Gallia-]

My point is simpler: trainer aircraft exist in multiple forms. The "traditional" path is introductory (how2fly with a prop) --> intermediate/advanced (confusingly enough, they both just mean "jet", but I think "intermediate/advanced" are a hanger-on from the days of there being a difference between subsonic and supersonic aviation) --> conversion trainer (F-15B/D with instructor).

Modern Western air forces have dropped the last part in favor of going straight from advanced jet trainers like T-38 or F/A-50 to operational fighters like F-22/F-35 with a sort of "figure it out" mentality. Normally you'd put the new guys in the squadron's two-seat OCUs for a bit to learn how to fly the aircraft and then they would know. Now it's expected that something like T-X or F/A-50 "should" be able to cover the OCU, but it probably can't, not really. So you're getting a weird hybrid of computer training in simulators where you learn avionics and a crude approximation of the new fighter's characteristics in an old fighter like F/A-50 or F-15D. The easiest solution is still to just have something like Pilatus PC-9, T-6, or Super Tucano --> Yak-130 or T-X or Goshawk --> F-22B or TF-35.

The operational conversion unit makes pilot production faster, safer, and less dangerous for everyone involved. It's also more expensive and harder to justify in an age of "no threats".

The concept of the "lead-in fighter trainer" is just a marketing ploy mostly. It's not possible to replicate the most unique characteristics of F-22 or F-35 with a aerodynamically limited aircraft like Yak-130 or F/A-50, which more appropriately approximate the F-15D or TF-16 series aircraft. Your misunderstanding seems to be that you just keep conflating "trainer" with weird marketing strategies like "LIFT" and "COIN trainer" or whatever. These aren't really important, or even related, since the most modern ground attack aircraft (F-35 and F-22) have no training variants at all, and the companies that market things like "COIN attacker-trainer" have no real success outside of minor powers, for good reason that isn't a conspiracy by the power elites of the major air forces of the world seeking to keep the little garage plane builders down. Mostly it's because things like F-22 and F-35 are so good at ground attack that the idea of a separate ground attack aircraft is dumb if you have those.

You just need to read more things about planes TBH.

If you want specific books or something I can maybe help with that depending on what you want to read, or if you want weird theses by eccentric Army MAJs and Navy CMDRs who advocate for things like the return of the barrage balloon and interceptor zeppelins I can deffo help with that. As far as trying to separate the conflated concepts of "trainer/ground attacker/light fighter" that seem to be mixed together in your mind from each other, I can't help with that except to say you should just consider them separate things.

Here's an argument by analogy for you: "ground attack"/"trainer"/"fighter" are "jobs" and "F-20/F-15/T-38" are "people". People work jobs, but that doesn't mean they are their job, and it doesn't mean you'd hire a Super Tucano to be a tactical fighter, nor does it mean that an F-35 is a bad ground attacker. But the latter part strays away from the analogy since you need to dig into the "CVs" (that is, their capabilities/E-M diagrams/avionics/weapons fits) of the people being reviewed for placement. You'll find that the most expensive people are generally the best at all the jobs, barring extreme situations like "lack of two-seater" (which is corrigible either way), and people who are better at a smaller subset of jobs are generally not good at those jobs they're qualified for in the first place.

[Vadia]

...

The operational conversion unit makes pilot production faster, safer, and less dangerous for everyone involved. It's also more expensive and harder to justify in an age of "no threats".

Mostly it's because things like F-22 and F-35 are so good at ground attack that the idea of a separate ground attack aircraft is dumb if you have those.

You just need to read more things about planes TBH.

Here's an argument by analogy for you: "ground attack"/"trainer"/"fighter" are "jobs" and "F-20/F-15/T-38" are "people". People work jobs, but that doesn't mean they are their job, and it doesn't mean you'd hire a Super Tucano to be a tactical fighter, nor does it mean that an F-35 is a bad ground attacker. But the latter part strays away from the analogy since you need to dig into the "CVs" (that is, their capabilities/E-M diagrams/avionics/weapons fits) of the people being reviewed for placement. You'll find that the most expensive people are generally the best at all the jobs, barring extreme situations like "lack of two-seater" (which is corrigible either way), and people who are better at a smaller subset of jobs are generally not good at those jobs they're qualified for in the first place.

I'm pretty sure that cost of flight time and maintenance is something that people still care about.

Cost and maintenance can easily mean less airstrikes and for the most part, less airstrikes is bad.

I'm aware that if you fight a comparable power, they can just shoot your planes down, but the F-35 and F-22 are very expensive planes. Each time you put them in the air, it sucks up a lot of money, and then you spend a long time trying to undo the damage done.

With an A-10, you can bomb them, and bomb them, and bomb them again. The savings are so considerable, you can spend them on doing even more bombings.

Against a comparable power, these planes aren't going to last very long, but then again... These planes were invented a long time ago.

On top of that, once you prepare your craft to do airstrikes and do them, people can suddenly detect you.

I don't know if you figured out a solution to this, but from what I've seen the past few years, it's like a sniper making a kill-shot and then suddenly a whole platoon is dropped on them.

I'm pretty sure that it's going to be very hard to fill up aircraft carriers with such expensive planes.

Granted, this is also NS, so people are running around with 140mm ETC death machines that cost 15 million dollars; but the vast majority of us can't afford that.

[Gallia-]

Money is no object. Militaries are not capital sensitive, they're quite good at spending it in the places it needs to go. The hard part is convincing people in charge of the military of the need to spend that money on the military, rather than on something else, like fuel subsidies, infrastructure investment, or pensions. This is why things like TF-35 don't exist IRL and conversion trainers are being substituted for objectively worse, but cheaper, "LIFT" trainers like T-38 and Goshawk.

[Vadia]

Money is no object. Militaries are not capital sensitive, they're quite good at spending it in the places it needs to go. The hard part is convincing people in charge of the military of the need to spend that money on the military, rather than on something else, like fuel subsidies, infrastructure investment, or pensions. This is why things like TF-35 don't exist IRL and conversion trainers are being substituted for objectively worse, but cheaper, "LIFT" trainers like T-38 and Goshawk.

I disagree. At the moment, the military likes to adopt things without testing them, or they have huge tests and then adopt nothing.

The US Army has spent decades wanting the Air-Force to give them air support, because in WW2 taking objectives was the goal, and in Vietnam it was killing people.

For some reason, the Air-Force has had this huge fixation on huge, massive carpet bombing planes or trying to drop nukes on the USSR. Sure, maybe dropping a nuke will end a war, but it might also end the world.

Meanwhile, people looked over the carpet bombing campaign of WW2 and found it cost a huge amount of money, and mostly just made Germany angrier.

The F-22 is cool, I believe in the F-22, but I also think that ground AA should be doing most if not almost all of the workload. What I like about airstrikes, is they are currently more precise or more concussive, then artillery shells.

NS nations like mine don't care about what is the best and the most effective, because we can't afford it, and we might never go up against someone who has it. Even when I do go up against F-22s, I drown them out with cheaper planes.

NS wars are not these increasingly smaller things like in RL, they are these increasingly bigger things.

What was the saying again? "19th Century Politics, 20th Century Warfare, 21st Century Technology?"

Maybe it's because I'm the son of someone who was in the army, but I'm a thousand times more interested in how many Griffons or laser-guided CRV-7s I can cram on an Avenger drone, then the F-35.

[Taihei Tengoku]

That's not even the best part of Predator (it's the gimbaled camera and the low political cost of murdering people with hellfires rather than in person)

[Vadia]

That's not even the best part of Predator (it's the gimbaled camera and the low political cost of murdering people with hellfires rather than in person)

You can fit three Griffons where you would put a Hellfire.

Mortars are simple weapons that for some weird reason, always seem to land wherever the most babies are. Artillery is well..we know how the people along the Donbass border complain to Vice about how they hate both Ukraine and Donbass, and want people to stop blowing up where they live.

A Griffon can blow up the top room of a building, and for the most part, the rest of the building should be okay.

Remember those two weird movies where Hollywood pretended that the number of uninvolved people killed by Hellfires was a number I could count on my hands? If it was a Griffon missile, the question if it was safe to fire or not, would be yes a lot more often.

I like the Avenger because you could just load on a lot of Griffons on it, and then really ruin a whole fleet of technicals. It's also a little harder to detect.

[Special Aromas]

That's not even the best part of Predator (it's the gimbaled camera and the low political cost of murdering people with hellfires rather than in person)

You can fit three Griffons where you would put a Hellfire.

Mortars are simple weapons that for some weird reason, always seem to land wherever the most babies are. Artillery is well..we know how the people along the Donbass border complain to Vice about how they hate both Ukraine and Donbass, and want people to stop blowing up where they live.

A Griffon can blow up the top room of a building, and for the most part, the rest of the building should be okay.

Remember those two weird movies where Hollywood pretended that the number of uninvolved people killed by Hellfires was a number I could count on my hands? If it was a Griffon missile, the question if it was safe to fire or not, would be yes a lot more often.

I like the Avenger because you could just load on a lot of Griffons on it, and then really ruin a whole fleet of technicals. It's also a little harder to detect.

Add some reading on the considerations surrounding potential collateral damage and the legal obligations of fighting forces to avoid impacting civilians to the books about aircraft trainers that galla was going to give you.

[Grater Tovakia]

In regards to trainer aircraft... anybody looking for a quick conversion to the F/A-18 types should look at the PC-21, Australia and Switzerland have used the type with great success as it feeds perfectly to the F/A-18.

[The Manticoran Empire]

Money is no object. Militaries are not capital sensitive, they're quite good at spending it in the places it needs to go. The hard part is convincing people in charge of the military of the need to spend that money on the military, rather than on something else, like fuel subsidies, infrastructure investment, or pensions. This is why things like TF-35 don't exist IRL and conversion trainers are being substituted for objectively worse, but cheaper, "LIFT" trainers like T-38 and Goshawk.

I disagree. At the moment, the military likes to adopt things without testing them, or they have huge tests and then adopt nothing.

The US Army has spent decades wanting the Air-Force to give them air support, because in WW2 taking objectives was the goal, and in Vietnam it was killing people.

For some reason, the Air-Force has had this huge fixation on huge, massive carpet bombing planes or trying to drop nukes on the USSR. Sure, maybe dropping a nuke will end a war, but it might also end the world.

Meanwhile, people looked over the carpet bombing campaign of WW2 and found it cost a huge amount of money, and mostly just made Germany angrier.

The F-22 is cool, I believe in the F-22, but I also think that ground AA should be doing most if not almost all of the workload. What I like about airstrikes, is they are currently more precise or more concussive, then artillery shells.

NS nations like mine don't care about what is the best and the most effective, because we can't afford it, and we might never go up against someone who has it. Even when I do go up against F-22s, I drown them out with cheaper planes.

NS wars are not these increasingly smaller things like in RL, they are these increasingly bigger things.

What was the saying again? "19th Century Politics, 20th Century Warfare, 21st Century Technology?"

Maybe it's because I'm the son of someone who was in the army, but I'm a thousand times more interested in how many Griffons or laser-guided CRV-7s I can cram on an Avenger drone, then the F-35.

The military is at the mercy of changing politics. FCS was motivated by the change in our fighting, until it went over budget, led nowhere, and Obama cancelled it. Crusader was tested and was looking promising and was then cancelled because it was heavy and was built for a conventional war with Russia or China, not the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army wants air support because that is the basis of combined arms: Ground forces supported by airstrikes to secure objectives. The Air Force, however, is not the Army and it has focused on strategic bombers because that is its job: To engage and destroy the enemy using air power. The Nuclear Arsenal is present as a deterrent, with the hope that no one is willing to risk total mutual annihilation just to end a battle or a war.

The Carpet Bombing campaign in World War 2 wasn't meant to break the will of the German People. It was meant to cripple the German war industry by destroying factories and killing or wounding workers. And in that goal, it was a resounding success.

In the case of air defense, it is supposed to be an integrated system, using interceptor aircraft, long range, mid range, and short range SAMs, as well as close in AAA. Airstrikes are more or less the same as artillery strikes, with the main difference being an aircraft has a longer range than a howitzer and PGM bombs have more options in terms of power while artillery shells are mostly uniform.

The problem with relying on cheaper planes is that you get what you pay for and the F-22 can kill your planes before they see the F-22. With 6 AMRAAMs and 2 Sidewinders, it can kill perhaps 8 aircraft before it will want to go home and restock. And it can hit you from its max range while you can't see it.

NS wars really depend on where you go looking for them. The Forums are generally big wars but some regions fight smaller wars and there are smaller wars on the forums, as well.

1,600 kilograms of bombs internally (the General Atomics Avenger is a stealth UAV) and 6 external hardpoints for 2,900kg total load. The F-35 can carry 2,590 kilograms of munitions internally and 6,800 kilograms on external pylons, making the F-35 a heavier hitter than the Avenger, in both maximum payload and stealth payload. You need 2.7 Avengers to equal the firepower of a single F-35.

[Austrasien]

The F-22 is cool, I believe in the F-22, but I also think that ground AA should be doing most if not almost all of the workload.

Hitler had the same idea. So did North Vietnam. And Egypt. And Syria. And Iraq. And Angola. It doesn't work out.

NS nations like mine don't care about what is the best and the most effective, because we can't afford it, and we might never go up against someone who has it. Even when I do go up against F-22s, I drown them out with cheaper planes.

Air combat is won by surprise and pilot skill. The F-22 is excellent for achieving surprise because of their speed and low observability characteristics. The central limit theorem suggests pilot skill will be normally distributed among pilots, so all thing being equal a smaller force of F-22s will be able to put their best pilots in the seats. Therefore they will almost certainly win. The Lanchester Square isn't a description of a battle where one side isn't shooting, which, in a clash between high skill pilots in fast stealth fighters versus mediocre pilots in easily detectable aircraft, most of the targets won't be.

[Gallia-]

Pfft just crosseye jam your way to victory. If the enemy's missiles all miss you win by fiat!

[Laritaia]

Pfft just crosseye jam your way to victory. If the enemy's missiles all miss you win by fiat!

Voodoo electro-witchery

burn him at the stake

[Gallia-]

Pfft just crosseye jam your way to victory. If the enemy's missiles all miss you win by fiat!

Voodoo electro-witchery

burn him at the stake

Sometimes a man just is way too lazy to make plongusii that require thorough ultrasonic, microwave, and x-ray inspection of every joint, rivet and weld to ensure the RCS isn't spiking due to mfg defects.

And sometimes a man would rather make simple things like guided missile cruisers and main battle tanks instead of ultra stealth fighters.

[The Manticoran Empire]

Pfft just crosseye jam your way to victory. If the enemy's missiles all miss you win by fiat!

This segues nicely into the importance of electronic warfare on the modern battefield.

[Gallia-]

Stealth is electronic warfare, so it doesn't "segue into" a topic which was already being discussed, and crosseye jamming would have trouble dealing with non-monopulse radars and infrared guided missiles, obviously.

Alternatively, you could just find a way to make this idea work by smashing sufficient types of different rocks together.

[Kassaran]

A thought, what if the next generation of fighter aircraft are minimally armed stealth observers, pulling from arsenal craft as many have proposed, but also serving primarily as forward EW and EC platforms? If you have a picket of fighters built to intercept munitions bound for targets on the battlefield, jamming those munition's guidance systems whenever and wherever possible would be far more important than not? Just a shit-post tier idea I thought about for a moment.

[The Manticoran Empire]

A thought, what if the next generation of fighter aircraft are minimally armed stealth observers, pulling from arsenal craft as many have proposed, but also serving primarily as forward EW and EC platforms? If you have a picket of fighters built to intercept munitions bound for targets on the battlefield, jamming those munition's guidance systems whenever and wherever possible would be far more important than not? Just a shit-post tier idea I thought about for a moment.

Jamming communications and guidance systems is one aspect. Defeating those jamming signals is another. The sword and the shield of electronic warfare.

[United Earthlings]

Concept pitch: Convertible drive IFV. Wheels are used for driving on roads, during training and peace time and long distance transit. Tracks are put on for fighting and generally in combat. Idea being to save maintenance.

So basically a modern version of the Swedish Landsverk L-30?

I like the Avenger because you could just load on a lot of Griffons on it, and then really ruin a whole fleet of technicals. It's also a little harder to detect.

Who doesn't like the Avenger? I even stuck some modified ones in my nation's Carrier Air Groups.

Just don't forget to spend a little time thinking about the entire supporting infrastructure that would be/is required for one's nation to successfully operate a planet wide fleet of UAVs. Not every NS nation is able to afford that or have the political leverage to piggy back onto an allies supporting infrastructure to enable them to operate said long range drones.

So, you might want to make sure your nation can check that box.

[Purpelia]

Concept pitch: Convertible drive IFV. Wheels are used for driving on roads, during training and peace time and long distance transit. Tracks are put on for fighting and generally in combat. Idea being to save maintenance.

So basically a modern version of the Swedish Landsverk L-30?

Wikipedia gives me no results on that.

[Crookfur]

So basically a modern version of the Swedish Landsverk L-30?

Wikipedia gives me no results on that.

Cause it ain't on the English language wiki (I think it's on the german one).
So you have to dig deeper.
http://tanknutdave.com/the-swiss-landsv ... ight-tank/