Comments by "Titanium Rain" (@ChucksSEADnDEAD) on "" video.

@kingghidorah8106 The Phantoms shot down were being ambushed in areas with very poor ground radar coverage, which allowed MiGs to cross the border and come from behind. Since these Phantoms were often escorting bombers, they were shot down in single passes at high speed. Phantoms in combat air patrols had a 5.5 to 1 kill rate. The USAF then started faking bombing runs with full Phantom flights that were prepared to counter ambush and that was a successful tactic. In the short period between the introduction of Teaball radar and intelligence station and the end of the air operations, the USAF kill ratio shot up. The USN kill ratio after TOPGUN was also 8.7 I believe.
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@kingghidorah8106 the F-4 could keep up and even beat the MiG-21 in terms of maneuverability at certain altitude ranges. If I'm not mistaken it was only 30k ft and up that the MiG-21 had the advantage.
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Most Phantoms were shot down by SAM/AAAA/ground fire.
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Desert Storm was near-peer considering that Russian and Chinese planners started to steer in the direction that they had to seriously consider that the US could do to them what they did to Iraq.
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@linusa2996 Physics have no changed, but we do have better aerodynamics and even thrust vectoring.
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Fun fact, Israel used F-15Cs and Ds to strike the PLO HQ in Tunis with guided and unguided bombs.
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Modern "all aspect" IR missiles do not have a single sensor anymore. They're like a thermal camera, it "sees" an aircraft from all aspects. In fact there's AIM-9X test footage publicly available which shows that it can see the QF-4 from the front and the seeker even goes after the aircraft rather than the hot exhaust plume.
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@STGN01 Quality is not less reliable. In fact, quality increases reliability. Quality actually reduces logistics and costs. You've clearly slept through the reasons the Japanese Miracle happened, one of them was a nation that was previously known for exporting cheap goods switched gears and started to outperform others in manufacturing by focusing on quality and improvement rather than fixing after the fact. Men with AKs did not beat the high tech. They got vaporized when the high tech showed up. What happened was that deep rooted identity and ideological reasons to fight have a lot more staying power than a bastardized form of Western democracy. There's no amount of forces you could have thrown into Afghanistan to change that. You cannot win by force, unless your plan is to actually erase the population and replace it with your own. Without quality, American aircraft would have been taken out at the dozen per day. It costs more to lose aircraft and pilots than spend a little more in quality. At this point you're in denial. Quality can curbstomp quantity in real life, and you're sitting here claiming that it didn't work.
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@STGN01 I didn't switch subjects. Since when do people buy quality goods, and they break down all the time? Meanwhile, German wunderwaffen had to make do with hot garbage of materials as they had a severe lack of quality alloys. You're trying to say German late WW2 stuff was "quality" when we all knew they had problems. Breakdowns were extremely common, and one of the greatest tank killers right after fuel shortage. They fought on their own terms, and got vaporized anyway. Staying outside of M16/M4 range doesn't do anything when they have a F/A-18 on call. They won against the Afghan army, which was underpaid and undersupplied. They didn't lose "some" battles. They lost almost every battle with only a few notorious victories.
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@STGN01 "generally means" - But it doesn't. In the minds of reformers maybe it does. That's what's called begging the question, you assume the conclusion without proving it with the necessary premises. You're trying to force a false dichotomy between expensive, capable and unreliable materiel and less capable but cheap and extremely reliable materiel. The problem is, the "cheap" stuff isn't that cheap, fielding more means having to bring more fuel and train more crews, and it gets torn apart by higher quality equipment when the rubber meets the road. It's a non-stop recycling of the "4 shermans vs 1 tiger" fallacy and it needs to stop.
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@linusa2996 Thrust vectoring happens while the rocket motor is still burning. You're not kinetically defeating those bad boys so close, you'll have to beat their turn or make them reach gimbal limit.
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@linusa2996 That would be valid for a tail pursuit. A modern missile will not follow an aircraft along its turn circle. It will predict where the aircraft will be at time of impact and take the most efficient path towards that place in space. It won't have to pull a tight turn radius, it will just slam into the aircraft. You don't have to explain how drag works. If A missile goes from M0.5 to M4 in 20 seconds, it will spend a significant amount of time above M1. I may be mistaken but the longest "within visual range" kill with a missile was at 21 miles because a Phantom pilot identified a MiG-21 afterburner plume at night.
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@JohnRodriguesPhotographer The Phantom is superior to the MiG-21 at 5k ft, balanced at 15k ft and only loses up high at around 30k ft. The Phantom is affectionally described as a brick, but it's a surprisingly agile aircraft especially after upgrades. It's the world's biggest distributor of MiG parts.
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@ricardokowalski1579 Missiles didn't "suck" that much, both the USAF and USN made mistakes. The USN correctly predicted that the then current-gen Sidewinders were pretty poor performers, and jumped ahead by investing in newer variants. However, they neglected Sparrow maintenance, with missiles bolted to aircraft that repeatedly landed on carriers and were exposed to the elements on the deck. This lead to the USN having greater success with Sidewinders, while the USAF scored more kills with Sparrows. Had the USAF followed the Navy's lead on improving Sidewinders before major operations started and the USN actually maintained the Sparrows, the "missiles suck" narrative wouldn't exist.
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@BH-21-00 Noted. So it's probably "pen and paper" like in the old days of "fly at X degrees at Y speed at distance Z from the target".
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The F-111 was the biggest tank killer aircraft in Desert Storm. That tech worked.
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@STGN01 "they were designing for a war against the Russians, who had the numerical superiority" - And technology beats numbers. Quality has a quality of its own.
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@STGN01 Nice try at changing the subject. The German superweapon programs were last ditch efforts and did not have higher quality. How about you read some books? Look into 73 Easting, and how two Bradleys came face to face with thirteen T-72 tanks in defensive positions. They managed to take out 5 tanks on their own before help arrived. Quality beats quantity. A large number of main battle tanks got their asses handed to them by two IFVs. How's the quantity argument gonna hold up when your MBTs are wiped out like that, and the enemy MBTs haven't even arrived yet?
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@STGN01 German "quality" was absolute garbage considering how much they lost due to breakdowns. They were making stuff out of crap steel and crashed B-17s at that point. The US didn't get its ass handed to it. The US tried to build a nation in a region that doesn't want a nation built. Most of the territory where we say Afghanistan is doesn't care about Kabul, and frankly the people in charge of Kabul barely cared about their country anyway. Militarily, the US won the vast majority of engagements. The win condition was for the government to stand tall without training wheels, and when the US left we discovered their troops weren't even getting fed or issued ammunition because all the money went towards someone's pockets. Are you seriously arguing that the US should have used more men rather than technology? We'd have thousands more dead, and the result would have been exactly the same - the Taliban have more sway with tribes than the Kabul government did. Technology made sure less Americans died trying to build a state that couldn't sustain itself. Enemies that avoid fighting on the US's terms. You mean like the Serbs? Sure, their military forces tried the "we fight on our own terms" tactic to preserve their fighting force, and the US just proceeded to bomb them until Milosevic yielded. What good is a mostly intact fighting force, if military power can just force you to concede? That's quality. I'm seriously suggesting that crap in quantity isn't going to do jack shit against good vehicles with well trained crews. You're missing the point, the Bradleys shouldn't have got the drop on the T-72s. They were scouting and got surprised by thirteen tanks, the T-72s should have had the drop on them and they were in defensive positions. MBTs. In defensive positions. More than 6 to 1 numerical superiority. Surprised enemy. All the advantages and quality still beat them. That's the point.
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@linusa2996 This doesn't change the fact that if you're inside high Pk range, dodging isn't really feasible. Kinetically defeating missiles is what happens outside motor range.
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@linusa2996 20 seconds of burn at Mach Jesus is farther than the eye can see. Most shootdowns happen with the pilot unaware he's being targeted, that's just how it is.
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@linusa2996 A change in the turn rate simply means a new predictive impact point is calculated and the missile adjusts accordingly. The motor is still burning and it's only getting closer to the aircraft, which desperate maneuver will save it now? 6 changes of direction? In 12 seconds? So assuming generously that each change in direction was only 90º instead of 180º, you had the aircraft pull 45 deg/second turn rates. The EM diagram for the F-16 suggests it maxes out at 20 deg/second. Sorry, but that's simply not feasible and I'm already being very generous by assuming the aircraft only has to turn perpendicular to its previous flight path, rather than actually pull a U-turn.
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@linusa2996 Nobody's talking about terminal phase. We're talking about slinging high Pk shots.
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The F-15EX was just a ploy to keep the Boeing St. Louis plant open.
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The F-117 has no radar to turn on in the first place.
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@jayklink851 IR is absorbed by the atmosphere so there's a severe range limitation in IRST.
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The issue is, the merge is one of those game theory situations where neither party should want to do it. With high AoA maneuvers and HOBS, it's preferable to kill at the merge than letting the fight go on and get killed. That's not dogfighting. That's just jousting.
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Depending on how the computer works, if the ground forces are directing an attack and know the coordinates even with GPS down, they can still feed it to the pilot whose aircraft has his INS calibrated to an airfield with a known coordinate. Otherwise a markpoint can be selected with the targeting optics and again INS can be used to calculate the release point.
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