The Tornado speaks by it self, the aircraft has serve well the english, German and Italian air forces, the Tornado has a better missile than the R-73, the ASRAAM is a missile nearer to the Python V than the R-73, the R-73 is not in the same class, what the Su-30 will try to avoid is an ASRAAM from hitting it not the Panavia Tornado, the Tornado can fire the ASRAAM without getting behind the Su-30 that is the reality, both at BVR will use AMRAAM type missiles

Feels like I am talking to a wall. :rolleyes:

Go back and re-read my last post, cos your reply addresses none of the issues I have raised. Only stubern 5 year-olds keep repeating the same tired lines over and over and over again hoping that if they say it enough times it will become reality. If that is the level you are at, then I will waste no more time with you. If you can do better, PROVE it with action.

And no, simple drawns you pulled off the net do not count as evidence.

Not is not questionable, it is a fact,

Oh really? If its a fact, then surely it can be proved beyound reasonable doubt. When was the last time a Tornado beat a Flanker in WVR combat then? :rolleyes:

the Chilean F-5 were far more capable than the French Mirage 2000 in mock combat thanks to the Python IV, an aircraft is a weapons system, if the missile you carry is better well does not matter if you have or have not thrust vectoring,

So what? Mig21s have apprently ‘matched’ F15 in mock combat under the right pre-set RoEs. Every dog can have his day, doesn’t come close to showing it is the better ac, and I stress again, we are comparing AIRCRAFT here and not missiles.

of course if it is a gun battle the Su-27, MiG-29 or Su-30MKI will rule over the Tornado, but only if the Tornado has no AAMs left, but the ASRAAM is part of the weapon system and the most important is what results you end up having.

You have a trule dreamy-eyed notion of how air combat works. To start off with, just because a missile *can* engage at certain conditions does not mean that it will be at its most effective or even have a decent chance of hitting your target. You pop-off an ASRAAM at a Su30 40 degrees off your broadside while the Su30 pops an R73 at you while he’s got you lock in his gunsight and you figure our who is more likely to end up in flames. We are not talking about the gulf in capacity between conventional IRAAMs v HMS cued high off-broadside missiles, both will have the later, and the difference in capacity is not huge.

Manuverability of the aircraft is also paramount in determining how likely it is to evade a hostile missile. You can both fire missiles at the same time, but you still loose if your opponent’s missile nails you while he dodges your’s.

The ASRAAM gives to theTornado a WVR capability that balances it`s short comings in performance and agility.

That is a questionable claim, and even if it were true, will only give credit to the missile and not the plane.

The Tornado might not be agile but armed with ASRAAM it does not need to be a MiG-29OVT or F-22, the Missile will do the rest because it does not need to be behind the intended target.

And thats why the Tornado is not great. With the right weapons suit, a great many other planes can do everything the Tornado can and more.

The Eurofighter of course is a better platform but as fighter and attack aircraft the Panavia Tornado was and is one of the best aircraft made in the world in the late XX century

I’m afraid it is just not true. ASRAAM is a very recent addition for the Tornado, before that it had absolutely no chance against a Flanker, Fulcrum, Eagle or Viper in WVR combat, and would not stand much of a chance in its prefered BVR field either because of the limitations of the airframe (don’t handle well at high altitude); and I highly doubt that its chances will be much better once ASRAAM comparable weapons are developed and intergrated onto its rivals. In ground attack, the Tornado’s combat record is questionable at best, and certainly does not come close to that of the F15E. The flanker derivatives have not seen combat to test out their ground attack ability, but they have far greater potential if not capacity then the Tornado.

The truely greats have stood unmatched for decades, the Tornado’s transiant advantages does not even come close to propelling it into that highly exclusive club.

The whole point is relatively low performance aircraft if fitted with fourth or fifth generation missiles become real threats to advanced 4.5 and even 5 generation fighter aircraft

And that makes that ‘low performance aircraft’ great? :rolleyes: If that was the case, then a 747 with a hundred VLS AAMs should be the best ‘fighter’ ever. 😀

no aircraft that has been made is perfect in every way… all GREAT designs had there faults… eg, the Mig-21 was a great design, but had limited range and a poor weopans carrying capability, the Harrier, not supersonic [so what] and limited payload [early models]. the DH Mosquito, wooden struture didnt like hot and high climates…. i could go on and on.. i think the Panavia Tornado has every right to be one of the GREATS….

In that case, I think you are awarding far too many ‘greats’ and in doing so, trivalising the term. The Mig21 was never ‘great’ in any way. It was made in enormous numbers and for a very long time, and thats about the only noteworthy thing about it; The Harriers just about hovers past the ‘greatness’ threshold. It was a major milestone in aviation history as the first effective VSTOL fighter, but besides that, not much (and don’t bring up the Falklands cause the Argentine Mirages they shot down were not equiped or ordered to engage the Harriers in air combat), however, VSTOL was so revolutionary and difficult to master that in achieving VSTOL status, the Harrier managed to clearly step away from its peers, an achievement that will only be matched (hopefully) when the F35C comes online sometime around 2010.

Being good is not enough to achieve greatness, how many ‘good’/’decent’/’effective’ etc generals have there been in history and how many truely great ones? True great fighters need to have something that really sets them apart from their peers. Anything the Tornado can do, its competitors can as well, and often do it better to boot.

‘Scanning…No network coverage found…Scanning…’

I think one of us is confused… Why does an object’s weight (or size/shape) matter if gravity is a constant? G-force is simply the number of times gravity is doubled. So if you weight 100 lbs, at 1 g you would weigh 200 lbs, but your mass remains the same. So a feather and a brick would also weigh twice as much at 1 g and exactly twice as much.

I think you are confusing the unit of measurement with the reason for the phanominon. G-forces are created not by gravity working many times as ‘hard’, but by momentum differential caused when an object changes direction abruptly. The strength of this effect is measured in Gs or ‘gravities’. As such, the laws governing gravity do not apply when considering the causes of G forces, but the laws that govern momentum do, and momentum is calculated by mass times speed.

I still don’t think a shorter pilot would have any advantage over a taller one. Or if there is any advantage, then it doesn’t have anything to do with g forces.

The reason pilots suffer from blackouts during flight is because when the plane changes direction abruptly, the body goes one way while the blood in the body ‘wants’ to go another as a result of its momentum, hence you have bloody draining from the brain and thus starving it of oxygen and causing the pilot to loose consiousness – blackout.

Think back to the part above about momentum equaling mass times speed. Now, we know that blood cells are the same size and so have the same mass, but they would have more ‘speed’ when in a tall person as opposed to a shorter one. To understand this, think of the ball and rope example meantioned before. when you spin the ball tied to the rope, it makes a circule, and the length of the rope is the radius, the longer the rope, the longer the radius and hence circumfronce (ie, distance traveled). Now, if you are spining at the same rate for two different lengths of rope, one object will have to travel further then the other in the same time frame, hence its speed is higher, hence it has more momentum. That is the effect of the difference in body height.

However, because of the small difference between the height of most average people, this difference in the effect G-forces will have on the pilot is very small, and not really worthy of being a major factor to consider when selecting potential pilots. That is why I suggests that other factors are more likely to be the cause.

However, purely accidemically, there is a difference.

In the USAF pilot requirements, all it says is that the pilot must have “body dimensions that do not inhibit safe operation in the cockpit”. If there was some advantage to shorter pilots, why doesn’t the USAF have such a requirement? And finally, if there was some advantage, it would make more sense to individually measure ass-knee length, sitting knee height, torso length, and so on rather than simply his total height.

As I said before, the advanatge of being shorter is marginal at best. It exists, but is not strong enough to make it a provolent criteria for selection of potential pilots. It takes a whole host of different factors to make a good combat pilot, and few enough people in the population have all of them as it is without some of them being rejected on the grounds of a very marginal factor like height.

As for different measurements for different parts of the body, well that doesn’t exist because height itself isn’t very important, and even if it did, the vast majority of people have body parts that are proportionate to their total height, so such detailed examination is unnecessary.

Most of us here don’t particularly like blair, but how would you feel if a country like russia or china came and ‘liberated’ us from the ‘tyranny of blair’? Would you be on the street waving a russian or chinese flag or would you be out there taking pot-shots?

Like it or not, us humans are rather thouchy when it comes to foreign troops coming and toppling our governments and installing new ones seen to be their cronies. Thinking like the way you do will only make it easier for British troops to be less then careful when iraqi lies are concerned. As soon as such thoughts become the norm, then you would have lost far more then what bombs and missiles could ever take on the battlefield, and for every insurgent you kill, a hundred more will be spawned to take his/her place.

Its easy to get emotional and revert back to the blood thirsty beast we evolved from, but if you do that, how are you any better then the mob you despise so much? Sticking to principles when everything is going your way is easy, the real test is whether you can stay true to what you believe even when things are against you.

Some interesting info, thanks. But if they were after night time smugglers, wouldn’t radars be a better investment? NVGs have pretty short ranges after all. And if the Navy did find LTTE vessles with radar, then NVG not be all that critical since the Navy warships will likely have searchlights on.

Having NVGs would be a definative advanatage no matter what else the Navy have, don’t get me wrong there. But I think the army and air force would probably make better use of them, and it seems a little strange to me that all the NVGs are going to the Navy, 250 does seem a little excessive after all.

Wolfy,
Even for a massive country like China, wih MASSIVE human potential : it is impossible to search for a ship that does not want to be found.period.
A group of ships that do not want to be found must be tailed from the base .even then trying to pin the tail on the donkey is such a waste of time and energy
THERE IS ALWAYS EXPIRABILITY
without time constraints it will be easy for the dog to catch his tail:for a horseman to ride consistently with the sun and circle the earth in 24 hours
A CVBG has time contraints :it has to do a operation in given period of time. else it is a failure
A rival to this CVBG has to recon the entire ocean and detect the CVBG AND prevent it from doing anything in INTERNATIONAL waters .(the word prevent does mean any action taken by the carrier is reported to all the other forces in the area of operation).IN OTHER WORDS, the element of suprise is gone and half the battle is won.
For eg. Consider the situation in the Bay of Bengal during the liberation of Bangledesh: The IN had intelligence that a US CVBG was in the very area as their CVBG…The US bieng an ally of Pakistan at that time.Even with the intel they had to find out their operational area…. …and the end result was Mrs.Gandhi politicizing the incident at an international level.Having the world on your side when the rival carrien can be closely followed by the world press stumps the carrier out. It is like making a buglar work in the presence of everybody.The role of the US was effectively neutralized and they could not do a thing about the incident
Wolf what i would like you to understand is without hard intel the US cvgb would have dissappeared into the night with the country’s leader having to explain why they unnecessarily cried “WOLF”
I think this argument should end now and we should return to the main purpose of the thread i.e.” To find the operational effectiveness of both the carriers vis-a-vis the other and to find the situations to which the countries can respond to using a carrier.”

You have some interesting ideas about the ability of a carrier, but I do not think you are operating in the modern world. As i have said before, past examples can and are constainly renders obsolete by the introduction of new technologies. If you do not update your existing examples and models with new developments, your models, and all conclusions drawn from them, are flawed or even obsolete.

As I have already said in previous posts, you will not need to have people manually scanning every bit of oceon since the advant of computers and software has made that unnecessary.

As for scanning an entire oceon, well notice how that was under the ‘no time constraint’ heading. It was a purely theoretical model to show how a carrier can be found anywhere. If it was a more realistic model, then you can factor in all sorts of additional info, such as theatre of battle, time since hostile carrier left port etc, which will actually help the hunter as it narrows down the search area. Also, if it was a purely carrier v carrier engagement in the middle of an oceon, then there would be effectively no time constraints, its not like either carrier will be going anywhere or attacking anything else.

I also fail to see how your ‘bengal’ example is off any relevence here.