Does anyone have any photographs of ANY of the Austrian air force planes, from 1970s until today, carrying a bomb or a rocket pod? Any image of any plane (including trainers) with any kind of bomb would suffice.

I’m interested in Hungarian Gripens’ air to ground capability. I’ve found some media writeups about HuAF wanting to get precision guided weapons but for the love of me i can’t find any confirmation. No US foreign sale document on bombs, no mention of a specific contract for specific amount of money in the media, no photograps.

Which is really weird since there IS a photograph of Hungarian Gripen with a Litening pod. Shouldn’t there be bombs available as well, then?

So now that we’re more or less done with the length, how about another round of measuring for the weapon bays? 😀 I’m getting 4,6 meters by 1,05 meters, with maximum depth of some 0,55 meters (though of course with carriage pylons and the forward third of the bay getting more and more shallow that doesn’t mean all of it can really be used for weapons)

But have the S300 batteries anywhere in the world ever been deployed with 9m96 missiles? Missiles themselves haven’t been developed fully until recently, no? And we yet have to wait and see if any s300 batteries will ever get them. Or will it, in Russia’s example at least, it be a separate matter, S300 using bigger missiles while 9m96 is used by S350?

Ws10 variant engine allegedly fitted to a j20

As far as i can tell, AIM-7M, in production since 1982 was the first sparrow to have an autopilot. Which means in theory one could illuminate only before impact. Still, illumination is also needed to guide the missile if missile needs to correct its mid course. So it doesn’t seem very useful.

Now, AIM-7P had an added datalink for midcourse updates. Finally the illumination was needed only during last several seconds. So With that model F15C could realistically fire at two targets and expect some half decent chance of a hit. Not fire at the same time of course, but perhaps with 10+ seconds of difference. Still, for the most of the flight, one could say two targets could be threatened at once.

Though, P variant started production in 1987 (also was converted from M) so realistically not that many were in service by 1990, probably majority of sparrows were still M variants by the time Soviet threat ended.

I agree it would be great if off topic discussions could be moved to their own thread…. Alas, that requires a few hours of moderation each day, and this forum can apparently hardly afford a moderator.