From ACIG page on this issue

That’s also what I was referring to. I never said they didn’t use the R-73 nor that it wasn’t a good missile at the job, but there were reported to have been at least two 30mm gun kills during the war between the Russian fighters involved, which shows that it still certainly has value in the air-to-air combat role, something that the Americans at Red Flag appreciated.

Logan Hartke

You cant pick and choose what this guy is saying. You have to either accept everything or disbelieve everything.

You don’t speak to many veterans, do you? There is much to be gained from talking with people that have been there, seen it, and done it. In fact, I’d rather have been flying with a pilot that has 200 kills and can’t tell a Yak 3 from a Yak 9 than the guy with no stick time and can tell you where the enemy aircraft are sent for their depot level maintenance.

I once spoke with a veteran that was flying P-39 at an airshow and couldn’t remember whether the type he was flying had the 37mm cannon in the nose or the 20mm cannon in the nose, but I still respected his opinions on the flying qualities of the plane.

Likewise, just last week I was talking with an F-15 pilot (a Major in fact). I heard him get his wires crossed after talking to dozens of people at the air show and tell one person that the plane he was standing in front of was an F-15A and then turn around and tell the next person he saw that it was an F-15C originally from Kadena. I happened to know that it was the latter and that his gaffe was likely the result of just talking to so many people throughout the day. Heck, at the same airshow a couple of seasons ago, I was listening to the An-124 Ruslan pilots making the same mistakes talking about things (“look at that Air Force fighter” – it was Navy, that kind of thing). You’d think that star49 would have done a better job educating them. They were probably just stupid Americans in Russian costumes. Impostors.

Most US Hellcat aces in the Pacific that helped rack up that 14-to-1 would tell you that all of their kills were Zeros. That’s impossible. Does it mean they were lying about the kill? No, at least not according to gun camera footage and Japanese records. It means it was a Val or a Kate or an Oscar.

Just because they can’t tell a Schmeisser from an MP40 or a Tumansky from a Lyulka or a Tiger from a PzKpfw IV or a Zero from an Oscar doesn’t mean they’re incompetent or incapable.

A lot of those same “stupid” Eagle drivers that don’t know where in the great nation of Russia the Su-30MKI’s engines are the same idiots that were popping MiG-29s over Iraq and the Balkans and putting their gun blips all over the Su-30s at Red Flag.

I was reading something that was saying all the myths about US soldiers that prevail in Iraq among the anti-American Iraqis. Some were the they had water-cooled underwear to help them deal with the Iraqi heat and X-Ray sunglasses to see through the clothes of the Iraqi women. Idiot as those myths may be, many of the believers of those myths were still plenty smart enough to place IEDs and blow up those X-Ray glasses-wearing GIs.

Logan Hartke

I did not mean to imply it is a natural, inevitable progression, & there is nothing in what I wrote which should make anyone believe I meant that.
…
I said, pretty clearly, I thought, that the Western Allies chose not to go to war with Spain because they saw war with Spain as contrary to their interests, despite Spanish aid for the German war against the USSR. Is that clear enough now? There was no “natural, inevitable progression”, as there was none in Japans war. There were reasons for each choice to follow a particular course, & the reasons were different in each case.

I wasn’t referring to your Spain post, but the one below.

Well, to be fair, the USA had surreptitiously joined the war against Japan several months before Pearl Harbour, even though that nominally mercenary (but actually US-armed, financed, & organised) force didn’t get into action until a few days after it, & the embargo (of a lot more than oil, BTW) was more of an attempted blockade, with other states being pressed very hard to join it.

Where, by your “to be fair” comment, you seem to imply that the establishment of the AVG in China brought the US into a war with Japan before Pearl Harbor, which leads to the logical conclusion that it was not Japan that initiated the conflict, an assertion which I was trying to disprove through my various examples, for I believe it to be a faulty one.

Japan saw the US embargo as a major threat (I think accurately) to its ability to wage war or even maintain its economy, rather than just a “major annoyance”, & calculated that its choices were acquiescence to US demands, or war – and chose the latter. Again, it was a calculation of costs & benefits, though IMO a deeply flawed one in the Japanese case, & following on from a rejection of the possibility of ending their war of aggression against China. But in neither case was there a “natural, inevitable progression”, & I have nowhere suggested there was.

Your first post seemed to have a “Japan was already engaged in war with the US via the AVG.” Since the only thing mentioned up to that point had been Pearl Harbor, the implied link there was that Pearl Harbor was just an escalation of an existing war, something I’d dispute.

Logan Hartke

AFAIK, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain were amongst the neutral countries in WWII Western Europe.

Technically Spain was. That was the point. If the US was to have been considered an aggressor prior to Dec 7, 1941 because of the AVG and therefore a legitimate target for Japanese attack, then Spain should have been hit by the Allies for the far more overt operations of the Blue Division on the Russian Front.

Logan Hartke

I wonder what one would need to do to be considered an aggressor in his book… :confused:

Oil embargo.

Logan Hartke

Ukranian Gripen

I started doing What-If aircraft profiles about three months ago and the Gripen was the first aircraft I did. One of the first what-if schemes I put it in was a Ukranian one.

I knew the MiG-29s and Su-27s won’t last forever, so it seemed plausible. I gave them a used ex-Swedish C.

I know that in all likelihood it would have some boring gray scheme, but I wanted something a bit more attractive, so I gave it something a bit more interesting (stole the splinter scheme from one of their Su-27s).

It seemed fitting for the topic.

Logan Hartke