Originally posted by Suggs
The Buccaneer! – Definitely still on of the best (if not THE best) low level strike bomber in the world – so good that te Uk Government scraped them rather than sell them overseas.

You mean just like the Italian G.91s? The Buccs were scrapped under CFE regulations, and also because the airframes were beat What do you think 30 years of low-level flying, half of which in salty sea air does to an airframe? Not because they were some secret wonder weapon. In fact, it was considered for some time to replace some of the Canberra’s tasks (EW training and such) with Buccs, but the state of those just wasn’t good enough to warrant further investment to use them for another five to ten years.

How can you see the pattern on the arrays if the arrays are covered by tarpaulins? Not really helpful.

As for the English bit, the editor-in-me wishes to remark that Crobato forgot to emphasise one word.

[quote]”For the detection and localisation of hostile radar emissions and jammers the FT-2000 makes use of four ground-based Electronic Support Measures (ESM) sensor posts, each of which is mounted on wheeled vehicles and can together track 50 targets simultaneously.”

Bold by Crobato, underline by me.

Sorry for interrupting, now carry on…

You mean how the absolute monkey’ed MiG-21PFV shot down full-pull USAF F-4Es and such?

It’s obvious you don’t like Russian gear, but the way you’re bashing them doesn’t seem to have the backup needed to make it justified.

Don’t forget to practice under all sorts of circumstances. Airshows, operational landing photography, sunny weather in high summer, sunny weather in winter, even grey weather… And digital photography is excellent for that, you don’t have to wait for your slides to be returned from the Developing Countries to see what mistakes you made.

Also, practice a lot with different lenses. Especially in landing shots, it took me some time before i could make a decent judgement on what focal length would be necessary.

Just go out to an airbase near you, try a bit, talk a bit to the other weirdos hanging out there, and they will probably give you some tips too.

Plenty of aviation/military mags to be bought at newsstands in the PRC. I got a sh!itload of them when i went there, and i did even restrain myself. Some seem to have some interesting info in them.

If there is anyone willing to translate an impressive-looking J-7 article from Chinese to something i can read, please contact me via PM.

Originally posted by SD-10
China GDP is now 6 times bigger than it was 25 years ago. Which no major country has ever done in history.

Germany and the Netherlands 1945 – 1970, easily.

Pal, you certainly know how to lift the level of discourse here!

Originally posted by Billy Bishop
According to my info Russia has two Mig-31D dedicated anti-satellite models (numbered 071 and 072), they entered service in 1986 and I have not read anything about them being withdrawn from service.

They never entered service. They entered trials at GLITs at Akhtubinsk, which is a test unit and not an operational one. 071 didn’t even have the full gear, this one was used for testing the optimal flightpath/launch pattern for ASAT ops.