Something that I’ve often done with Fishbreath is debate the question “If you were in charge of defense procurement, what would you go and buy?” I’ll have some more fun with the these prompts starting today. First, some rules and notes.
THE RULES: 1) Whatever you’re buying has to be in production. This rule is kind of limiting, since there are lots of cool cancelled projects out there, but that’s okay. We can always specify a time frame to redefine the problem if we like. But we do want to avoid hypothetical weapons that didn’t actually get out into the wild ugly world. The first test for a military system is whether or not it can escape bureaucratic hell. 2) You can only buy what’s available for export. And if there’s an export version, that’s what you’re getting. Sorry, no Raptors for you (though these also violate Rule No. 1). 3) You need a consistent environment to fight in. This takes the form of a hypothetical country, listed below.
NOTES: Our hypothetical country is the nation of Borgundy. This is an (obviously completely made up) country in Northernish Europe. Or possibly some fictitious continent that’s a lot like the terrain and climate of North-Central Europe. They’re a lot more conservative than actual Western Europe, reflecting certain tendencies on the part of myself and Fishbreath and also because that means they’re much more likely to fulfil their NATO spending obligations. Call it a return to good old early 20th Century Militarism. Threat nations are assumed to be using ex-Soviet or modern Russian gear, though a war with other, NATO-compliant adversaries is not ruled out. Borgundy is not a member of whatever alternate-reality EU-analogue might exist. We like not listening to representatives not elected by us and controlling our own fiscal policy, thankyouverymuch.
This is a post of limited interest to anyone who does not own an R53 Mini, but I couldn’t find a simple answer anywhere else on the Internet, so here it is anyway.
As a proud first-generation modern Mini owner, the question of how to do better than 20mpg in my almost exclusively city driving routine weighed heavily on my mind, until I decided to test it. Some cars (such as my mom’s old BMW 318i) do best at higher revs than you might expect. The Mini does not. What you want to do is short shift as much as possible, with a target cruise RPM of 2000-2500. My suspicion is that, whenever the supercharger bypass valve closes at ~3,000 RPM, you get such a large amount of added air that any economy you gain from being nearer the middle of the power band is wiped out by the necessity of adding so much more fuel to get the mixture right. I went from 20mpg to 24mpg when I tweaked my driving.
7/14/2015 addendum: I’m back to highway driving, and I find that the same axiom still holds. Short shift—I went from about 275 miles before the low-fuel light comes on, to well over 300.
I am a conservative on the Internet, and I play games, read speculative fiction, and watch TV. People who produce the media I consume, by and large, are either in vocal disagreement with me on almost every substantive issue, or silently disagree with me on almost every substantive issue. I maintain this is not a bad thing.
I certainly don’t take the progressive view, which frequently declares certain pursuits, views, and luxuries anathema1. See handwringing over the movie adaptation of Ender’s Game, for one, or the occasional calls for boycotts of business which support gun rights, or who are accused of being too capitalist in their outlook, or the case of Brendan Reich of Mozilla, or various fora with a leftist bent whose progressivism extends to the progressive erosion of the Island of Acceptable Opinions2. This censorial impulse is frequently served with a side of disappointment or regret: “I really enjoy this thing, but the people who provide this thing are the scum of the earth, so I can’t have it!”
Some conservatives do yield to that impulse, but since I’ve already mentioned I enjoy consuming the products of the entertainment industry, I can’t. My choices are separate the work from the people, or live under a rock, and the latter is not a particularly charming option. Of course, separating the work from the person altogether is impossible. Maybe Green Eggs and Ham is a work without a message, but once you move beyond that level of complexity, almost every piece of art says something, whether or not the author had something in particular in mind to say.
That, then, is why it’s a good thing that a lot of storytelling I enjoy comes from people who disagree with me. We live in an age of echo chambers and isolation. We can go through life effectively avoiding exposure to people who don’t think the same way, but media has a way of sneaking in and showing us someone else’s opinion. Reading a novel colored by a communist utopian author’s perspective isn’t apt to turn me into a communist utopian, but it does tend to present a case, implicit or explicit, for communist utopianism. As wrong as I think that case may be, seeing it presented keeps me from lumping communist utopians into the Nameless Other category—though perhaps guilty of poor reasoning, they’re still humans.
Which finally brings me to the title of the post. We staunch conservatives with a fondness for pop culture have practice with that viewpoint, because the entertainment industry is so overwhelmingly leftist. Staunch leftists have a lot less practice in that realm3, and so I most often see them as the perpetrators of pop-culture incivility: angry proclamations that authors like Jerry Pournelle, Larry Correia, or Orson Scott Card are unfit to read, not because of the quality of their writing4, but because of the views they hold. That, I think, is definitely bad: it subverts media’s role in humanizing the other side, and depoliticizing life and rehumanizing the other side is an extremely important part of avoiding a society of cells of harmonious agreement in violent disagreement with all the other cells.
1. A word with a religious origin used advisedly. Humans like telling other humans what not to do. Progressivism rejects the thought that the traditional institutions which tell other humans what to do are worth much, and has to fall back on telling other humans what to do on their supposed merits when read through a progressive lens. “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow the consensus leftist view” lacks something of the original’s verve, though. 2. Obviously, what I’ll term ‘my side’ doesn’t have the cleanest of hands, either, but I’m more qualified to nitpick about people I disagree with, so I don’t have any specific examples. 3. Though more, perhaps, in the personal realm. I hear a lot more about leftists surrounded by conservative family or friends than the other way around, but that might just be the sorts of circles I run in. 4. Which may be good or may be crap. Of these three, I’ve only ever read Card’s solo work, which ranges from good to crap all on its own.
…
It strikes me that I could probably apply this mode of thinking to the #GamerGate flap, but I’m not sufficiently thick-skinned to deal with the potential response to a whole post on that topic. The short version: the ‘death of gamers’ articles which helped push the movement more mainstream were examples of the same sort of cultural excommunication I spent this post condemning, and the #GamerGate people are guilty of declaring some games journalists unfit to read because of their politics. Both sides may be guilty of other things, and I don’t claim to capture every facet and every nuance of either side’s position. That’s why this is a paragraph below the footnotes instead of a fully developed post of its own.
Last Wednesday, Leatherneck Simulations released the MiG-21bis Fishbed-N module for DCS, and I’ve been getting to grips with it since then. Here are my impressions so far on the aircraft and simulation. It’ll take a while before I’m comfortable enough with the plane to talk about the campaign or the included single missions.
The MiG-21 was designed as a high-speed, high-altitude interceptor, and its shape reflects that: teensy delta wings highly swept. Overall, it’s quite a slight machine: its maximum takeoff weight is a mere 10,400 kilograms, next to the 17,500 kilograms or so of the Su-25T (also described on this blog.
Takeoff calls for full afterburner: with a rotation speed of 350 kilometers per hour, the MiG needs the extra kick in the pants to get off the ground in good order, especially with a reasonable load. Handling in flight is benign at high speed, and a little wallowy if you get below 450 kilometers per hour or so. That said, the MiG retains good controls authority down to the lowest speeds at which it can fly, and up to angles of attack where most planes would be complaining, or bumping you into angle of attack limiters. It’s even possible to do something like the famed Cobra maneuver a la the Flanker, although not quite as crazy off-axis.
It shines brightest in the linear and vertical axes. Drag is low, and acceleration at afterburner is exceptional. Below 4,000 meters altitude, you have access to a second afterburner mode, which increases the kick in the pants factor still further. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that 0-300 kilometers per hour on the runway takes more time than 1000-1300 kilometers per hour at 2,000 meters. Climb is similarly rocket-like, especially while the second afterburner is available. Even with a full combat load, it’s only a hair away from a 1:1 thrust-weight ratio.
The front office is very 1960s, as is the design (it entered service in 1971). Steam gauges and switches are the order of the day. It comes from the era before pilot workload was a major concern, so switches you’ll need are positioned helter-skelter around the cockpit, although some of the most important functions do show some grouping. For instance, the weapons control panel, at the top left of the front panel, has all of what you’ll need to select and ready weapons.
Speaking of which, the MiG-21 is DCS’s first full-fidelity multirole fast mover, and I only feel a little bad about how much I’m stretching the definition of multirole. Your weapons include a variety of obsolete air to air missiles, from the RS-2US beam-rider to the R-55 let-us-take-RS-2US-and-add-semi-active-seeker-da upgrade to the R-3/R-13/K-13/AA-2 family of IR and SARH missiles. Also available are the R-60 and R-60M, the latter being more nearly obsolescent than straight-up obsolete. The air-to-ground loadout options include a mix of similarly obsolescent things, like 57mm rocket pods (abandoned in general use in Afghanistan, because they were insufficiently effective) and the Kh-11 Grom radar-beam-riding missile (highly effective), and the timeless FAB series of general-purpose free-fall bombs. There are also some esoteric options like the rocket-assisted runway-penetrating BetAB-500Sh. All told, it’s a curious kit, capable at short range in air to air combat, and limited in its maneuverability in that realm, and more than sufficient for oppress-the-rebels-style strike sorties, examples of which in the real Middle East have recently featured the MiG.
Aiding you in finding targets, aiming those weapons, and firing them, is the avionics suite, which really isn’t significantly more complicated than, say, the Huey’s setup. Certainly, it’s less to get to grips with than the Ka-50, and a whole lot less to get to grips with than the Warthog. The kit comprises four systems: the radar, the optical sight, the radio navigation system, and the autopilot.
The radar is simple to use, but no more capable than you’d expect: it’s useful only in the near BVR arena, and to cue radar homing missiles. It has no dogfight modes, and a detection range of maybe 30 kilometers on a good day, if you can tease contacts out of the clutter. (Clutter is modeled for the first time, and is pretty nifty. And annoying.)
The optical sight includes the actual sight unit and the weapons control panel next to it. The former is simple to set up, providing gyro-based aiming for the gun and air-to-ground rockets, and indicating what an IR-homing missile is tracking. (For radar seekers, you’re on your own.) The weapons control panel is effectively an analog stores management system: you pick the pylon with a big honking knob, the master mode (either air to air or air to ground) with a switch, and the weapons paramenters with a variety of other switcher.
The radio navigation system is surprisingly useful1. The ARK is a standard radio compass, capable of tuning the NDBs scattered around the Georgia map and providing bearings to them. RSBN stations, the other kind of beacon the MiG can tune, function like VOR/DME, providing cues to fly to or from a station along a certain radial course, and distance to the station, with a range of about 200 kilometers. The MiG can provide steering cues to intercept and fly along a radial, or, while flying along a radial, descent cues to reach pattern altitude within 20 kilometers of the station2. The third position on the RSBN mode switch is landing, which utilizes the PRMG instrument landing system3. It’s a pretty standard ILS. The NPP (read: horizontal situation indicator, read: radio compass thingy) has some tick marks on its inner dial which provide steering points to construct a standard landing pattern, which I thought a very handy feature. Stay tuned: after I mention the autopilot real quick, I’m coming back to landing.
The autopilot (really, the flight control system; the Russian acronym is SAU) has a few handy features: a straight-and-level mode, a ‘stabilized’ mode that tries to maintain your current bank and pitch4, and a pair of landing modes. One flies you in automatically, one provides you flight director cues, like you’d get on a more modern aircraft automatically, and neither seem to be working right now.
Which brings me to perhaps the most exciting phase of flight: the landing. It’s been a while since I’ve flown a simulated fixed-wing aircraft as complicated to land as the MiG. With those tiny delta wings, it requires an insane turn of speed: 350 kilometers per hour, or almost 200 knots, over the runway threshold. To compound that, it features blown flaps: engine bleed air is vented along the wings to provide more lift at low speeds and high angles of attack, as you find on landing. Most planes don’t mind an idle-throttle touchdown; with the MiG, I find myself flying into the flare and very slowly reducing the throttle to avoid dropping it on the runway like a streamlined brick. Fortunately, the brakes are good and a drag parachute is mounted in the tail, so stopping after touching down halfway down the runway doesn’t often present much of an issue. (Unless you shoot a second approach and forget to have the parachute repacked in between, in which case you’re going off the far end of the runway.)
That’s about all I have right now. I’d like to write about, or potentially stream, some of the campaign at a later date, but there are a few things stopping me—general just-past-release issues. Game performance is pretty horrid right now. The MiG’s developers are working hard on optimizations. A few avionics bugs slipped through the pre-release net, and are also being worked on. That said, the MiG was a definite buy for me, an icon from an exciting era past, and given Leatherneck Simulations’ progress on cleaning it up so far, I think it’s more than worth the cost of entry.
1. Quoth me, to skypirates collaborator parvusimperator: “I guess when you have such a short range, ‘divert to alternate’ is not an okay response to bad weather.” 2. In DCS, all of the RSBN stations are at airfields. 3. I’d been so disciplined with footnotes until just now. Anyway, the PRMG system is a lot like the western ILS, except it provides guidance both ways on a runway and fits in a single truck, which is a rare case where the Russians seem to do something better than we do. 4. Or something. I haven’t quite figured it out.
Last month, I spent a week on a short-term mission trip to San Sebastian, Spain. Later on, I’m going to write on a few things I took from it personally. Today, though, I’m warming up with some expansion on an observation I made on the way back, on what seems to me like a key difference between evangelism here1 and in Spain.
First, I’ll rewind a little to describe the trip. I, forty or so students from the high school ministry in which I volunteer, and ten other volunteers and staff put on a nightly street festival in various well-traveled parts of the city. The festivals featured amusements like balloon animals, face-painting, and line dancing2. We had fluent Spanish speakers3 manning a few tents with the sole purpose of outreach, and others circulating in the crowd. I admit, before the trip, I was unconvinced of its effectiveness4. I’m pleased to admit I was wrong5, and the key difference I alluded to has to do with perceptions of the church.
The local institution of the church shapes the way people look at the worldwide body of believers church, and the way people look at the church determines the best way to reach them. In the US, there are plenty of stereotypes and misconceptions, but today I’ll just pick one—the trendy, vain, insular evangelical church focused on appearances only6. A secular American looking at the San Sebastian trip through that lens might ask, where’s the part where you help people?
This is not an altogether invalid complaint, but it contains an implicit premise which doesn’t hold: the problems I see with the church here are the same problems everyone sees with the church everywhere. What might convince the notional secular American—seeing a church deeply involved in serving its community7—might not be as effective for a secular Basque.
Here I descend into rampant speculation. The conception of the church which seems most prevalent to me among Europeans is that of the ancient, crumbling establishment, either a cultural identifier more than an identifier of a changed life, or a building populated by the elderly and doomed to irrelevance in a generation or two. Against that backdrop, the ministry in which we took part turns heads and defies expectations8: here are fifty students and adults with enough heart and enough fire to leave their comfortably air-conditioned building in Texas and cross an ocean to share this good news. That’s just not a thing the stereotypical Spanish church would do, and it certainly seems to have sparked enough curiosity to change some lives.
Of course, we did the easy bit, and the local churches we worked with have the harder (but more rewarding) work of shepherding a bunch of new believers and watching them grow. Fortunately, they too have enough heart and enough fire to see it through. Anyway, that’s not the only way this trip was illuminating for me, or personally interesting, but until I finish the second part of this two-part series, you’ll just have to wait and see.
1. That is, in the US. 2. Which I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I might. 3. And occasionally some other people; a decent number of English-speakers passed through. 4. Although I do know everything… 5. …it turns out I actually don’t. 6. This is almost always an unfair take, and I’m certainly not knocking the modern style of evangelical church, given that those I’ve attended on my own advice generally fit the mold. 7. Which many do. 8. I could probably defend the argument that this describes almost every sort of outreach, but that sounds like a great topic for another post sometime later, so I’ll hold off.
This morning’s target of my ire is this tumblr1, whose function seems to be to complain about Steam tags being spammy or mean or whatever.
Now, the tumblrist2 has a valid point, in a very limited sense. New games, or games with small communities, are likely to see a much less useful set of tags. The rest of the blog is just silly, though, and it boils down to this: “In the middle of this useful set of categorizations for this game, someone tried to be funny!” Or, equally present, “The random member of the gamer hoi polloi is not entitled to have opinions about art games!”
The first one—people trying to be funny—is going to happen everywhere on the Internet all the time. That’s just how it goes. The second complaint gets my blood up, because it’s grounded in the intolerable premise that Real Art Is Inscrutable, and You Can’t Understand It, and that’s utter baloney. Here’s a thing to try, if you find that people aren’t getting the message you’re trying to communicate in your games: make better games, or suck it up and deal with the critique that your art-game isn’t actually a very engaging piece of interactive entertainment.
It seems to me that a vein of entitlement runs through the arts nowadays. At some point in the last century it became sufficient to just have a message to be taken seriously, and we lost the idea that artists ought also to be in the business of creating beauty. That’s why I can name a half-dozen movie soundtrack composers, and not a single composer-composer after Shostakovich; one of those categories makes pretty, accessible music which ends up having a message anyway, and the other makes music with a message that’s dull and uninspired.
I doubt I’ll change anyone’s mind with this rant, but it was cathartic.
1. Entitled ACTUAL STEAM TAGS, because cruise-control for cool. 2. I like this word, although tumblrer is more fun to say.
I’ve been thinking about new sorts of content for the Fish Bowl, and hit upon this idea. I like games, you see, and I like writing—so maybe I should try writing about games? There’s no better place to start, I would say, than the game which has been consuming all of my time: StarMade, the block building game with spaceships.
I saw someone else say that ‘Minecraft with spaceships’ was too reductive, but it’s not inaccurate. StarMade is still in alpha, and the meat of the game right now is in the building. That part plays very much like Minecraft with extra spice: put blocks down to make ships, but some blocks have extra functionality. Power generator blocks make power, thruster blocks make you move, weapon blocks give you guns with which to blow stuff up. Putting blocks in contiguous groups makes them more effective than they’d be separately, so there are advantages to building, say, reactor rooms and engineering spaces. That leads to a natural progression from small ship to large ship in power and cost. It scratches the naval engineer itch I’ve always had—I find myself planning out a ship’s hull shape and interior spaces first, and the internals and hull from that plan in a way that isn’t entirely dissimilar to how ships are actually built.
Beyond building, the gameplay’s still being fleshed out. Crafting is more or less useless; the recipes are completely random, and you might find yourself with a block you can buy cheaply from the various space stations requiring a half-dozen of the most expensive components in the game, or you might have a 300,000-credit block recipe requiring two units of sand. The idea behind crafting is nifty, though. Factory blocks take a recipe and materials and turn them into outputs, and they can be linked together: some factory blocks could make intermediate materials from raw stuff, then be linked to a final production factory to produce usable blocks. Putting factory upgrade blocks next to factories makes them faster and more efficient. The potential for a really neat system is there, but it needs some refining to make the possible inputs to a recipe similar to the value of the outputs.
The flying and combat work reasonably well already. Flying I’d call semi-realistic; there’s drag and a speed limit, but you don’t change directions when you turn. I understand prettier competitor Space Engineers has more physics (you need reverse thrusters, for instance, and gravity is supposed to work like gravity), but StarMade gets by with what it has. Weapon construction has some interesting tradeoffs—while missiles are straight-up better the bigger they are, smaller blocks of guns do more damage over time, but at shorter ranges with slower projectile speeds. You can put AI-controlled turrets onto bigger ships, and although those could use some further development in terms of manual target selection and the like, capital ships with batteries of defensive guns and such are plenty exciting already. I find the death of ships compelling, too: weapons taking chunks out of the armor and the internal spaces, and capabilities slowly decreasing as the ship loses power, weapon, and engine blocks.
All told, it’s a delightful build-spaceships Lego set, and the AI-controlled pirates (which can use your designs if you allow it) and space stations provide some opportunities to try out your designs. Multiplayer seems solid so far, and there’s a lot of fun to be had in collaborative building and comparing designs (and eventually blowing them up). Even as an alpha, I give it a thumbs-up. I look forward to seeing how it develops as it gets closer to finished.
As the most dedicated Russophile among my flight-simming friends, I strapped myself into the cockpit of my early-birthday-present A-10C intending to make like good Soviet propagandist and put it down for every trivial flaw I could find in otherwise-perfect product of decadent capitalism. My final opinion turned out to be a little more measured. The Charlie Warthog is, in a lot of ways, a fine aircraft, and perhaps even the Su-25T’s superior (I would say the jury is still out), but it’s not quite the world-beater I thought it might be.
I’ll start with how it flies. The one-word description is ‘docile’; the two-word description is ‘very docile’. Those big, straight wings yield excellent handling at low speeds, a great roll rate, and all-around pleasant performance. The two podded turbofans strapped to the fuselage in back are high-bypass, which is to say they’re the same sort as the engines on most airliners: the jet exhaust contributes less than the volume of air moved by the fan at the front. It doesn’t make for a fast airplane, and indeed a loaded Warthog struggles to reach the sorts of speeds I consider ‘slow’ in the Su-25, but in any aircraft without an air-to-ground radar, sloth is a virtue (which explains my thing for helicopters). I count this one as even. The Su-25 has better thrust-to-weight and better ability to escape danger, but the A-10 can loiter just about forever and is an easier weapons platform.
Since all fixed-wing planes are basically the same, I got on top of the flying thing in just about no time flat. The two remaining pillars of the Warthog (the systems and the weapons) I learned at about the same time, but I’m going to hit weapons first. The biggest drawback compared to other the other DCS platforms of my acquaintance is the inexcusable lack of dedicated anti-tank missiles. The Su-25T can carry sixteen, plus another six laser-guided missiles, and that’s a lot of semi-standoff capability. On the other hand, the A-10’s gun is worthy of all the praise it garners. It’s effective against every target up to and including the vaunted M1 Abrams, provided you attack from the right aspect, and it makes a lovely, lovely sound.
The guided bomb options (fitted with the GPS-guided JDAM kits and the laser-guided Paveway kits) are good, and can be mounted on most of the hardpoints, but the Maverick only works on two of them, and the Su-25T’s Kh-25 (the Maverickski) is roughly equivalent. The Warthog’s rocket options are typically American, which is to say horrid; the Russians, with their long experience in Afghanistan, have a much better selection (from tiny little 57mm peashooters to 340mm monsters). The Su-25 has better light and medium weapons, and the A-10 has better heavy stuff; in my book, that goes to the Su-25.
Finally, we come to avionics, that traditional locus of American superiority, and the A-10C doesn’t disappoint. The dash holds two color multifunction displays, which control the armaments and targeting, and can display a moving map, and it’s all brilliant. The A-10’s targeting pod (the LITENING, a hardpoint-mounted jobber), through gyroscopes, gimbals, and voodoo magic (I repeat myself), plus a healthy dose of positional awareness, can track a point on the ground even if the wing or the airplane is blocking it, through a complete turn. It features an absurd amount of zoom, plus an IR camera and a standard CCD, and really, it’s hard to say anything bad about it.
It also feeds into the Sensor Point of Interest concept: with any sensor, from the targeting pod to the navigation display to a Maverick seeker to the little visual designation cursor on the HUD, you can declare a Sensor Point of Interest. It sticks around, and you can slew all of your sensors to it at any time. It’s a very, very handy bit of systems integration, and makes re-locating targets on subsequent attack passes a lot easier than they are in the Su-25.
Still, as good as it is, the designers missed two tricks. For one: by Russian standards, the A-10C’s autopilot is archaic. The Su-25T and the Ka-50 both have modes galore, up to and including ones which will follow the mission route or line up on a target, and the A-10 has… one mode which orbits, and one mode which flies straight and level. An orbit mode being the bare minimum for a single-seat attack aircraft, the A-10’s omission of anything fancier is a significant strike against it, given how much head-down work it expects you to be doing. The second one, I wouldn’t have thought of had it not been for the Su-25T: an infrared jammer in the tail. It makes a great deal of sense. Attack planes hang around at low level, where any mujahid with an SA-7 can take a pop at them, and having a bit of kit which makes rear-aspect attacks difficult is a gigantic win.
In the end, the Warthog is what I expected it to be: a solid ground-attack platform with a gun that’s unmatched in its effectiveness. At the same time, it isn’t quite what I expected. It’s only just entering service now, and being such a modern piece of kit, I have to wonder: why did the Air Force settle for very good, when perfect was so nearly within their grasp?
I, with a metrical title, recount my thoughts on recent Su-25T shenanigans, including the two failed attempts before the one that made parvusimperator’s final report. -Fish
I’ve already written my initial impressions of the Su-25T, so I can skip that part and go straight to the SEAD mission.
As we were getting our armaments in order, kicking the tires, and lighting the fires, I suggested, “Why don’t we try a synchronized takeoff?”
Parvusimperator raised several legitimate objections: “Because I only started flying this aircraft an hour or two ago? Because it wanders all over the runway? Because we’ll crash into each other and die?”
“Pessimist,” I said. We lined up on the runway in rough formation, him as the leader ahead and to my left. We held the brakes in, ran up the engines, and released the brakes as we started rolling… and somehow, most of the way down the runway, I passed him. As little sense as that made, it wasn’t hard to get back in formation—I just slowed down and let him pass me. We turned toward the target, three SAM batteries 100 kilometers southeast of our airfield. Two of them were medium-range area defense systems: one 9K37 Buk and one Improved Hawk. One 9K33 Osa provided short-range support. Soon after we left the field, we were already getting painted by the I-Hawk’s search radar. The radar warning receiver made a little ‘boop’ every now and then as the beam hit us. Range to target, according to our instruments, was about 90 kilometers when we started getting the radar signal, and parvusimperator’s anti-radiation missiles had a range of about 50 kilometers. We drove in to that range at about 500 meters above ground level, whereupon parvusimperator lofted the first missile at the I-Hawk’s search radar. By that time, the Buk had found us, and we turned in that direction. After parvusimperator launched his missile, the annoying solid tone my radar warning receiver was blaring into my ears turned into an annoying fast beeping.
“I’ve been launched on. Going defensive,” I said, feeling very professional as I rolled out of formation, left a cloud of chaff in my wake, and dove for the deck. Looking out the right side of my cockpit, I could actually see the missile’s smoke trail off in the distance, headed in my direction. Fortunately, my dive to the deck and my turn to put the missile on my three-o’clock ran it out of energy before it could hit me. Parvusimperator, who had been watching his missile in, was less lucky: although he had fired on the Buk battery before the missiles launched, the battery’s search radar had cued the launcher’s fire control radar onto us, letting it launch its missiles and guide them to us even after parvusimperator’s missile knocked out the search radar. He took a hit and punched out, and we restarted. Our second try didn’t go much better—owing to a DCS bug, the anti-radiation missiles blew up moments after leaving their hardpoints.
On the third try, we finally found a little more success: parvusimperator launched from nearly maximum range on both of the long-range SAMs, and tagged the short-range one with one of his other SEAD missiles. Lacking his fancy ELINT pod (which gives him HUD cues toward radars, and therefore targets), I had to resort to more desperate measures: first, my FLIR targeting pod, which proved unhelpful, and finally my good old Mark I eyeball. I found the smoking husk of the Osa, dropping a cluster bomb on it for good measure, and headed north from there, following the threat heading indicator on my radar warning receiver and eventually finding the Hawk battery just as parvusimperator did. I made one pass with rockets and destroyed the launcher, and was looping around for another when parvusimperator tagged the last vehicle with a laser-guided missile. That done, we climbed to our rendezvous point, formed up again, and went home.
