Warhorse64

First requirement being? Expeditionary air-to-ground. Have we even fired an air-to-air shot in anger since WWII? (Korea, maybe?) Then I have to wonder why we think it is so critical that we have to pay through the nose to acquire it. Because it's crucial to the primary mission in a high-threat environment. Afghanistan is an entirely different kind of war. No CF-18s fighting over there either. The point I was trying to make was that we may very well find ourselves 'leading the charge,' as you put it, because very few other countries are willing to do the dirty work that needs to be done. Obviously, in aid to the US forces, but still with an important role to play.

Yeah, it was a good idea then, and it still is, for a couple of reasons. If they didn't buy F-16s, they would have bought Rafales, or J-10s, or some Flanker variant. So they were going to get the capability, regardless. Might as well get some of that aid money back, then, no? Also, whoever provides the weapons also gets to provide the training, which means contacts and influence with the Pak military. That may not be all that useful if things go completely south on us, but it's potentially very useful in keeping things from going south in the first place.

Air defense of Canada is a secondary requirement, though, isn't it? The only things we need to worry about intercepting are rogue airliners and widely dispersed heavy bombers. Stealth isn't terribly relevant in either case, so external fuel tanks are fine, and any given fighter will only ever be able to engage one or two targets per flight anyway, so limited ordnance won't be an issue, either. Of course, it's always possible that our neighbours to the south will decide to invade us, but if that happens we're screwed regardless of what we're flying, no? Hmmm ... Given our experience in AFG, where we were one of the few countries to actually allow our troops to fight, I'm not sure this is a valid objection. I would expect US forces to be doing most of the heavy lifting, to be sure, but as costs go up and numbers go down, I don't have much trouble imagining that they would really like us to help, either ...

So, is aircraft performance really all that relevant these days, anyway? I mean, it is simply not physically possible for a manned aircraft today to outfly a missile, due to the limitations of the crew. And modern AAMs, coupled with helmet mounted sights, allow you to engage a target pretty much anywhere in your forward hemisphere, which greatly reduces the need for ACM. "3rd generation performance" may very well be all that is needed ...

There are also a few excel readers available from shareware sites like download.com and tucows.com.

There's the Open Office suite, which is sort of a freeware version of MS Office. The zip file is about 150 meg, tho, so I don't know if you could call it 'lightweight' ...

Check the Italian Tornado IDS in EC2003 ...

It was great fun. The biggest issue really was that the most interesting scenarios took too long to play, people would have to drop out.

The old way actually worked pretty well, IMO. The down side was that there were some scenarios where one type of asset, for example long range bombers, did almost all the work for one side. If that type of asset was concentrated in one group or base, the other player(s) on that side might wind up with nothing to do but watch. OTOH, allowing any player on a side to give orders to any group sounds to me like a recipe for command confusion and general silliness. It might work to allow the controller such privileges, designating him as overall commander, I suppose. For the SA, if you do go with a free-for-all, perhaps send his messages to the last player to give orders to a group. If nobody has given orders to a group yet, give the message to the player who is least busy at the time, perhaps judged by frequency of SA messages to the players. One thing about the SA: in HOL, time did not stop while a player dealt with the SA. With a minimum compression of 10 seconds, this often meant that whatever disaster the SA was warning you about had happened by the time you finished reading the message! This MUST be changed! Either time stops for the SA, or minimum compression needs to be 1:1 so you have a reasonable chance to react, or the units in question do the intelligent thing by default while you read the message and you can change it afterward.

IIRC, the distribution was by group. The controller could certainly reassign groups in mid-game if one of the players dropped out. I *think* he could also do this even if everybody was still there, but I'm not positive about that.

Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party (socialist) and Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Liberal Party (centre-left). Based on current polling results, there is a non-trivial chance that Layton could be our Prime Minister in six months or so, which is a rather seriously shocking development.

IIRC, although some a/c have an active (if quite short-ranged) terrain following radar, some of them use LADAR or passive radar, so they would not necessarily betray themselves to ESM. Depending on the range limits of ESM, it might turn out to be pretty meaningless anyway.

I think the F-111s could doe NoE as well. Maybe the Su-24s, too.

That doesn't drop sonobuoys automatically, unfortunately ...

Sounds like having a good fix and dropping as near to the target as possible is paramount to success in this case. Emphatically agree!

Add my vote for it being worthwhile. And thank you for all the work you put into doing this for us!

It was just a quick and dirty conversion using the generic settings on the Windows 7 Paint program. I noticed the deficiency in some of the colour schemes, but wasn't sure how to fix same, or if it was even possible.

Whoops! Missed a couple ... M1_Abrams.bmp MLRS_05.bmp

Okay, here are RSF77's images of vehicles, reformatted as 256 colour bmp's and resized to fit within the 320 x 200 limit 9a52_smerch.bmp 9P140_Uragan.bmp 220px_Dongfeng_2__CSS_1_.bmp 220px_Sa_3trck.bmp 300px_SA_5lncr.bmp 300px_Sa6_1.bmp Amd_sa10.bmp Amd_sa11.bmp Amd_sa15.bmp Arrow_anti_ballistic_missile_launch.bmp Chinese_Dongfeng_Missile_railway_transport.bmp DF_11_TEL_vehicle__1.bmp DF_21A_TEL___Chinese_Military_Museum_Beijing.bmp Df_21d_on_the_highway.bmp Hawk_mobile.bmp HIMARS.bmp HIMARS_DA_SD_07_43938.bmp Patriot_missile_launch_b.bmp S_400_Triumf_SAM.bmp Sa_2camo.bmp Sa_4.bmp Soviet_SA_9_Gaskin.bmp

You could have multiple players on each side, one of whom would be the 'controller' in charge of distributing that side's assets among its players prior to game start. I don't really remember how the staff assistant was handled, but the minimum time compression was 10 seconds, which could be a real pain for key moments when you wanted to have 1:1 ...

Yeah, great site, thank you for the link!

If you are running a recent version of Windows, the Paint program can convert among a number of the common formats.

I've just checked in game, Don's description of how the unit window behaves is correct in all particulars.

Ya know, I realize that budgets are tight, and that modern precision guided weapons mean that small numbers of aircraft can have large effects, but still, the numbers of aircraft being committed seem ridiculously small. Four aircraft from here, half a dozen from there ... has anybody sent as much as a single squadron?

I was looking at this platform in the game today, and noticed that its heaviest warload was two 1,000 lb JDAMs. I thought it was supposed to be able to carry a pair of 2,000 lb JDAMs?