https://tenor.com/view/happy-endings-tears-of-joy-crying-beautiful-gif-3404249
I donât think Russia has produced an aircraft as objectively good looking as the Tu-22M2. The Su-27 is a close second for sure, but a Backfire with F-4 inlets absolutely does it for me.
Can someone identify the missile in the third picture from the top, the Cat closest to the camera on itâs fuselage mount?
It seems to be an AIM-120 but larger and a blunter nose. Is it a C variant or even a D model? I donât think the D was ready during during the last days of the Turkey but maybe it was.
I canât find any variant diagrams in the four minutes I spent on it, closest I could get was this pic from the ED forums of an F-15 loaded down. See the slammer on the top mount compared to the othersâŠ
I think it is an AN/ALQ-167 jamming pod.
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Thanks! Now that you have pointed it out, I can see the antenna in the front of the pod which I did not notice before.
The 120D is recent, the Cat has been gone a long time now.
Besides, they gave up on arming them with 120s to save money when they decided on the retirement date as far as I can recall. They saw little point in spending all that so they could carry them for just a few years.
The AIM-120 died many deaths in the Tomcat. The original funding for the A/B went towards modifying the original LANTIRN into the LTS and integrating it.
Apparently at some point someone at Rayray figured out how to get the -120 to work with the APG-71 on the -14Ds, and that got pushed out as part of a larger software update. However like you said, the community at that point was getting so heavily deployed they were flying the remaining air frames apart. Retirement was bumped up from 2010-ish to 2006 and it was considered a pointless expenditure.
EDIT:
Now Iâve made myself sad
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In SF2 I had Tomcats with 120s, because SF-universe budgets were unlimited. It was nice.
For the life of me I canât remember if there were 120s in F-14FD. They were already in USAF service at that time (post-DS) but I donât recall when the USN got them, not that it matters as you can make a game set in any year you want.
After all, NL did how many Comanche games? Not to mention the much better EECH which gave us the best 66 weâll ever see. Almost 20 years later we finally got rid of the 58Ds but still have no replacement other than a 64 with a DJI Phantom doing peekaboo.
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AIM120 on the Tomcat wasnt deployed to the fleet, by time it passed testing tomcat was already being retired.
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Boats, or ships, or whatever they are called. Shoats works I guess.
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Excellent! Such a goofy class of carriers.
Very cool!
Do you think I will be able to lower the angled deck elevator while @fearlessfrog is on short final?
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Depends on what bell the ship is answering - thereâs a max speed limit for having any of the elevators at hangar deck level.
Which set of carriers was it that they kept in service slightly longer because the additional Nimitz classes werenât ready? I thought I remembered reading somewhere that the F-4 was kept in service longer because the F-14 couldnât operate from these particular carriers.
Midway class. CV-41 and CV-43 specifically. They had super interesting careers. They were built during the war as the ultimate WWII straight deck carriers, but just missed out. They were refit a couple of times throughout the fifties and sixties to operate faster jets. Midway got this humungous refit in the mid sixties that increased itâs deck acreage by something ridiculous like a third, but overran so much on costs that the other two ships in the class, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Coral Sea never received it. They also ran into the issue that the ships were built on relatively narrow BB hulls, while incorporating more armor than had been traditional in previous CVs. Increasing the deck acreage only added more weight, and by the 70s the Midway had a very low freeboard, apparently the hangar deck got wet a lot.
FDR was decommissioned then scrapped in the 70s because the Navy was terrified that instead of getting authorization for more Nimitzs, the Carter administration would just decommission it. They received another round of upgrades in the early 80s. Coral Sea was decommissioned just before Desert Storm, and Midway would be gone relatively soon after.
They never operated Tomcats because the hangars were too low to accommodate the tails, and the Navy wasnât paying for another upgrade. They operated F-4s into the 80s, and F/A-18s once those had all been retired.
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And also made the thing a holy terror to get aboard in any sea state above about 3.
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A boat is a water vessel that can be picked up out of the water and put on the deck of a ship. A ship is a water vessel too large to be picked up out of the water and put on the deck of a ship. (The definition is before FOFO ships were invented) However, in US Naval Aviator, the carrier is referred to as âthe Boatâ. Also, the first USN submarines were technically boats and were labeled as such. That label has continued in the Navy even though an Ohio-class SSBNs really are not boats.
AgreeâŠIMHO if you are going to go with Oil Burners (and thus deprive @Navynuke99 the chance to play with virtual neutrons) I think the Kitty Hawk-class would have been a better choice. Two starboard side elevators forward of the Island and the port side elevator moved aft to get it out of the landing area. The problem is you can only get three ships from the same model. CV-67 had a canted stack to lessen the stack gas burble on final.
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A sea story told to me by somebody who was shipâs company on Midway: Evidently a new battle group staff embarked the ship that had never been aboard a Midway-class before. One night they are doing flight ops and the Staff Air Ops officer calls down to find out why they arenât launching aircraft from their waist catapults.
âProbably because the Midway doesnât have waist catapults.â was the pithy answer. 
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