Part 85: S14E02: 1979.09.29-10.01 (Casual Eradication)
S14E02: 1979.09.29-10.01 (Casual Eradication)Last time we received an upgrade. All front line fighting stops to celebrate.
1979.09.29
Remember the Thunderchief run? Remember the endless fuel tank strikes?
The mission video
In which we're overdressed for the occasion
I failed to grab the stats, but it's all in the video. I did keep the outtake, though.
The outtake
In case it's hard to see, an Aphid was launched at Two. He flew across my tail dumping flares. The missile lost him, and then acquired a new target.
While reviewing the shots I noticed this
One of the guys we lost on the first day, the teleporting wreckage man. Keep him in mind.
1979.10.01
How's going there contributing to the victory efforts?
The mission video
In which we ravage a unit of the deadliest Soviet vibrators
I dig the % counters. That CCIP is godlike.
So, the MIA guy...
I had no idea, they can come back. Licking Dragons are hardcore.
Damn that machine gun!
P.S.
Errata again
The Casualty posted:
A-10s do have air refueling capability. The receptacle is on the nose, directly ahead of the cockpit windscreen.
P.P.S.
And more corrections and info. The thread keeps on giving
Makrond posted:
The A-10 is absolutely 100% a gun that flies. The GAU-8 is an absolute monster of a machine, and makes up almost 20% of the aircraft's empty weight. As the MiG-27 demonstrates you can't fuck around with 30mm rounds, at least not once you start throwing them out at 4000 per minute.
The nose gear of the A-10 is offset to the left when looking at the plane from the front. This is to accommodate the absolutely enormous ammo box and feeding system for the Avenger. The Avenger itself is offset to the right when seen from the front, this is because it fires from the leftmost barrel. This puts the recoil perfectly in line with the center of mass of the aircraft. This makes it terrifyingly accurate since the recoil forces don't pull the nose in any particular direction. It also uses a linkless, double-ended feed system that allows spent casings to feed back into the ammo drum to be cleaned out by the ground crew. No links means fewer points of failure, and no spent casings means the GAU-8 can be fired at basically any angle, at any airframe g-loading and at any airspeed with no chance of a spent casing shredding the engines.
The A-10, without refuelling, can fly 450 nautical miles, loiter in a combat area for 2 hours, fly back and land with fuel to spare. It can also mount 600-gallon drop tanks that give it a ferry range (ie a maximum, airport-to-airport flight at cruise speed/altitude) of about 2200 nautical miles (4000km), which is roughly enough to fly from one US coast to the other.
It was also built around the AGM-65 Maverick, but that's far less interesting than a giant gun.As Selenic mentioned, the A-10A doesn't have any built-in targeting systems and relied on the electro-optical seeker of the Mavericks (I believe all but the outermost pylons had a link to the display in the cockpit) to visually acquire targets at range. While it's a temperamental system, it definitely does what it's intended to.