There should be multiple jets in the release version

[Tankbuster 1733]

I see the F-35 as more of a long term test for VTOL technology in Jet aircraft.

A crushingly expensive test that the DoD are happily selling to the world's airforces as a mature package.

[maffa 29]

@Chortles, i wonder if you read my post a lot of pages ago. You look like you take some of my points but at the time there were lots of people too much enthusiastic about their fixed wing playtoy that didnt accept really kindly what i told them...

Making a long story short: planes have always been the smelliest turd in the game and they have always been out of context, so so long and thanks for all the laughs.

Making a long story average: a war theatre live on the balance of three elements: aerial dominance, sea dominance, ground dominance. Its common knowledge that aerial dominance gives you the initiative, enabling the winning side to score by up high and jumping beyond (or hitting hard) the fronline. This aerial war is fought by air superiority fighters, in the number of tens and hundreds, together with C3/AEW&C planes, AG planes and such, on a front line much wider than the ground's. Behind these planes there's a whole supply chain to keep them nominal once their mission is over and come back to base. Now: whats the use of a single, lost F35 in a base on aspeck of an island in the middle of the Aegean Sea? It's a laughable idea, really. A single military jet on an island is a nonsense. The only value they may have is to play the role of precious, stationary targets to blow up on a incursion mission.

This doesnt mean that there shouldnt be fixed wing jets at all in the game, only they should be AI controlled: transportation, ground attack, air defence, whatever strikes your fancy: they take off hundreds of miles away, climb to their assigned flight level, do the thing they need to do from up high, be it to drop a GBU or some dumb bombs, turn their tail and go back to play golf with their colleagues and friends at their air base, far away, secured and protected from all evil. This is the way you fight air warfare in an all-out war. Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan: all modern wars where jet fighters were employed they never fought from the very place they took off from. Its simply absurd having a multimillion dollar/euro worth piece of technology in a hostile place. Anyone in his right mind would take it elsewhere safe, and if there's no anywhere else safe to stash your precious plane, it means you just lost. Whatever the map BIS may come up with it wont ever be large enough to accomodate objects that fly to the speed of sound ten thousand miles above the ground -unless someone want to make something as big as the Korean insula, 200.000 square kilometers give or take, but if your Ifrit breaks along the way its gonna be a long walk home...

Moreover, anything flying in A2 was so ludicrously ugly to see and fly that i personally wont shed a tear for missing the chance to fly a shiny piece of tech with the flight model of a baloon. There's a single excpetion, that is the Super Tucano, a turbprop COIN plane, which is sturdy, slow, dumb and cheap enough to fit in the scale of Arma. Also his flight model is almost as basic as a cessna 172 so it could be well represented with A2 flight model.

Helicopters are a completely different game. They can and must stay near the front line, they are sturdier and more expendable, in a scenario where aerial dominance hasnt been set yet and geernal balance is not s straightforward, they gain a great weight and importance. It was theorized during the cold war that WWIII would have been a helicopter war -maybe someone older here will remember Amerika, the 90's miniseries, that was the idea. Besides, its no easy to move helicopters in and out an island, so i must confess i dont know the surrounding area of Stratis but it may even be that they were been stranded there sooo... they are there to stay (until relief). In short they are more in context with the infantry focus Arma has.

Bottom line: an infantry sim and a fighter jet sim are two different things. They move in different worlds, have different times, different priorities, different concept and shapes of frontlines and battles, and they shouldnt be mixed. I am sorry to say this, but even if you (generic you) are fond of your memories of when you epically flew your A10 to relieve your team from a tough situation, such actions are just plain dumb. The very idea that maybe, somewhere, sometimes, in some server, someone took a F35 down with an RPG and that made his day, makes me wanna hurt a kitten. All these things were a nonsense and still are. Maybe this someone took his time to write in a forum that the animation of the bolt coming out of his L115A3 is not just right, who knows.

In order to have a good simulation of a ground war, what happens up above should be of no concern to the grunts. Everyone do their job, and if the bomb fall on you, it means that your airforce is on the losing side or its a blue on blue, and either case you cant do nothing about it.

I say all this out of love for the experience i enjoy playing a rifleman in Arma, a fighter pilot in F16 BMS, and reading about military strategies and doctrines.

[chortles 263]

Kind of a moot point since BI has since revealed that CSAT will get a subsonic jet for CAS... except it's actually in the vein of "fast air" and "light attack/jet trainer" instead of "2035 Su-25".

[Imperator[TFD] 444]

Afghanistan: all modern wars where jet fighters were employed they never fought from the very place they took off from.

Camp Bastion and those 8 AV8's are an exception. :)

[maffa 29]

LOL well yes i stand corrected, if it werent that A-stan is not as tiny as Altis...

[[evo] dan 79]

I wonder what the Blufor jet will be. I just hope BIS doesn't cheap out (Although it would be realisticish) and give blufor the Aermacchi M-346

[progamer 14]

I was hoping for more variety with jets. I don't want balanced jets that are equal, that's no fun as in real life jets are different from each other. Sometimes that means in Arma should have to have 3 vs 1 jet or same variation.

---------- Post added at 01:23 ---------- Previous post was at 01:21 ----------

@Chortles, i wonder if you read my post a lot of pages ago. You look like you take some of my points but at the time there were lots of people too much enthusiastic about their fixed wing playtoy that didnt accept really kindly what i told them...

You are assuming the mission has the jet start in a hostile place and not launch from a carrier or fly to the island.

[maffa 29]

If it is player piloted i dont see how it could be any different. Do you want to take off from a different place than Altis? An off-the-map airbase in Athens or Sicily?

Again, if it were a turbo-prop it could take off from Altis and fight in Altis, but if we are talking about A-10s and above, it's plain stupid. A PAK-FA and a F-22 taking off from the far sides of altis and dogfighting in the middle is something so plain stupid id want to bang my head with a lead pipe. Sort of simulating a F1 race with Ferrari and Red Bull painted go karts.

Combined forces doesnt mean "all forces start from the same patch of land". Combined forces means coordinating forces that behave in different way, because of their speed armament or element the are in. I suggested AI takes care of jets and fixed wing transportation, while players can take care of rotary wings that really belong to this scenario. I would like artists would concentrate on making several different helos, and/or several different ground vehicles since there's only a very few.

I understand you would like to play in your F35 alongside your comrades on the ground, but you cant, because Airforce pilots and Army grunts are not comrades, simple as that. They belong to different worlds and if they meet on the battlefield only means that either the pilot ejected or the grunt got severely lost.

All this said, i know you are going to answer "Yes but i like piloting fixed wing planes in arma, got a problem with that? you don't want them you dont play them" and even if i would like their art dep efforts were focused on more relevant projects, i cant say anything.

[Ranwer135 308]

welp, better pack up and close the company down, game won't sell with only one plane

well, i suppose the AiA (all in arma) addon will be a big seller for the game (make buyers want it as well arma 2)

[chortles 263]

@ Maffa: I'll note simply that if the CSAT CAS jet's appearance is indicative of what the BLUFOR CAS fixed-wing aircraft will turn out to be, then BI is distinctly going "well below A-10"; I can't find a primary source for it but I've seen it claimed more than once that BI has already specified that all both factions' CAS fixed-wing aircraft would be subsonic.

[maffa 29]

@Chortles i understand, but i cant help noticing that expectations were different, so im just trying to make my point as clear as possible.

[nimrod123 11]

well i still think they should have gone COIN style CAS, but hey...

[maffa 29]

Tucanos, M346s and most of all choppers and unmanned vehicles are the best for COIN. You cannot do COIN with sonic planes.

COIN stands for COunter INsurgency, so you have some armed civilians among other civilians, swarming all around. You need to pick small slow targets hiding in urban or mountan areas, so you need to stay low and fly slow to pick your targets. You cannot use a hundred million plane to shoot a million missile from FL110 at mach 1.5 on a AK47 armed takistani sheperd (id like someone would tell DOD about it, too)

[chortles 263]

@ nimrod123: I guess by "COIN style CAS" you mean turboprop? :p Because jets can and have been utilized for "COIN style CAS", such as the A-37 Dragonfly and the BAC Strikemaster.

@ Maffa: I would note that there's speculation about the M-346, though mainly pejorative since it'd be viewed as "more Arma 3 style mirroring" due to the M-346's derivation from the Yak-130 which some believe to be the aesthetic design basis of the revealed CSAT CAS jet. There was some excitement in the "CAS aircraft speculation" thread about the idea of the Super Tucano, but seeing how closely BI's playing their cards to their chest with what's finally been revealed, I admittedly expect similar opacity regarding the BLUFOR choice. Mind you, my personal speculation is that the CSAT CAS jet is basically meant to play "bomb truck", based on this photo where the lower-right "in-game photo" has the jet with lowered landing and underwing ordnance...

[maffa 29]

@chortles: even though im Italian and M346 are built in a factory standing 3 km from my house, im not too excited to have jets whatsoever in the game. No matter how subsonic they are -and the Master is slightly transonic, i.e. it can reach transonic speed in a prolonged dive- IMO they are out of place. M346 and Yak-130 are two fruits of the same tree, as Alenia and Yaklovlev industries had a joint venture that split at a certain point, thus leaving two similar framed planes with different equipment and avionics. Moreover greek government as well as Israeli's are involved with the frame so let's say that it could have some sense in this Clancy-esque scenario we have now. But, i cannot cope with the fact that they should take off from the very same place they have to fight on. Nonsense, really, moreso if we think we have so few helos and ground vehicles which are the bread and butter of this scenario.

[chortles 263]

@ The M-346 talk that prompted over half of your post isn't substantiated. As I said, BI has given no hints whatsoever about what the BLUFOR CAS fixed-wing is.

[maffa 29]

I havent read the thread you are referring to, i just stating that no matter how "subsonic" the plane is, if it's a jet it's not worth using it in an island this little.

[chortles 263]

Again, they haven't even said it to be a jet -- I've noticed that it's been just "the CAS fixed-wing aircraft". ;) Hence others' own speculation as to the idea of it being the Super Tucano.

[metalcraze 290]

The island being too small isn't the problem. That it will most likely be a 1:1 clone of L-159 with a different skin just like all vehicles in the game in relation to each other - is.