Gotta go with the A-10, but I'm falling in love with the raptor. Back when I was in the Navy, I was headed out to the fantail for a smoke, and as I was dogging the door down, coke in one hand, smoke in the other, I see an F-18 streak by, silently, right on the deck, just off the beam of the ship. I yelled "ooh sh#t!" but couldn't cover my ears quick enough before the boom hit. My teeth hurt for an hour after that, they rattled so damn hard. But, I was a fire controlman, so pilots are my natural enemy, so ultimately, my favorite aircraft is the one I can shoot down the fastest...
Anybody like military aircraft?
- Thread starter brtshstel
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My knowledge of planes is limited to a few months of playing Ace Combat 6 on my 360. However, from playing that game a developed a love for the F-22 Raptor and the A-10a. The A-10 was my most used fighter due to it's ability to engage most/all targets with a variety of bombs(I used the deafult missiles for air to air and Fuel Air bombs for air to ground). I switched to the F22 when I could though, as it had a better air to ground bomb(It was a homing cluster strike bomb, like the airstrike of call of duty 4), better speed and I found it easier to manuever and dogfight.
I can't pick just one. There are too many awesome choices.
SR-71 take-offs are just awe inspiring with the brute power on display, the F-15 just looks so elegant, the A-10 so nimble and yet so robust, the B-52 impressive with its sheer bulk, The F-18 Hornet, the Mosquito, the P-38 Lightning, the P-47 Thunderbolt... Damn, I miss air shows.
(Getting buzzed by a crazy Ivan in an AN-124 Condor, entirely outside of air traffic direction, was hair-raisingly awesome too. The Aluminum Overcast was particularly low that day...)
-- Steve
SR-71 take-offs are just awe inspiring with the brute power on display, the F-15 just looks so elegant, the A-10 so nimble and yet so robust, the B-52 impressive with its sheer bulk, The F-18 Hornet, the Mosquito, the P-38 Lightning, the P-47 Thunderbolt... Damn, I miss air shows.
(Getting buzzed by a crazy Ivan in an AN-124 Condor, entirely outside of air traffic direction, was hair-raisingly awesome too. The Aluminum Overcast was particularly low that day...)
-- Steve
Top five in no particular order:
1) CH-47 Chinook. One of the biggest, most powerful, fastest choppers in the world. It can outrun Apaches.
2) A-10 Warthog. One of the ugliest, most kickass planes ever built. Built like a tank around that bigass Vulcan gatling gun. The thing can shoot THROUGH a tank.
3) AH-1W SuperCobra. Just a kickass attack chopper.
4) B-52 SuperFortress. This plane has been in service longer than any other in all of history, and it's projected to stay in service for another 40 years.
5) F-15 Eagle. One of the fastest planes still in use today. Two seater multirole fighter capable of damned near anything, and fucking tough, as well. In one Israeli exercise, an F-15 collided with another plane, the F-15 lost a wing and still managed to land after flying for several hundred miles.
1) CH-47 Chinook. One of the biggest, most powerful, fastest choppers in the world. It can outrun Apaches.
2) A-10 Warthog. One of the ugliest, most kickass planes ever built. Built like a tank around that bigass Vulcan gatling gun. The thing can shoot THROUGH a tank.
3) AH-1W SuperCobra. Just a kickass attack chopper.
4) B-52 SuperFortress. This plane has been in service longer than any other in all of history, and it's projected to stay in service for another 40 years.
5) F-15 Eagle. One of the fastest planes still in use today. Two seater multirole fighter capable of damned near anything, and fucking tough, as well. In one Israeli exercise, an F-15 collided with another plane, the F-15 lost a wing and still managed to land after flying for several hundred miles.
Now now, you don't have to make assumptions that a plane was chosen just on something as arbitrary as aesthetics (or lack therof), despite giving no reasoning for his choice. Yes, the Phantom did have problems against MiGs in Veitnam at first. But the problem is that people only focus on that particular point, and look at the USAF's awful track record; the US Navy's track record was not that bad after 1968. People often forget or overlook that once TOP GUN was established and pilots were trained how to dogfight once again, the Navy did make a decent comeback by bumping the kill ratio up a few notches. Also, the Israeli Air Force (whom which never abandoned dogfighting to begin with) shredded a lot of the more maneuverable MiGs used by the Arab airforces and suffered fewer losses than the US did. One of the positive (and therefore ignored) nicknames for the Phantom is "the world's largest distributor of MiG parts."Khell_Sennet said:
While the Phantom has been heavily criticized for its design, we have to remember that it was designed in the 1950s in the era where dogfighting was thought to be a dying art, and the early Cold-War doctrine made supersonic, technologically advanced, flying missile platforms all the rage. The earliest Phantoms was designed to do two things and two things only: fly really goddamn fast and shoot down Soviet bombers with radar-guided missiles. The Phantom was destined to fight an apocalyptic World War III against a technologically-equal superpower, not a geurella-proxy war against technologically-inferior revolutionaries. Maneuverability and visibility were of no importance. The canopy was intentionally configured into a "razorback" to reduce drag and utilize every bit of the 17,000 lbs of thrust from the two J79 turbojets, allowing it to go faster than mach 2 (the first of only two Carrier-based fighters to do so) so it could intercept bombers, and since dogfighting was no longer important to SAC, visibility was ignored.
While the Phantom is often (justifiably) written off as an unmaneuverable plane, its slow-speed, low-altitude turning radius was tighter than that of the MiG-21; the MiG-21's fight is high-altitude because of its higher wing-loading. But the widely exported E model and the carrier-based S model both sport leading-edge ailerons and added retractable slats, making it a modestly better dogfighter despite still being at a disadvantage against MiGs.
Even if the Phantom was replaced in American service as the frontline fighter/interceptor immediately after Vietnam, its true successors were not all that different from it. The Tomcat and Eagle were better dogfighters, but they still had a number of other problems the Pentagon had with the Phantom. They still followed the two initial design perameters of the Phantom, which are high speed/acceleration/rate of climb and beyond-visual-range missile combat. Even if the Tomcat and Eagle replaced it, they obviously had problems because the F-16 and F/A-18 were brought to address the cost, size, and maintenance issues of the two huge "Phantom clones."
Now, the Phantom is not my favorite plane, but I have to give credit where credit is due. It did have its problems like any Cold-War design had, but it seems to me that a lot of "experts" whom have given their imput to military web sites, coffee-table book-publishers, and the History Channel seem to have skewed the facts a bit in order to get their points accross with as little ambiguity as possible. It performed very well in combat roles which it was never designed to do from the get-go: air superiority, fighter-bomber, and suppression of enemy air defence. The Phantom, despite being such an "abysmal" fighter, is the most-produced modern jet fighter in the Western world, and about a thousand of them still fly today in active military service.
I'm disappointed that nobody has mentioned the Vought F4U Corsair...tsk...tsk. Such a beautiful plane with it's gull wings.
I love The German Luftwaffe Planes and the later Experimental ones.
But these are my all time Favorites:
Me-109:
http://www.stelzriede.com/ms/photos/planes/me109.jpg
F4U Cosair(Not German):
http://www.world-war-2-planes.com/images/corsairturning.jpg
ME 609:
http://www.luft46.com/mess/309-2.gif
And the F-19:
http://www.infomercantile.com/images/4/49/F-19-refueling.jpg
But these are my all time Favorites:
Me-109:
http://www.stelzriede.com/ms/photos/planes/me109.jpg
F4U Cosair(Not German):
http://www.world-war-2-planes.com/images/corsairturning.jpg
ME 609:
http://www.luft46.com/mess/309-2.gif
And the F-19:
http://www.infomercantile.com/images/4/49/F-19-refueling.jpg
While everythying you said was true...YOU FORGOT TO MENTION THE GAU-8 30MM GATLING GUN which for you ignorant fools can take out a tank with a one second burst.Khell_Sennet said:
If you'd ask an Army or Marine grunt in Iraq or Afghanistan, they probably hands down say the Predator/Reaper UAV. It can hover over a battlefield for hours tracking down insurgents to their strongholds and then blow it up. Many a time has it saved lives of men in the field.
I hold a deep place in my heart for MiG fighter jets. But the Messerschmitt series will always hold number one. It was just awesome looking. The first fighter I ever saw in person... even if it was only a replica... and the name was so hard to pronounce but sounded so cool at the time.
I dunno.
I dunno.
Those are Hellcats......Your.Name.Here said:My great uncle flew Corsairs for the marines.
Yeah, they're kind of awesome.
Personally I like F-22's and A-10 Warthogs.
Mine is an experimental prototype whose designation was something like X-33 or something like that. It was computer assisted with a pilot, and could do amazing things like hove on its rear engines (it didn't bend them), go sideways, turn around at full speed instantly. The only problem was that the sensor on the front of the craft controlled the computer, and it had been installed incorrectly (the sensor). The pilot bailed out after it began to spin horizontally and randomly fire the engines. Now the X-3"4" will be special!
P.S. sorry I could not get pics. It looks like a Typhoon with a hurricane chaser's sensor
P.S. sorry I could not get pics. It looks like a Typhoon with a hurricane chaser's sensor
Soviet Mig-3, Lockheed Martin P-38 Lightning, OV-103 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Discovery], Any compound helicopter, either coaxial or intermeshing.
