Recent content by Crowbar Six

It's something the British Army has trained for continuously since WW2. The issue is that urban areas differ from Northern to Southern Europe and different again in Africa or South America etc with different construction methods, housing layouts etc. Israel I suspect has a more limited range...

They tended to consider existing IRBM/SRBM in the 1960-70's

The RAF Nimrod 2 fleet regularly flew with a pair of Sidewinder AIM 9L on the outboard pylon during the cold war from 1982 onwards.

You also don't know the impact SAC EW will have on Russian C3 , plus SAC and TAC will be going after Russian command nodes and bases around the periphery of the Soviet Union further degrading intercept efforts.

SAC had a lot of tankers so they could fly bombers deep into the Soviet Union. The US also had a lot of bases around the periphery of the USSR including access to bases in Iran, Turkey, Libya the UK, Iceland, Pakistan and bases in WESTPAC to attack targets in the Eastern Soviet Union, SAC had...

The spec was too nuts. They wanted M2.0 from 40,000ft to 0 ft, a better compromise would have been M1.3 on the deck.

The project was massively over budget and if the Olympus engines had continued to suffer from resonance issues it would never have achieved squadron service. Though politics were an issue.

Much as I loved the TSR2, it had issues. They had problems with the rapid throttling causing vibration, they had to delay flight tests as the undercarriage was showing some issues when landing and a lot of the electronics were either not working correctly, the other issue was maintenance issues...

Plus the UK wanted to charge an eye watering amount for the SMLE tooling. It's why Australia bought all their tooling from Westinghouse at a significant cost benefit even after paying the tariffs for imports into the Empire.

9mm Parabellum is the best choice though, like all cartridges it's a compromise though historically it seems the best choice, it's powerful enough to be effective but not so powerful it's users need wrists of steel to use it in a pistol.

They did make a some EM2's in 7.62 x 51mm , in one of the earliest Forgotten Weapons Ian got to shoot one that made it to the US. The UK MOD concluded that the action would require a redesign to handle the extra-power so they abandoned the design and picked the FAL instead...

The reason the UK ditched 195mm engineering HESH gun on AVRE's was they found a MBT with 120mm HESH was more flexible and had much better combat persistence. For bunkers, AFV's, IFV's will definitely get wrecked by 120mm HESH

The Venezuelans actually did adopt the FAL in .280 (7mm) but converted them to 7.62mm. https://www.forgottenweapons.com/arms-of-the-venezuelan-coup/

I read a couple of old Friteninig hands on PPRUNE who had flown and serviced them. Engine fires were the main source of emergencies and hull loss. This is the Wiki page for losses only, it won't include any that made it down in one piece or had an emergency on the ground not resulting in a...

Not with how often Lightning's engines spontaneously combusted in flight.