It has been a long while since I last wrote about the HX-things in this Blog. Now that Kaisaniemi air day is almost upon us maybe it is time to make something. Again Command modern operations is a game, not a real simulation environment, so accuracy is maybe on 50%-70% ballpark.

I’m going to put all results in this page as they come ready for viewers benefit. I have only made a few practice runs before real thing, and didn’t made statistics on the runs due family time constraints.

Typhoon

As can be seen from the scorecard, Eurofighter Typhoon caused substantial destruction on VVS side of things: 37 fighters and AWACS, 19 TELAR vehicles plus 15 different kind of bridges all together. The bridges and the logistical isolation of battle area is sort of the point here, but caused hole in opposing airforce would also be a boon in short to medium run. As I mentioned I did not do any kind of statistics on the scenario, but I venture to make and educated guess that “normal range” of losses for Finnish Air Force would be 3-7 fighters considering the complexity of situation.

So what we found out is that given enough flights FAF with Typhoon is indeed capable of offensive operations against VVS, but venturing outside of Finnish aerospace might prove costly thing to do. Also I feel some of the losses sustained by the FAF are due the limitations of AI in the game. So out of the 42 fighters out in scenario 5 were lost in this round.

Meteor performed 37 spalshes out of 76 meteors fired (plus 3 ASRAAMS) give Kp of 0,486-0,468. So Missile performance is quite par on what we saw in Arctic Night scenario where we had 0,486 Hit probability over a few runs of scenario. And as .500 would be a hit in each salvo, or “perfect score” [talking CMAMO, there is a possibility to change preferenses to fire a many missiles as you would want to each target, but I have left it alone, as a salvo fire each target seems to be the preferred way to go globally. (Well salvo of 2 against gen 4 and gen 5 fighters, gen 1-3 only get 1) It would maybe be better for Lightning II, as they only carry 4 AMRAAMs.]

SPEAR EW and SPEAR 3 missiles performed in SEAD role in combo quite well: As long as you get the SPEAR 3s in about same time in as SPEAR EW flies close you are good. If the timing is off Pantsir and Buk systems are quite capable of making pigs breakfast of your salvo. Video is of Defense webs production and quite informative about the systems and also how to attack them.

So FAF would be quite cabable to go on offensive counter air operations against VVS and support interdiction/deep strike missions against close by targets in Carelian Isthmus and East-Carelia and thus provide army help in war fighting. This of course has some limits as Finnish establisment has decided to honour uncle Joe’s dictates about sufficient Air Force size for Finland. And for that obscure reason to limit the Air Force to 64 fighters.

We do know that Eurofighter Typhoon is Air Dominance optimized fighter in HX competition, and is well capable to over-match current crop of Suhois. The problem in Typhoons HX run are the cost per fighter and cost per flight hour. (Two turbojets just suck up twice as much gas as one does.) The Eurofighter is quite prolific fighter in world so there is no fear of ending up as the sole user, and as Typhoon will be constantly used in action around the globe, the armaments will be top notch all the way to 60’s. The politics are also there as three major EU partners are using and developing the fighter on wards. So there might very well be heavy EU pressure from German/Italian/Spanish quarter. UK is no longer part of EU, but Finland has emerging military co-operation with the British so this will also add weight into scales in Typhoon’s favor Also there would be clear path to take part in Tempest development deals.