Originally Posted by
DirtyProp
Only the Ukrainian people can answer that question, and nobody else. It is their fight and they are the ones paying the highest price.
We can only support their decisions, whichever ones they choose.
*applause and complete agreement*
Originally Posted by
langleybaston
Gentlemen, the enemy has four options.
He will choose the fifth.
Ain't that the truth?
Originally Posted by
Pali
I wonder how hard it is to adjust them to carry western made weapons especially HARM missiles which may play a role in expected oncoming offensive of Ukraine.
Drawing on my limited experience in ad hoc systems integration of slapping a piece of hardware onto an aircraft (in our case mounted on a bomb shackle with some shielded cords) and in another case as a substitute for a different piece of avionics, the answer to that is informed by first asking
"What level of risk are you willing to assume?"
If you want it to have highest reliability and best chance to work as desired, you'd need to do detailed systems integration testing and field trials - soup to nuts - so that the brain inside the aircraft and the brain inside the piece of ordnance don't get sidetracked by a variety of other signals and pulses that also use electricity.
"How hard" is on a sliding scale depending on what level or reliability you are interested in. Generally, it takes time and effort.
Why is this so important? You want it to work when the shooting starts.
As an example of getting this horribly wrong, the USN's Bureau of Ordnance (before WW II) didn't get it right with submarine launched torpedoes.
It wasn't until Lockwood took the bull by the horns, after the shooting had started, that it got sorted out. A few details from the wiki article on this, I read a book on him years ago when I was at sea and had the time...but the lesson was received. Get it right before you send them out to shoot the ordnance.
He pushed the Navy's Bureau of Ships and Bureau of Ordnance to provide his men with the most effective submarines and torpedoes possible. He oversaw the tests that proved the unreliability of U.S. torpedoes, which at the time were often running too deep or failing to detonate, and prompted the improvements that made them the highly effective weapons they became in 1944 and 1945. In fighting for better torpedoes, Lockwood had to fight the Mark 14 torpedo and Mark 6 exploder supporter Rear Admiral Ralph Waldo Christie, who had been involved in the development of these weapon systems in the 1920s and 1930s, and who was convinced that their reported problems were caused by poor maintenance and errors on the part of the captain and crew. During a tense Washington conference with fellow admirals in early 1943, he demanded that, "If the Bureau of Ordnance can't provide us with torpedoes that will hit and explode, or with a gun larger than a peashooter, then for God's sake get the Bureau of Ships to design a boathook with which we can rip the plates off the target's sides"