Ngl my personal real-world experience of dealing with british tech has been abysmal.
Still the 39E has never and will never carry an AIM-9L/M variant. So it is not “proven” that it actually can according to how much of these air to ground munitions are decided on.
I do understand it for balancing reasons and what not but still a double standard.
Don’t give Gaijin any ideas 🤫
I think that’s sort of a game convention/balance thing. It’s also never been seen with the AIM-120 (that i can remember) and only ever used the Meteor, so… yeah…
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Of course there’s a need for more bombs haha what.
And why would it need to be? The fact of the matter is that it’s either it gets AIM-9Ms or it gets no heaters at all until the IRIS-T is added. It’s really not a stretch at all.
Though Gripen with AMRAAMs on the wingtips would be a sight to behold
No, different version of plane need to be proven separately. The jump C → E especially since it’s in practice an entirely different plane, it just shares the general shape.
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Yeah that too. Maybe we will see the 39E in service with the C-8 next year or around then. Tbh I am not sure we even have any RB99 (120B) left in Sweden except for the green striped blind training ones.
Perhaps. The C has been seen with GBU-39 on both inner and outer pylons but i’m uncertain if it’s ever been mounted simultaneously on all 4 pylons for the C. For the E i haven’t seen it on the outer at all.
If/when the 39E starts seeing operational use that may change for ferry purposes. Gaijin only need proof that carriage is possible outside of T&E - so there’s hope yet.
It’s how we’ve ended up with an F-15E that can carry almost 2x as many MK82s as it used in real life on the dev server… So it’s definitely a possibility in future.
I think the GBU-39 are mounted on the NATO pylons of which the 39C can have or choose to replace with Swedish pylons (swedish ones have a gunpowder charge and a better hook while NATO has pressurised air and you need a rig to mount the hooks on) while to my knowledge the 39E will only use NATO pylons. This is just from speaking to some maintainers who in general are displeased with the NATO pylon in general with it being slow and cumbersome to work with.
Honestly wouldn’t be the worst idea to have a cheaper ARH missile in stock for training either way.
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We have bought 250 or so 120-C8 to my knowledge but I think pretty much all of out 120B were sent to Ukraine. The training missile is just so ground crew can learn to hoist it up. Not much more than that.
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The carriage is likely just to do with the cost of certifying the airframe and wiring for that rather than the pylons themselves. It makes more sense to carry them on the fuselage pylons as it has less drag.
Not that I can envisage a scenario in which a Gripen would be using 16 SDBs in the first place, let alone 24 sadly.
Just need to hope that someone takes a photo of it ferrying SDBs I guess.
You wouldn’t use a fighterjet to ferry munitions back and forth as missiles and bombs are only allowed a certain number of sorties/flight hours before they’re no longer allowed to fly with. Also expensive as hell. This is why there are transport planes like TP84 or in the future KC-390
They do in US service, I don’t know about Swedish service. Was done all the time during GWOT with F-15Es and such.
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During war time if you have no other means that is one thing, especially if they are going to be dropped right after then it doesn’t matter much except for the cost of it. But Sweden does not do this (and neither does the US) unless it is absolutely deemed necessary)
The US very much does it especially when it’s just transporting munitions between bases in the AOR. This is off of a first hand account from an F-15E pilot who did exactly that a number of times.
USAF practices are irrelevant to this thread however.
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They do ferry them, and they of course are not going supersonic or high g manuevers.
They do it since the jet has to go there anyways with its squadron so they take weapons along
Anyone else have issues with point locking Spices with TGP? The bombs will guide to some random point not where I was aiming.
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