Yes, and I have also emailed maybe a dozen or so archives and museums about it. I know of a few people and places who have the information I need yet the answer is its not cleared for public release.
That’s near always the issue with modern airframes, even those that don’t see active service anymore, like the F-14. And can be due to the reuse of certain components for later airframes;
The F-14D’s IRST (IRST-21) almost certainly formed the basis of the Legion IRST Pod’s (TALON HATE) sensor. And so probably won’t see the light of day for decades at that point. and as such certain segments of the Flight manual remain unreleaseable. Even though there are basically no surviving airframes that could even be returned to flightworthy status outside Iran.
Same with Harrier 1 unless they plan on upgrading FA.2 and having it go out again but that is extremely unlikely.
The harrier 1 was better then the Harrier 2 in some ways like speed and max altitude.
It was very much a tradeoff made to increase the useful ordnance capacity and range with the big wing, moving further away from it’s originally envisaged role in forming the defensive Anti-Aircraft cordon of the nominal Sea Control Ship and later VSTOL Support Ship CONOPS and towards Reactionary QRFs to support landings and other medium CAS duties utilizing limited / minimal support infrastructure.
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Yessir as i’ve read more than a healthy amount about lol.
If I where to have made a Harrier or Sea Harrier I would have made a composite wing in the same general layout as the Harrier 1 wing but with the Lerx like on the tested Gr.3. Revised the Aerodynamics and added some leading edge slats for better High AOA lift.
So you’d get less induced drag with similar speed and altitude.
ffs… what does it take…
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Maybe I should start making blood sacrifices???
Or if the Harrier was meta or a nation Gaijin liked I could just send them a youtube video and that would be enough (like what they just accepted about the Rafale STR)
so when a MiG-23MLD gets wing root vortex generators it turns into an excellent dogfighter over the straight-line M/ML (at least before the supposed nerf, perhaps even after),
but when a harrier gets significantly more generators and sawtooth edge with 2 notches it may as well be the same as some 7eleven grilled sausage yak38 wing, just without the dead weight engines…
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Imagine being so blinded by your own biases that you actually believe that.
That’s just embarrassing.
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To be fair it isn’t entirely an unfounded suspicion.
‘MaRkeTinG LiEs’
Or indeed my personal favourite. ‘Igla looks like Stinger - thus Stinger can’t be better.’
"For other MANPADS systems, open sources indicate a higher overload such as 18, 20 and even 25g in the case of the Mistral 1 MANPADS. However, these MANPADS systems have only slight differences in the area of aerodynamic surfaces compared to the 9M39, so a multiple increase in average achievable overload compared to the 9M39 cannot be expected. "
Then there is the issue of Western NERA - which Gaijin seems to refuse to model anywhere near being as effective as it really should be. Including constantly misreading STANAG specs.
Think about it. Whenever there is a Western capability that doesn’t have a Russian equivalent - they mess it up. Then they dig their heels in when it is bug reported and claim it cannot be possible. The Harrier being the latest example. The devs refuse to shift their position despite a metric tonne of evidence passed their way.
Shuffles Papers
I rest my case m’lud.
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I spent an embarrassing amount of time and effort into researching the Harrier. I found a lot of evidence the quite honestly can’t be denied as it’s from sources that have sent people to the moon.
Even NASA was like .91 max with like half the engines thrust. Gaijin turned around and said well we didn’t believe it can go any faster.
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Exactly they lumped it into the same category with planes like the f104. Yet it’s wing was developed to make as much lift as possible with a small area and maintain lift at high AOA.
Yak-38 has a wing area of 199 sq ft it’s empty weight is over 16,000 lbs
Harrier 201 sq ft (with a higher aspect ratio) and its empty weight is less than 13,000 lbs.
Yak-38 max thrust in forward flight was around 13,000 lbs Harrier is over 16,000 in just max thrust with lift getting to over 18,000 lbs
The yak-38 also has a ceiling of 39,000 feet and top speed listed as 650 mph (in game it gets into the 740s)
If you look at it from this perspective it’s easy to see the wing isn’t as weirdly proportioned to the fuselage only the intake and fan section of the fuselage are weirdly large but they actually produce lift as well.
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Take this to a tech mod or someone, the bug report mods seem to not care half the time
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I took it too a tech mod to get it accepted to begin with. Its the Devs just saying that THEY don’t believe the reports basically. They think the plane performing the way it does in the reports is just not possible.
The devs said they could take a look at the MiG-21 MF comparison however, but they prolly don’t care all the same.
Honestly they must have something against the harriers. They refuse to listen to the complaints about them being 4x as hot as they should be and now this, it’s a joke
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Because IR signature in game is based directly on output thrust, not engine exhaust temp & mass throughput.
I’m also working on a potential suggestion to model it after examples provided by “The Infrared & Electro-Optical Systems Handbook” Vol. I, though -VI. and a number of patents that explain how flares actually function. It just takes so much time to collate the various excerpts into something useful, since there’s so much to work though and parse it in such a way that it is at least somewhat readily understandable by the intended audience, and includes scenarios to serve as exemplars so debate can be had, or improvements / changes be made evident.
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Yes its very stupid though as the Harrier was very cold in terms of IR sig. for its day at least. The ability to deny sidewinder shots by tilting the wing is something it could do. If it was modeled correctly in game it would actually require skill to kill, and the devs don’t want there MiG-21S players to have to get good.
I do remember reading that the Harrier IR signature was reasonably good from certain angles simply by virtue of how a Pegasus engine works. If the front set of nozzles are ‘cold’ - so only using first stage compression air - then effectively your jet efflux is being diluted to a lower temperature than just the rear nozzle exhausts.
I mean, I STILL wouldn’t want to be underneath, adjacent to, or anywhere near a Harrier with it’s nozzles down - but these things are relative.
Yes the front nozzles helped mask in a similar way to how Helos have their jet exhaust pointing into the blades.
The Jet jet efflux flows over the tailplane of the harrier as well and provides extremely good pitch control at all airspeeds. Sharkey Ward talked about this, so as far as the specifics I do not know the degree to what the nose pointing ability became. It was enough to beat F-5s MiG-21 and most other contemporary fighters in a low speed fight.
Starting to wonder… for my part, I bought the AV-8S… when it came out… more fool me eh… never again.
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