I recently unlocked the preceding F-18D and have started research on the Su-30MKM in the Japanese tech tree. However, upon test driving the jet, one thing confused and admittedly disappointed me. Why are the cockpit controls and the computer warning voice in completely different languages? I play simulator battles, so yes this does matter.
Most of the cockpit is in English, as shown in the screenshot above. This makes sense. The Su-30MKM and the Su-30MKI (Indian version) were designed for nations where English is used as the aviation language. This means the cockpits were labeled in English. Admittedly, the cockpit model reuses some of the Russian MFD and sight assets, so there is SOME Russian there. I am (mostly) willing to overlook this minor issue, though.
What really bugs me is that the cockpit warning voice is in Russian even though everything else is in English. This makes no sense to me for two reasons. Firstly, the whole point of standardizing aviation languages is to avoid confusion. Why would they introduce three separate languages (Malaysian, English, and Russian) in the same cockpit if they specifically went through the trouble of changing everything to English? Secondly, the proceeding Malaysian MiG-29S does in fact have an English cockpit AND English warning voice. Why would the Su-30MKM break that convention in a newer jet where reprogramming the voice language is all that much easier?
To be clear, I do not know for a fact what language the voice warning system uses. I only know the cockpit is supposed to be in English, though I assume that would imply the warning voices are in English too. I could not find anyone else discussing this matter and it is not as though I have actually flown an Su-30MKM to verify this myself. It simply makes no sense to me and seems like somebody overlooked changing the voice language when modeling this jet. Does anyone have any light to shed on this issue?
PS: To address the person who will no doubt say “Just learn Russian” that isn’t the point. The point is that this doesn’t make sense, and if it is in fact an oversight, it should be a simple fix since the English voice files already exist in game. Besides, while I do recognize some of the alerts from flying Russian-built jets before, the added layer of confusion should be altogether unnecessary in a jet that is said to be in English.
