That one was coined after the beginning of the air force, after WWI. It was a lot truer then. And as far as I can tell (as I work at the French ministry of defense), you can really see the difference in the officers behavior, no matter what their actual specialty is.

*cough*

B-52H, ca. 1962 at the most recent.

KC-135, ca. 1960 to 1964 for the ones still airborne.

Expected retirement dates for both are now somewhere in the vicinity of 2040... and both were supposedly to have been retired sometime in the 1980s, then again in the 1990s, and... you get the idea. It's not totally inconceivable that somebody is still flying a BUFF in 2070. Actually, desktop forge technology would make keeping the beasties in the air EASIER than it is NOW because the new parts would outperform the originals and not just be re-machined bits from retired aircraft or one-off hand-builds by the heroic depot matinenance personnel.

The [?]C-130[?] is still in production TODAY so it's hard to gauge how old any particular airframe might be, and thus not as effective an example, but you're right about being a turbo-prop.

As turbo-prop aircraft OUT of production go, how about the P-3C Orion Maritime Patrol Aircraft? It's actually based on the old Lockheed Electra airliner, ca. 1957 - 1961 give or take with a first flight in 1959. They MAY start phasing them out of service in 2013 if the new P-8 Poseidon actually keeps on schedule. I'll believe that when I see it - "There aren't any subs left to hunt now that the Russians are out of the game!" Right. Tell that to the Chinese who surfaced a NUCLEAR (not a Diesel-Electric) sub within SIGHT of a US carrier in the Sea of Japan INSIDE all the ASW escorts and sub-hunting aircraft while ON AN EXERCISE! Sorry, pushed my own button there and I digressed.

-Kerenshara

Actually, talking with some of the folks here in Winnipeg, it turns out that every now and then some Redneck finds a crashed trainer from WWI or WWII (Manitoba was a major training area for the British Empire/Commonwealth during those times) and gets them up and flying again. It's getting rarer and rarer, but it still happens.

And you're right about the nanoforge bit, it's certainly going to make old equipment performable again. I mean, hell, it actually found a way to improve on the AK-97! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

On the flipside, the feed material for those nanoforges are RFID rigged out the wazoo, and it makes for some really visible equipment to the forces that provide said material. Not always a good thing. (And because they're deeply imbedded, a simple tag eraser isn't going to cut it.).

I'd like to have seen something on a larger MILITRAY VTOL. I see the "Osprey" for DocWagon^TM but things being what they are, the need for a LARGE true VTOL aircraft would seem to be self-obvious, especially for the corps if they have isolated outposts needing resupply or evacuation.

I was thinking something like we saw in Avatar with ducted fans in multiples or a double-wing "Osprey" tilt-rotor at the least. As forces get smaller, the need to deploy tactically rapidly will continue to grow to where conventional aircraft, even STOL aircraft like the one featured in Unfriendly Skies won't be sufficient to the need, and the current V-22 system is inadequate. It's a huge improvement on the (ancienct) CH-46 Seaknights and their Vietnam-era bullet holes, but with improving materials technology it would be fairly trivial to maximize the technology. That was MY big disappointment, anyhow.



-Kerenshara

Go back and re-read the fluff... untagged stock is available TO THE CORPS and GOVERNMENTS or on the black-market at exorbitant prices and high availability. It's the stuff you buy at the [6^th World Hardware Store] that's tagged to Hades and back. The corps and/or government s would be the ones mostly making the aforementioned parts... or those in their employ who could demand a supply of the tag-free stocks. Further, remember the signal range on RFID tags: 0. You've got to be within zilch range to find them by the tag (say, walking through the metal detector built into the door frame of the corp you're trying to infiltrate?); they're there more for "tracking" sources than as a "Hey! I'm over HERE Stupid!" kind of thing. Like a supply of nannie-manufactured illegal weapons show up on the market and KE scans the things and finds them loaded with stock from batch [email="47A-66$#-@~99-2072"]47A-66$#-@~99-2072[/email] and they run that back against records and find out Binky the Ork bought them at his corner store, and a raid on the registered address for the SIN turns up Binky counting his Nuyenn as his forges burble happily behind him. That night, on the news, "a 27-year-old ork was killed in a police standoff with Knight Errant security forces forced to employ deadly force when the suspect produced a high-powered weapon and..."

(Yes, the pun is intentional.)

-Kerenshara

Isn't that what LAVs are supposed to be? Air Mobile forces in the same way Vietnam had Air Calvary using Hueys, only larger and faster, but with less ability to hover in place (Not a smart idea in a combat situation anyhow.)?

That's how I'd read the Cascade Orks selling the Skraacha to the Native American Nations, using it as a Fast Troop and Materials Transport that could also be provided to "The Private Sector" (Read: Smugglers.).

Anyhow, IIRC, there's a picture of a Helicarrier in Arsenal as well...

Can't fault the logic in that. Especially if the local government is making their own feed stocks to ensure they're clean.

But what if the enemy, with their own nanoforges get their hands on the feed? Wouldn't it also make sense to have your own back door in there as well?

Then again, if those back doors are found, then the troops are at a great disadvantage due to...

DAMNIT! Now my brain hurts! This is why I didn't take that CSIS guy up on his job offer!Signal 0 is 3 metres. (SR4A Page 222). Short, yes, but cluster drop some retransmitting sensors all over the place where you think there's some OpForce located, and...

Or one guy who the CO hates in a Lockheed Sparrow with some jacked up sensors specifically tunned for RFID tags... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

LAV's (Low Altitude Vehicles) are good for speed, mediocre at best for range, CAN NOT benefit from in-flight refueling, and positively lousy for payload beyong their own mass. Not a one of the LAVs as presented or even described can haul something more than a Shadowrun-er, SpecOps team. Awesome for smuggling and raiding and insertion of SCOUT forces, no way to really move whole companies of troops. WAR! still talks about company size units, and so do other books in things like Desert Wars.

So LAVs are not like 'Nam Air Cav. Think of them as specialized descendants of the Harrier as opposed to the Huey. The Huey takes more power to hover, but In Ground Effect can pull that off for as long as it has fuel. Not only is the Harrier pushing it's engines to the maximum in VTOL mode, but it has an actual finite time limit in that mode per-mission. Put another way, LAVs can hover, but it's not their nature. I keep saying this: LAVs are WIGE (Wing In Ground Effect) aircraft, not true VTOLs.

And as to hovering being a bad idea in combat, yes and no. Think of the argument about the A-10 Thunderbolt II (aka Warthog) - It's a dumptruck of a plane with a top speed most airliners would sneer at. But when supporting ground troops, that lower speed means it can loiter in the combat zone on-call whereas a true fast-mover is more of a single-strike aircraft, with limited engegement time. Granted, sensors and computers in 2070 are much more capable of self-direction, but we don't see much of that in the Fluff. The human element still has primacy. Why is that? Because IFF can fail, and the human brain can make judgement calls much more effectively.

And there are plenty of circumstances where you want you ARMED transports to "hover" (or just fly overhead slowly and menacingly) overhead. Note how recently we're seeing airborne sniping becoming a more common tactic? Cripes, the US Coast Guard uses it daily in stopping drug runners! The smartlink combined with a full-up comlink and tied into the aircraft's flight control system would be the next best thing to a unmoving platform, calculating lead/trail and other factors lik bank.

Anyhow, I'm liking the meat of this discussion, sorry if I'm turning out my signature Wall-o-Text.

-Kerenshara

"What if the enemy captures our fuel?" See: German primary objective in the Battle of the Bulge. It's an axiom of military operations.

The feed is mostly inert. The RFIDs are "tags", not a computer network. It's not like being able to slip in lines of code to the finished device's OS. These things aren't Star Trek "replicators"; you have to assemble the parts and load the software. That is assuming you can use them to make something as advanced as the (optical) computer circuitry of 2070 with them. In one of the books it discussed how nanites are used in a lot of heavy manufacture, but this ain't them. This is a 3-D "inkjet" printer that builds working parts a few molecules at a time. It may even use nanites to some extent, but it's not the level seen in real manufacturing. I just don't see how your stock could be tampered with short of destroying it, like gasoline.



Ah, true of ground operations, yes, and a very good point. But we're talking about aircraft. You're going to fill every square decimeter with an rfid? To keep them in place, you'd need drones. No, in flight operations, it's just not pat.

Now for ground operations it's another matter. And I imagine since the tags are passive, you'd still be able to scan your recaptured stocks before you used it, neh?

-Kerenshara

Sorry, thinking of Security Tags which only go off when a certain command is sent to them. Such as a certain cow going:
"I'm Being Stolen!"

Right, right. I keep thinking like a ground pounder. I don't check my verticals, either. 'Course, I'm just a dumb civvie puke, so what the hell do I know really?