I like vectored thrust aircraft, but I just don't know how the rules work as far as maneuverability.

For example, the Federated Boeing Commuter has the Improved Takeoff and Landing 2 mod, but the GMC Banshee does not have it listed. As a matter of fact, other than in subtext calling it a vectored thrust craft, I can't find any rules for it's operation. I mean, is no suggestion of how it maneuvers other than its maneuverability rating.

Another question that I have is about the MiG-67; what weapon mounts does it have? Can it mount launch weapons?

I would really appreciate anything you guys have found about T-birds, either in 4th or earlier, or how you handle them (house rules and such) within the game.

Vectored Thrust and LAV are VTOL vehicles, so they don't need take off and landing distances.

T-Birds are "technically" a vector thrust aircraft, but they are more accurately described as a "hover tank." LAV stands for Low Altitude Vehicle, and I believe their max flight ceiling is a few miles, at most. I'm not sure exactly what rules your are looking for... keeping in mind that LAV's hover overtop of the terrain a little bit, they operate under all the normal rules for vehicles.

In SR4 Arsenal the MIG-67 does not come equipped with weapon mounts or launch weapons by default, you need to add them according to the appropriate rules.

Every 3 points of body gives a possible weapon mount which can carry larger then LMG size weapons, which includes launch weapons.

The MIG has a body 18, which means it can mount a heavy turret, which can carry a Main Gun. See p 123 Arsenal.

Ah, well I had just noted that in the picture (whatever that is worth) that it seems to have a heavy turret, as well as a smaller turret for what I assume would be anti-missile defense.


The funny thing about that is that in the arsenal errata it notes that "Unless specified in their description, all helicopters and rotordrones automatically possess the equivalent of Level 2 Improved Takeoff and Landing" which makes no note of VTOL or LAV. But I was just wondering if I was missing something.


The Hovertank comment was what I was looking for. I just needed to know whow much of an aircraft it was.

LAV aren't Helicopters and Rotodrones so you can use the VTOL rules for takeoff and landing. But as has been mentioned for all practical purposes LAV can be treated as ground vehicles for movement.

What I was getting at is that they implied by omission that LAVs can't use VTOL rules because they found it necessary to specify that Helicopters and Rotodrones can use VTOL rules in the errata, and they didn't see fit to mention T-Birds.

But the Ground Vehicle treatment for on the ground movement is very useful to me.

In the first novel, "Never Deal with a Dragon," they specifically refer to T-Birds as panzers. I'd imagine their max ceiling being somewhere only just over the tops of trees. Keep in mind that they are designed to operate below minimum radar altitude which is only a few hundred feet.

I always imagined the runs that smugglers took their T-birds on as tree top skimming up and down the hollows and valleys to avoid being seen, while still needing to be a good enough pilot to dodge the occasional tall tree. Think a forested Death Star trench run...

Just because they are left off the list doesn't mean they can't do VTOL.

You can also read p.100

"Nicknamed t-birds (aka thunderbirds, for the distinctive
noise they make as they blur past), LAVs rely on ground eff ect lift
and very short wings to keep them in the air, and so are limited
by low altitudes and high stall speeds. Dangerous to fl y, t-birds
require skilled pilots (called t-birders). Th ough they guzzle fuel
like pigs, t-birds are ideal for smuggling as they’re fast, hug the
ground to fl y under radar, can carry good hauls, and can be geared
up with armor and weapons."

My memory is a little shaky on this, but SR2 or SR3 listed their max flight ceiling as usually around 350 meters above ground level, I think. There were no rules for it, but they were supposed to burn a lot more fuel if they weren't doing Nape-of-Earth flying.

and rigger3 noted that while they could no vertical takeoffs, they rarely did because of the jet blast (a issue with the real life harrier as well, i think the vertical landing area they use on ships is basically a large grate so as to protect the ground crew).

Indeed the book did call the vehicle a panzer. Interestingly, the name of the vehicle that the main character (Samuel Verner aka "Twist") rode in was called Thunderbird. I think the name was adopted as the vehicle classification almost by accident ("I want my rigger to have a Thunderbird").

heh, would not be the first time a nickname is more well known then a designated name...

The A-10 Warthog, vs the proper A-10 Thunderbolt II, for example.

I view T-birds as the SR equivalent to BattleTech's WiGE vehicles. This means that not only are they not VTOL by default, they actually have a fairly high stall speed since they rely on "ground effect lift and very short wings" to stay in the air. Of course, they could be modified to have V/STOL capabilities, but I don't see that as the norm.

my thoughts exactly

Their hover ceiling should be only in ground effect.

A Harrier is technically capable of vertical take-off but would burn AFAIK about 60% of his total fuel capacity to do so.
When landing vertically a Harrier actually injects water into the jet exhaust to cool it and make it somewhat less dangerous. Thus Harrier landings must happen within a rather short time window (less than a minute AFAIK) before the water tank runs empty.

The Walter Jon Williams cyberpunk novel Hardwired featured LAV tanks called "panzers" and their operators the "Panzerboys" smuggling goods across the US to avoid the evil Orbital corporations. I always though the change from "Panzer" to "T-Bird" after SR 1 was to establish a more distinctive feel (tying into Native American terms). And perhaps because there was a "Hardwired" sourcebook for Cyberpunk 2020.

It's been a while since I read Hardwired but I think those "panzers" were explicitly described as hovercrafts not aircraft of any kind, weren't they?

It's been a while for me too (I should fix that), but you could be right. Though they're both fast tanks without treads that fly close to the ground to avoid radar, so the basic effect is the same.

You are correct. It's a gap in Arsenal and BBB. It might be fixed in SR4A, but I'm not certain.

- J.

They've always been a little vague on this. SR1 variably used the words LAV, panzer, thunderbird/t-bird and "ground-effect" aircraft.

i guess "flying brick" is a trademark?

The equivalent vehicles in CP2020 - Aerodyne Vehicles or AV for short - are explicitly described to only stay airborne because their engines were originally built for aircraft with double their weight.
AVs are in general much smaller than Thunderbirds, more like flying minivans with the smallest models actually designed to resemble flying cars like the police spinners from Blade Runner or the the aircars from The Fifth Element. Setting-wise they are not meant as flying tanks but jet-powered helicopter replacements.

Iirc panzers have a max altitude of 5000 meters, atleast in sr3. If it's changed recently excuse me.

They manuver with directed blasts if air. I imagine this is like some missles do today. I'll look but I'm fairly certain that you can find that in one of the rigger books 3 I believe.

The SR3 Rigger Chapter had a nice artwork of an LAV.

THIS is the correct answer. You hit it right on the head, HappyDaze. The military has been playing with the concept for years, and the old Soviet Union actually built such a beast as a long distance/high capacity ferry transport. The advantage in comparison to a helicopter is the relatively massive payload increase (frequently used for armor and defense systems as I have seen it) and lifting of the absolute ceiling on speeds by conventional rotor-winged aircraft due to advancing-blade trans-sonic/trailing-blade stall issues. Compared to a true airfoil aircraft they are slower and less agile/acrobatic.

The In-Ground-Effect vehicle takes advantage of some peculiar characteristics found in low altitude flight. The single best example that most people will be familiar with is the Harrier II jump-jet. If you compare it to the Harrier I, one of the features you will notice is the dramatically enlarged strakes under the fuselage. These were added to give it a "In-Ground-Effect" advantage related to how the air moved under the vehicle on a pure power VTO (OK, and the redesigned wing helps too). It was one of the single largest contributors to the huge increase in usable payload in VTO configuration. They even help when performing a rolling STO. Another thing that has become an issue in the conflict in Afghanistan is the dramatically reduced effective lifting capacity of the rotor-wing carrying fleet. Much of this is due to the very high base altitudes experienced in that country, but another is the VERY dramatic mountainous landscape, which means that flying over a valley a helicopter suddenly finds itself outside of ground effect, and the engines and rotors have to work harder to keep it in the air.

Now that the info-dump is over, I guess I should go with a simple description of the craft based on old fluff (including other cyber-punk literature of a similar nature) and the picture on P.113 of Arsenal combined with what little we know or can surmise based on real-world airframes. Essentially, it would help to think of them as a cross between a "hover tank" that doen't use a conventional skirt to gain the initial ground clearance and a "jump jet". The "jump jet" transitions to pure airfoil mode where all the "lift" is generated by large wings after take-off. The "hover tank" is constantly having to be 100% suspended by the power of the lift engines. Using a combination of lift engines (fans?), stub wings and body shape (lifting body) a "thunderbird" achieves very high speed Nape-Of-Earth flight profiles by harnessing the increased dynamic lift found flying In-Ground-Effect 100% of the time while being able to take off and land (near) vertically, but is not constrained by the requirements of pure-airfoil flight, meaning it can be blockier and heavier than the "jump jet" while having some ability to fly over things like trees and buildings than the "hover tank".

The down side is that they're fuel hungry, technically complex, and very expensive. But sometimes, that's just what you need.

Now, compared to pure vectored-thrust vehicles (like a ducted-fan tilt-rotor, for example), these things can't maneuver or take off/land worth a drek, and that's why a HTR team from DocWagon^TM is going to want to use one of those instead of a t-bird. The idea of even TRYING to pilot a t-bird between the buildings of downtown Seatle even WITH being a jumped-in fully enhanced rigger scares me drekless. They're just too fast - you're either in flight or landing/taking off, and there's no tolerance for error. (Edit: OK, you COULD stay on your lift fans below stall speed and pretend to be a regular V/STOL, but your range is going to be ATTROCIOUS. A little known issue with the Harrier, which is what you're pretending to be at that point, is that when in full hover, it needs to inject water into the engine for cooling or it will burn up, and they only have something on the order of ninety (90) seconds endurance in that mode, even if you DIDN'T run out of fuel in very short order. But I think I made my point here.)

Everybody is free to disagree, of course, but that's MY call on the issue.

well i guess a city t-bird could pull something similar to the (X)F-35 that has a cold lift fan hooked up to the hot jet engine.

say a big sucking intake up top, either routed straight thru the body or split into nozzles, powered by either a jet engine (that add its output to the lift as needed) or a gas turbine (yes, i know its a jet engine without the output, but im looking for a way to get around the "meltdown" issue).

err, it just dawned on me that two of the harrier nozzles are cold, the front ones...

Yep, most people miss that one. The front nozzles of the Pegasus engine (on and unique to the Harrier) are exclusively High-bypass bleed-air from that mother-huge primary stage fan. The only diference between what the Harrier is doing and that the F-35 is doing is that they eliminate the movable vectoring nozzles and use pure shaft power to drive an off-axis (and my, didn't THAT gear box present a minor engineering and materials-science challenge by itself?) lift fan. I would guess that the actual diameters are close on the two fans in question, but with the axis perpendicular to the angle of flight (as opposed to parallel) means you can have a LOT lower profile airframe, enabling you to achieve two simultaneous capabilities the Harrier cries itself to sleep over: supersonic cruise capabilities and frontal aspect low-observables (read: stealth).

Oh, and the surplus turbine idea is the main reason that early jump-jets failed over and over until the Harrier (originally called the Kestrel) came along; They are dead weight in foward flight. The lift fan in the F-35 is, too, but the total mass involved (and attendant limitations imposed on airframe profile and aerodynamics) is still far lower than a conventional additional turbine, especially since the actual primary engine is more than powerful enough to drive the thing.

Oh, that reminds me: one other thing the Harrier weeps for: reheat (afterburner). It's ineffecient as all drek (Zone 5 reheat invreases the fuel consumption of the core turbojet/turbofan by a factor of around five in exchange for a fifty to one hundred percent increase in total thrust, as a rough rule of thumb), but gives a tremendous ability to generate surges in acceleration, and combined with the radical thrust vectoring capabilities built into the nozzle, I am going to be curious how/if it can VIFF (Vector In Foward Flight) during a dogfight. The Argentinian pilots who tangled with early model FRS Mk 1 Sea Harriers over the South Atlantic during the 1982 Falklands War were scared out of their minds when the planes suddenly seemed to stop and JUMP (taking vectors radically out of the angle of flight) sideways when the pilots threw the vectoring nozzles PAST the vertical to partly foward and red-lined the Pegasus. They lost not a single Sea Harrier in air-to-air combat, and despite being limited to short-range Sidewinder missiles and their internal gun with a (very good) short range radar, racked up 21 kills against a vastly numerically superior opponent. The Argentinians called the planes "La Muerta Negra" - the black death.

not sure if the F-35 has the nozzle to pull of what this bird did:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell-MBB_X-31

but if it can, ouch!

The X-31 was (is) a technology and engineering demonstrator designed and built to explore flight control potentials in a post-stall environment. In other words, it was designed to see what you can do once the wing "stops flying".

Something to consider is that the F/A-22A Raptor can pull many of the same kinds of maneuvers, in theory. So far, it's been mostly a trick of getting the meat-ware in the ejection seat to be able to first command the maneuver, second control the maneuver and third, figure out a genuine use for the maneuver. Post-stall maneuvering was first demonstrated as a real possibility by the MiG-29 Fulcrum (post-stall controled tail-slide) and the Su-27 Flanker (Pugachev Cobra, abrupt past-vertical stall and recovery). The original YF-22 prototype is popularly believed to have narrowly beat out the competing YF-23 fighter in part because of the inclusion of vectored thrust capabilities. The later version of the Soviet-era Su-27 Flanker (re-designated Su-35) have 2-D thrust vectoring (Nozzles move up and down) similar to those on the Raptor. I am unaware of any current design incorporating 3-D thrust vecotoring (full 360 degree rotational capability).

The nozzle on the F-35 V/STOL variant is capable of ninety degree downward swivel, but I never bothered to consider if it also has in-axis 3-D vectored thrust capability. I will need to do a little research on that one. I DO know the visible nozzle design is not configured for 2-D vectoring, which is less effective in a single-engine design anyway (in a twin engine aircraft, you can use the nozzles to generate vector changes in Pitch and Roll).

What actually makes these maneuvers is a combination of factors, not just vectored thrust (though that feature opens up frightening and exciting areas of the flight envelope). Primarily what you need is an engine capable of operating in a highly disrupted slipstream, or even pull air from acute angles to the vector of flight. The second thing you need is what has become the expected standard: digital flight control of a negatively-stable airframe. In plain terms, that means the airplane is ALWAYS trying to go out of control, and the only thing keeping the nose pointed in any given direction is the active control of the computer systems making over thirty corrections a second. (If you ever get a chance to watch one of these birds up close in level flight, gaze at the primary flight controls. They look like they're having a minor seziure.) Originally, once the engineers figured out what they were doing, aircraft were built to posses "positive stability", which meant that if they were to "depart from controlled flight", if the pilot released the controls, they would tend to try to return to straight flight. Later (since "stability" also can be described as a "resistance to maneuver"), fighter aircraft were built with a "neutral stability" meaning if the pilot took their hands off the controls, the plane would tend to stay where it was. The F-16 Falcon was built to have "relaxed stability" in the Pitch Axis (nose up and down), with computerized flight contols to keep it from "swapping ends" (trying to fly backwards). The X-29 technology demonstrator (with radically foward swept wings) was actually built to be dynamically unstable in all three control axes (Roll, Pitch and Yaw), kept flying foward by a trio of advanced flight control computers working in tandem. The F-117A Nighthawk (Stealth Fighter or Black Jet) was IIRC the first production warplane with negative dynamic stability, a consequence of its completely unorthodox shape (dubbed the "hopeless diamond" by the engineering team). These days, it's assumed negative dynamic stability is what you're going to get with any fifth generation fighter plane (F/A-22A Raptor, Eurofighter Typhoon, F-35 Lightning II, Whatever the Russians toss on the market next).

And it's those digital flight controls which will also make something like a t-bird controlable at all, as well.

Okay... the last few posts where quite... mindblowing for me but i think i followed.

Vectored Thrust doesn't actually mean that the vehicle has a turbine for staying in the air, it could also be a fan, so a drone like the Dalmatian (which is declared a vectored thrust) could be something with fans or turbines.

So... a T-Bird is a Vectored Thrust Vehicle with Turbines, VTOL Capabilities and should actually have the Unstable Structural Agility Mod per Default, right?

I just went waaay back to the Rigger Black Book and there the Dalmatian is indeed described as being turboprop-driven. Unfortunately the picture there does not fit the description: The text speaks about a drone that initially looks like a miniature plane but with engines that allow vertical take-off and hovering - which basically sounds like an Osprey-style tilt-rotor system. The picture on the other hand shows a combination of vertically and horizontally mounted jet turbines with not a single rotor visible anywhere...
(But well, artwork not matching text is a classic with SR.)

I have always assumed Vectored Thrust to meet this description. The problem is the new classification of LAV confuses things, with the descriptions of the two being so similar as to be identical for practical intents and purposes. Further fuddled by the fact there is no defining mechanics between the two.

- J.

I had not pegged you for someone with aeronautics as a field of interest O.o

Oh, dear. Does it show?

Um, why not?

*scratches head converting their posts into Crunchy Bits^TM*

Um, let me take that in order:

For skill purposes, I would say that generally the LAV will perform in the same general category as Vectored Thrust vehicles, under the general "Pilot: Aircraft", but I would probably rule it as a separate specialization. An argument could probably be made (quite stronly) for making it an exotic skill all its own. (That is how my group did it. Don't ask me WHY our Sneak Adept had Pilot: t-bird at 4.) Per SR4A, P. 349: Vehicles & Drones, the GMC Banshee is "Vectored Thrust", so there you go. I found a cite.

V/STOL would be just about a requirement of the type. The Soviet-era monster I mentioned was actually a sea-plane IIRC.

Absolutely, but bear in mind that the "handling" figure is already figured into the listed base stats. (OK, me being picky here, but you can't engineer that feature back into an existing aircraft without a COMPLETE rebuild, rearranging and relocating control surfaces, stabilizers, center of mass, and lifting surfaces. It's not just playing with the controls. Now, if they meant using FBW (Fly-By-Wire/Light) controls to boost maneuberability, then sure, that would be refittable, but I'm not sure the upward tic isn't too large.)

That help?



(EDIT: Aw, drek, I just realized I never answered this part. I must be getting age-challenged.

Turboprop just means having a gas turbine turning the (usually geared) shaft which drives your propulsive element. Turboshaft is actually the broader and more inclusive term. The V-22 Osprey is indeed what you're looking for as a referant: twin turboprops that rotate on flexible wingtip naceles. It's popular in fiction literature and film to have a pure turbojet/turbofan nacele, but it takes a LOT more horses to lift on pure thrust in that mode (with an attendant fuel consumption increase) or that's what we'd have seen by now. And if you want to depict a rotating blade assembly, the usual artwork is a circle indicating the maximum diameter of blade sweep. I remember old artwork which had that in some shots while not in others. Another example is a lot of line art of prop-driven aircraft in the real world omits the blades in profile views. So don't let the artwork completely sway you, especially if it's black-and-white and cropped into a rulebook.)

Dunno, you just somehow never struck me as a grease-monkey ^^

That's because (unless you count gun oil) I'm not.

Think slide-rule.

Like I was mentioning above, the diference isn't so much how you get off the ground, as in how you stay in the air and what flight performance envelope you're shooting for. "Thrust" is a vector (force applied in a given direction). When you say "thrust" without the term "vectored" attached, the ASSUMPTION is that the angle of thrust (your acceleration force vector) will be in line with the angle of flight and perpendicular to the angle of lift, opposed to the angle of drag. When you add "vectored", you are stating that you can change the direction of the applied "thrust vector" away from that classic parallel line, resulting in a "net vector" that isn't straight ahead; This allows you to (with enough power) oppose gravity with thrust instead of aerodynamicly generated lift. By adjusting the precise angles, you can have engine thrust provide BOTH lift AND foward thrust without the use of aerodynamic lift at all. (Yes, "lift" describes both the name of the aerodynamic principle of speed-derived pressure differential AND the acceleration vector opposed to the pull of gravity; "Thrust" describes the foward acceleration vector of an airborne object AND both the power AND direction of the engines. In a conventional aircraft, they're one and the same, but with "vectored" thrust, things start getting slippery.)

The aerodyne is a pure vectored thrust motive vehicle, receiving little or no effective lift from aerodynamic forces. The LAV lifts off like the aerodyne, but most of its gravity-opposed vector is derived from IGE (In-Ground-Effect) aerodynamic forces once airborne. Technically it's a huge deal. The V-22 Osprey is the better analog to the LAV because in foward flight it's wing provides 100% of the gravity-opposed acceleration vector, much like the LAV, resorting to brute thrust for lift on take-off and landing. The aerodyne is going to perform better in the hover and low-speed flight environments, but the LAV will have much higher top speeds flat out.

For those who may be inclined to mistake LAV for "hover", the "hover" system relies on a self-contained cushion of air, contained in some form of plenum chamber under the vehicle. It is strictly incapable of coventional "flight". The LAV still uses conventional aircraft-based aerodynamic lifting forces, but only has enough "lift" so long as it remains close to the ground where it can take advantage of "In-Ground-Effect" forces which artificially boost the lifting power of the airfoil/lifting body.

The vehicle that the protagonist drove certainly was. Even though they're different it's still close enough for lawyers, IIRC they changed the name to not step on any toes. And after the whole Macross/Battletech thing FASA had I don't blame them.

Now give the Hover-Craft-Adaptiopn to an LAV, what do you get?
Or Jumpjets to an Hover-Craft? And then improved take off or however that's called?

A LAV that can make a running takeoff on unimproved surfaces, but the payload/range increase is negated by the weight of the extra gear... Crunchy Bits^TM say it's redundant. OK, ok, I suppose you could make the argument that it gives the thing excellent taxi/concealability in places like a swamp... assuming you can fit it between the trees... and can cope with ingestation of foreign matter. Remember: most swamp hover vehicles are IC (Internal Combustion) powered, not turbine (jet) driven. Jet turbines do NOT take kindly to foreign matter, and while they were able to engineer the M-1X Abrams main battle tank to do it, that engine isn't designed to provide aircraft thrust. And a hovercraft, by its nature, kicks up a drekload of spray and debris. *thinks about it some more* If you could come up with a good reason the thing would need to spend a lot of time moving (relatively) short distances at ground level as opposed to flying, then I guess you could rationalize the mass penalty.


A dangerous one-off testbed, redardless of what FASA said. *grin* Seiously, if you'e using a non-rigid plenum chamber (read: rubber skirt) then you wind up dumping 100% of the air when you take off, making landing a genuine challenge. A rigid plenum chamber would be feasible, but ONLY if the jets could bring you in for a precisely controled level landing and hold you up while the chamber re-pressurized to weight-bearing capacity. If you're going to go to that much trouble, you selected the wrong chassis to begin with.

They're wiz ideas, the kind of things that have spawned X-planes in the past just to see how it would really work. The problem is, they would be of seriously limited utility and/or dangerously flawed. I DO like your creative way of looking at the problem, though.

It's been forever since I read that book, but there are a couple things that I remember: first, the guy was a pilot before the smugglers had to switch to "panzers", and the areas he was traversing were not especially suited to "hover" trafic because of terrain obstacles. But like I said, LAV's only get the benefit of being IGE at VERY low flight levels, so they aren't going to be doing what most people think of as "flying" at even moderate altitude: they are virtually confined to hard (read: VERY close and violent) NoE flying. IGE fight IS based on some of the same ideas as a conventional hovercraft, in terms of letting air keep you off the ground, but there IS an airfoil effect. In synergy, they let you carry meaningful cargo, fuel, weapons and IIRC what they called Chobam VII armor (a light-weight derivative of the composite armor package on the Abrams, Challenger II and Leopard II MBTs, developed in Chobam, England).

If you were making a parallel comment separate to the discussion of how a SR "LAV" might work, I didn't mean to gripe at you. I am under the impression though that you were trying to bring those vehicles in as a counter-argument for how SR might treat them, so I figured I'd address the point.

There is a reason the Soviet WIGE transports were designed to fly over the Baltic and not the mountains.

Well, to be fair to the Ruskies (come on, this game was written back when that's what we called them), those things are positively HUGE and about as maneuverable as a 1950s tractor trailer going uphill with an overload. Their ability to do things like "bank" are severely limited as a consequence of design purpose. But they can in a pinch rise up enough to clear moderate obstacles with a little notice. The LAV has enough surplus power to handle that with ease, and isn't quite so underpowered to begin with. But it's a good point.

Party Pooper ._.
But yeah, no, i did not think things through to the end.
5 Minutes later, i in my bed sleeping allready ^^#

Sorry for the slight digression but Kerenshara is there any particular reason you post in a different font? Just curious since I've seen your replies in a few threads recently.

Just a few? *laughs* What's my post count up to these days, anyhow? Since when? This is my one form of relaxation when I need to spin down after work and NEED to get some sleep.

As to the font, because people complained when I did it in green. *grin* I like it, mostly, but there are a couple perks to it that I won't bother going in to as well.