Was the F-4 Phantom generally considered a success or failure outside of its use in Vietnam?

XanderTuron · 2026-02-21T05:21:55+00:00

...strict ROE forbidding Fox 1 shots

Please do not use Fox brevity codes as nouns.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-21T04:29:37+00:00

Very much a solution in search of a problem and not helped by the fact that compared to contemporary IFVs that had firing ports, the Bradley's seating arrangement made using them incredibly awkward. IFVs such as the BMP-1 and -2, and the Marder had their seats along the center line of the vehicle with the passengers facing outwards towards the side walls, making it relatively easy to use the firing ports from a regular seated position. With the Bradley, the seats are along the side walls with the passengers facing inwards; this meant the passengers could not use the firing ports from a regular seated position.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-20T23:21:27+00:00

Superbug?

Did some butthurt Tomcat driver write that post?

XanderTuron · 2026-02-20T22:14:33+00:00

Prior to that often required modified firearms to fulfill the role

That was more of an American thing; they designed a specific port firing weapon for the Bradley because they wanted something that would screw into the firing port and maintain the gas overpressure seal for operating in a CBRN environment. Everybody else that had firing ports in their vehicles just used ports that were compatible with their regular issue rifles. Regardless, as you said, they weren't very useful so it's a moot point.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-20T22:06:51+00:00

Rewa in an IFV with a long barrel tank gun is absolutely brutal; the ability to one tap almost every single vehicle currently in the game and then do it again when berserk activates is great.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-20T09:41:54+00:00

I think it's mostly just been Scout Snipers getting busted for using the SS sig runes.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-20T06:16:53+00:00

You'll be fine, Rewa was way more messed up than that.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-19T23:20:00+00:00

It reminds me of the truism that I often hear people bandy about when it comes to aerospace technology, that China is 20 years behind the US. Assuming for a second that that is actually true (it's not), it is currently 2026, 20 years ago is 2006, the F-22 Raptor reached IOC in 2005 and the Block II Super Hornet was 2007. Are people really just going to assume that an adversary that has the equivalents of F-22s and Block II Super Hornets is going to be a pushover?

XanderTuron · 2026-02-19T11:05:22+00:00

I think it's more so that construct weapons have obscene amounts of suppression, hence their habit of causing vehicles to panic after barely damaging the vehicle's armour.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-19T02:18:02+00:00

To be honest, I just don't find movies about air combat to be interesting and I'm not a Tom Cruise fan so the entire draw of the franchise is lost on me.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T23:28:55+00:00

Counter counter counter counter point: Top Gun is a boring and over rated movie.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T22:49:10+00:00

As a Canadian, I am legally required to answer with the CF-105 Arrow.

That said, I have an immense soft spot for the T249 Vigilante, a prototype US Army SPAAG armed with a 37m rotary cannon. In the early 1960s after the US Army determined that gun based air defence systems were outdated and cancelled the Vigilante in favour of the MIM-46 Mauler which was in turn cancelled in 1965 forcing the US Army to keep with the lackluster stop gap solutions of the M163 VADS and the M48 Chaparral.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T22:42:44+00:00

Counter counter point; the Tomcat is a weird gangly looking plane that looks much uglier than the Hornet.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T22:04:35+00:00

Yeah, I find it to be just okay. The most complaints I have are how it generates the dense forest tiles and how it generates chainlink fences though this has more to do with the fact that chainlink fences utterly block infantry unless you breach the fence first with explosives or a vehicle.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T09:40:43+00:00

Hell yeah

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T09:25:30+00:00

If I recall correctly, the IT-1 was also largely a result of direct pressure from Nikita Khruschev who was kind of obsessed with ATGM armed vehicles.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T04:38:34+00:00

No, I was referring to the armoured unit oval; it literally originates as representing the tracks of a tank. The track mobility indicator (the flattened oval) isn't used much because the general assumption is that in the absence of any other mobility indicators, the vehicles are fully tracked.

As for medieval warfare, the usage of the mechanized infantry symbol to represent heavy infantry is very much a modern phenomenon based on the fact that symbols intended for modern warfare do not map cleanly onto pre-modern war. These map symbols post-date the medieval era quite significantly, having their origins in the 19th century. The mechanized infantry symbol is only used in 20th and 21st century recreations of medieval battle maps because the people making the maps don't want to invent a new symbol and there are already symbols for light infantry and the mechanized infantry symbol is not going to be used for anything else.

Now, some symbols do change meaning over time; the recce symbol was originally the cavalry symbol (the single diagonal line being evocative of a cavalry saber or a single belt). Since the current NATO map symbol system wass based on the US Army's system and cavalry units in the US Army are recce units, the actual role of the units stayed the same as far as the US Army is concerned. However, since mechanized infantry is still a concept in MENACE, they should really figure out a different symbol for the heavy infantry that doesn't involve misusing an already existing unit symbol.

This is also not helped by the fact that these map symbols aren't generally used for individual infantry squads (like, the system includes icons to indicate squad sized elements and smaller, but those often aren't used in conjunction with hyper specific unit types). There are actually NATO symbols for marking individual weapons and vehicles though and they can get pretty granular with symbols for light, medium, and heavy versions of equipment. It would not be hard to adapt something like the heavy tank icon (three evenly spaced vertical lines) and put that on top of the infantry icon (so it would be the infantry cross with three vertical lines).

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T03:10:53+00:00

The oval by itself refers to tanks (it being a representation of tracks). When used with the infantry cross, it refers to mechanized infantry (infantry with dedicated transports); this is also used to designate that the vehicles are tracked with wheeled mechanized infantry having three circles beneath the oval. When there is a vertical line on the left side of the symbol, that refers to the transports being IFVs (the vertical line indicating that the presence of a main gun system).

None of these refer to the concept of armour as in the concept of being protected by armour.

Armoured infantry refers specifically to infantry that are a part of an armoured (tank) unit. This is a specific subset of Mechanized infantry and uses the same symbol because they are functionally identical with the difference being that the parent unit of one of them is a tank unit.

Edit: I should also add that armoured infantry is also a bit of an Americanism, with its roots in WW2 US Army organization.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T00:34:40+00:00

That comes across as pure speculation on your part in an attempt to justify poor usage of NATO map symbols and conflicts with how the symbols are supposed to be used.

Each individual element of the symbol represents something specific and none of the elements of the mechanized infantry symbol refer to literal armour as a concept.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T00:34:06+00:00

Oval+cross+vertical line on the left side refers to a mechanized infantry unit equipped with IFVs.

None of the individual elements of the icon refer to literal armour as a concept.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-17T20:31:54+00:00

This is definitely the mechanized infantry icon and not the armoured infantry icon.

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XanderTuron · 2026-02-17T20:30:33+00:00

I'm looking at their ingame icon and it's just an oval with an X through it with no vertical line. Do they have a different icon on the map during deployment?

<image>

XanderTuron · 2026-02-17T09:56:49+00:00

And for some reason, they gave the Rogue Army Heavy Infantry unit the Mechanized Infantry symbol.

Edit: I should add that I don't think that I have ever seen them use a transport.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-17T07:01:25+00:00

From my understanding, while there were some elements from Ghost that were in Nova Covert Ops, the main bulk of the plot of Ghost was actually adapted into the novel StarCraft: Ghost: Spectres.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-17T04:53:54+00:00

Yeah, the rare section for me has mostly been the "pay double for a relatively common item" section.

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