fd_ski:
Soda, i can't say that i share your enthusiasm over F18s. I served 4 years in Cecil Field ( before they moved all east coast 18s to Ociana ) and i'm yet to see an 18 fly without 2 or 3 droptanks.
Navy is twitching their noses cause that bird has no legs whatsoever. E model while enlarged the tanks by 1/3 also got the gas gulping F14 engines.. and nothing really changed
Agreed, though you can drop those droptanks when you show up to battle, like you can in AH. The Su-27 had the fuel internal and while it was possible to dump some, it took time to do so, more time than you had. If you took too much fuel (like on a long CAP or patrol) you ended up having to fight with all that extra fuel. The difference was startling, thrust to weight while light in a Su-27 was something akin to 1.3:1, heavy it was .8:1... a huge difference to account for in thrust. Wingloading numbers were also massively different between light and heavy configurations. You can imagine that acceleration numbers probably had similar declines. The original Su-27, up until the Su-30 versions didn't have A-to-A refuelling capabilities so they had to load up with internal fuel. Even now the relative servicable rate, and numbers, of tankers is low and it would be assumed that in most cases the Su-27 would use internal fuel for the entire flight. (btw, at max internal fuel the Su-27 has a terrific range, far more than it has been given credit for).
The Navy was also pissed about the bring back capabilities of the F-18's, or so I've read. Dumping a smart bomb in the ocean isn't a very good way to save money. The E models are supposed to help stop this practice. The E model helped address growth capabilities in the airframe regarding computing power also.
Amazing they consider the E model an F18 at all, the dimensions are totally different, as are the designs of major portions of the internal and external structure. What was supposed to be just an enlarged C model turned out to be a new plane, with the same basic shape as the old one....
Russian missile technology is substantial. It's hard to tell if they are ahead or not, although they do have many designs with claimed capabilities that are only now beginning to be implmenented in western designs like the 9X, ASRAAM, AMRAAM or IRIS-T. I suspect the latest western designs have probably leap-frogged over the russian designs, but for a while the russian designs were most likely superiour.
On a side note to the missile debate, western ECM was considered substantially more effective than eastern designs. Many/most russian fighters barely had provisions for chaff/flare launchers, or had relatively few expendables. Russian fighters did not have internal ECM capabilities or have provisions for many expendables (chaff/flares). More recent upgrades have addressed this problem substantially.
The russians did have significantly better "rough field" support for their aircraft. US, and most western designs excluding sweden, are runway only designed. This could have been a significant issue had it come to a real war between the two during the cold war. Again, rough field performance depended on what you had to work with though, take-off weights couldn't be near maximum and while it was possible to takeoff/land on grass, it was not considered that safe.
-Soda
