July 11, 2015

Wings of the Great War Dives into the Trenches of World War I

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With a name like Wings of the Great War, you’d think the manufacturer would be content to stick to replicating aircraft of the Great War. In a turn about of sorts, the manufacturer announced today plans to offer a complete line of 1:72 scale combat vehicles that saw action in the War to End All Wars. Their first pair of tanks, which are expected in October, bring to life two of the most iconic vehicles ever to see action during the conflict – the British Mark IV Male tank (#WW10003) and the German equivalent, the Sturmpanzerwagen A7V Infantry Support tank (#WW10002).

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Composed of resin and bundled with a decorative display base, their new armored vehicle series takes aim at a sorely overlooked segment of the pre-assembled market place. All we need now are the infantry, trenches, a “no man’s land” – festooned with barbed wire, craters and scorched earth – and we may just yet have a fully comprehensive look at the first war of the twentieth century.

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Halo 5: Guardians – Combat Continues to Evolve

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Ever since Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers captured my imagination several decades ago, I’ve been fascinated with the sub genre of military science fiction. With the imminent release of Microsoft’s video game, Halo 5: Guardians, it made perfect sense to start checking out some of the new products being developed that will appear in the game and likely make an important impact on the industry at-large.

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Besides all of the scale figures and vehicles currently on the docket, Dark Horse Comics, makers of the Halo comics series, has been tapped to create a squadron of warships that also form an integral part of the back story. Three ships are expected ahead of the game’s release, including the USNC Infinity, USNC Pelican drop ship and a Halo Covenant Truth and Reconciliation Cruiser.

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Each comes fully painted and attached to a handsome display stand, and measure, on average, eight to nine inches in length. You can find all three ships within our redesigned Halo Universe section.

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Dragon Tip Toes into the Cold War

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World War II has long been a bastion for Dragon, serving as a breeding ground for literally dozens of fighting vehicles from around the world and from virtually every theatre imaginable. Happily, the Company may have finally moved beyond its roots to other epochs, by offering a 1:72 scale model of the US M103A1 heavy tank (#DRR60691). Based upon a tank that served with the 24th Infantry Division in Germany during 1959, its refreshing to see that they are willing to step out of their comfort zone every so often. Since the M103 shares the same chassis used on both the M48 and M60 series of medium tanks, its a fair bet collectors will likely see these subjects in the not-too-distant future.

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“Tilting” the Battlefield to the US Army’s Advantage

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If the US military has its way, tiltrotor aircraft will form the backbone of its heliborne forces for much of the early 21st Century. Resembling the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, the V-280 Valor, under development by both Bell Helicopter and Lockheed-Martin, is being designed to replace the aging UH-60 Blackhawk and AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, two very dissimilar aircraft that could be combined into one role to save on costs, parts-sourcing and other mitigating factors.

According to Flightglobal.com, “those attending a land warfare exposition by the Association of the United States Army in October are likely to see a V-280 mock-up on display as a utility platform one day and an attack variant the next. And, perhaps on the third day it will transform again into a medical evacuation platform.

Despite army desires to build two separate, specialized vertical-lift platforms to start replacing the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk and Boeing AH-64 Apache in the 2030s, Bell thinks both missions could be performed by one identical or near-identical rotorcraft based on the Valor design.”

While the US Marine Corps could be convinced to transition to one universal platform, the US Army still remains dubious about the proposed concept.

“The medium category is going to be two aircraft with two capability sets,” Maj Gen Michael Lundy, who heads the Aviation Centre of Excellence, told BreakingDefense earlier this year. “We’re not going to build a sub-optimised aircraft.”

Still, Bell thinks an AV-280 concept might gain traction, and it plans show off its utility and attack configurations on different days at AUSA. The company already builds attack and utility derivatives of the UH-1 Huey for the USMC (the AH-1Z Viper and UH-1Y Venom), and recently demonstrated forward-firing rockets and missiles on the Bell Boeing V-22 tiltrotor.

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The F-35 Can’t Dogfight

F-35 Dogfight

According to an F-35 test pilot, the F-35 isn’t a capable dogfighter, unable to turn or climb quick enough to keep up with a fictitious adversary. The single engine, fifth generation joint strike fighter is currently being deployed across several services, including the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy, replacing a number of aging weapons platforms.

“The F-35 was at a distinct energy disadvantage,” the unnamed pilot wrote in a scathing five-page brief that War Is Boring has obtained. The brief is unclassified but is labeled “for official use only.”

The test pilot’s report is the latest evidence of fundamental problems with the design of the F-35 — which, at a total program cost of more than a trillion dollars, is history’s most expensive weapon.

The U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps — not to mention the air forces and navies of more than a dozen U.S. allies — are counting on the Lockheed Martin-made JSF to replace many if not most of their current fighter jets.

The Pentagon counters that the F-35 wasn’t designed for close-in knife fights that form the essence of a one-on-one dogfight. They claim that because of its advance avionics, stealth, and other characteristics, the plane was actually designed for stand-off combat, in which the aircraft would take out a target from a distance of several miles. Frankly, this was the same logic that was put forward when the F-4 Phantom II was introduced in the Vietnam Conflict, as many argued that the days of the dogfight was over in favor of advanced missile technology. The result proved so disastrous that the F-4 eventually had to be configured to carry a gun pod below the fuselage so it could deal with enemy aircraft should its missiles fail, which oftentimes proved the case.

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