"Volksarmee fixed-wing air support for TY" Topic

The fact that the East Germans had to rely on Russian SU-25's for fixed-wing air support in TY bugs me, so I bought 4x aftermarket 1/144 MiG-27's (Hobby Craft and Revell) to use as proxies for the MiG-23BN's available to them at the time (they only began to receive SU-22's in '85 which rules it out). I also bought 8x OzMods AS-7 "Kerry" (aka Kh-23) air-ground missiles to sub for the Kh-25's of the SU-25 with no changes to stats.

Because the Flogger's 23mm cannon is less powerful than the 30mm gun of the Frogfoot, I reduced its Anti-Tank stat by 1. The only other change I made was to cap the number to 4 aircraft, similar to the reduced number of Hinds the Volksarmee can have. Thankfully I didn't have to reduce the Aircraft Save stat since the ground attack Floggers have increased armor compared to the more numerous interceptor variants.

SU-25:

MIG-23BN Flogger-H:

Looks good to me. Did they use SU-17's too or was that only the Poles?

Nice stuff. How are you making the new cards?

How are you making the new cards?

I'm hardly a Photoshop whiz so I take what I call a "brute force" approach using just two Windows programs, Paint and Powerpoint.

The front of the card is pretty simple. I just open up a blank slide in Powerpoint and insert an existing BF card in JPEG format as the underlying layer, in this case one of the Volksarmee cards with its tri-color border. The card should be 3.18" wide × 4.29" long. I then pile on additional layers over it as needed. Most of these "new" elements are again taken from existing cards; I just copy and crop whatever I need, save them as JPEG files and insert and position them where they should go.

New text have to be created in Powerpoint. I just select the closest fonts and size them to match existing cards. A lot of trial-and-error at first but it gets easier believe me.

The back of the cards I created from scratch using Powerpoint's various drawing tools, then add and position text boxes as needed. By using the Control and various ⬆ keys together you can precisely place an element anywhere you want.

All the photos and art, like the photo in front of the card and the silhouette on the back, are free for the taking with a simple Google image search. One of the best things I learned working on these cards is that Powepoint has a Picture editing tool which allows you to "crop out" the background of any photo (making the space behind the main subject transparent). You can then save the picture as a PNG file and insert it over any layer you need to give it a different background.

Not the SU-17, but East Germany operated 48 Su-22M4 and 8 Su-22UM-3K until unification, when they were passed on to the Luftwaffe.

Got a pair of MiG 23's myself;was wondering how they'd be used in TY by WARPAC.

I've been building several SU-22 as proxies… not done yet, but they're getting there!

E Germans and Soviets should have the SU17/22 before anything else.

As far as I understand it, externally speaking the SU17 and SU22 were essentially the same aircraft- just redesignations for export marketing with different avionics etc. These models are hardly remembered today but were actually the mainstay of the whole Warpac short range ground attack force in the 70s and 80s.

In the TY timeframe- the SU17/22 would be far more common than the SU25 Frogfoot which supplemented but never replaced it as the basic Warpac ground attack fast mover- the Frogfoot would be a relative rarity, but there were hundreds of SU17/22s.

Mig23/27s would be mostly reserved for longer range strikes so should be really pretty rare over the battlefield, though I guess if it's allowed in the rules, folks will do it whatever.

Generally, we wargamers deploy fast movers over the battlefield too frequently. To get an idea of the actual planned fast jet use for both sides in a European war- it's well worth picking up Alfred Price's 'Air Battle Central Europe'- a meticulously researched gem from the 1980s. Very reasonable on Kindle.

I admit I went with the MiG-23 because I think it looks cooler than the SU-17/22, not simply because the East German Air Force had them sooner. There was also the fact that eventually the SU-22's outnumbered the ground attack Floggers 54 to 18 in the Luftstreitkräfte der NVA.

And I did read that the operational readiness of the SU-17 exceeded those of the MiG-27 and SU-25 in 1985.

I'll post cards for you SU-17 and -22 fans later to use as substitutes for the Frogfoot.

I don't consider the SU-25, Harrier and A-10 to be "fast movers" since they are subsonic. The only TY-approved fast mover is the Tornado IDS of the West Germans.

Absolutely agree with the statement that jets conducting CAS are over-represented in war games and to read Prices book, it's excellent.

That being said, if you really want DDR LSK jets, considering using MiG-21s. The vast majority of their JGs were equipped with one flavor of the MiG-21 or another, and they trained in ground attack as a secondary role.

I don't do TY, so have no idea if they're on the game or not, just have spent an inordinate amount of time researching the LSK

Good point about E German Mig 21s as potential CAS assets. I've seen one or two photos of Soviet and other Warpac MIG21s with 80mm rocket pods underwing. Not optimised for CAS but certainly capable of it, and by the mid 1980s hardly more risky as a mission than tangling with F16s etc…

Fanatik- I've really never heard of supersonic capability being a defining quality of 'fast movers', or 'fast jets'.
One thing I can say is that the RAF certainly regarded its Harriers as part of the fast jet force. Subsonic Harrier pilots were in the RAF's fast jet aircrew occupational speciality along with Jaguar, Lightning and Phantom crews. I'm pretty sure that A10s and their pilots were regarded in the same way by the USAF. All of the times I've ever heard the term fast movers or fast jets used is to describe combat jets in general- never with any qualification about maximum speed.

I'll take your word for which aircraft types TY might approve as fast movers. I would be pretty surprised to see a Tornado in a CAS role in a real conflict (Luftwaffe had lots of Alpha Jet As earmarked for that). On the other hand, I would also be surprised to see a Soviet ground force which fielded as many Shilkas as BMPs- though that seems perfectly allowable from some of the games I've seen.

I think A2A fighters with a secondary ground attack role may be more prevalent in reality but are ignored by necessity in Team Yankee because CAS in TY has to defeat MBT's.

The A-10 and SU-25, the two most points-costly aircraft in the game, are versatile all around and equally good against heavy armor and infantry. The cheaper Tornado and Harriers are dedicated tank killers with their cluster bombs and dispensers.

My goal isn't to replace them with other aircraft more likely to be available to NATO and the Warsaw Pact between 1980 and 85 in Europe but to come up with possible alternatives that could still be reasonable and realistic. This is why the MiG-23BN here and the F-16 in my other thread conform to the stats and point costs of the existing TY SU-25 Aviation Company and USMC Harrier Attack Flight with only minor tweaks due to the individual aircraft involved. For instance, I had to lower the Anti-Tank stat of the MiG-23BN's gun to 6 from the SU-25's 7 because it's 23mm caliber as opposed to the Frogfoot's 30mm cannon.

I'll post a new thread later tonight for the SU-17 and SU-22 cards to use as SU-25 substitutes and an updated one for the MiG-23BN as well upping its maximum number to six as per the SU-25 Aviation Company allowance.

"Fast Movers" is any jet-powered ground attack bird. Prop-jobs are not fast-movers. And then you have helos at the bottom of the speed stack.