About The shadow airplanes in the battles

Day 3,295, 19:28 • Published in Romania Argentina • by L E V I A T A N
Hello everyone, its been a long time since my last article, and because I care about my followers (??? I decided to write a new one.

Maybe you noticed that when you throw a small or big bomb in a battle, some shadow airplanes start to pass from both sides. You may think "woaaah this is so freaking awesome!" and then return to your tanking, but... have you wondered what airplanes are those?

I've the answer, for almost all of them and without other topic, lets go and see! you may surprise yourself on what you will find 😉

Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit




The B-2 is a stealth bomber, meaning that it can avoid radar detection thanks to its particular shape, it can carry up to 80 250kg bombs or 16 1000kg bombs. Each one of the 21 B-2 built costed around 2.1 BILLION USD which means the entire program costed the orgasmic number of 44.7 BILLION USD, yes you read that right.

Sukhoi "Flanker" + unknown fighters




So, we have a bit of a dilema over here, from one side the upper shadow is obviously from a member of the "Flanker" family, the point is... which one? there are several of them, from the one that started all, the Su-27 to the ultimate Su-35. If we consider that the Su-27 was the first of them, we should go ahead and talk about that one.

The Su-27 "Flanker" is the direct response from the soviets to the USA Grumman F-14 Tomcat and McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle after 809 units built and over 320 still in service only in Russia, it has become the most common fighter jet in the Russian Air Force. It can carry up to 4500kg of armament and each unit cost around 30 million USD.

On the other hand, the two shadows below are very tricky to figure out, it could be a MiG-31 or a F-15 or a Panavia Tornado and tons of other options. If any dev reads this article, it would be nice if you could tell us which airplane or airplanes you used for the shadows.

Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye




The name of this fellow is pretty accurate, it's designed to work as an airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) airplane, which means it can detect aircraft, ships and vehicles at long ranges.

The big "dish" is in fact an also big radar (most aircrafts have their radars inside the "nose" so you can actually figure out how much big this one is).

The Hawkeye can track more than 2000 targets to a range greater than 400nm (this is around 640km) and each unit of those costs around 172 million USD

Unkonwn Forward-swept wing jet




This one is very hard, after a day of searching I've come to the conclusion that the shadow aircraft used in here is not real, the upper image aircraft is the Grumman X-29 but as you can notice, is different from the shadow one.

So, we don't have a specific airplane, but maybe you're asking to yourself "what is a Forward-swept wing?" let me give you a short answer to this, it's one of many wing configurations, this particular one gives you more maneuverability at high speeds and high angle of attack (this is good for fighters), but the reason you don't see many aircrafts with this wing shape is because they are unstable and hard to recover from a stall, leading to a possible death.

A final word about this one, if any dev knows which model, concept or SciFi was used here, please let us know!

Lockheed A-12




At first I was about to present this as the SR-71 Blackbird, but then I looked deeply and noticed that the body is way too thin to be the last one, also the SR-71 has a litle tip at the rear of the fuselage.

The A-12 was a reconnaissance aircraft built by the CIA's request (I guess you realize its purpose by now) It is the father of the SR-71 and other two aircrafts (the YF-12 and the Lockheed M21).

After some incidents involving USA spying on the soviets and these ones shooting down their spy airplanes; USA designed the A-12 to fly higher and faster than any other, by doing so at 95000ft (29km) and Mach 3.2 (3500km/h) they were widely used on Vietnam to photograph SAM sites at the safe altitude of 80000ft (24km)

As an offtopic note, these missions where the origin of my profile phrase "Though I fly through the valley of death I shall fear no evil. For I am at 80000 feet and climbing."
Well my friends that was all for today, I hope to read you soon and I wish all the best for you! until next time.

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About the shadow airplanes in the battles

https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/2621796/1/20

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