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Danger Zone, a C:MANO Let's Play

Rufus Shinra

Well-known member
For Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations owners, I stumbled on a pretty nice French take on the Falklands War.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1679578385&searchtext=french

The scenario takes place in 2020, Maduro going expansionist to keep control on his collapsing economy, and thanks to political support from Russia and China, Venezuela actually manages to get away with invading Guyana (the non-French one) and Suriname. Caracas is now looking towards French Guyana and tries to act quickly to keep its momentum. "Terrorist attacks" cause important losses in the French garrison in Guyana, as all players move their forces ASAP. The French CVBN and an amphibious force are sent from France to Guyana while an emergency redeployment of six Mirage 2000-5 and two nEUROn stealth UCAV is made on a local airstrip (expendable forces as whatever is deployed there wouldn't last long if forced to fight alone).

The Navy is within a couple of days of its goal when Venezuela invades in an attempt to get a fait accompli before the main force gets in range. The order of battle involves a few dozen Sukhoi, 30 and 35, incredibly annoying helicopters, armoured forces crossing the border, SSK, mines and a few surface ships on the Venezuelian side. On the baguettes, a CVBG centered around the Charles de Gaulle CVN, and introducing the next-generation Suffren SSN rushed into service for this operation, two Mistral amphibious landing docks with an aging escort and a full load of transport and combat helicopters plus ground forces, the expendable forces in Guyana proper, and a bunch of A400M transports plus A330 MRTT based in France. The A400M can do some tactical refuelling and those based in France carry equipment to build a small airstrip to land and refuel (but not rearm).


The scenario is interesting in showing how important omnirole capabilities are for modern aircraft (Rafale, Su-57, F-35), as many of my bombing flights ended up being re-routed to do air superiority missions. The couple of stealth drones was also surprisingly useful, thanks to their sensors that were critical in a jungle environment with a low cloud ceiling making it hard to find enemy armour from high altitude and to guide air strikes. A great demonstration of the use of remote sensors/effectors. The three A400M that were initially present in French Guyana also became war-winning assets in the first day, being my only available tankers to keep the air cover in useful range while the aircraft carrier was still a bit too far for confort. This first day required a lot of micromanagement, both for the tankers and the drones to locate and illuminate ground targets. Finally, a superb David vs Goliath fight between the Mirage 2000-5 and the two dozens of advanced Flankers, in which the question isn't whether they survive but how many bogeys they can take with them before going down over the jungle and whether they can keep the tankers safe.


Now, let's go to the... Danger Zone!



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Tactical situation minutes before the invasion. The police station on the border with Suriname will be attacked by mechanized infantry, starting a 48 hours war.

Near the station, on the coast, you'll see the landing zone where I'm supposed to deploy the amphibious and heliborne troops, which are currently prepping in the Mistral group in the middle of the map. They'll have a dozen Tigre helicopter gunships from the Army as support, and the Suffren SSN is in front of the force to open the way. The Mistral LHD are escorted by a second-rate stealth frigate (La Fayette class) and an elderly anti-air frigate (elderly, as in, uses SM-1 rail launchers as its main armament, it's that old). A recon group with an older frigate even and another second-rate stealth frigate is in the South to cover any inbound underwater contact trying to close in, as the Venezuelan forces have a German-built Type 209 SSK and two Russian-built Lada SSK. Now, the Lada are a real issue, they are modern SSK armed with Kalibr anti-ship missiles. Asshole piece of Russian engineering that go subsonic for most of their flight and then drop their first stage to rush at Mach 3 when they get close. Problem is, my Mistral's escort are armed only with SM1-MR and Aster 15 anti-air missiles which have a range too slow to intercept the Kalibr before they start their rush, making interception a very risky proposal if missiles are inbound.

The CVBG is further Northeast, closing in fast. You can see in the white window part of its air group, ready to take off, and on the right side of the screenshot the ammunition and fuel available to the battlegroup. The 6 Mirage 2000-5F, the two nEUROn and the 3A400M are in the Félix Eboué airport, in the cluster of buildings in Guyana. East of the cluster is the area where my A400M in France could drop the landing strip building equipment.


On the left, French forces (translation: Gulf War, France sends a squadron of twelve trucks "Time to kick ass.")
On the right, Venezuelan forces (translation: for 3 MiGs bought, one pins free!)

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Yeah, gonna kick some ass.

My first move was to launch my CV's Hawkeyes (dedicated radar and surveillance aircraft) in Mission Arabesque, in which they'll relay themselves to keep active and passive watch over the combat area while Rafale with an air superiority loadout take off to keep everyone polite. Two of the Guyana-based A400M take off to get away from the action and offere refuelling services. The Mirage 2000-5F are being prepped by the mechanics while their pilots received the last rites from local priests: they're deader than dead but will have to make their sacrifice count before the reinforcements can come. Première action, je lance mes trois Hawkeye dans la mission Arabesque, ils vont se relayer pour assurer la surveillance active et passive de la zone, tandis que des Rafale chargés en air-air décollent. Mes deux A400M prêts en Guyane sont lancés vers le large pour les mettre à l'abri et servir de ravitailleurs tactiques. Les Mirage 2000-5F sont encore en cours de préparation, les pilotes reçoivent les derniers sacrements : ils vont devoir faire payer leur peau aussi cher que possible avant l'arrivée des renforts. The yellow polygon shown on the previous picture shows the estimated position of an unknown radar emitter, the area getting smaller and more accurate as time passes and both the emitter and my planes move.

Sadly, I didn't take screenshots during the Mirage's last stand, but after one hour, they all went down at a pretty steep price for the opposition, as you can see:

[umg]https://i.ibb.co/vwWjkg1/French-Falklands-2.png[/img]

Honour to those who fought well, taking down 12 planes and 2 helicopters for their own 5 (one Mirage was stuck on the ground with mechanical issues). A Rafale M F3R is selected and you can see its white radar cone, and you can compare it with the yellow radar cone of a Su-30MK2. This width is critical in air combat as the more advanced plane can keep a good track on its targets and guide its missiles while doing a lot more complex maneuvers, so in a duel, the Su-30MK2 will either have to move in the direction of the enemy missile or dodge and leave its missiles on its own until reaching the planned activation point whereas the Rafale can move 70° away and guide its missile while ending far away from the Su's missile's activation point. Welcome to AESA radars, in this case the RBE2-AA: assholish, effective and discreet, leading to several Su-30 and Su-35 getting whacked by the carrier's plane as a first flight is prepped to attack the invading mechanized infantry column.

Second critical advantage, the Meteor missile. First of all, it has a higher max range than the Sukhoi's missiles, modelled in-game at 75 nm (compared to 60 nm for the Sukhoi's best missiles and 45 nm for the Rafale's other missile, the MICA). Second advantage, Meteor has a ramjet rather than a rocket engine. In C:MANO, as soon as a missile gets beyond 50 % of its max range, its hit probability decreases as it loses its kinetic energy (in the game, once a missile gets a lock and manages to catch up its target, its sensors are tested against the target's defensive electronic warfare suite, then again against decoys and then against the dodging maneuvers of the plane, the last check using the updated hit probability). For Meteor, this decrease in effectiveness starts at... 75 % of its max range. So the Su's missiles start losing effectiveness at 30 nm while Meteor starts to do so at almost 60 nm. In long-range combat, it has no equivalent on Earth, as IRL.

The infrared-seeking variant of MICA also was an amusingly effective weapon for medium-range combat, better than the radar-guided one. Finally, an early cruise missile salvo against an air defence radar ended as a complete failure as my missiles got detected and shot down en route by OPFOR planes.


On the lower-left report list, you can see how useful it is to have tons of sensors on your plane, the SPECTRA electronic warfare suite detecting the enemy helicopters' radars while the plane's radar is accurate enough to classify the helicopters using their radar returns.

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Each aerial contact gets its own radar detected, identified and classified by SPECTRA, the Hawkeye and the nEUROn flying South of the selected Su-35K (the nEUROn flight is the double blue half-circle near the coast). BTW, that flight just dropped four laser-guided bombs on the mechanized infantry to welcome them to the jungle. Imagine two stealth drones flying barely above the treeline at Mach 0.9 and bombing you without warning. Sadistic but deserved. Meanwhile, the fighters are toying with the Su-35K, making them shoot at max range for zero effectiveness. Notice also in the report list the red-coloured ones indicating the detection of enemy missiles more than 50 nm away, thanks to the high-performance infrared cameras on the planes. It makes evasive maneuvers so much easier.

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Now, an enemy Mi-35 gunship has been attacking the now-defenceless airport, but the last A400M tanker/transport pulled a fucking Ace Combat move and took off under enemy fire while the gunship destroyed the last Mirage in its hangar (remember, the one with mechanical failures) but missed... the last surviving nEUROn drone (one of them got shot down while coming back from a raid).

This, people, was a mistake that would be discussed by historians for decades, as this drone would make sure the ground invasion forces would suffer hell. In good part thanks to the Rafale flight you can see on the West near the coast, fully loaded with bombs but still taking a couple of minutes to whack an enemy air superiority fighter. Omnirole, baby. Overall, our losses at this time are one Rafale, six Mirage 2000-5F, one nEUROn, exchanged for 2 F-16, 3 Mi-35, 6 Su-30MK2 et 9 Su-35K 17 fixed-wings shot down for 8 lost, and the score is going to get higher soon...

Meanwhile, in Vera Cruz, or somewhere else above the Atlantic Ocean, the A330 MRTT and the A400M are flying towards Guyana, but suddenly...

French-Falklands-5.png


VAMPIRE VAMPIRE VAMPIRE !

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South-West of the Mistral group, we just got what is poetically called a "flaming DATUM" a submarine-launched cruise missile taking off and moving towards allied ships. The Combat Air Patrol detects it instantly and provides an approximate location of the shooter. Remember the Kalibr missile I discussed earlier? Well, that's those fuckers right there. The stealth frigate Aquitaine isn't in a proper position to use its modern Aster 15 missile, so the only available warship would be the Cassard, wit its semi-active SM-1MR Block VI missiles, AKA an obsolete piece of crap.

The landing ships' only survival chance, with their full load of infantry and vehicles, lies in the air cover, and only one of them is in range with another that could afterburn to provide support, knowing that it'll run on fumes afterwards and need the tankers to not crash-land in the ocean.

French-Falklands-5a.png


The first Meteor does a fully vertical dive on the sea-skimmer, gets a radar lock. 95 % base hit rate, but with an interception angle at 110° that pushes the hit rate down to 58 %. The Kalibr's small radar return pushes its even more down, to 48 %. The sailors and ground-pounders pray to MBDA, the missile designer...

French-Falklands-5b.png


The 100-sided dice is thrown and lands on 18, lower or equal than 48, and it's a hit, the first Kalibr disintegrates itself above the waves. The sailors start looking for papers to throw around the CIC in celebration before remembering that:

1) They're not in the USN;

2) They'd have to clean everything up afterwards;

3) The regulations in the Marine Nationale removed most paper and shifter to e-mail;

4) There are three other missiles incoming.



New prayers to MBDA instead, but the following interceptions are done even more easily, the plane having gone to a lower altitude to get better shots on the Kalibr missiles

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The Rafale pilot gets his sunglasses and starts singing "Highway to the Danger Zone" on an open channel, knowing that from this day onwards, he'll never have to pay a single beer anywhere in Britanny and Provence. Which is damn-well deserved because without him, there would have been one or two ships sunk directly by these Kalibr fuckers.



Meanwhile, another boat is going to remind the Lada SSK that it isn't really welcome. I present you the Suffren SSN:

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A Lynx anti-submarine chopper has a perfect firing solution on the Ladar while the Suffren is coming in hot, but the decision was taken to give the shot to the submarine, because you don't get every day the chance to score the first official sub-on-sub kill since the last World War.

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Two F21 heavyweight torpedoes in terminal approach, 1,600 m away from the future mass grave.

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It was one too many. The Russian-built decoys only had 15 % chance of fooling the F21... which could have gone back for another run again and again until it ran out of battery... an unlikely outcome, the F21 having a range higher to Mk48 ADCAP or UGST torpedoes, an being IRL much stealthier than what C:MANO posits, thanks to its fully electric drive.

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Time to strike back now, with a triple-pincer attack on the enemy airbase near the Guyana border: cruise missiles will break the door by destroying the SA-17 (Buk-M) anti-air missiles, giving an opening to the last nEUROn stealth UCAV to locate precisely the targets and illuminate them for a Rafale flight loaded with bombs.

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As the strikes go, Maduro tries a Hail Mary with several Su-30MK2 with anti-ship missiles. They are detected way before they come in range, and lose two-thirds of their numbers before running away as the handful of missiles gets shot down mercilessly.

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After one way, another Rafale and a naval helicopter got destroyed, in exchange for... 14 Su-30MK2, 15 Su-35K, 2 F-16 and a shitload of helicopters. And the SSK. Oh, and two elderly frigates that tried to come into missile range and each got six heavyweight bombs for their attempt (I doubt there was anything larger than a coin floating afterwards). By then, it was just a final sweep, with the Mistral deploying the gunships to go highway of death on the remaining invasion troops in the jungle. Venezuela tried dropping some airborne troops, but without dislodging my amphibious ones, and Maduro pulled back after one or two hours of this.

A pretty interesting scenario overall that requires some decent management of all the assets to achieve a victory, showing the importance of the early hours, where most of the war was decided. Once the initial push was blunted, it became almost impossible for the OPFOR to turn things around, but had they managed to shoot down my tankers and my drones, I would have been in a pretty bad situation, CV or no CV.

This Let's Play is dedicated to my favourite crayon eater, Doc Holliday, and his legendary analysis of a France-Brazil fight over Guyana.
 
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Meanwhile, the fighters are toying with the Su-35K, making them shoot at max range for zero effectiveness.
I laughed and closed.

UPD. On second thought, some clarification seems to be necessary.

Rufus, you're supposed to have a fully operational brain. Think about it for a second, if an action is obviously doomed to yeild no useful effect, why the serious f*ck the enemy should be committing the said action? The answer is, in reality what you described would mean that the enemy is pursuing some other objective, such as e.g. preventing you from closing in by scaring you off or something like that, which in turn means that in this particular case it's Su-35K are toying with the opposition, not the other way around.

Also, depending on quantity of missiles in a volley the cooperative engagement capability of Su-35 takes care of the natural drop of pK at the far boundary of engagement envelope. Put simply, the shortage of pK per missile is compensated by quantity of networked(!) missiles in a volley, which ultimately produces reasonably high pK per attack.
 
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I withdraw my objections, sorry.
The pilots in this scenario are level 2/5 for Venezuela's side and 4/5 for the French side. 5/5 is called "ace", as you can guess. Though the superior range, electronics, stealth and other elements make for a duck/Su-35K fight a kinda one-sided struggle. Keep in mind that it's the K variant, using the Irbis-E PESA radar, which tends to make them highly visible to EW suites. As for the RVV-SD, well, it's a good equivalent to the AMRAAM, but not exactly a peer to Meteor (that'll be, possibly, the K-77M, if it comes into service). That kept OPFOR in a pretty tough situation overall.
 
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