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Along with the group of F/A-18 aircraft, the Hornet’s Sting update introduces one more famous fighter to War Thunder. This is the first non-VTOL aircraft in the game to be equipped with thrust-vectoring nozzles. It’s also one of the most advanced members of the Su-27 family: some give it a “four plus plus generation” tag. Please welcome: the Su-30SM!
Conquering the sound barrier took multiple years of hard labor and ingenuity. Designers had to create engines suitable for flying at at least transonic speeds, adapt the airframe to the new environment, change the wing shape, and make it durable enough to sustain supersonic loads. Last but not least, the anticipated ‘sonic boom’ needed to eventually go from an achievement to a routine event, and that meant that all the cutting-edge solutions had to be as simple and cheap as possible.
Compared to the armored vehicles mass-produced by the giants of the military industry, Italian tanks made in the middle of World War 2 looked pretty pale. The resource and technology scarcity that began in the Interwar period meant bad news for the mechanized units of the Kingdom. Italian crews could only dream of vehicles like the Soviet IS tanks or the German Tigers. The Ansaldo and Fiat companies were looking for a way to create a more modern machine for the army, but the only vehicle that reached mass production was a ‘light heavy tank’ called the P40.
Sometimes, production hell leads to the most unexpected consequences. In the late stages of the Cold War, the US Army spent more than a decade trying to settle the requirements for the new generation of main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. The anti-aircraft vehicles fared a little better... At least, at first glance.
In late March 1994, the skies witnessed the maiden flight of Europe’s new symbol of military might: the Eurofighter Typhoon. Aircraft engineering companies from the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Spain joined their efforts at the last stage of the Cold War to create a contemporary combat aircraft that would fit their requirements. They couldn’t pick any of the available foreign offers for reasons of pricing, quality, or politics, so the only remaining thing was to design their own machine.
In the last decade of the Cold War, the military shifted its attention to ‘multirole combat vehicles’ that could be used against both ground vehicles and aircraft. Most of the projects, although there weren’t too many of them to begin with, eventually got discarded, but some machines managed to see the light of day. The Italian OTO Melara company, for instance, created a new system with the sophisticated name of ‘OTO main anti-aircraft tank for intercept and combat’, better known as the ‘OTOMATIC’.
Should someone have a competition for the most unusual aircraft created during World War 2, the Dornier 335 Pfeil, which means ‘arrow’, could surely fight for one of the top places. With an engine and a propeller in both front and rear, this machine was surely exotic to say the least. The layout had actually been used before, during the First World War, but it never became popular due to a number of unsolvable issues. Among those issues were the high vibration of the long drive shaft connecting the pushing propeller and the low effectiveness of the tail surfaces.
