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Sabre21 -> RE: Helicopters in FPC (1/10/2015 7:38:10 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: MaxDamage
I just dont get it why the soviets have lower morale. Soviet/russian morale was high in every 20 century war. If you heard about Stalingrad or Kursk. I cant find an explanation for this.
I was stationed in the former west Germany from Jan 83 to Dec 85 and then again from July 88 to Jun 90. From my experiences working with the various Nato allies, the US, Brit and German morale was almost always very high. Even after extended times in the field, morale was never an issue.
As for the Soviets, I would say that in the early 80's it was pretty good, but between 88 and 90 it had gone down quite a bit. I encountered Soviet troops on a few occasions, and those border and Spetnaz units were always very professional and no doubt highly motivated. As for the regular line units though that was a different story.
With 25% new conscript replacements every 6 months, these units were constantly having to retrain to maintain even basic skills. They didn't have a professional NCO corps as western forces do, so these duties were left to officers. Maintenance and morale was a big problem in the late 80's. There were plenty of reasons for this though, the war in Afghanistan was coming to a close and not going their way, the Soviet Union was collapsing from within and there were plenty of soldiers not getting paid for up to 6 months..yea...morale was going down the toilet then.
Now, let's remove those negative factors and say money and effort was put into building up the force in preparation of a war with the west, then I would say morale would have been good as would their maintenance.
Another comment to add is that the Ka-50 wasn't in being in the late 80's early 90's...nor was the Longbow Apache. Both were very early prototypes. As for helicopter losses, no doubt there would be many, especially amongst my cobra brethren since we operated right up on the FLOT (air cavalry). The apaches though could hang back 5 to 8 kilometers and fire hellfires all day long without even seeing the target. Later versions of the hellfire missile extended that to 12 k's.
As for the dual rotor creating more air disturbance, that's an interesting one. I know the heavier the helicopter the more powerful the rotor system must be thus creating more disturbance. But I'm not sure if the KA 50 would create more than a comparable sized single rotor helicopter. This has to be a pretty noisy helicopter though, because where you get most of the noise is where the wind from the main rotor interacts with the tail rotor on most helicopters. With this one, like a Chinook, you have 2 large rotors putting out a lot of air disturbance interacting with each other. That equates to a heck of a lot of noise.
The best rotor system for aerobatic maneuvering is a fully rigid system. The old huey and cobra had a semi-rigid system which could only use 2 blades. Then you have an articulated system which most helicopters use. Finally you have the fully rigid which up until the advent of strong composites were restricted to light helicopters like the Hughes 500 and Bo-105 types. There is a lot of stress put on a fully rigid system and that increases dramatically as the weight of the aircraft goes up. The Comanche was the first in it's weight class to use a fully rigid system due to the all composite rotor blades. The program was shut down in 04, but had the Soviet Union still existed, I have no doubt it would be in operation today.
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