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1. Woggy's Zeonic Frolicks (washedoutgundampilot@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 28-Aug-2023 05:32:05 JST Woggy's Zeonic Frolicks

   in reply to

   @Boomerman @BobsonDugnuttHB @Shlomo The 35 is as close as they’ve gotten to catching up, we’ll have to see how many they can field. The new glass is basically them cribbing lessons from the civilian scene, adding some screens where they can and trying to play catch-up, but they’re still about 20 years behind.

   It’s a passable retrofit, but they still have some room to improve (much like our lightning, which has forgotten some of those lessons in favor of multifunction buttons) The buttons are all too similar, the stick still sits between your legs (not comfy and it uses up invaluable workspace on the lap). It’s as good as they’re gonna get for a time, but it still has the scent of that russian obstinance like they’re too good to put THAT much thought into ergonomics.

   We put a whole lot of research into breaking down EVERY part of the cockpit and making it as inobtrusive as possible. That pays dividends when you’re adrenaline soaked, when you need your eyes on the box and out the bubble. Our stuff has been broken down a thousand different ways to make sure you can operate a box without looking at it, that you can reach your hand and complete basic muscle memory tasks with minimal processing power. Seeing the russian’s solution of having like, 60 identically sized buttons surrounding a panel is something you’d see in 90’s business jets. (Note that the 16’s buttons are kinda caged, so you can feel your way up and hit them in that center console, closer to your body. Further out you have the bigger ones for multifunction)

   Then again, the russian school has some thought behind it too: Every knob represents a subsystem, compartmentalized and more easily serviced. When you combine something into a single control, you end up with our lovely 20:1 maint:flight ratio (generous for some A/C)

   This kind of thing is what I love picking old guys’ brains about. This is the distillation of HOURS of late night drinking asking about development processes and research expeditions to ukraine in the wake of the soviet breakup. Russkies have a very alien approach to a lot of their aviation, some of it is better, some is worse. They just weight different aspects of the mission more than we do. We consider top end performance, cost no object, while they’re grounded in reality to have a functioning aircraft they can afford to repair