What modern weapon platform (excluding nukes) would be most effective

How tough is the dragon?

How maneuverable is the dragon?

What abilities does the dragon have?

How smart is the dragon?

>>43528609
>Travel at mach 1
>See dragon several km away
>BRRRRRRRRR
>Bye dragon
You don't even need missiles

Railgun.

>>43528669

Stop being a roodypoo and answer the question

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>>43528609
>>43528696

>>43528609
What's most important is being able to pierce the dragon's armor. That's about it.

>>43528724
Anti ship missiles then

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>>43528712

Wow you seem like a blast I bet people love gaming with you

>>43528786
Ask a vague question, get an unhelpful answer.

>>43528762
Dragon scales are even stronger than ship hulls, so that can't be right.

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>>43528803

>>43528762
No, anti ship missiles are good for making a really big explosion. Not saying they wouldn't work, but they would be serious overkill, and they aren't intended for targets as small and nimble as a dragon. Any sort of anti-vehicle weapon firing a sufficient amount of armor piercing rounds would do it easily enough.

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>>43528689
>hit dragon from beyond the horizon at mach 7
It'd have to be at like 40,000 feet to even see the ship.

>>43528852
>anti-vehicle weapon firing a sufficient amount of armor piercing rounds
>thinking normal armor piercing rounds are enough

>>43528689
Railguns could work, they do pierce depending on what its firing and the output.

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>>43528876

>implying 30 mike mike depleted uranium rounds wouldn't be overkill

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>>43528609
A Regan Era USN battle group

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starstreak_%28missile%29

and likely any laser guided modern anti-armor weapon.

>>43529053
Just how fucking strong is this dragon?

>>43529053
Honestly, if they sail that close, I wouldn't be surprised if a SR great dragon could take out half of it in one breath.

>>43529199
That's just for show. They'd be a lot more spread out normally.

>>43529462
You say that like they know how to deal with a dragon.

>>43529484
Hostile target, airborne.

>Unleash the Phalanx

>>43528609
Depends on the setting. If its a d&d dragon that has damage resistance/magic then it would require an enchanted missile or bullet to be effective.

>>43529587
Okay, it's effective. How effective is the enchanted missile or bullet? Would it require more than one to take out the dragon still? Is the dragon quick enough to dodge?

>>43529587
Not especially. D&D has rules for hardness and HP of objects. I'm pretty sure anything that can fuck up a modern warship can deal enough raw damage to make a dragon very, very sorry for being here.

>>43529750
Have you already converted modern warships to D&D stats? I'm waiting.

Woah... I never thought I'd have a legitimate usage for this link.
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cSzw9eUZOs

>>43529770

You could do it with D20 modern probably. It has stats for tanks. A main gun for a tank does 10d12 damage with HE shells.

>>43528609
AC130 105mm canon.
That, or a fucking A10 team loaded with a bunch of whatever has enough penetrating force to penetrate the Dragons armor and explode inside.
Unless your dragon is some kind of magical Mary Sue, he can't possibly survive, and/or even get a chance to fight back.

>>43528609
What about biochemical weapons?

>>43529530
They needed the entire Luftwaffe and magitech to take out Feuerschwinge and she was half asleep.

>>43529906
>A10s
>implying a proper dragon wouldn't outrun it

>>43530085
>They needed the entire Luftwaffe and magitech
and even then it still took months and millions of lives until they could deploy it against her

isn't she also pretty low in terms power compared to Lofwyr or something?

>>43530040
I dunno bro, they aren't technically immune to disease but they have a pretty high fort save. Don't forget that as dragons get older they get access to spells, including cure spells.

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>>43529587
>enchanted missile or bullet to be effective

Shouldn't be a problem

>>43529822
That's it.

Thanks everyone for coming

>>43530085
The Luftwaffe is pathetically small and under-equipped.

>>43529906
>Unless your dragon is some kind of magical Mary Sue
It's a dragon, depending on setting they can be an entire race of magical mary sues.

>>43529906
>Using the A10 as good against anything
U havin' a giggle m8? A10's are shit and have been shit at their intended role for decades with literally every other combat plane in the theater doing their job better.

>>43530602
B-but
Muh BRRRRRRRR

>>43529898
>A main gun for a tank does 10d12 damage with HE shells.

Is that considered a large amount of damage?

>>43530310
Thousands. Technically she just rekt shit around her lair.

>>43530085

It might be able to outrun an A-10, but can it outrun a bullet? An anti-air missile?

>>43531076
or you know
the best answer
>>43528864
>>43528689

>>43530958

Yes. It is basically guarenteed to one-shot anyone but someone near level cap.

>>43530958
Typical Adult Dragon has close to 200 Health and strongest Breath attack does 12D4 damage. Tank would probably wreck that fucker in three or four hits. Great wyrm (Strongest Dragon, basically a God) has more than 500 HP and Breath attack for 24D4 damage. It would take several Tanks to take it down, but great wyrm dragons are exceedingly rare.

So, yeah, Dragon God can be killed by a squad of 5 or 6 Tanks. Dragons a shit. Modern Weaponry wins.

>>43531598
You wouldn't even need tanks. If the dragon insists on flying just hurl SAMs at the fucker until it falls out of the sky. If it's on the ground you use ATGMs instead.

>>43531598
Fuck, I was looking at Black Dragon for that. My bad. Red Dragon attacks for 12 D10 as an adult and 24 D10 as Great Wyrm, and health is more like 250 for Adult and 660 for Great Wyrm. It'd be like fighting Godzilla, but a team of 7 or 8 tanks could still handle it. Tanks do fucktons of damage.

>>43530602
I forgot that a typical dragon came with SAMs. Oh wait, they don't.
>>43530958

D20 modern is just 3.pf except modern day. Something like magic missile would work exactly the same and do the same damage in d20 modern. The health and attributes scale the same, (14 =+2 modifier, etc).

So it would, in theory, translate.

I can only imagine what exploding 30mm damage at several thousand rpm would do dice wise, but it's not like we have a shortage of A10s.

When in doubt, a BUFF fully loaded with 72000 pounds of explosive can always carpet bomb it if/when it lands. Or MOAB it's cave entrance.

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>>43531686
What about Pathfinder not-Godzilla?

>>43530602
>A-10s are shit meme
Go away Lockheed. The A-10 has the best accuracy in the force for CAS missions, the best loiter time on target for infantry support, and the lowest operating costs.

>Muh F16 sortie rate
Includes all the times they have to return to the barn with bombs on the wings due to loiter restrictions, also we've got way more of the Falcon than the Warthog.
>Muh B1 strike numbers
Voted most likely to JDAM the shitter instead of the house with the sniper in it. Counting bombs dropped when you need two is disingenuous.

I get that the jet jocks don't like the A-10's mission, but you fags won't let Army fly fixed wings, so eat shit.

>>43531695
JDAM kits can hit helicopters, if you've got a man with a laser, you could probably get a dragon with one.

Or 160 out of a B1 flying faster than sound...

>>43531734
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpBngmCpUrU

>>43531757
>but you fags won't let Army fly fixed wings
>tfw the only reason the AF and Marines survive as branches is staggering amounts of PR

A tomahawk and a couple infantrymen with TAG.

>>43531734
Fast Healing would present a great problem, especially if it can escape somehow. 697 HP is monstrous. However, those can be counteracted by machinegun fire (keep hitting it so it stays engaged) and radar (all tanks have them, can coordinate attacks easier).

You'd likely need a coordinated effort between the Army, Navy, and Airforce, and a lot of pilots would probably die. However, I think any modern army, even joke armies like North Korea, could probably take it down if they had to.

This would mean mobilizing a lot of vehicles, though.

>>43532016
What sort of damage type would munitions used fall under?

>>43532042
Although it says the monster is immune to fire, munitions would generally be concussive damage since the explosion makes a lot of force and spread shrapnel and shit everywhere.

So, probably neutral damage.

>>43531757
>best accuracy in the force for CAS missions, best loiter time on target for infantry support, and the lowest operating costs
You're wrong on literally all counts. The 'danger zone' for friendlies is orders of magnitude larger for the A-10 than with the fleet of fast movers.
Its loiter time is PATHETIC, there's a damn good reason the F-15E and fucking B-1 performs more CAS than the A-10 has in the last decade.
And lowest operating costs? Fuck man, the entire reason they want to scrap the A-10 is because they cost way too much for what they can do. They're a large fleet of aircraft that do everything worse than everything else and don't even have the excuse of the F-16 being a fucking light air superiority aircraft that has been twisted into a multirole.

>won't let the army fly fixed wings
The Army has refused twice now to consider taking the A-10 fleet. They don't want them.

>>43531734
He literally can't hit or catch the right kind of fast mover, and while I don't have the rules for a GBU-54, but a B-1B can drop 160 of them from up to 15 miles out, higher in the air than his breath weapons or rays can reach, slave them to a laser designator, and expect sub meter accuracy (too bad fast movers seem to carry GPS JDAMs almost exclusively IRL).

If they each do tank shell damage, they'll kill him in one go. But they do way more than tank shell damage, he's meat paste.

>>43528876
A regular farmer with an axe can beat dragon armour with a little luck. Any anti armour weapons are going to be plenty.

>>43532103
The big danger zone is for a gun run, not for bombs, you twit. A JDAM from an Eagle, Falcon, or Bone is almost always GPS guided, a JDAM from an A-10 is going to hit my laser, not some desk rider's interpretation of my strike call that's 10-30 minutes stale.

Further, guns and rockets let the A-10 effectively engage dispersed infantry targets, something that JDAMs are fucking shit at if the terrain isn't smooth.

The A-10 is cheap to fly but they're trying to dump it to save enough to buy another half a F-35 because they've been told they need to draw down costs in the new more peaceful world Obama has forged for us, and the A-10 is the smallest and least sexy rice bowl they can offer.

The only drawback to an A-10 or whirly bird as CAS was the fact that they could get you a fast mover so much faster.

The A-10's cost per hour of flight is almost 5 grand less than a Falcon's, it's literally the cheapest jet to fly in the inventory, cheaper even than those biz jet VIP transports.

>>43531598
What the fuck? Great Wyrm doesn't even do any attacks in your simulation. If he just stood there and took it, of course he's going to fucking die.

>>43532442
>the only drawback
You forgot to mention that they are also pretty much the only thing that outside a fucking helicopter that can get shot down by goat herders with russian surplus MANPADS from two decades ago.

HEAVILY depends on the dragon type. If it's a 3.5 dragon of any reasonable age, the fucker's way too smart and magical to get hit. He's assumed the shape of the president and mind controlled the important parts of the army already.

>>43532507
It only gets one action per round. Six tanks get one action each. Even if it wins imitative, it kills one tank, gets raped by the rest.

>>43532507
>I cannot into reading comprehension.

>>43532555
How many did?

0

The Iraqis got one with a Roland SAM, but that's not a MANPAD. Might as well cry about losing Falcons to SA-3s. Combat aircraft face losses, it's inevitable.

The Airforce has hated the Warthog from day 1. Every argument they offer as to why they cannot afford to field the A-10 revolves around maintaining the PR environment they need to protect F-35 procurement.

Not reality.

>>43532599

This guy's got it right, I think. If it's a D&D dragon (which seems to be what everyone is assuming it is), then he's going to be less Smaug and more supervillain-who's-also-a-high-level-caster.

Yes, modern weaponry would wreck the shit out of just about anything in D&D. But a dragon wouldn't ever need to fight to take over the world. Shapeshifting and mind control are just about enough to take down the world on their own, not to mention if he actually had a decent spell list on top of it--and nobody in our universe even knows Detect Magic, let alone Dispel. The fucker'd be unstoppable.

If he decided to tank a hundred fighter jets, sure, he'd lose. But dragons have high INT and WIS, they're not damage sponges.

>>43528609
Id say a single tunguska russian AA vehicle would do the trick, or for that matter any modern cannon based AA

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>>43528609
THIS.

2K22 "Tungusca" self-propelled anti-aircraft vehicle.

>Hunting a dragon? 25 horsepowers per ton on treads, if a crawling dragon can pass there - this thing can follow him. Has it's own radar for spotting the dragon, still can obtain targeting data from AA command and control in case you are using an entire regiment with better eyes against an army of dragons.
>Dragon is going to attack a town? Prepare an ambush, hiding your sole Tunguska in high bush. At 18km dragon is spotted and tracked, 8km - missile away, around 7km dragon ded.
>Got ambushed yourself? 30mm dakka-dakka with Twin Linked in the ugly dragon mug and, armor and ventilation designed to withstand nuclear blasts at close range will laugh at all but most insane amounts of dragon breath

This thing is literally the best you can have in case of dragon threat.
>Aircraft
Maintenance up your ass, vulnerable to dragons attacking your airfield (unless you have AA covering your base, but then why you need aircrafts?), and we can have a shitton of scenarios where it's impossible to use air support
>Tank
Your target is AERIAL. This ain't no fucking Battlefield - tank cannons suck at this, period.
>Tactical Operators Operating Operationally
GB2 Hollywood.

>>43528689
One problem
>modern weapon platform
>not "perspective future prototype"

>>43532442
>>43531757
>>43529906
I understand Americans love their BRRRRRRT, and A10 is a damn fine aircraft, but using it against a highly maneuverable aerial target is Doing It Wrong.

>>43532734
It wasn't just any Roland SAM, it was an un-upgraded Roland 2, putting it at least twenty years out of date. The A-10 is a great plane, but it is increasingly vulnerable and the battle doctrine it was designed for is obsolete, meaning that it is only deployed in low or no threat environments. The F-16 can carry the same weaponry except for the cluster bombs, which you wouldn't want to use in a CAS mission, and the gun, they actually developed a version of the gun for the F-16. Meanwhile the F-16 can carry a greater variety of bombs and perform gun runs.

It should be noted that Air Force itself is looking to replace the A-10 not with the F-35, that's just a stopgap measure, but with a specific low threat CAS program similar to the Super Tucano or Scorpion.

Also, only one F-16 was shot down in Iraq 2; for comparison 3 Falcons were shot down in Desert Storm while 6 A-10s were lost due to being shot down or to damage caused to AA fire.

>>43528686
>Travel at mach 1
>AWACS sees dragon a hundred km away
>Fox Three
>Bye dragon

Now let me ask you, would you rather be 100km+ form the dragon, or 'several'?

>>43533643
> and the gun, they actually developed a version of the gun for the F-16.
They tried that gun with the F-16 in the Gulf War by mounting a cut down version on a pylon.

It was terrible. The pylon bent on firing, the pilot never had a reticle to aim it, and the plane went too fast to effectively put rounds on target.

>>43533916
That and against the targets you'd realistically be using it against it's overkill.

>>43533643
>Super Tucano
This is exactly what we need to round out the low and slow CAS options. It is far more practical than trying to desperately keep a shrinking numbers of A-10s airborne in the face of old age, or god forbid rebuilding the production line at the cost of untold billions.

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>>43530602
hey nigger,

>>43531757
this.
40,000 times this. you must be one of those DOD-type cocksuckers who thinks whatever the USAF head office issues in a paper is the way of the world? dude, the US military is a bureaucratic, political nightmare, and USAF general ship is in a slap-fest because the USMC and SOCOM love those fuckers, and the brass would rather win their bitch fest against them than realize there's a reason they ask for BRRT.

>>43533815
>AWACS sees dragon a hundred km away
>bringing in AWACS
Now this ain't fair. Next thing you say, the entirety of continental US was dropped somewhere in the middle of the setting to hold up all the logistics.

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>>43529053

this tbqh

>>43533328
>Enter thread
>where the fuck is my SPAAG
>Tunguska
Muh nigga.

I'll note that tanks are actually decent at hitting low flying helos. Fire control has gotten far, but even an Iraqi tanks used airburst rounds against UK helicopters during the Iraq invasion. Russia likes to shoot ATGMs out of their barrels and some of them are accurate enough to intercept helicopters as well.

But I'd rather take a Tunguska or a Shilka any day of the week for dat RoF, Radar, and gun elevation.

>>43534112
You mean the turbroprop from south america? I don't know man, there's CAS and then there's COIN operations, the former needs a fast plane that can avoid getting shot down by AA and carry heavy weapons to bust armor.

>F-15E flying at an altitude higher than a dragon can go
>Drops a few JDAM's on the dragon when it's on the ground

that'd do it. dragon wouldnt even see it coming

>>43535296
>>43535296
>Drops a few JDAM's on the dragon when it's on the ground
Or drop a JDAM on it when its flying. Unless it moves faster than it drops, a JDAM will kill the target.

Its the IRL rocks fall everyone dies.

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>>43529530

Phalanx is the last line of defence

the cold war USN had multiple lines of air defence due to the constant threat of whole regiments of soviet supersonic Backfire bombers capable of launching multiple AS-4 Kitchen anti-ship missiles each

>Tomcats use long range Phoenix missiles to thin the herd of bombers before they can launch their anti-ship missiles
>every air defence radar in the battle group lights up
>incoming bombers fire their anti-ship missiles
>Cruisers sling SM missiles at the incoming anti-ship missiles
>if any get through other escorts sling RIM missiles at the incoming missiles
>if any get through then Phalanx tries to shoot them down
>if they get past Phalanx RIP in peace CVN

>>43531598

Assuming the person who is controlling the dragon isn't a retard, he can simply keep dragie' out of the tanks' LOS.

>>43535293
>fast plane
>avoid getting shot
What part of that sounds like an A-10 to you? I'm not looking to replace the F-35 with the Super Tucano, nor the cold war A-10 that in theory would be carrying 10 Mavericks and popping T-72s by the company, just the A-10 in and only in its current role.

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What about if the dragon was on the part for dragons in the iron kingdoms warmachine levels of power?

If I remember form the old monsternomicon from the source books torus offspring had created ratings between 40 and 60.

Man I wish I still had that book. It had art showing one of them picking up a steamship one handed

>>43529053
God bless America.

>>43528609
The very fact that you have to exclude nukes points out how OP modern militaries are versus a single dragon. I'd rather see a larger scale (pun intended) matchup: a nuclear-armed carrier battle group versus a flight of dragons.

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>>43528609

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A single maduce.

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>>43536618
also works well against bombers, fighter jets, cruise missiles, and the occasional airliner.

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>>43528609
Assuming d&d dragons in a straight up fight, dragons lose under the firepower of combined arms with varying losses.
If you wanted some kind of intresting outcome, you need to put the intelligence of the dragons in play, not just raw combat power.

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>>43536665
>and the occasional airliner

>>43528609

Depends on the dragon

>>43536684
Ukraine separatists apparently.

>>43536698
Nice try hohol

>>43536330
if the dragons are anywhere but the open sea or maybe siberia you're going to want to avoid using nukes though

>>43536678

This is perhaps the most important insight made in the scenario so far: a dragon might not be physically indominable by heavy weapons, but it certainly will try its hardest to avoid being hit by them once it realizes their capablities.

>>43536684
Russians.

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>>43536684

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>>43536698
>>43536717

>>43536721
>>43536739
Go away RIDF.

>>43528609
The issue is this: D&D has the only consistant statistics for Dragons. SADLY any attempt at modern weapons has made firearms practically USELESS even in normal combat.

Look at d20 Modern's sad-sack of firearms. The best is 1-2 d12.

Now scale that up to fighter aircraft. The best a missile is intended to do is 3d12 at best. And this depends on who you talk to. Then there is that pesky DR.

Here is the problem then... how do you properly scale a weapon?

A F-22 carries the nasty AMRAAM. A missile designed to take out ANY flying target, no matter how tough, even the legendary A-10's armor.

You're telling me that a Dragon's scales which are probably as thick as an A-10's metallic hide can stop a high-explosive round, which could level a building? Which could sink a trawler if needed?

Yeah I know what card you'll play. "Magic Bitch!". Sorry, if that card is played you lose the game. Your typical modern Air to Air can ERASE a aircraft with a direct hit, and even if it explodes yards from it's quarry the pilot is going to have to consider how well his maintenance crew packed his Ejection Seat's parachute.

And you're telling me that a DRAGON... a mother trucking DRAGON can tank that shit?

You see where reality breaks here?

>>43536752
UIDF pls go

>>43536759
Sorry but I'm not UIDF, I'm VCIDF.

>>43536768
Vice City?

>>43536774
Vatican.

>>43536786
Hohols are orthodox so piss off

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So how much artillery do you have to fling at a dragon the size of a mountain range (if we are not using nukes), with its heart likely sitting at least one or two km deep in its body, and scale plates a few dozen meters thick and hard as iron or steel?

>>43536856
No nukes?

Start with these and work your way up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_Ordnance_Penetrator

Really though, Ancalagon the Black would call for nuclear bunker busters and better honestly.

>dragon wakes up
>casts divinations for their planned planeshift to a peculiar high tech world
>no magic there? No problem
>dominates one of his thrall wizards into forging an item of "immunity to nonmagical weapons"
>doesn't even need it when he plane shifts in, as the LoTR fanclubs he has mentally influenced has set up a grand welcoming party
>sets up a huge harem of human thralls and vore fetishists upon Fort Knox and enjoys life

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>>43536899
>dominates one of his thrall wizards into forging an item of "immunity to nonmagical weapons"

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>>43536856

use a AShM

they can punch a hole straight through a ship without the warhead even exploding

>>43536899
means magic is physically possible.
US Navy would probably start a Wizard unit and enchant some bunker busters.

>>43529053
>Dragon's hideout is in Central asia
Checkmate, USN

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>>43536975

>>43536949
Good luck in your research when by the time your studies has managed to work out how to tell that magic even exists, the dragon has magiced a realm of control upon the land and now everyone praises and adores him, even your former comrades would lay down their lives to protect him from any harm, all for the low price of a human life every two weeks...

And this week, it's you who has been chosen.

>>43536899
>no magic
Congratulations, the non-magical defense item doesn't is a paperweight, the dragon can't fly or breathe fire, and collapses; suffocating under the weight of its own mass and shattered skeletal structure.

https://youtu.be/dL9_Tldmrhs

If this is a 3.5 dragon of high enough CR and Loredrake, you know the dragon will just be an Astral Projection, right?

>>43534161
air force mechanic here
I can at least vouch that a-10's are pretty reliable, in that they don't break much
f-16's are fucking garbage in particular, and b-1's are hell on earth in regards to breaking the fuck down all day every day

>>43537736
Quick question: Do you think the F-35 will finally be killed off? Is it even superior to what we have in the air right now?

>>43537752
iunno, never worked on 'em.
I was speaking partially from experience and partially the testimony of a co-worker. actually, I basically hate my job and want nothing to do with jets in any capacity.

>>43529587
There are two ways to get around DR. Catering to the damage type that bypasses it and overwhelming it with such force that it doesn't mean much.

Guess which method our modern military would use?

>>43536758

In pathfinder, a 6 pounder is statted to do +10 (8d6+1/×3), while as stated above the mighty 120 mm does 10d12.

A dragon attempting to take high-calibre shots to the chest is going to find itself turned into swiss-cheese; the difficulty is actually hitting them with such weapons, which you need a dedicated AA vehicle to do.

>>43532629
I highly doubt a dragon that's lived long enough to become a great wyrm did so by being stupid enough to face multiple large targets head-on.

It's much more likely that it would open the fight with a low, fast flyby, possibly enough to gain a surprise round, and pick off the first few tanks while moving too quickly to accurately target. Tanks aren't geared for AA.

It is likely that it wouldn't expect the sheer power of the tank's weapons, so what I see happening is that the dragon, after striking despair into the hearts of his foes with a display of terrifying speed and power, lands and presents himself before the cowering survivors so that they might know the face of the god who shall destroy them.
Then he gets slammed by a shot of two, loses an arm, and flips his shit.

>>43536856
One guy with bitchin jewelry.

>>43536938
>straight through a ship
A ship is famously not a mile deep.

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If the dragon is an optimized 3.5 dragon and magic functions in modern-day Earth, then the planet is doomed, since the dragon is less of a brute and more of a hyper-sorcerer.

An ancient steel dragon from 3.5 Dragons of Faerun is CR 15. Yes, 15. Assuming it is a Loredrake like any optimized dragon, it has Huge size, Hit Dice 31d10, Str 29, Dex 10, Con 23, Int 24, Wis 25, Cha 20, skill points 442 (skill rank cap 34), BAB +31, base Fort/Ref/Will +17 (+10 against poison), natural armor +30, DR 15/magic, spell resistance 34 (44 against 4th-level and lower spells), and immunity to acid, paralysis, and magical sleep.

The CR 15 dragon has speed 60 feet, fly 200 feet (poor), swim 30 feet. It has darkvision 120 feet, quadruple-strength low-light vision, and blindsense 60 feet. Its frightful presence extends out to 300 feet, frightens creatures of 4 HD or less, and shakens creatures of 5-30 HD. Its main breath weapon is a 50-foot cone of poisonous gas dealing 10 Constitution damage.

Five terms per day, it can use Alternate Form to assume animal or humanoid form until it chooses to shift to a new form or it changes back to its natural form. In all likelihood, the dragon will be maintaining a human form while wearing an 8,000 gp item of continuous Strength of the True Form (Dragons of Eberron p15), allowing it to make use of its full Strength, Constitution, natural armor, and damage reduction even in an alternate form.

Once per day each, the dragon can use Enthrall, Charm Person, Suggestion, and Mass Suggestion as spell-like abilities.

All of the above comprises about ~1% of the dragon's power. The remaining ~99% come from its spellcasting and its eleven feats.

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>>43538945

The ancient steel dragon has 21st-level sorcerer spellcasting, except that it also has Divination as a 4th-level spell and True Seeing as a 5th-level spell on its list. It has 21st-level sorcerer casting due to being a Loredrake, and knows nine 0-level spells, five 1st-level spells, five 2nd-level spells, four 3rd-level spells, four 4th-level spells, four 5th-level spells, three 6th-level spells, three 7th-level spells, three 8th-level spells, three 9th-level spells (one of which is most likely Invoke Magic for casting in an antimagic field).

The CR 15 dragon effectively has infinite wealth due to any number of spellcasting tricks, and can and will use that wealth to purchase for itself many, many powerful items.

At the very least, the dragon is equipped with a Belt of Magnificence for +6 to all ability scores, a +5 resistance bonus to saving throws item, a Daazzix's Vest for +5 spell resistance, a Spellguard (Shivering Touch) item, a Third Eye Conceal for immunity to mind-affecting effects and divination, a Hathran Mask of True Seeing, a panoply of either Knowstones (Dragon #333 p93) or Drake-Helms (Eberron Explorer's Handbook pp151-152), items of continuous Beastlands Ferocity and Delay Death to render hit point damage is irrelevant, and several Portable Holes, but it will surely be employing many more magic items than that.

The dragon has eleven feats, all of which are from racial HD. Therefore, it can choose all of them as if the feats were gained at its highest Hit Die. It qualifies for epic feats. The dragon picks three iterations of Automatic Quicken Spell, three iterations of Automatic Silent Spell, three iterations of Automatic Still spell, Martial Study (Iron Heart Surge) for further assurance against antimagic fields, and Epic Spellcasting.

Yes, the Epic Spellcasting feat. As if all of the above was not enough, the dragon can completely rewrite reality through the use of epic spells, which it can freely research due to infinite wealth.

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>>43538957

The dragon dwells within a Genesis-forged demiplane and proceeds to conquer Earth using its Astral Projection of itself, mind controlling populations and obliterating what it sees fit to obliterate. This ancient steel dragon would be nigh-impossible for most fantasy settings to trounce, let alone modern-day Earth.

CR 15.

Still feeling confident about taking on an optimized 3.5 dragon?

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>>43533328

The US cannot into SPAAG, pic related.

Actually that's a more interesting variation. How would each nation deal with dragons?

The US would be having it's air force get in boom and zoom dogfights.

Russians would be seeing how well dragons can fly when the atmosphere is 40% fast moving shrapnel and AA rounds.

I suspect the UK and France would be attempting to fight it out with the air force, but the real work would be done by their respective commando units ambushing dragons when they landed.

>>43536715
how would a dragon avoid being hit by weaponry designed to take out targets going 10 times faster than him at least?

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>>43539128

If this is a D&D 3.5 dragon, items of continuous Beastland Ferocity and Delay Death to render hit point damage irrelevant.

Yes, most 3.5 characters can acquire such items. Yes, 3.5 is a horrifically broken game.

This would be a much fairer fight if the dragon was *not* a 3.5 dragon, or at least had access to none of the usual game-breakers.

>>43539212
I'd say a nuke would still work given that in addition to 20 kinds of stupid levels of damage it deals, its also going to deal several hundreds worth of attribute damage point blank from the radiation alone

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>>43539239

Add a 112,000 gp continuous item of Sheltered Vitality (from the Spell Compendium, just like Beastland Ferocity and Delay Death) to the list of items, then. The dragon now considers all hit point damage, ability damage, and ability drain entirely irrelevant.

You have to remember that you are dealing less with a dragon and more of a hyper-sorcerer with virtually infinite wealth and access to planar metropolises and its own private demiplane, much like Eastern mythological dragons rather than Western ones.

>>43528609
Convince the japanese to do research on dragons, it will be amazing to see how fast they make there whaling ships fly.

>>43529587
In d&d a Patriot missile would be in the region of 200d6 damage. DR15 only gets you so far.

>>43529822
All this tells us is that the Dragon wins without DM fiat.

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>>43538924

it really depends on how tough the dragon's soft flesh is. you said that the scales are as tough as steel so that implies the soft flesh under scales is weaker than steel

a big bastard AShM like a Kh-22 could hole the scales but how deep after that it could go and how much a 1000lb shaped charge warhead would do really depends on the flesh

although quantity has a quality of its own too

>each Tu-22M bomber can carry three Kh-22
>each squadron level attack can launch 45
>each regimental attack could launch 180

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>>43528609
Hey /tg/, how big is a dragon? I mean exactly, to the inch, and it MUST be true of EVERY dragon in EVERY setting! I demand a single objectively correct answer!

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how hard could it be?

>>43528813
A scale is stronger than steel, but muh Tolkien ripoff soldiers can stab a dragon, so it's not based on sheer penetrating force. A ship hull missile would push the scale and flex the hide enough to severely dent the dragon, followed by kaboomboom

>>43538970
Do you feel confident about fighting a fleet of navy ships?

>>43539658
>items of continuous Beastlands Ferocity and Delay Death to render hit point damage is irrelevant

Yes.

>>43539425
6 fathoms, 1 metre and 2 inches long

>>43528609
If you put magical bullshit monsters in settings where modern weapons and logic work it doesn't matter what weapon platform you choose because the dragon is so fucked it's not even funny no matter which one you choose.

Natural armour and muscle doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell when you point something at it that can flatten a tank or put a hole through a bunker, from so far away that the dragon is still just a dot in the sky.

If you can take Smaug out of the sky with an arrow you can do it a thousand times over with a shitty quad gun on a rusty old toyota pickup.

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>>43539658
>>43539786

That is an embarrassing typographical error in that quote.

In any event, the CR 15 ancient steel dragon most likely diverts the fleet using a Demand spell (via Knowstone or Drake-Helm) to implant a Suggestion in any target at any distance. If that fails to work for whatever reason, the dragon sends in some of its Greater Planar Binding-bound planetars to decimate the fleet with *their* 9th-level spells, while the CR 15 dragon turns its attention to more meaningful concerns, like employing epic spells to bring the world under its righteous grip.

>>43539212
>If this is a D&D 3.5 dragon, items of continuous Beastland Ferocity and Delay Death to render hit point damage irrelevant.
Okay, but many modern ordinances would still kill it with those items. Delay Death doesn't stop the body from being blown to pieces or disintegrated.

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>>43539891

If we are bringing disintegration logic into play, then add Bracers of Armor with the Proof against Transmutation armor ability.

Now the dragon considers hit point damage, ability damage, ability drain, transmutation effects that would affect its form, polymorphing, petrification, and disintegration all entirely irrelevant.

It can also employ spells such as Ghostform to turn incorporeal; modern-day Earth would need magic on its side to even touch incorporeal entities.

This is only the tip of the metaphorical iceberg for immunities.

It has probably thought of all this beforehand; between base Intelligence 24 and base Wisdom 25 and inherent bonus tomes and a Belt of Magnificence bringing that up to Intelligence 35 and Wisdom 36, it thinks at a level far beyond any human being. It has access to a wide variety of divinations too, such as Contact Other Plane (asking parity questions as is standard) and Vision.

This would, again, be a much fairer fight against a non-optimized 3.5 dragon.

>>43539968
>If we are bringing disintegration logic into play, then add Bracers of Armor with the Proof against Transmutation armor ability.
A missile isn't transmutation. It's just force. Those bracers would be useless beyond their armor rating.

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>>43540049

Either the missile is replicating Disintegrate, in which case it is a transmutation effect, or it does not provide a Disintegrate effect at all.

Disintegrate, by the way, deals hit point damage, which is covered by Beastland Ferocity.

Magic must defeat magic if we are bringing a high-level 3.5 caster into play.

>>43530310
>millions
Incorrect. In the end, the total casualties were tens of thousands of people, mostly German military and the residents of small mountain towns and villages. About 30,000, if I remember right.

She was terrifying, to be sure, and that really is a huge number of casualties regardless of whether you think of her as a natural disaster or a lone mass-murderer.

But it was nowhere near 'millions.'

>>43540141
Proof against Transmutation does not give the wearer immunity to physical attacks. It's quite explicitly a defense against magic only.

>Either the missile is replicating Disintegrate, in which case it is a transmutation effect, or it does not provide a Disintegrate effect at all.
Unfortunately real world physics take center stage when talking about the effect real-world weapons have on living bodies. And unless I'm mistaken, physically tearing something apart does not fall under magical transmutation, even in D&D.

>Magic must defeat magic if we are bringing a high-level 3.5 caster into play.
Maybe, but only if they use the proper spells. A dragon who assumes he's invincible won't have the chance to cast ghostform after he's blown to pieces and killed immediately.

>>43540141
>Magic must defeat magic if we are bringing a high-level 3.5 caster into play.

Nah, there's always Psionics and a high enough level ranger can probably get a pet that's immune to arcane magic entirely.

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>>43540273

>Unfortunately real world physics take center stage when talking about the effect real-world weapons have on living bodies.

We can apply real-world physics, or we can apply WotC d20 rules. We cannot cherry-pick from both.

If we apply real-world physics, the CR 15 dragon immediately collapses upon itself, unable to support its mass, and none of its magic functions.

If we apply WotC d20 rules:
www.dandwiki.com/wiki/MSRD:Starships#STARSHIP_WEAPONS

Then even when blasted by a "1-megaton warhead" from a futuristic starship, the dragon merely takes 16d8 damage.

>>43540320

Psionics virtually counts as magic under the default psionics-magic transparency rule anyway.

What is this about a ranger's animal companion? I have heard of supermount builds in 3.5, but never of one that can compete with a high-level full spellcaster.

>>43540373
>We cannot cherry-pick from both.
Why not? Also, that doesn't preclude physical forces from tearing a body apart. People and creatures can still eat food and lose limbs in D&D, after all.

>even when blasted by a "1-megaton warhead" from a futuristic starship, the dragon merely takes 16d8 damage.
You do realize modern warheads are much heftier than a single megaton, right?

>>43540476
Then they're dealing more damage and not going "lel u ded xD."

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>>43540476
>You do realize modern warheads are much heftier than a single megaton, right?

Modern ICBM or SLBM use multiple 200-800kt warheads instead of the big 1mt warheads of the past. although 3 highly accurate 200kt warheads have a greater effect against hardened targets than 1mt+ warheads.

There is a reason the russians ditched the SS-18 Satan's 20mt warhead for multiple <1mt warheads.

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>>43540476
>>43540543

>Why not?
For the same reason that comparing a dragon statted out in Fate Accelerated to a dragon statted out in D&D 3.5 would be entirely useless: the two systems are simply incompatible and represent entirely different realities.

No matter how high up one goes in this table, the effects are merely more damage.

>MINE, NULL (PL 9)
>This weapon is horrifyingly simple in design. It harnesses nuclear strong force to generate a field in which all atomic bonds cease to exist. Matter in the mine’s square and all adjacent squares is pulverized into subatomic dust.
>A null mine ignores a ship’s hardness.

This deals 10d100 damage, which is still irrelevant in the face of Beastlands Ferocity + Delay Death in continuous item form, or in the face of incorporeality.

>Also, that doesn't preclude physical forces from tearing a body apart. People and creatures can still eat food and lose limbs in D&D, after all.
This takes fiat or special abilities by RAW, not simply damage.

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>rockets
>tanks
>irl physics

What a bunch of casual as fuck faggots. Bottom line: dragons are vermin. A nuisance predator that mauls our livestock and should be shot on sight whenever possible. I ride our fenceline every fucking day and at least twice a week I shoot a fucking dragon on one side of the ranch or the other. If I'm lucky, one 7.65 NATO behind the eye puts them down, but if I miss [it happens, even with ACOG] my SCAR is semi-auto - so I just keep plinking until they stop moving. This stuff ain't hard, nerds. Just cowboy the fuck up!

>>43540621
>the two systems are simply incompatible and represent entirely different realities.
But then the stats you're quoting for starships would be equally incompatible. The abstracted rolls they're using are dealing with an entirely different scale.

Unless you think eight dudes firing assault rifles is the equivalent of a megaton warhead.

>>43540696
Welcome to d20.

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>>43540696

This is incorrect. The hit points and damage of the starships are, in fact, on the same scale as other creatures.

This is why the smallest of the starships in the page, the 24-foot-long "launch," still has 80 hit points, hardness 20, and a laser that deals 6d8 damage.

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One of these. The big difficulty is deploying it safely.

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>>43533328
>Tactical Operators Operating Operationally
>GB2 Hollywood.

Son.....

>>43540848
I'm just not sure why he thinks cherrypicking from fantasy and reality is OVER THE LINE, but cherrypicking from fantasy and d20-make-believe is perfectly legitimate.

>>43540688
>ACOG
>SCAR

Play less shooting games. Shooting a large predator in the eye isn't that easy, and there's no guarantee that would affect a dragon meaningfully.

Depends on the dragon. If it's just one of those little shits Saint George killed, we should be fine with just about anything. But if it's a larger fantasy RPG style dragon you're probably going to need one of the myriad rounds designed for hunting animals like elephants, and if it's one of the still larger you may need a proper anti-materiel rifle

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>>43540912

Mostly because d20 Modern/Fantasy and WotC 3.5 are cross-compatible for the most part, sharing such things as Hit Dice, base attack bonus, Fortitude/Reflex/Will saving throws, and so on and so forth.

We know what an ancient steel dragon Loredrake would be like in WotC d20, and we also know what various types of high-grade weaponry would be like in WotC d20 as well.

We do not know what an ancient steel dragon Loredrake would be like in "real life" in the slightest, so there is no use drawing a comparison there.

>>43536856

Considering one plebe in a flying boat killed it, I'd say a few high explosive rockets would do the trick

>>43541119
>Mostly because d20 Modern/Fantasy and WotC 3.5 are cross-compatible for the most part
However d20 modern's stats are not even slightly accurate. There's no point using it in the comparison.

>>43541159

My favorite thing is the 120' range incrament on the sniper rifles.

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>>43538970

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>>43541159

What mechanics do you propose be used against the CR 15 dragon in this scenario, then?

For that matter, how would you justify the epic spell-slinging ancient steel dragon Loredrake being confronted in direct combat in the first place, as opposed to operating from its demiplane via Astral Projection and its legion of Greater Planar Binding-bound planetars, using magic to force populations to bend to its will?

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>>43539301

What's all this shit? If you're going to talk about dragons with super magic abilities in our reality then we'll just counter with equally unrealistic tech feats such as pic related

>>43541251
Look, we may not have any idea what an ancient steel dragon Loredrake would be like in "real life", but we DO know what actually existing weapons are like. And we DO know that d20 modern is not an accurate depiction of the modern day.

OP didn't ask "how would a dragon fare in my d20 modern game". This isn't something you can just slap with game mechanics and solve like a math equation.

>>43539425

About tree fiddy

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>>43539840
>If you can take Smaug out of the sky with an arrow you can do it a thousand times over with a shitty quad gun on a rusty old toyota pickup.

We are the allahu snackbars, dragonslayers.

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>>43541303

3.5 dragons were brought up earlier in the thread as a reference point. That is why I showcased the extent to which a 3.5 dragon can be powerful even at merely CR 15.

>>43541313

How would ignoring all hit point damage, ability damage, ability drain, and transmutation effects translate into real life, then?

How would incorporeality, for that matter, translate into real life?

How would the ability to Greater Planar Bind planetar after planetar after planetar and formulate epic spells with the luxury of infinite wealth from one's own demiplane (the stagign point for Astral Projections) translate into real life?

This is less of a dragon and more of a hyper-sorcerer, as I have mentioned before.

>>43541421
>How would
>>43528712

>>43528609
SPAAG battery. Something like the flakpanzer Gepard with radar-guided twin 30mm cannons with programmable ammo. I mean, even if the dragon armor is somehow, magically, more durable than airplane fuselage, the wings aren't.

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I posit that a much fairer scenario (fairer for modern Earth, that is) would be a D&D 4e young gold dragon downgraded from solo status to elite status (as per page 218 of the Draconomicon 2), given the Change Shape power prescribed for gold dragons (as per page 219 of the same book), and updated to use Monster Manual 3 damage math.

Let us call this a "very young gold dragon," since it is roughly only 40% as powerful as a regular young gold dragon.

The very young dragon has formidable defenses: HP 190, AC 23, Fortitude 21, Reflex 23, Will 21, resist 15 fire, +2 bonus to all saving throws. It can bring to bear a fiery bite, claws, multiattacks, a breath weapon of weakening flames, and a frightful presence that stuns enemies out of their wits. It has speed Best of all, it can change shape into human form, and it *keeps all of these defenses and attacks even in human form*, so the dragon can trounce just about anyone in a personal-scale brawl.

It also boasts incredible skills by modern Earth's standards: Arcana +15, Athletics +13, Diplomacy +13, Insight +12, Intimidate +13, Perception +12 (with darkvision), all other Strength-based checks +6, all other Constitution-based checks +6, all other Dexterity-based checks +7, all other Intelligence-based checks +10, all other Wisdom-based checks +7, all other Charisma-based checks +8, and an effective Bluff +28 for concealing its true nature from others while changing shape. This means the dragon is far more skilled and talented than just about anyone on the planet; its mind operates on an entirely different level from humanity's.

As per page 83 of the Draconomicon 1, the very young dragon can have whatever rituals are appropriate for it up to level 9, in addition to an extra trained skill (say, Heal) for the purpose of ritual casting.

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>>43541700

Some notable rituals that the very young dragon could employ are Ancestral Whispers (level 6) for gaining skill training as needed, Calm Emotions (level 3) to defuse situations, Change Self (level 6) for further disguises, Comprehend Languages (level 1) and Tongues (level 5) to get past language barriers, Cure Disease (level 6) and Raise Dead (level 8) for ingratiating itself to the locals, Discern Lies (level 6) for cutting through deceit, Duplicate (level 6) and Hallucinatory Item (level 5) for object-based ruses, Fool's Gold (level 3) for similar ruses, Hallucinatory Terrain (level 8) for disguising a lair, Object Reading (level 5) to figure out how an item works, Speak with Dead (level 6) for interrogating corpses, and Shrink (level 6) for theft.

It could even use Enchant Magic Item (level 4) to outfit itself as needed.

Of course, the main challenge for the dragon will be acquiring ritual components; this is hardly impossible. While in human form, it can use its skills and resources to slowly amass such ritual components, from rare incenses to precious salts.

I, for one, think that the very young dragon could get reasonably far in mortal society given such tools at disposal, but it would not be a foregone conclusion.

>>43533643
>they actually developed a version of the gun for the F-16.
And it's hot dog shit that burns 50 hours of airframe lifespan per magazine because of vibrations, and can't achieve a dense enough pattern to fulfill the fire mission until it's closed to within half the range of the A-10's ideal gun run trigger point, do to (again) vibration and reduced rate of fire.

And not only did we lose the same number of Falcons as Warthogs in GWII, but the Warthog managed to RTB every time in Yugoslavia, and we lost Falcons there.

SPAAGS are dangerous to A-10s in a way they aren't to most mud moving CAS missions, but MANPADs have never brought one down, the reason why cutting the A-10 force is a shit idea isn't because the A-10 is going to be survivable in the contested airspace over a peer state conflict, but because it is the best and cheapest plane for the job we're doing now (and will likely be stuck doing until the death of the petroleum economy or the adoption of a new isolationist foreign policy). The cost savings for mothballing them are literally negative when we look at the sortie and deployment cost for the alternatives.

Gun runs in an F-16. You know that's how that Jordanian pilot ended up in that cage, right? Small arms ground fire received in a straffing run.

>>43537752
In the maintenance of the F-35 is supposed to be relatively easy, with few of the parts needing other parts removed to be accessed and the like.

>>43539109
I have always been a fan of the theory that the entire design team on the Sargent York were in fact Soviet Mi-24 Helicopters in disguise.

>>43542183
Your looking at the A-10s all wrong, the cost savings are not in mothballing them, but in not rebuilding the factory to get more when the airframes run out of lifespan, which from my understanding is not all that far into the future.

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>>43536899
dude, you are so fucked.

>DARPA realizes magic is go
>new unit, SEAL team nine, uses SCAR-H rifles +5 with three different load out mag types
>Abrams II comes with a dome of protection as well as a cannon that fires spheres of annihilation
>the A-10 II is fully antigrav, uses the jets as back up, and has a 20-ton payload and perfect agility..plus, due to permanent frost enchantment and bag of holding ammo crate it can fucking BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTT all day and no feel it....
and that's before the A-10 II is equipped with Vorporal +5 30mm rounds of EvilBane


that dragon....is so...fucking....fucked

in case you didn't know, magic don't exist IRL. moment we do find that, welcome to Shadowrun...

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>>43538155
ok,

WHICH PF book has modern weaponry?

i sooooooo fucking need this!!

>>43528686

>Dragon casts Protection from Missiles and Nondetection. Your conventional weapons are now useless and it won't show up on radars.
>Proceeds to fire breath the shit out of you
>You lose

Some settings have smart Dragons with magic and powerful abilities. Some have Dragons that are ancient and mountain-sized. Some Dragons fly in space and eat planets. Some Dragons are more like intelligent animals. Some are just the size of a large horse. Some have magic, some don't.

There are so many fucking variables that the question is fucking stupid.

>>43543142
No, the Airforce wants to mothball existing airframes before they run out their lives. Almost no one is talking about restarting production.

>>43529053
>that battleship
Wut?

>>43529898
Dias that mean I'll have to roll 12 dices?

>>43543346

It means roll 10 dice, each of which has 12 sides. The average roll on a single d12 is 6.5, so the average total there is 65 damage.

>>43543294
When we found out that the Soviets were building the Kirov class battlecruiser, Reagen decided to reactivate and upgrade the WW2 battlewagons, so four of the Iowa class got upgraded to 80s tech with nuclear shells for their main guns, tomahawk cruise missiles, CIWS, modern fire control and radar, and better engines and stuff. The last war they took part in was Persian Gulf 1.0

>>43539380
More like 14d6.
Damage is really fucked up in DnD.

>>43539109
>>43542797
The Sergeant York mostly worked, on a hardware level. They were wedded to using 100% recycled stuff from tanks and aircraft in boneyards as a design fundamental, though.

The 40mm autocannon were from the old M42 "Duster" SPAAG. The hull and powertrain were from an obsolete M48 tank. These parts actually worked. But some bright bulb at the Five-Sided Funny Farm on the Potomac was absolutely fixated on the idea of pulling the ancient (even then) AN/APQ-79 radars out of early F4 Phantoms headed for the junkyard, bolting them to the top of the turret, and somehow or other, through the magic of computers and technology, this jet fighter intercept and target illumination radar was going to work as a gunlaying radar for antiaircraft guns.

They'd have done better pulling the almost equally ancient AN/VPS-2 radars off the earlier M163 "Vulcan" SPAAGs and bolting them onto the Sergeant York. The AN/VPS-2 is a shitty system and it was obsolete before it entered production, like so many US military projects of the Johnson era, but at least it was designed from the ground up as a gun-laying radar.

These days, of course, all the chatter is that SPAAGs are obsolete anyway, now that you can bolt a Stinger launcher to any old HMMWV and have equal mobility and greater range. There's even a "Linebacker" variant of the Bradley, which has its TOW launch tubes replaced with Stinger launchers, and which is intended to spam Stingers at the bad guys until they die.

>>43543452
16" ICMDP was also purchased--fucking scary shit they are, too, each of them equivalent to about a battery's worth of 155mm ICMDP arriving simultaneously in a well-executed time-on-target barrage. But I don't know whether they were ever used.

>>43532599
Even ignoring that. How does a artillery army deal with Greater Shield and Greater Protection From Arrows?

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Phoenix command (that rpg made by a nasa rocket scientist) was made to be compatible to d&d I think.

Human have a average health stat of 10
On d&d this stat is con.

RED Dragon has a con of 31, thats is 3.1 times the human one.

With dex of 10 this means same armor bornus as human, in phoenix command terms I am assuming "same armor" as unarmored human

So look at this table with some damage total a human would have and div by 3.1 to find the dt total the dragon would have.

>>43538945
>skill points 442 (skill rank cap 34)
Its worth nothing that 20 ranks of Hide is equal to being invisible. 30 ranks is a moving undetectable target, and 40 is a completely undetectable object.
And Invisibility is just 20 ranks of Hide.

How the fuck will you find a creature with 34 in Hide, and it can have Invisibility on the top of that?

>>43543928
Obviously you'll have to trick it. Put up signs that say "this way to the free virgin buffet."

and when the dragon gets there, it's an anime con

A 3.pf dragon of any decent age will quickly conquer modern earth, since it has access to the Wizard/Sorceror's spell list naturally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiRo841YjkQ

thread soundtrack?

>>43543452
OK, thanks, I wondered how the xxd6 worked

>>43544182
Why does this thread keep on insisting that modern weaponry will beat 3.5 magic?

>>43544504
Either a willful lack of imagination or absolutely no understanding of how retarded 3.PFs spell lists are.

>>43543831
Average human = Stats 10
Shoot With ak47 (with full metal jacket) and weapon skill as 1
a red dragon

He roll and hit the dragon in the pelvis


the damage total will be 1612
Dragon has to make 00-99 roll
on 00-60 he knocked out
on a 61-94 he is stunned
on 95-96 he is dazzed
on 97 he is disorientates
and on 98-99 he pass the test


also, after 90 seconds the dragon will die (people can try to heal him before those 90 seconds, to try to increase the time before he must make the die roll and the chance of not dying)

>>43544738
god bless kalashnikov

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>>43528609
Yes good goy, kill the dragon, let it's magic infect the world, I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong with that, no siree.

>>43544504
Most people have no idea how broken the basic shit like Shield and Protection From Arrows/Missiles is
And those are not even that broken.
Anything that can use Permanency of even the less broken spell effects has a chance of taking over the world.

>>43544504

This. The 3.5 spells are pretty much kindergarten-level NUH UH. It's like that kid with the force field eating dog. You're putting force fields into a universe with no capability to field a force field eating dog, so there's zero point to the thread except for people to wank NUH UH and show their superiority from their ivory tower.

>>43539109
>UK abd France fight it out with airforce/operator ambush

Nigguh we got the pedigree on this shit. Just gimme a sword and a horse, problem solved.

>>43539109
>UK and France
>implying we don't just need sword, board and trusty steed

Other countries just fuck off (china you can stay), we've been doing this for ages.

>>43544803
the DR/AC granted by either wouldn't be very relevant in the face of modern firearms

incorporeality is what works, trying to stack DR against a stinger is silly

>>43544860
You do realize modern firearms would deal 1D1 per bullet, right? With a ridicules penality for volley fire?

How the fuck are you going to damage anything with damage resistance?

>>43544504
>Why does this thread keep on insisting that modern weaponry will beat 3.5 magic?
Because real life weapons give realistic damage unlike d&d

*unless its not the d&d damage that is unrealistic (as in do less damage) but people/stuff defenses are, a little less lucky

This thread just reaffirms my hatred of full splat 3.5.

> naturally every dragon is a lore drake, and epic level spreadsheets are just CR-15
You must be a delightful player.

>>43544954
>You do realize modern firearms would deal 1D1 per bullet, right?
no

RAW aside, anyone else think its reasonable for overwhelming force to break through certain magical protections?
Like say a protection from arrows/missiles spell fails to properly protect you if you do something stupid like stand infront of a ship mounted railgun

>>43545071
If you're going to throw humanity's full power against something be a good sport and let the other side do the same.

>>43545102
Why would they deal more?
This is D&D. Where a AK47 would deal 1D6 damage for a full magazine.

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>>43528609
The hills are alive
With the sound of BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT

(and also dead dragons)

>>43528609
>DR 7 tops
>25 HP tops
Just need a good rifle to knock them out, and then keep shooting.
AA guns'd tear them to shreds real fast.
A single missile'd send them to the -5xHP for an instant death.

>>43545203
A shame the crew are all mind controlled and consider the dragon their dearest friend. He's also incorporeal, invisible, and cannot be detected.
>>43544825
This.
>>43545071
Even in CORE a dragon would fuck the universe over. Greater teleport, Dominate Person and Greater Invisibility/non detection would be enough to control all the world governments, and a dragon can easily get all of those spells. 3.pf is buttfuck retarded when it comes to magic.

>>43545175
Generalizing a fair bit here but
Longbow projectile has about 80-100 joules of kinetic energy
ak 47 projectile is more like 2000 joules

>>43545131
>full power ...let the other side do the same.
Humanity's full power is not a play ground argument between 7 year olds who have just learned about the concept of arbitrarily large numbers, combined with a bunch of bullshit created by a game company that can't be assed to understand how their own various published materials interact. I mean, that "cr-15" dragon is the sort of thing the awful state of 3.5 has made it the GM's job to say "Fuck-off, Tommy" to.

Pull some fully stated dragons from even the most horrible of caster-edition's published works, and the Airforce will just say GG well into the epic levels.

I cut my teeth on 3.5, I loved playing 3.5, but sometime around 2008 finding players who weren't interested in using an encyclopedic knowledge of low quality splats to suck the fun out of the game became nearly impossible. I want to tell stories and throw monsters at the party, not personally audit every thing you want to put on your char sheets.

>>43545494
>you lose because I don't like the way you want to win

>>43545447
>/non detection
Doesn't do what you think it does. It protects against divination spells.

>>43545116
Force cage etc has always had a strength break DC and a high hardness/hp in my games.

>>43543715

There's something amazing about the York in that there doesn't seem to have been a single good or coherent idea in the entire process side. Like "Why do we need this?", "If we need this why do we need to make it out of spares?" "Why not revise our standards now that it's become apparent it has a preference for locking onto trees, it's own guns, and defense department officials?"

>>43545481
You are thinking about it wrong. Very wrong.
A ring of regeneration already grants complete immunity from organ damage.

>>43545534
That last one is a feature, not a bug.

>>43545535
How does that alter the fact that a bullet is naturally way more dangerous than an arrow?

And it doesn't save you from all organ damage, it saves you from organ damage that doesn't instantly kill you.

>>43545535
>>43545650
Just hitting it with a thermobaric bomb would melt the ring anyway.

>>43545650
>How does that alter the fact that a bullet is naturally way more dangerous than an arrow?
As I said: Not in D&D.

>>43545778
This isn't D&D though. This is the dragon in our universe with our physics.

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>>43545815
>with our physics
Why are you delusional?
What makes you think it doesn't scale?
Remember: D&D is a world where the concept of the planet can be killed by a +5 weapon

>>43545778
Good thing I'm not shooting deer in D&D, I'd have to reload, more than likely.

If the D&D dragon comes to here, we're going to have to remember that it is here, not in D20 modern.

Just as Greater Invisibility doesn't save you from blind sight, it's not going to save you from radar.

>>43545907
What makes you think a Radar doesn't quality as Sound Sight?

>>43545923
>Sound Sight
Because it doesn't use sound.

>>43545650
Protection from missiles fucks it all the same.
>>43545815
That makes things even more dangerous, since if that's true then the dragon can trivially violate causality with Greater Teleport.

>>43546116
>Furthermore, it causes a reduction of 1 from each die of damage (but no die inflicts less than 1 point of damage) inflicted by large or magical missiles, such as ballista missiles, catapult stones, hurled boulders,

Tank shells, AAMs. JDAMs, and Aircraft cannon are not arrows. You'll soak 10 damage with this spell, fighting a D20 modern Abrams, and we've demonstrated that a real life Abrams can do things that a D20 modern Abrams cannot.

>>43546223
Note that this is from the text of the spell protection from missiles.

>>43546116
>hurled and projected missiles such as arrows, axes, bolts, javelins, small stones, and spears.

How much of this shit is traveling more that twice the speed of sound? Oh, right, none.

Fastest crossbow in the world is 6x slower than an AK 47 bullet, 8x slower than an M16. For what reason would your spell trigger on this?

My hunting rifle would out damage a D&D light ballista, a projectile that this spell doesn't protect you from, judging on its performance against bears.

The real modern world is a very different place than the world your spell was built to work in.

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>>43545494
>I cut my teeth on 3.5, I loved playing 3.5, but sometime around 2008 finding players who weren't interested in using an encyclopedic knowledge of low quality splats to suck the fun out of the game became nearly impossible. I want to tell stories and throw monsters at the party, not personally audit every thing you want to put on your char sheets.

>can't handle your players' knowledge bantz

>>43540688
>7.65 NATO

>>43545587
>EA Games enters the Military Industrial Complex

>>43545447
>reater teleport, Dominate Person and Greater Invisibility
The world isn't run by kings anymore. Even if you mind control the entire political wings of nations the Army is just going to catch on and blow them the fuck up.

>herf derf mind control army
cool story. Everyone who doesn't feel like shooting at the dragon or the people who support it gets taken out of command and replaced.

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Like five insurgents with two $500 RPG-7s with HEAT warheads could kill one the size of a building if they didn't instantly die.

.950 JDJ would probably fuck them up pretty hard.

>>43540688
>Doesn't know the proper name
>Implying the Marines, who're the only group to actually get the SCAR series, actually use them instead of the M4A1 and M16A4
>Implying soldiers besides MAYBE a squad lead get optics
>7.65 NATO

You'd get an iron sights 5.56 weapon that can barely drop a human, let alone a dragon.

>>43542648
Yeah... except the people who made it sent mechanics to lend extra maintenance so they can say its been activated in the armed forces. In reality those planes are staying in their hangers if we go to war tomorrow.

Every promise in it being easier to maintain is a total lie.

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>>43544784
Well, its not like anything good will happen with Caim and Angelus around anyway.

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>>43547064
>You'd get an iron sights 5.56 weapon that can barely drop a human, let alone a dragon.
Everyone gets an optic, 5.56 kills people dead good.

Picture is exit wound from 5.56.

>>43547548
Why would you kill that mouse?

>>43546675
> Wanting to have to babysit character advancement to prevent bullshit caused by broken splats.
This doesn't even touch how 3.5 spellcaster shitters tend to forget the limitations of their spells, see >>43546223
It isn't bants, it's shitty powergaming.

>>43547064
>iron sights 5.56
Optics like ACOG and holographic have been universal since we invaded Iraq. Even if we didn't the idea that only squad leaders get vital fighting equipment is horseshit. The only difference you'd see is a squad leader getting the M4 instead of the M16. Except now we're gravitating to everyone getting the M4 since carbines are all the rage now.

>>43547593
>Mouse, bigger than a cope can.
I don't want to live in your world.

A dragon's greatest weakness in such a scenario - he doesn't know shit about RL and it's capabilities. Meanwhile, the general in command of Operation Siegfried played D&D in high school.

Checkmate.

a couple hectopeasants

>>43547719
That can is tiny

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>>43547747
What if the dragon does know about the modern world?
What if the dragon controls a secret Illuminati group of humans to cause global warming and overheat the world and wipe out humanity through capitalism?
What if there is a dragon controlling everything from under the pentagon right now so it can usher in the dragon age?

>>43547979
What if god-king Reagan is causing global warming to slowly kill the dragon?

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>>43547979
>What if the dragon controls a secret Illuminati group of humans to cause global warming and overheat the world and wipe out humanity through capitalism?
Then it's up to communists to save the world.

>>43545447

A bigger threat is that the dragon can dimension door into heaven and hell and eat all the damned and sainted dead of earth without any opposition.

>>43547850
A cope can is bigger than any hole I want in me. I know bad dragon enthusiasts might disagree, but they probably wouldn't call it tiny. You, my friend, are on a different level, calling it tiny.

Seriously, it's like 3 inches diameter, that wound is 5-6.

>>43545447
>cannot be detected.
By divination magic. Not something we use.

>>43529199
>Honestly, if they sail that close, I wouldn't be surprised if a SR great dragon could take out half of it in one breath.
At first glance I was going to say that you are vastly underestimating their size. The big one in the middle is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Theodore_Roosevelt_(CVN-71)
and is 1,092 feet (332.8 m) long.

but then I noticed you said SR, the only thing I can think off would be shadowrun, in which case its not their closeness that matters, its the fact that shadowrun dragons are basically gods. They are literally impossible to touch without very very powerful magic. Nukes don't even bother them, unless its magic nukes

>>43548036
>What if god-king Reagan is causing global warming to slowly kill the dragon?
perfect comeback

>>43545481
Like that has ever mattered whenever they made gun rules. The only edition of D&D that got gun slightly less wrong was 2e, with the d20 adaptation of 7th sea being a valiant attempt.

>>43548316
Again, we don't live in D&D world.

>>43548315
Ronnie likes his dragon steaks well done.

>>43532016
Pretty sure tanks don't have radar, bud.

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>>43528609
Depends entirely on the dragon and if protection from arrows applies to other missile weapons.

Because a single missile cruiser could take out a dragon before it comes over the horizon.

>>43545534
"Why do we need this?" was because pretty much every mechanized army in the world has some kind of self-propelled antiair platform that can keep up with the tanks and APCs in order to make it a bit more dangerous for the opposition to use close air support. The West Germans had the "Gepard" (similar idea to the Sergeant York but actually worked, mainly because the German R&D system wasn't run by people with a recycling mania). Because, for all the promises the Air Force and Navy make about "air supremacy," in the event of World War III the Russians were going to contest the skies over West Germany vigorously and bloodily at an absolute minimum. But yeah, the Germans have the Gepard, the Russians had and still have the ZSU-23-4 and the 2K22 "Tunguska", and so on. It's a role that needs filling, the M163 "Vulcan" was a mediocre design from the get-go and wasn't really up to the job in 1963, much less in 1983, and even today armies that can't be 100% assured of absolute uncontested air supremacy whenever they fight need something to keep the other guys' air force from doing what we did to Saddam Hussein's army on the retreat from Iraq. (See also, "Highway of Death," and the pictures of miles and miles of highways in southern Iraq jammed with burnt-out T59s and BMPs bumper to bumper when Saddam's army started fragging their officers and fleeing for their lives toward the end of the ground offensive in '91)

As for why it needed to be cobbled together out of bits and pieces of obsolete crap from junkyards, this was a decision made at the highest procurement levels, probably by people who spent too much time watching reruns of "The A-Team" and forgot that they were not really Mr. T.

80% of it worked. They even developed new APFSDSDU and proximity-fuzed 40mm ammo to improve the lethality of the guns. The electronics were fixable. Even the Israelis have put better radars and fire control systems in the M163s they still field.

>>43548316
Since the dragon is coming here, what matters isn't how guns work in D20SRD land, but rather how they work here.

>>43539109
Russia is so obsessed with ground based anti aircraft weapon systems, both missile and gun based that I don't think they'd terribly threatened by dragons.

>>43549952

They control the pivot point. They're not threatened by anything, despite the warmongering usa putting their bases right on russia's borders.

>>43531695
>>43531598
>>43531686
>>43539212
>>43540373
>>43543175
>>43538155
>>43543831
>>43545071
GURPS
U
R
P
S

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>>43549952
>Russia is so obsessed with ground based anti aircraft weapon systems, both missile and gun based that I don't think they'd terribly threatened by dragons
VERY true.

Russian AA is multi-layered to insanity. They have machines and complexes for every fucking level of organization - from companies to divisions. Shilka and Tunguska are just the lowest level with the Pancir-S, Strela-10, manpads and the like. Then there come machines like Tor, Buk, Kub and Krug. Higher up you get huegrange collective defense complexes like C-300, C-400 and their modifications. Every layer having both eyes of it's own, dedicated radar complexes and command&control units AND exchanging data up and down the chain, with the highest levels peeking around with massive overhorizons like Nebo-M.

Soviets knew that US are really into superior airpower. So they jumped equally as hard on anything that shoots down flying shit.

>>43550297

Its because every version of MiG ever fielded is shit compared to its American fighter equivalent, and so USSR knew it wouldn't win the air-war, so set out to do the next best thing, and let nobody fly.

>>43528609

Another dragon with cybernetic enhancements.

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>>43550518
>Its because every version of MiG
Well, considering that the backbone of Russian airforce are not MiGs but Su - what does it change?

>>43550676
Nothing.

There was still always a fighter gap.

>>43549646
The warded creature gains resistance to ranged weapons. The subject gains damage reduction 10/magic against ranged weapons. (This spell doesn’t grant you the ability to damage creatures with similar damage reduction.) Once the spell has prevented a total of 10 points of damage per caster level (maximum 100 points), it is discharged.

Again, this spell isn't that good against modern weaponry.

>>43550676

Well, against last generation's Russian fighters, the F-15, America's air superiority fighter of yesteryear has something like 120 confirmed air to air kills with 0 losses.

In air force wargames, the F22 racks up hundreds of kills for no losses against F15s, 16s and 18s. In fact, the only wargames where the F22s have suffered losses have been in ones with our allies where the rules of engagements were skewed to the point of retardation so that the Frenchies could have some good military propaganda on the home front by saying that they didn't get curb stomped like little bitches by the F22, where in any actual fight, their Mirages would have died like bitches.

>>43551134
>Well, against last generation's Russian fighters...
...piloted by whoever but actual Russian pilots. You do remember that the most important element of aircraft is the meat filling between seat and controls?

>In air force wargames
>rest of NATO
>relevance

>>43551225


We work with the real world data that we have, and since Putin and Obama haven't had the decency to declare war on each other so that us internet nerds can get better data on which to argue our points, what we have is what we have.

>>43551134
I find myself wondering about that. I've used some computer games (I know, derp derp) like the old "Flight Commander 2" to run force-on-force simulations.

At least in what is supposedly a fairly realistic, if abstract, sim, any jet fighter starts to die once the odds get p past 5 or 6 to one, unless you've set up an extremely long range engagement in which F14s launch all their AIM54s from 150km+ out then turn and head for home instead of following the volley of missiles in for a guns-only "knife fight" against the survivors.

Even F15s or F16s vs. MiG-15s, when it's six on one, the F16 driver sooner or later runs out of missiles, and attempts to close in order to use guns and BFM. One of his aggressive turns against one MiG15 is going to put him in the gunsights of another, and he's gonna die, AIM9Ms and AIM120s or no. F22s also die a lot when the odds are six on one or twelve on two.

So I'm skeptical about these wargames, what the rules of engagement were, what the models were, and what that implies about the weapons in use. Supposedly the F22 is "low observable" and difficult to pick up on radar. Can an AIM120 lock onto it and kill it, or no? Does anyone know? It's a rhetorical question and I'm sure that if anyone knows the answer is classified.

Nonetheless I personally think about things like pulling F4E airframes out of the boneyard, putting General Electric F135 engines in them (*cough* 2+:1 thrust-weight ratio with a combat load of AAMs) and the full avionics suite that the F22 carries--far from the most expensive part of the aircraft, and that big old Phantom airframe certainly has room to fit them. Load it up with AIM120s and whatever is this week's newest flavor of short-range heatseeking AAM (are they still using the AIM9M? what if we'd adopted the Navy's AIM95 advanced short-range IR seeking AAM forty years ago instead?) and see how this performs compared to more modern platforms. I bet it'd be a better CAS platform than the F22.

>>43551477
>A better CAS platform than the aircraft designed 100% for air superiority

Are you mentally challenged, friend?

>>43551534
No, but the Pentagon is, buying F22s ("Not one pound for air to ground!") when the wars we've had since the fall of the Soviet Union have needed bomb trucks and CAS platforms, not hundred-million-dollar toys for a Fighter Pilot Mafia that still dreams of saddling up to ride through the Fulda Gap to Valhalla.

>>43551477
We are on AIM-9X now.

I like how after it was determined that unless the Dragon was a sorcerer it would be killed this thread became a portal to /k/.

>>43551639
ah. I used to follow that stuff avidly. Back when I was paying a lot of attention, the AIM9M9 was the New Hotness, being better in some unspecified and doubtless extremely secret way than AIM9M5, which was itself much better than the AIM9L--which was itself so lethal that British Harrier pilots over the Falklands called the AIM9L the "Wish Me Dead Missile."

All the ECM/ECCM stuff is fascinating in its own way, but I get the impression that it doesn't matter quite so much when Iran or North Korea is a much likelier foe than the air forces of the Warsaw Pact circa 1989. When your opponents are mostly flying Chinese MiG19 copies that don't even have radar and sixty-year-old F5s, how much more deadly do your air-to-air missiles really need to be?

>>43551762
Sky's the limit. Think of all the awesome Ace Combat games they won't make with these toys.

>>43551600
That's because the US plans for a conventional war you dumb shit. They maintain an overwhelming advantage on conventional force across damn near every field from sky to sea to ground.

You do not maintain a global police force, enforce your political will, or head the largest military bloc in the world by designing your force for fighting COIN operations.

You stupid, stupid motherfucker. Use your eyes and look at why those low level insurgencies are the only thing the US involves itself in, because no one else has the balls to fight them. When they fight conventionally, a war is fucking done, its over in weeks if not days. Occupation is hell but any actual war? There is no force on the planet that has any realistic way to stand against them for long.

Those billions spent on planes? They're used to ensure trillions in US-backed international trade remain secure by enforcing freedom of navigation.

>>43551876
And if the F15s and even the F14 were good enough--good enough and then some--for any conceivable conventional war already, then what?

What do you mean by "conventional war?" Against Russia? Against China? That goes nuclear instantly, within hours of the first shots being fired, so it's not really going to matter whether the Fighter Pilot Mafia has the newest toys when they have to ditch in the ocean because their base is now a self-illuminated glass parking lot. Against anyone else--like who, Iran? Yep, we really need those hundred-million-dollar F22s to shoot down those fifty-year-old museum pieces we sold to the Shah back during the Johnson Administration, they'll kill 'em so much more deader than F15s would, amirite guise?

"stupid motherfucker," indeed.

>>43537866
This. The thinking of the US/NATO military since WW2 can be summed up as "We need bigger/better/faster/stronger guns."

>>43551600
The F-22 is actually very good at air to mud if you don't mind trading away your stealth, and currently we don't, because Assad can't give the Russians good data on the F-22's radar characteristics when he never sees it without external fuel tanks.

And even if we were in a scenario where stealth matters, the nodal E-war capability the F-22 gives us makes it a force multiplier for every other allied plane, and it can still sling like 8 SDBs wearing JDAM kits.

But yeah, shrinking the 22 order looks like one of the biggest blunders of the 90s now, the F-15 fleet is aging rapidly.

Maybe the Israelis will demonstrate how great the Silent Eagle is and we can order some of those, the 22 production line will cost a lot to restart, enough that it might just be better to build a B model instead of just asking for more.

>>43551762
The biggest improvements to the X have to do with gunsight helmet slaving and off-aspect performance.

>>43552009
>That goes nuclear instantly
You really are stupid. Escalation of force is a thing and a philosophy used by every nuclear nation, where the use of nuclear arms is never the first and only option. Please stop living in the cold war propaganda.

Resting on your laurels is the anathema of a dominating power. You do not stagnate and expect to maintain power. If all your potential rivals are constantly seeking to match your strength you need to surpass them. You do not plan for the now, you plan for a future where you are fighting someone equivalent to you. To do any less is to invite destruction into yourself.

You seem to lack any vision of anything immediately past your own nose. Please consider the aircraft lifespans, their ability to be upgraded on those airframes is a finite quantity without new design and increasingly expensive and inefficient without building something from the ground up every so often to actually utilize your new technology effectively.

>>43552009
>Hellcats are good enough, we should never build anything but hellcats because no one will ever build anything better even if we can totally build something better and have plans for it, no one else can ever

>>43552009
Gen 4.5 proliferation is a thing you know, and MAD response is less than guaranteed in peer state conflict. There were plenty of scenarios conceived and planned for where our response to Russian aggression would have had to be less than nuclear, and it is a certainty they had similar war plans in their folders.

>>43552263
>There were plenty of scenarios conceived and planned for where our response to Russian aggression would have had to be less than nuclear

[citation needed]

You do know that the only reason the US and USSR didn't dare to make war on one another other than by plausibly deniable proxies was the enormous nuclear arsenals on each side, right?

This is, by the way, the reason the Warsaw Pact and NATO weren't ever going to do anything but make scary faces back and forth across the Iron Curtain. The Russians had lots of plans. Most of them, from what we learned from the KGB's archives briefly being open in the early 1990s, when they were really hurting for cash, started out: "Step 1. Turn West Germany/South Korea/Turkey/Norway/etc. into a radioactive moonscape, sprinkled liberally with persistent nerve gas and genetically engineered anthrax from that secret lab at Astrakhan..." Step 2 was contingent upon the rather bizarre fantasy that Step 1 could take place without instantaneous retaliation from the West, matching the initial attack warhead for warhead at an absolute minimum, if not escalating immediately to SAC and the Navy's boomers emptying all the holes all at once. But then the Soviet Union itself was founded upon all manner of bizarre and counterintuitive assumptions, to which their leaders played lip service in declarations about how "the correlation of historical forces makes Soviet victory inevitable" right up until they bankrupted themselves trying to prop up dozens of Third World client despots and it all rotted out from under their feet, so one supposes a certain level of fantasy and magical thinking attended their thought processes all the way to the top for the seventy-odd years their rather odd system endured.

>>43552550
If Russia pushed for Iran and her oil, we wouldn't have risked the destruction of Western Europe or the nuclear scourging of the American mainland over them, but we would not have been able to settle for supplying the insurgents like we did in Afghanistan, the stakes would have been too high. That's the example that's strongest in my memory.

War wasn't risked because of fear that it wouldn't stay contained, but that isn't the same thing as a guarantee of general escalation.

File: sprint-lta-900x530.jpg (76KB, 900x530px) Image search: [Google]

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Thread premise is a non-nuclear solution. So ignore the fact that the Sprint missile had a nuclear warhead and focus on the fact that it accelerated at 100g and 5 seconds after launch it was at mach 10. 15 secs after launch it could hit a target at 19 miles up and 25 miles down range. It was designed to hit an ICBM during re-entry with a nuke. I think it would work with a dummy warhead.

>>43552749
replace nuclear warhead with solid mass

>>43552690
If US and Soviet troops had ever met in combat, and it had not been a mistake, some local incident that took place without the approval of higher command on each side, the nukes would have been flying within hours. In Iran, in West Germany, in South Korea, hell, in Antarctica.

And that is why it was never going to happen. The Soviet leadership had no desire to be uncontested masters of a radioactive cinder.

How many million Russian soldiers is it worth to capture a West Germany-shaped puddle of radioactive slag, and almost certainly get everything from the Elbe to the Urals rendered indistinguishably uninhabitable? For the Soviet leadership in the postwar era, the answer was apparently "zero." This is called "deterrence," and it's part of a much-despised, much-misunderstood doctrine called MAD.

>>43552749
Yeah, but what if the dragon waits until the Sprint is withdrawn from service before attacking? Dragons are sneaky and patient.

>>43552805
What if the dragon invented the MIRV so as to render terminal phase ballistic missile interception obsolete...

>>43552850
What if the dragon disguised himself as Merv Griffin and went shopping at Mervyn's?

>>43552805
We use massed starstreaks instead. Not quite as fast or anywhere near as massively powerful, but still reallly fucking fast and capable of delivering larrge amounrs of hurt.

File: TOMG_-_MechaGodzilla.jpg (475KB, 1082x1600px) Image search: [Google]

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Mechagojirra

>>43552911
To fight the dragon, or to substitute for the dragon as an alternate threat?

Either way, now you have two problems.

>>43552896
I don't know, I'd be more comfortable with a massive cold war era multi layer dragon, I mean air, defense program.

>>43552785
>If they had ever fought it would have been nuclear instantly
http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0000309596.pdf

Recognition of flexible response escalation of force was done by both sides during the cold war. The soviets believed it was only a temporary stage in a war for EUROPE or the home land but it was not nuclear assured in conflicts in the sino or middle-eastern regions.

>>43552983
> flexible response escalation of force
Was not implemented in the US nuclear force until the late 80s/early 90s. There was much talk of flexible response before but the Single Integrated Operational Plan had remained "On the word go blow the fuck out of everything."

As for tactical nukes those were already in the hands of low level and even foreign officers. All you needed for a nuclear strike was a West German colonel who panicked.

>>43553806
Which is not necessarily a bad thing, in terms of stability. The Cold War era may, in retrospect, turn out to have been more peaceful and more stable than the 21st Century.

>>43547593
That isn't a can of lip balm.
Thats a can of snus.
Its the size of the bottom of a larger glass.

>>43551039
A missile that misses do not deal damage. And it stacks with the Dragons already insane damage resistance.
With Permanency it would grant it a almost nigh immunity to projectiles.

some sort of mini-gun/CIWS, tunguska or zsu would spit hell at the thing

>>43555545
>A missile that misses do not deal damage. And it stacks with the Dragons already insane damage resistance.
>With Permanency it would grant it a almost nigh immunity to projectiles.

No, that spell is literally pointless against modern projectiles.

File: 1446778826308.jpg (63KB, 500x390px) Image search: [Google]

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Why does /tg/ generally agree that a 3.5 wizard with 9th-level spells could take over the modern world effortlessly, but when the topic of contention is a 3.5 dragon with 9th-level spells and shapeshifting, /tg/ is all "NUH UH WE COULD SHOOT IT DOWN"?