Ejecting at high altitude is not generally recommended. Parachutes don’t work above about 17,000 feet, and there’s that much more chance that things will go wrong with the seat in freefall, as our poor FSR pilot is finding out here. It’s a long way down.
So! Here’s the last page of the little comic I threw together during the fall break. Take a look! And incidentally, since your votes have vaulted 6-Commando well into the top 200, I may just make a weekly sketch or something a feature. It’s utter nonsense, this ranking system – totally artificial. But publicity is publicity, so there you go, I guess…
And of course, there are two more Comics of the Week! Check them out!
Supervillainous: The Crimson Claw is a family man, fiercely devoted to the people he loves, and…largely indifferent to the rest. He’s a well-known supervillain who played the game the smart way, and built both a home and one heck of an arsenal. In the capes world, life can be chaotic, and it’s not easy to raise a family. The Crimson Claw, however, is hardly the type to back down from a challenge.
Retroblade: In the year 3007 a reality crash has wiped everything out. The last known survivor, Axel Kepler is working his way backwards through time, trying to figure out where it all went wrong. With a severely out of touch Database, a Transmutation Device for food (that if anything, makes molecules less edible than they were before) and only a cryptic Blueprint left by his sister to guide him, he needs help… He needs a Team. Together, they will find out how to fix things, who the good guys really are… and why people from the future have such cheesy haircuts.
You do know since the early days of ejection seats the seat separates shortly after ejection.
I believe that for aircraft that operate higher than parachute height, the seat is supposed to stay with the pilot in freefall until the altimeter reads that it’s safe to detach and open the chute. This, therefore, is not an optimal eject.
Well, certain “someone” took down swift scout plane with surgical precision. Now this someone has a lot of time to finish off the pilot (or at least his patachute, and let the gravity do its work).
Ah, the suspense must be killing him (if “someone” doesn’t) 🙂
Well, at least until they hit 15,000 feet, that’s for sure.
Can whoever fired that laser track the pilot too? Because if it can, there won’t be enough left for them to bury…
There’s going to be a lot of freefalling debris. Picking out the falling pilot from that would probably be kinda tricky until the chute opens, and by that time the altitude may be low enough that the angle for the shot just isn’t there anymore.
Killing a defenceless enemy is technically a war crime. I take it even in a heated ideology fueld war in the 6-Commando universe they do have some respect for The Hague or Geneva convention (or their fictional counterparts) and the sanctity of human life.
Aside from the ethical imperative not to kill someone who is no longer a threat, capturing the pilot of a stealth recon plane should prove more useful than killing him.
Mathieu will comment on this, for sure.
Nice work so far with this new chapter. I wonder if it is a flashback from the past or taking place in the current timeline. Maybe it’s also another of MIKE’s mind “intrusions”.
I also like that other story evolving at the TobWebComics-site.
Its only a warcrime, if your side loses. Its unfortunately a truth, that warcrimes tend to be determined according to Victor’s Justice, where in it is the winning side, who decides what is and is not a warcrime or an attrocity.
Remember, If rebels are on our side, they’re freedom fighters. If they’re on the enemy’s side, they terrorists.
I we kill civilians, its “Tragic Colatoral damage, if the enemy kills civilians, its a warcrime.
If we invade country, its a nessasary but regrettable step for stability and freedom, if the enemy invades a country, its naked aggression and imperialism.
There’s a euphemism to cover anything people want to do to each other, but that doesn’t make it okay.
If he was traveling supersonic when he ejected, it may be a mercy if whoever shot the plane shot him, too.
http://jalopnik.com/5894022/what-happens-when-you-eject-out-of-a-jet-at-800-mph
That plane definitely didn’t go supersonic. Not with those wings. You wouldn’t need to shoot down a plane that tried to go supersonic with a design like that, you’d just have to make sure you stepped out of the way of the falling wreckage.
With long, flat wings it’s designed for high altitudes. You can’t see it from any of these angles, but it has anhedral wings, too, to maximize lift in thin atmosphere. It files high, but not fast.
Not sure if U-2’s and SR-71’s even had ejection systems…
Okay the U-2 does have an ejection seat, and the seat stays with the pilot until they reach 15,000 ft.
The SR-71 and its kin did have an ejection system – http://www.ejectionsite.com/sr1seat.htm
That’s not to say it was any fun to eject at Mach 4, mind you…
It’s definitely no fun to eject from any aircraft at ***ANY*** speed, or so I understand.
Members of Martin-Baker’s famous ‘Ejection Tie Club’ ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin-Baker ) usually come away with wrenched muscles, compressed vertebrae and so forth. Enough physical consequences that a pilot will probably require some degree of medical treatment before they are fit to fly again.
Oh shit you updated the comic on TWC?
Why is everyone doing this to me
(ok it’s just you and NotImportant, but still, I feel fooled)
I’ll find a good place to put all the pages sometime soon. It was just a brief interlude, so’s you could see what I was doing when I was “on vacation.”
“Looks like I’m walking…”
Once you hit the ground you are, anyway. Long way back to Russia, though…
😉 It’s the last line from ‘Midnight Run’. one of my all-time favourite movies ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk7F1OVve8s )
The last joke in the movie being that DeNiro’s character, after all he’s been through (a lot), now has a fortune in thousand-dollar bills but nothing small enough for cabfare.
Not that our Russian pilot friend is in anything near as good a situation.
Not a correction or anything, but it’s interesting to note that on real life Soviet designs, the ejection handle is supposed to be activated by placing both your hands through it palm upwards, so that when you pull it up both your forearms end up against your torso. This is to ensure that your elbows are in for the ejection and you don’t lose your arms on the edges of the canopy, especially if the canopy itself failed to eject and you have to go through the plexiglass.
Also, in order for the seat to separate, it first deploys a drag chute from your headrest so that you’re properly oriented and not tumbling, then you’re kicked out of the seat and you can open your own parachute, which until that moment was your seat cushion.
Source – from around 12 I used to hang around the Kogalniceanu Airbase because I had relatives working there, so I got to see a lot of MIG 23s and 29s close up. I also got to meet a lot of interesting pilots, including one who had bailed out of a MIG 23 twice in a year (he was grounded after that – the g-stress of ejection really mess up your spine) and he told me all about it including showing me the seat he used and letting me try on his suit, etc.
Oh, and speaking of those nifty high-altitude suits – the most interesting feature is the fact that the helmet collar is attached to the torso front and back with tensioned wires, so that the pressure inside the suit doesn’t just rip it of and send it flying like a champagne cork… Also, it takes about 45 minutes of lacing to make the suit fit you, especially if you’re a scrawny kid…
Jeez, well, not for nothing, but I’m one of those “ground guys” and with little experience with Soviet emergency-egress technology. In my defense though I got the little wind flow-obstructing disc, which keeps the pilot’s chest from caving in under forward wind loads. 😉
Incidentally, this isn’t meant to be an optimal eject, either – the plot has broken free of the ejection seat far too early – the stabilizing drogues (I think modern seats have two, actually – or are they rigid booms?) didn’t deploy, sending it into an anticlockwise spin and threw the plilot free of the seat. Hence the deployed but unsecured chute. Might still make it, but this isn’t the way it’s supposed to go.
I’ll add, by the way, that although I guess I must have assumed it, I didn’t know that Soviet high-altitude suits laced up the same way as U-2 suits do, though I guess it makes sense. I kind of just gave the pilot a modified version of the Soyuz pressure suit, which wouldn’t make the most sense from a mobility standpoint.
But heck, it’s all a comic… 😉
Yeah, it’s a comic and it’s your world, which is why I didn’t mean my words as criticism 😀
I was just commenting because through some coincidence I happened to know how an ejection scenario from a Soviet jet takes place, using the KM-1 seat from the MIG 23.
On the other hand, the ejection sequence you drew is entirely plausible as “alternate-tech” because the seat looks like a composite of the Zvezda K36D (the current one on late gen MIG29s/ SU27s with the wind obscuring disk and twin drogues on rigid stalks) and some US designs, like the Martin-Baker Mk. 10 SJU-5 fitted to the F/A-18 Hornet.
And especially if you say the ejection didn’t go as it should,… yeah, I can see that happen. Keep up the good work!
I don’t know when my plane is disintegrating in a big Fireball around me, ejecting, even a bad one sounds like a much better idea than trying to ride the burning hulk down. I’m fairly certain here that the blue-on-blue came from M1E’s replacement who doesn’t want to go back in his pen. He’s just telling his former masters that he doesn’t appreciate them trying to blue-on-blue him. In that case I’m not even sure the Geneva Convention applies.
For the record, I think this pilot is a Red, not a blue.
Sucks to be you dude sucks to be you!