ORIGINAL: Mark Basel
Doug, I remember the ACMR pods they would hang on the pylons. You could go watch in real time on a big screen and see what was happening or go to a debrief for your unit and see how your pilots did. It was cool seeing how things went and who was shooting who and how.
Yep.. Those pods were designed to have roughly the same drag/aero characterstics as the AIM-9. Newer generation aircraft are actually having the TACTS pods built into the aircraft. The F-117 was the 1st, and as I understand it, the F/A-22 and F-35 are both carrying the system internally.
The original system was limited to 4 aircraft due for a variety of reasons. My father spent the better part of 2 years back in the early 1970's at MCAS Yuma installing/testing the 1st ACMR system. VMFAT-101 was the primary test squadron back then when they were Rhino drivers. Pretty sure Buck Garza wound up in that unit here at MCAS Miramar for awhile
It was called ACMI by the Air Force, ACMR by the Navy, and then someone finally got the bright idea to have a single name for the systems and called it TACTS. The last update I saw handled 128 aircraft and I believe has been updated to include ground units now as well. I'm sure it's an even better system now.
Oh.. and it used to have a cool little miniature golf game built into the debriefing system too for those 'down' times.