KAI KF-38 Black Eagle Concept - A Berkut Aircraft Addon -

Indulge me for a moment and let me take you back to the early 2000s. The War on Terror was in full swing, Windows XP had just launched, everyone was crazy about the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and fifth generation fighter jets like the F-22A and what would become the F-35 family were in their infancy. Back then, Russian aircraft were taken way more seriously than nowadays, and manufacturers such as Mikoyan and Sukhoi were more eager to offer their creations to nations that weren't necessarily part of the Soviet and later Russian spheres of influences. One such country was Korea, which was offered the Su-35 several times before being rejected in favor of the F-15K Slam Eagle.

But... what if Korea had actually taken the Russians seriously? What if they had gone ahead and licensed some of their designs instead of the venerable Strike Eagle for production? This addon mod seeks to partially answer that question, and offer a glimpse of what the culmination of such cooperation would have looked like. To that end, Kosnag and I have been working hard to come up with a concept that blended in the most exotic technologies from the 2000s into a Korean 5th generation jet. To do that, we took the base Su-47 Berkut model and inspired ourselves, with due permission of course, on artist AST21's VAA Su-47 VSM. 3 concept art for an advanced, stealthy Berkut aircraft. The aircraft's front section was extensively redesigned and it was given new thrust-vectoring nozzles and landing gear wheels, as well as a new suite of weapons, with a F-22A cockpit and avionics. Performance was also increased to bring it to Su-57 Felon levels, with sixteen skins to choose from based around different themes. In addition, in a first for the Ace Combat 7 modding community, this aircraft is also equipped with a new feature, the Advanced Repair Engineering System (ARES), which allows it to use the drop-tank functionality to fully repair the aircraft back to 0% damage, proving itself to be extremely useful for those missions where you have to play aggressive until the time runs out. Finally, we chose the name KAI KF-38 Black Eagle - an homage not only to the Republic of Korea Air Force 53rd Air Demonstration Group, but also to the Korean Allied Black Eagle jets featured in 2000s real-time strategy classic Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack, Yuri's Revenge. As well as a play on the Golden Eagle, the meaning of the Russian word Berkut!

So what do you get with this mod? Let's check:

• []An advanced performance profile similar to the Su-57.

  []Powerful but reasonably balanced weapons:

  []4QLAAM - 4AAM with the long range of LAAM and the great homing capabilities of QAAM.

  []XSDB - unchanged from the main game, useful for detroying clusters of ground enemies with precision.

  [*]MPBM - the classic and beloved Ace Combat Zero SPW now comes in a special AGM-158 JASSM