February 2023 - Month of the Mirage F1

Hi folks!

Last month was pretty brutal in terms of workload; I managed to blitz my way through a year's worth of backlog in about a month. With the F-86 Sabre, MiG-15, Mi-24P Hind, Ka-50 Black Shark and F-16 guide updates completed, I plan on taking a short "operational pause" to recharge my batteries for about a week or so.  

After that, I can finally start working on something new that isn't the Apache. You know what this means, right? This means... it's time for the Mirage fever to kick in! (No, Mirage 2000, I'm not talking about you...)

The Mirage F1 guide will be a very interesting project. It's a fairly "old" aircraft by modern standards, it has a temperamental engine, a cursed ghetto Cyrano IV radar, steam gauges everywhere and it's riddled with french labels. That's right up my alley. This jet is a reminder that during the Cold War, France used to be a huge exporter of military aircraft and still produces great aircraft to this day.

One of the challenges will be to cover different variants of the jet in a way that isn't too cluttered or disorganized. I want to have the guide structured in a way that allows the addition of other variants easily (something like what I did for the A-10C Tank Killer Expansion and Ka-50 Black Shark III expansion). So far, we have the spanish Mirage F1CE and the F1EE, which was recently added. Both versions are very similar, so covering them should not be too much of a headache initially. 

I do not know what to expect for the F1BE (apart from the aircraft being a twin-seater with a lengthened fuselage, reduced fuel capacity, removed internal cannons, added cannon pods and external drop tanks). The Mirage F1M (modernized) version will likely require much more work, but we have no estimates on when the F1BE and F1M variants will be available. Therefore, I'll work under the assumption that the scope of the initial release of the guide is limited to the F1CE and F1EE for now.