Axia Interactive Media makes a number of collections on CD ROM. Know Your Combat Jets is one of these, and its a tidy bundle of images, information, and multimedia.

The opening screen brings up five images. Clicking on one of the images takes you into one of the five major divisions including (clockwise from left) Multimedia, Structural, Combat Role, Affiliation and Red Alert.

The multimedia section gives you access to four main areas: Intro, US Combat Aircraft, CIS Combat Aircraft and NATO and Allied. Any presentation can be zoomed in from the small window view to a full screen (max 640x480). Multimedia includes both slide presentations and movies. (Click HERE to bring up a slide from CIS multimedia section).

The structural section is divided into Wings, Engines (and intakes/exhaust types), Tail, and general Structure Types. Its an educational tour of aircraft design and quite interesting.

The Combat Role section covers Fighters, Attack Aircraft and Specialists. (Specialists are aircraft dedicated to reconnaissance or electronic counter-measures. This section is the smallest one, with only four aircraft listed). To my surprise, you can even bring up charts of performance data on your aircraft of choice. Clicking on the text button can bring up anywhere from one to four pages of information in a scrolling window.

The Affiliation section is broken into US, Nato and Allies, CIS and All Combat Aircraft.

Click to continue . . .

Red Alert was one of the sections that surprised me, being a bit of a Janes like topic. Red Alert is broken into Missiles, Action, Multiple Variants and Scramble. The scramble segment is the section devoted to the silhouette ID portion of the collection. Can you tell what aircraft these are by their silhouettes?

Most of the aircraft in this collection are represented by quite a number of images. For example, I clicked on F14 in the NATO and Allied section and found ten images and six AVI files. The images are available at 640x480 and represent a nice cross section of action and angles including carrier landings. The AVIs look quite good run in a small window but as expected, lose quality when expanded.

The missile section covers A2A and A2G ordnance, including some relatively exotic equipment. AVIs are integrated in this section also.

Overall this is a very nice collection and a bargain at $19.95 Canadian. This 1995 collection isn't a native WIN95 application though it ran fine, but Axia is also working on a WW2 Fighter Collection that will be fully WIN95 compliant. If they also bump up the quality of the multimedia collection it will be well worth the wait!

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