A silly (OTish) question -

[raketenjagdpanzer]

assuming there's a little air-power here and again ("we have the planes and every once in a great while the gas to fly one or two"), is it terribly suspension-of-disbelief breaking to have a notional Harrier do a VTOL while armed?

[DigTw0Grav3s]

Depends on a lot of factors. How heavy is the load? How much fuel? I would think that it could probably happen with a pair of rocket pods and an otherwise slick configuration, but not fully loaded, I don't think. It has a pretty low bring-back weight for vertical landing, IIRC.

[Rainbow Six]

I don't know if a VTOL whilst fully fuelled / armed is impossible, but the Royal Navy's last generation of carriers (i.e. the ones that carried Sea Harriers) had what was known as a 'ski ramp' at the bow and without checking any sources / reference material I'm fairly certain that standard procedure was always to do a short take off using the ski ramp.

As DigTw0Grav3s has already said I don't think there was any issue doing a vertical landing on return though.

[Adm.Lee]

No, but it was my understanding that VTOL uses a lot more fuel and pilot skill to pull off than a normal landing. Pilot skills degrade, and need practice: more fuel usage.

Given that there are a lot more empty airfields than jet fuel, it doesn't break my disbelief, but it does stretch it by being wasteful of resources. Like throwing your last TOW at an unarmored truck-- which I've seen plenty of groups do, anyway. :p

[Olefin]

A Harrier VTOL takeoff was only possible with less than maximum weight - so it could be done armed and fueled, but not at full fuel and armament. Which does mean, however, that you could take a Harrier with perhaps half it fuel load so it can do the VTOL, shoot and then have enough to get away, with a good amount of its armament on board - especially if said armament was expended rather rapidly on say, a Soviet armored column.

As to the avgas situation - having enough to operate a few aircraft is defintitely possible - Krakow has enough to be able to operate its one helo for a couple of short range missions if it had to. The Americans had enough even after divesting themselves of all their heavy equipment, fuel, etc.. to operate a single helo for a short range mission. I think the operative word will be short range missions.