these missiles arent meant for close range lol why would you use a meteor when iris t is a choice, permance varying with altitude is not a big problem as it applies to conventional rocket motors too although not to the same degree. its not to big to fit in stealth fighters at all either it will be integrated in f35 soon its just a matter of time and size isnt the main reason why it hasnt been integrated yet.
no shit it doesnt outperform a r37 in range, its a much bigger missile, and the r37m isnt meant to take out fighters the meteor is, the r37 is very fast but its not very maneuverable and if fired from max range which is what russians did ukranians got plenty of time to defend or retreat, which is what they did as r37m mostly got mission kills.
meteor is a whole other kind of missile, it pulls as much as it would ever need to and bleeding its speed is a nonstarter.
and one thing you forgot to mention about meteor, is that its as close to a stealth missile as we ever got
like comparing a missile meant to take out awacs and tankers to a missile meant to take out fighter is a pretty dumb thing to do. the r37m is talked about so much because its legit the only option russian fighters have to engage ukranian aircraft, anything else is too dangerous.
and one last thing, aim260 is a project that is absolutely needed by the us, it not using ramjets which is a very new thing as far as using it in a a2a missile is not a surprise, they need the aim260 fast. the last time the us dabbled with ramjets in weapon was the 60s.
The r-37m is definitely meant to take out fighters, it literally says on the export brochure and it has a target overload of 8g, plenty to hit fighters and is advertised as capable of hitting fighters.
To be fair, Russia also says the Khinzal is a ‘hypersonic’ and that it ‘cannot be intercepted’, even though the V-2 rocket was nearly hypersonic by the shear basis of going nearly Mach 5- so I always take Russian equipment with a grain of salt.
And this is very, very relevant. If you have two missions with data-link capacity, like the Meteor and the PL-15/120D/AAM-4B, etc etc, that means the launching aircraft can fire and forget, and bugger off a whole lot sooner and have their missiles arrive on target first, with accurate guidance.
Take away your datalink, and the launching aircraft still can turn away with it’s missiles still engaging the target to better notch, crank, or otherwise defensively react against the meteor that is still taking it’s sweet time to get to a target. Going say, half the speed in transit on average means it’ll take twice as long to get to a target, a target that knows you’re there in this case and has fired on you, likely having a range advantage, and forcing you to go defensive well before your missiles have gone fully autonomous and after the opposing aircraft has already gone defensive
This is the export variant, not even the one used by the russian airforce, which has double the range. why lie on the export variant? anyways this is offtopic so lets go to the su-27 forum or something else to discuss this
8 g would mean a overload of at most 22/24 gs. Its not meant to tale out fighters, it can its still a dxtremely fast missile with a big warhead but its not meant to do so, and no its not “plenty” to hit targets its the bare minimum, anything less and it would be trivial to dodge, we know of its perfomance against what are very outdated fighters, even if we take into account ukranian modernization packages(which im skeptical how many are implemented) the su27s and mig29 sre very outdated the f16s are less so but even then.
The meteor isnt a slow missile, and it has a significant range advantage over everything in its weight class. Also real life isnt like war thunder. Aircraft dont fight 1 on 1 in a place with no ew or awacs, aircraft dont fight 1 on 1 im general, radars are extremely simplified and modern radars especially are guesses that lack functionality. And missile seekers arent all the same.
I don’t think even EFs or Rafales will do any better or worse. It’s the lack of EWACS that makes jets so cheap as is with the Indian Pakistani one. Also I think R77 only has 10 or 12Gs with target load but that translates to 50Gs which is plenty so this one should be 25 at least, which I think is good enough, although definitely speed dependent. If it’s 25Gs at Mach 5 then that is indeed lacking.
R27r has a target overload of 9gs but it’s 35 gs. Both r73 and r77 have target overload of 12 Gs but they’re 40 and 50 Gs respectively. What’s making r37m orders of magnitudes less in terms of g pull even though its target overload is only 1 less than r27r
that sounds unrelated to the maneuverability in that case, you dont need 35gs to hit a target maneuvering at 8gs, mistrals for example are rated for 8 g manuvering targets, same for stingers. both over around 20/26 gs of overload, as far as i know late sparrows are much the same.
and this is probably irrelevant, but on rosoboronexport site the wording between r-74 and r-77 says “up to 12gs” and on export r37 its says just “8g”, and if you look at the numbers they provide they dont have a “maximum target load factor” for the RVV-BD. might ultimately be irrelevant.
they also say
“Missile is capable to engage the most important air targets, such as air command posts, AWACS aircraft, jammer aircraft, reconnaissance aircraft, and others at distances exceeding the enemy fighter’s engagement areas.”
they dont include fighter jets
imm reply to myself to add that its probably better to end this discussion, i dont want to hijack the thread to talk about something else, im available in dms if you guys want.
A meteor is still slow compared to a missile that burns all/most of it’s energy right away (and then doing terminal in the case of dual pulse) so instead of transiting at Mach 4+ while at range, a meteor may only transit at Mach 2 let’s say. That’s a speed difference of half, which means it’ll take twice as long for the Meteor to get to an effective target position.
That means if the enemy it was fired at goes into an offensive crank, the missile will have to lead significantly more due to the speed difference when compared to a missile fired at the meteor carrying aircraft if they similarly went into a crank.
It isn’t that the missile is objectively slow, it’s that the missile is comparatively slow in transit speeds because of how it burns the motor to maximize PoK during Terminal. That gives it more of a tactical disadvantage when the missile cannot be guided by something other than the carrying aircraft, similar to the disparity between using an AIM-7 compared to the R-27ER. The 27ER arrives on target much sooner and leaves the AIM-7 dead in the water. In this case both missiles have their own seeker for terminal, however, it has to be guided to that intercept point first.
That also extends to other missiles like the PL-12 for example. The Meteor will take longer to get to a target simply because it transits slower than a PL-12 at range.
mach 2 is significantly below any public number for the meteor(most public numbers over around mach4/+), and the speed matters so much in the case of aim7 and r27er because they require constant guidance from the launching aircraft, in the case of a fox 3 speed is of much less significance if the missile is capable of mach 2+, and slower acceleration is irrelevant when the missile is fired well before the opponents missile because it outranges it
That’s referring to TOP speed, which is usually during terminal. It cannot do that top speed the entire transit time because of how the motor burns, and there’s no way the thing carries enough fuel to do Mach 4 the entire time while in atmosphere AND achieve similar ranges when in a roughly similar body to the AIM-120. Simply put.
true but mach 2 is a lowball to say the least, and mach 4+ is the public number.
thats the number to go off, you can guess that the speed varies during flight time(slower acceleration because its a ramjet), but from that to say that it drops to half its publicly reported max speed is a massive stretch to say the least.
