That’d allow you to get more resolution if the limiting factor was something like your beam width, I think. The diffraction limit is a far more fundamental problem for imaging systems and cheating your way around it is generally not possible with a single, fixed emitter/receiver. I’ve only played around with that a bit for optical systems, but from everything I’ve seen it should work pretty much the same for radar.
I didn’t consider scene matching, that’d allow it to switch to active guidance way before a good return on the selected target is returned. Interesting, wasn’t aware it could do that.
The 114L operates at 94 GHz too, or am I mistaken about that?
Back to War Thunder, the GRB environment is incredibly cluttered. Can the 114L get mid course updates? Because otherwise only being able to differentiate targets at the very end of its flight path might end up with it just going for wrecks, teammates or enemies more or less at random if there’s enough movement. And with longer ranged shots taking ~30 seconds between launch and impact there’s a lot of room for that.
So if we plug 0.00768699 ( 2.99792458 x 10^8 / 39x10^9) [Lamda = c/F] into the prior formula
= (70* 0.00768699) / 0.18 = 2.989385
= 0.5380893 /0.18 ~= 3 degrees
Similarly for 35GHz, results are ~= 3.3 degrees
I do know that the seekers used for both the Hellfire and Brimstone share a design linage from the canceled AGM-124 Wasp. Which itself lent heavily on prior work done on integrating PAVE Mover and realizing the strike component of the system.
That cuts the range at which it can differentiate targets down further then. Doesn’t make too much of a practial difference I suppose.
It does not support mid course updates, right? I couldn’t find anything regarding that with a quick search, and that would probably be mentioned.
That sounds like it’d be a headache for the context of War Thunder, if implemented realistically.
But for a LOAL launch the searched volume is probably biased to align with the predicted axis of travel of the target to provide a better chance of a detection should the target change course or speed after launch
These thing can be abstracted and expanded upon or refactored over time.
Duplicating the PARS’s seeker on a hellfire propulsion section would be enough of a baseline -114L to least get a feel for how balanced it would be, and then build out additional functionality as needed.
And it could further be restricted to either using dual rails (in place of the M299 quad rails) and / or a single set of stations to ensure quantities are limited.
Since the Generic smoke grenade could be abstracted to include MMW band obscurants practically nothing would change in terms of counters.
They probably should create a placeholder for full MMW. So its essentially “IR+” better than normal IR guidance, but fully LOBL target tracking without having to mess about with modeling the MMW properly
That would be expected, yeah.
The problem with War Thunder is that there’s a lot of targets stuffed into a very small area, the movement paths are generally the same and within minutes you have them cluttered by the wrecks of dozens of tanks. For a 7 km launch that Hellfire is going to travel just about 30 seconds. If we assume that the tank is stationary and the closest wreck is 30 m away it will be able to differentiate between the wreck and the target at a distance of just about 500 m, ~5 seconds before impact.
War Thunder has a lot of stop and go, tanks don’t really travel with a set speed in a set direction. The chances of the missile acquiring the correct target after it had 25 seconds to move with random speed and direction changes through a field of tank wrecks seems very low (well, unless your target is either camping, moving with continous speed and direction or very isolated).
Spoiler
I plotted the range at which two targets could theoretically be resolved according to the Rayleigh criterion, better than continuing to punch numbers into a calculator. Assumed reflector diameter: 180 mm, just like above)
In cluttered environments IIR F&F weaponry already struggles with switching to wrecks (in War Thunder), and that only really happens if the target gets so close to it they’re pretty much touching. This would presumably be significantly worse.
They could, but that would be extremely unrealistic make believe if what we’re assuming here currently is correct.
At the latest since the addition of the Israeli AH-60 with 16 Spikes I didn’t think the addition of AGM-114Ls would’ve been much of a balancing problem, if everyone were just given VIRSS smoke. A nuisance for other helicopters, no different for ground. Probably would’ve been fine with the full 16 of them.
I never expected the AGM-114L being so harshly kneecapped by the GRB environment if implemented realistically though. Not really sure where to go from there. Implement it realistically but just skip to the JAGM so you can redirect to the intended target using SALH?
Why should that be done, as in “better than normal IR guidance”? From what we’ve seen here it seems to be significantly worse for the context of War Thunder.
The Brimstone would still be unbalanced. It’s probably hard to implement if things like scene matching and whatever other special stuff they have were to be implemented, and how exactly it works is probably not known publicly. Scroll up a bit and you’ll find that you can calculate the radius around boresight it scans, that becomes absolutely massive at the lauch ranges you can get out of it.
And then you still have the problem that these things would seemingly target vehicles and wrecks at random in many of the scenarios they’d end up getting used in ingame.
BOL - totally fake modeling that is SIGNIFICANTLY weaker than IRL performance for the sake of balance (should basically be large calibre flares with short burn and standard calibre chaff, at the moment both are 1/4 the strength of regular CMs)
AJ168 - total work of fiction guidance method because Man-in-the-loop wont be modeled
IIR - Reported to just be 2x methods of IRCCM instead of actually modeling IIR because it would be too strong and bad for game health.
Why then MMW MUST be accurately modeled or not added at all is beyond me when we have multiple other examples of things being added in dramatically different states for the sake of game balance/gameplay
Heck just look the Typhoon’s PIRATE and CAPTOR-M for how badly modeled things can be in War Thunder
Guidance systems usually get cuts to parts of their capabilities for balances sake, not physics breaking improvements. Add the PARS 3 LR to that list, that was using SALH when they added it to the game.
They could make up some magic mmW weaponry that behaves like current IIR AGMs, sure. The people that want realistic implementations would probably be disappointed, I wouldn’t mind and you seem to be a fan of that idea for just as long as it’s the nation you play that gets an in game advantage out of it.
I understand MMW radars would be too powerful currently
But for example in the case of the PARS It used to be SALH because gaijin thought it was too powerful
Well now it has its full IR seeker modelled Why cant a similar thing be done for other nations that are lacking FNF weapons right now?
AGM-114L for example could just have a fake IIR seeker for the time being so that its atleast on par with everything else
Or they could add a nerfed MMW radar implementation so that it would behave the same as a IR seeker would
Or if they really did not want to ahistorically change the seeker they could just add the JAGM and disable the MMW part of it so its just SALH/IR
Options DO exist gaijin just dont want to take advantage of any of them for whatever reason and yet they keep adding more FNF missiles to top tier
That is entirely part of the trade off that you make for the convenience of F&F ordnance once it’s not on the rail you have no further input.
But then you turn around have have entire salvos ripple fired into the Spawns on; Ardennes
Artic
European province
Maginot Line
any of the Fields or Approach variants
or many others
Using the APG-78’s G-MTI to cue the seeker for example and the issue should be self evident where there is very little actual cover for a significant distance and so practically play to their advantage entire teams could be wiped in short order with very little counterplay (Autocannons with HE-VT ammo & Hemispheric radars would go a long way to making intercepting ordnance viable)
That’s the thing they are designed for attacking pop up targets of opportunity, and taking down incoming columns of armor while limiting exposure, not pin-point accurate attacks on singular targets that are in cover. which is where the SALH / IIR variants come in.
Its certainly an option but leads to the question of if you add it to the existing -64D or wait until the -64E, further if you go straight to the JAGM-MR, AGM-179, AGM-169 or AGM-176
