So… where are the Shrikes and HARMs at? I would love to see them implemented before the AMRAAM. Especially seeing that they’re older than the AMRAAM.
Very often the production date doesnt matter for war thunder. For example we have the J-8F from 1999, but not the F-15 from 1976 or the F/A-18 from 1983
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Gajin also said that antiradation missiles are not coming for awhile
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well… that sucks. I’d like to be able to do runs on the Bomb bases / convoys without getting shot down by aimbot SPAA
Devs have hinted the real reason is damage profile, and how it would work in WT.
ARMs produce mission kills without necessarily producing total destruction. They’ll blow the radar off a vehicle, or shrapnel it into uselessness, but the ship or tank it’s on will still in many respects be fine, crew alive, etc. Which in WT terms means you just hit the repair button and 10 seconds later you’re 100% again. I think most people who want ARMs would find that unsatisfactory. Massively amping their damage to create total vehicle kills causes its own problems. So it’s clear they’re struggling to find a way to implement them that would make anyone happy.
There actually is an ARM in game now, the missile on USS Douglas. But they couldn’t figure out how to make that work then, so they just made it work like another ATGM. Which is silly, but is what they’d probably have to do with other ARMs given the mechanics that exist today.
Guess that may be a similar reason as to why ASM have not yet been implemented more widely (and more realistically), apart from the Kormoran: One can simply not reliably kill a ship with an ASM or two, as also history shows: Yes, a few ships hit with Exocets were sunk, but only after a few days usually.
You can for sure knock your target out and make it inoperable for a while both with ASM and ARM, but killing the target is something more difficult, but in the end what the players want…
unless it direct hit or near the target and most of the SPAA have very thin armor the explosive mass should be enough to damage or score a kill as i know about antiradiation missile
I’m fine with the missile not having a 100% killrate. Mainly because the use would be GRB or GSB. In ASB if it doesn’t guarantee a Kill you might as well not use it since the AA vehicules are way to good at shooting down planes, it looks like they have a 3000m bubble where they will kill you 90% of the time.
A 100-200 pound HE warhead fuzed to explode above a vehicle and shrapnel it will certainly do some damage, particularly to exposed parts, like radars.
In WT if you can’t immediately followup with some.other form of weapon before it repairs you won’t get a total kill though.
IRL that’s not what happens, there’s normally dedicated ARM slingers, who suppress so someone else can then get in and kill, ideally.
I agree sim players would get some use from them but RB players would just get cranky. The “but ma missul” posts we’d see here can write themselves.
But they already have the answer in the Overpressure mechanic, even the tiny AGM-112 Sidearm (AIM-9C with a Passive Seeker) has a 4.7kg warhead which is on par with 152mm HE that has 38mm of penetration which is more than enough to deal with lightly armored targets.
All that would really need to happen is the removal of the existing hard cap of 20mm for ATGM overpressure damage wholesale. you can also simulate what the damage would look like using the penetration viewer, It should be fine.
and that doesn’t even account for the larger ARM missiles like the Standard ARM or HARM.
Yeah I think you’re underestimating the difference in overpressure impact the same round would have with prox fuze aimed at maximizing the shrapnel effects vs point-detonating fuzes of a standard HE shell landing on or in close proximity to a ground vehicle, tbh.
Famously a mis-aimed HARM (68 kg warhead) going for the tail gunner radar of a B-52 shredded the tail with shrapnel, but the plane flew on and landed safely.
Would ARMs kill some soft-skin AA? Yes, probably, if accurately modelled. But it likely wouldn’t be the game changer some people think it is. I think they should add them eventually, I’m just saying people will be dissatisfied, and that’s why they’re not rushing to do it yet.
That’s purely due to how the fuse & warhead are integrated and the target not being the right type. The fuse works due to where specific doppler shift induced by the movement of the missile body past the antenna array sets of the fuse the moment it flies past the antenna (a quote from the below video claims the shrike uses 70 degrees as the critical angle). This combines with the fact that explosives are deliberately shaped to provide an annular Blast pattern and so eject the majority of the preformed fragments in a small band around the missile body. it also has a backup impact fuse as well. and with ground radar’s most of the important bits are centrally located with the antenna.
The reason for this is because there are a number of potential delivery profiles that have vastly different angles of attack and so a regular warhead isn’t optimal.
The issue is that the Soviets contemporary to Shrike doesn’t exist, their early forays were designed to strike very specific strategic targets(Early Warning and Strategic Missile Defense Radars) and carried by specialist airframes, in limited quantities at very long ranges. Which is what the Dev Q&A was going on about.
Western ARMs on the other hand proliferated rapidly with practically every fighter designed after the F-100 being able to carry at least a single pair, let alone the Strike and Attack airframes.
A separate issue is that the ARMs tend to outrange contemporary SAMs let alone the systems that some nations have access to in game.
Doesn’t that video say that the penetration was aimed at “those [external] components that could not be protected” and only was effective against “light metal” though?
The other issue is, as you say, these are designed to be fired from well outside detection or engagement ranges. So it’s another game mechanic, like UAVs, where you have no idea what’s about to happen, then in most cases there’s a bang and a puff of smoke above you, your radar is randomly destroyed, which you then repair (or occasionally you’re just randomly killed).
Is there any evidence anywhere of an armored combat vehicle being totally destroyed by an ARM, as opposed to the mission kill of its radar? Not in a test. Like an actual vehicle in a war. I haven’t found one.
In Serbia and other wars the major effect of HARM possibly being out there was just to keep people from using their radar, which counts as suppression, sure. But very few actual even-just mission (radar dish) kills.
Getting back to the video, where you see the fragments, quoted pen figures for HARM were it needed to be able to penetrate a half-inch (12 mm) of “soft metal”. So yeah, you’re really relying for your damage estimate on overpressure (which can be significantly mitigated by warhead design if you’re aiming mostly for the frag effect too).
Useful recap of historic capabilities of ARM here: https://yadda.icm.edu.pl/baztech/element/bwmeta1.element.baztech-30059b86-8d05-4f6d-9867-536a331e16c6/c/Czeszejko.pdf