GR.1B was a modification for Sea Eagle rather than Martel
IIRC AR Martel was considered early in Tornado’s career but never integrated because the RAF really wanted to replace them with new missiles (Sea Eagle replacing TV Martel and ALARM replacing AR Martel)
There’s some 1980s Tornado marketing stuff mentioning both the TV and AR version of Martel as potential armaments, and AR Martel was probably still an interim option while ALARM was being developed. But it’s never been clear how Tornado would have employed the datalink pod for TV Martel.
The TV-guided AJ 168 Martels were only carried operationally by Buccaneer and Nimrod. So Buccaneer S.2B is the only dead cert.
Sea Vixen was the trials airframe used to fire both variants of Martel during development, but it was a specially-equipped FAW.1 operated by A&AEE at Boscombe Down, where what we have in War Thunder is a regular Fleet Air Arm FAW.2.
As Gunjob posted above, Tornado GR.1 is a strong candidate on the basis of documents saying it was intended to carry both versions of Martel.
There’s also a not-so-strong case for Phantom FGR.2 (F-4M), but Phantom never had a proven Anti-Ship role in British service. There’s just this scanned image that is of AFAIK unknown origin
Ed:- it’s from McDonnell’s internal report on UK Phantom development B617 https://img-forum-wt-com.cdn.gaijin.net/original/2X/6/6835b5410b99e553f48417e7d5055f9e3c3463a8.jpeg
You’ll notice these are all twin-seater (or more) aircraft because during the terminal phase of the missile’s flight, AJ 168 was meant to be guided towards a selected impact point by an operator looking at the seeker’s TV-footage.
Owing to the fact it was completely fire-and-forget, the AS.37 Anti-Radiation version of Martel was to be carried by more aircraft including single-seaters such as Harrier GR.1/GR.3/FRS.1 and Jaguar in addition to the above. But so far it’s not clear we’ll get ARMs in War Thunder.
Vulcan and Victor also carried the ARM in addition to all the previously mentioned aircraft.
Another possiblity i just realised with a re-read of the dev-post
They could just make them ASMs. Rather than being TV guided, they could just make use of the naval radar the Bucs have and make them into AS-34 equivalent ASMs. it would be the lazy option, but it is a possiblity. I guess we’ll have to wait and see
While not in game one other platform that had TV martel planned was TSR-2 which actually had the datalink pod intergrated into its weapons bay. So would be able to carry its two martel+2 external flair pods without sacrificing a pylon to it
I just hope we get more naval themed maps for air.
The new south asian city map is basically all ocean yet there are no carriers and no cargo or fleet ships.
Adding more anti ship missiles gives me hope they will add some more AI ship targets and give vehicles like the buccaneer a unique role in Air RB with high rewards for taking out different ships to encourage strike aircraft gameplay.
Adding more naval maps would help to counter the buccs long take off run with a carrier’s catapult to give them some extra speed as currently the buccaneer at 9.3 is one of the slowest bombers at the BR and with no good guns or missiles the gameplay is basically fly far from the enemy, bomb and go back to base.
