Dassault Rafale - Variants, Characteristics, Armament and Performance - Part 2

Off topic but F-35 is literally the 2.0 version of the F-16 with L-O characteristics added. It does everything the F-16 can do, but better. Barring a gun-only sustained rate fight (which it is not designed for).

At a far higher cost. I don’t have the exact numbers but you can probably field far more F-16s for the same cost

numbers were skewed in early days by low production numbers. It’s about the same now actually.

If you say so… but even then, something like a Gripen is way cheaper to maintain and more available

This’ll be my final point on this since it is off topic

Spoiler

not by too much

the operating cost number people claim for 39e is just the cost of fuel and munitions, without including maintenance

any non 5th gen is gonna look abysmal compared to actual 5th gens. even the rafale

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F-35 is ugly, long live gorgeous delta canards.

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To be fair it didn’t do too shabby in the Dutch trial.

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Nop, dutch trial have it on par and since then many of the planned things for f-35 didn’t go throught while rafale got more improvements.

But yeah other aircraft were absolutely not competing in terms of score compared to rafale/f-35.

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So … everything I stated about sensor fusion allowing the pilot to see positions of hostile and friendly aircraft on the hmd and mfd based on data from datalink, Spectra and the radar was right!

“The main aspect the aircraft was completely designed around according to modern French military doctrine?”

Funny how i provided an aircraft “I wont say its name” that’s currently capable of doing this “Visually” ingame as an example and said example became the focus of “confrontation” instead of an example of reference as intended.

No one said what you were saying wasn’t correct (irl), I for example was saying that it simply wasn’t anything special

Rafale is already best PvP plane in AIR RB. It will get better with the fixes that will be required against Gen 5s.

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Mica IR and Meteor, hell of a loadout.

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Hopefully we see a lot more fixes coming for Gen 4.5 aircraft in the lead up to 5th gens. Rafale is underperforming in every aspect from the RWR, MAWS, LWS, to the radar and TV sensor as well as missing signature reductions.

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MICA EM missile should have increased range (Updated)

MICA EM missile should have increased maximum range // Gaijin.net // Issues

Closed the new report for the MICA EM’s range, and instead this report was updated.

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Thought I read FWD for review, but suggestion…

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Unfortunately this is the case for missile performance stuff, you can see it happening for the AIM-120s as well:

AIM-120A & B - Performance against manoeuvring targets too low // Gaijin.net // Issues

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Yep they take their sweet ass time, but eh maybe in one of the dev servers of Q1/Q2 2026 the fix could pop up.

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There’s a strong possibility that next-gen missiles are either IIR missiles or next-gen fox-3s. If it’s next-gen fox-3s then France only has the option of fixing the MICA’s EM range because the MICA NG EM is not yet in-service while the AIM-120D, PL-15 and etc. are in service.