Dassault Rafale - Variants, Characteristics, Armament and Performance

AESA seeker might be harder to jam in the future as well if/when it comes to AESA radars as well as if jamming is added.

Currently no, it’s mostly useful against RWRs (LPI radar), jamming and countermeasures, and to a lesser extent stealth features.

In any case i don’t see this missile coming anytime soon, Current MICA with a fix to its range would already be more than enough (hell it’s already enough in its current state)

As to notching, i can’t really prove it, but signal processing came a long way since the 60s, and i don’t think simply turning 90° will do anything to even a 90s seeker, but it will bleed the missile of its energy

I know many people attribute the notch difficulties of the MICA to the notch angle, but from experience, it’s not harder to notch than before the changes to the seeker. At least the changes are not significant.
The difficulty of notching the MICA mainly lies in its speed, as the faster a missile goes, the better the notch needs to be to make the apparent deltaV inside the notch values of the missiles

MiG 23 doesn’t use the same type of radar as the in game modern radars tho.

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i heard that we have the best variant or the 2nd best variant of rafale in the game is this true ?. what upgrades can we expect in the next variant of rafale that can be added to wt ? and which variant do we have in game ? is it the F 3R ?

I mean i guess so yeah, the changes for the existing f4.1 (1000kg hammer mostly but not that useful) are not that big from what i remember, otherwise until f4.2 with mica ng there won’t be much of an upgrade and we will have to wait a long time for the planned f5 standard.

Otherwise Gaijin could always add older rafale with pesa radar instead of the aesa one starting at f3r.

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wont the meteor be better than the mica ng ? i think F3R can already use it.

Yes and no, it’s easy to think that France is quite “doomed” in terms of long-term relevance but this isn’t the case.

The Rafale F3R we have in-game is still “gimped” as well as its weaponry like the MICA in many ways. I can foresee the Rafale continuing to get “buffed” over time and maintaining its top spot even after further additions of other vehicles. The Rafale has 90 reports open and over time we should get those reports implemented while other countries may need to get newer vehicles in order to keep up to the Rafale which continues to get buffed. Similar to how the Rafale F3R received more buffs when Su-30SM came ensuring it wasn’t made irrelevant.

So while we do have one of the best Rafale variants in the game, the variant itself is not at its best. There is still a long way to go. It may take another 1-2 years of continuous buffs for the capabilities of Rafale F3R to be realized.

But anyway, after the Rafale F3R there’s the Rafale F4.1 which just adds GMTI mode if we ignore weaponry.

F4.2 is set to be in service later this year and that one adds GaN which increases power for both the radar and SPECTRA jammers.

Rafale F5 is in the works and that’s too far away to talk about even though we know what some of the upgrades will be, which looks to be promising such as completely new radar, engines, and etc.

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how so, by having a HMD?

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Two different purposes. It’s like saying “Isn’t the AIM-54 better than MICA EM?”

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Ignoring the sarcastic tone in your statement, the list is too exhaustive to state.

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can the rafale get a better radar in the future ? i feel like the current rafale may struggle once they add radars like the captor E , no35 , raven (gripen e). as they have greater than ±90* azimuth coverage. compared to the rafale’s ±70* azimuth coverage in game.

If you mean azimuth coverage, then I cannot see that getting better as Rafale uses fixed arrays and doesn’t have them on gimbal. But even as we go into the future, I’d imagine notching will become less relevant with AESA radars having a better time keeping lock through the notch. MiG-29SMT for instance is able to guide Fox-3s through near notch and despite such a capability it is 13.3 BR for a reason.

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yea ig it will still be very useful in medium range but iirc mica ng is still not real for air to air role ? i think its only been used as a surface to air missile as of now.

We have nothing confirming it has even been used for surface to air either. It’ll be delivered later this year however to be set into service, by then it should qualify to be in-game but as someone else said earlier the current MICA EM can be set to get further improvements negating the necessity of MICA NGs for now.

having a better azimuth coverage will help you in kinematically defeating a missile , imagine eft notching at mach 1.5+ while still maintaining a lock.

There’s an upgrade in the works, but that won’t help with azimuth coverage. Captor-E and Raven achieve the high azimuth by having the radar dish on a swivel, the RBE2 is a fixed plate.

RBE2

Raven

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Captor-E

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Again, sounds good on paper but Mig-29SMT didn’t really play out like this when Fox-3s first dropped even back when it had ±90 degree radar gimbals.

In theory MiG-29SMT should have been wiping the floor with everyone else but that didn’t really occur.

Theory = \ = In-practice

the problem is that the mig-29 is a mig-29 with an abysmal flight model and bad Fox-3s for long range

Sure, but long range isn’t really the name of the game currently is it? R-77 ever so slightly outranges MICA EM and I wouldn’t say M2K has one of the best flight models post nerf, although still better than MiGs. Yet M2K is 13.7 with mica em that is shorter ranged with a MiG-29SMT capable of providing guidance while notching the target.

The real answer to why this theory doesn’t work out in practice is because while you may be notching one aircraft, you’re heading towards another aircraft coming from a different angle remaining exposed to them. I would wager SMT is quite fine doing this notching thing in a one versus one but we have a team game.

How useful will notching and guiding be in a 16v16?

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you cant only notch you can also go partly cold
while guiding in multiple radar missiles

i have a feeling that this will be the new meta