If you are talking MICA EM vs Aim-120B… Then… the AMRAAM has maybe a firing window of maybe an extra 5km?
But below that, MICA EM is suiperior in every single respect.
Read again i added extra infos.
That is not ultimately true. MICA EM has been made to be a SRAAM/MRAAM while MICA IR is indeed made only to be a SRAAM. But yes METEOR is Rafale only BVRAAM but it’s not a MRAAM this role is filled by MICA EM and soon it’ll be replaced by MICA NG.
In any way MICA discussion should go there :
SPECTRA (allegedly) has (L-)DIRCM compability, but I have not been able to find anything more concrete about this capability or possible options.
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Im honestly just going to put that thread, along with the EFT thread as a note at the very top of this topic
(If @WreckingAres283 wants to)
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Double the thread mentions ))
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AFAIK it doesn’t turn as fast as missiles suited for short range like the sidewinder or mica
We will do it different in the next thread (which I am going to set up manually).
The devs should add some sort of pinged content feature like on Discord so that you can send people to the pinged contents that’d be faster than to have to send people to the first message each time.
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Moving to mica thread
What of the recently mentioned double Meteor mounts in some material? Do you know of any photos of those? I believe they were being tested on later F.4s or maybe even the F.5.
The only way that the 27SM should have 14 missiles is:
2 of the inner 4 R-77s get put on new hardpoints in the wing and the 27SM is renamed 27SM3
If they did that, it would technically be accurate. But as it is right now, it’s a Frankenplane.
I’ve only seen those on EFT render. If at all it would probly come with F.5 imo.
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Future proofing from the sources I’ve read.
The parameters I am quoting are not an extreme launch condition. They represent a scenario that is similar to the way that everyone else makes maximum launch range claims. An extreme launch scenario would be launching at a Mach 1.8-2 target while also being Mach 1.8- 2 at a planes service ceiling. The Rafale has a service of 50,000 feet while the Eurofighter has a service ceiling of 65,000 feet.
Why do you think that Safran is advertising that it can climb to 40,000 feet in 2 minutes? Is that altitude just convenient for bird watching?
Why do you think the supersonic STR requirement for ESR-D was made?
Do you think the Rafale would have some kind of drastically different mission profile than the Eurofighter? Or radically different than any other 4th generation fighter? Considering that Eurofighter and Rafale originated from the Future European Fighter Aircraft program it seems logical that the Rafales air-to-air BvR strategy would be similar to the Eurofighter…or literally any other 4th generation fighter.
Why do you think that SNEMCA chose to publish performance graphs for the M88 at sea level and at 36,000 feet?
Could it possibly be that they were anticipating fighting up that high just like all of the other Europeans?
Now that I have explained that these are not extreme conditions and are actually pretty typical of a BvR profile…lets look at some modeling.
Represented here is the time to impact for 4 missiles on symmetrical Mach 1.6 engagement with a missile launch range of 80km. The blue missile represents the current MICA as it exists, the orange is Aim-120, and red is R-77-1. The other two MICAs represent modifications to the base missile; the green is simply the current MICA but with AMRAAM lofting profile and no self destruct, and the purple is the same but with its diameter reduced and a 1.4 drag coefficient which mimics a suggestion earlier in the thread.
Simply changing the lofting profile brings its long range performance directly in line with AMRAAM. Changing its diameter and drag makes it superior to the R-77-1 at range. And guess what…none of them will meet the Mach 3 vertical launch set point or the Mach 1.2 retained energy set point at 13km from a sea level to sea level launch. These are the set points that DirectSupport wants the missile to reach based on stringing together an old MICA VL brochure and data on the Magic II.
In order to approach those the 1.2 retained speed requirement, the missile drag has to be further reduced. In order to meet the Mach 3 set point and the 1.2 setpoint the lofting profile, thrust, and drag has to be changed.
The missile in red represents one that meets both requirements. Green is only modeled as further reduced drag to meet the final setpoint and blue is standard MICA.
How would these missiles look in game? Well lets go back to our BvR scenario.
Every version of the modified MICA ends up having a time to impact that is less than the R-77-1 which is currently the best missile in the game as far as straight line BvR kinematics.
The story doesn’t get any better at close range either. Improved MICA would have an even shorter time to impact at close ranges. It would be a 10% improvement over current MICA and R-77-1.
What this whole song and dance over improving the MICA is to ensure that the Rafale out matches everything else in the game as much as possible.
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That would align with some papers made by the people that worked on the DDM. They have done some public papers on L-DIRCM integration on fisheye systems, just like the DDM-NG, probably coming from and internal development effort for futur implementation
Spoiler
fakour
To be clear the actual MICA brochure states 30G at over 12km. Only inferred things from DirectSupport are :
- 30G at more than 12km means at least 30G at 13km (I dont agree with that assumption)
- Speed of the missile needed to achieve 30G derived from Magic 2 (which is irrelevant as well, since they are different classes).
The brochure, being MICA VL, means its from ground/sea platforms, so it makes sense that this figure (30G at 12km) should be achieved at (or near) sea level. Now, the video provided by DirectSupport only showed a contact against a sea level aircraft. However, the launch angle was very favorable (70° instead of 90°), so it looks pretty clear from that missile falling out of the sky that this requirement is not met.
I have no idea how to make a custom mission, but now with the off bore radar capability of the MICA, it might be possible to test the actual 90° launch against targets at different altitudes and check if any match this requirement, but I doubt this is happening.