New seeker was already confirmed to my understanding. Meteor uses a more powerful derivative of MICA EM, and Meteor MLU should use a more powerful derivative of MICA NG EM which has an AESA seeker. So we know Meteor MLU is expected to have AESA seeker.
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it’s not exactly a bad seeker so its not really a balance factor
No, that is not the case. I am referencing real world dissimilar air training events and claims not just from pilots but from powerpoints and other sources. If you doubt any of the claims please DM me so as not to derail the topic.
@DirectSupport knows as well as I do that even the F/A-18 can give the Rafale, Eurofighter, etc a run for their money in DACT. The results of these events do not speak to the performance of the airframes or how they will arrive in war thunder. I cannot say this enough.
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no it’s indeed very good
But AD4A still entered service in 1996, so it can’t be expected to be as good as a 2026 AESA seeker. Not to mention there is very little information available to document how those seeker really perform. Range, reaction to stealth, notch resistance, etc.
I personnaly have a feeling notching and multipathing overperformed quite a lot in the march testing, but really, i don’t have anything to back up my claim, it’s more a feeling
Except for the multipathing. MICA shouldn’t multipath at 50m or so like it did during the test. Why ? Because the seeker MICA uses wasn’t only derived for use on the Meteor, but also on Aster 30, which proved capable enough at shooting down sea skimming targets accurately.
Not to mention MICA is also used on ships, and itself does rather well against low targets : https://www.mbda-systems.com/press-releases/mbdas-vl-mica-successfully-fired-by-the-royal-navy-of-oman-from-the-al-shamikh-opv/
Well, with how slow things are going, and the fact that France even had to sell their own stock of Rafale F.4s to other countries, who knows how long the F.3s will stick around for.
It was my impression that nothing can be upgraded to F.5 standard, but I’ll wait until I find a good source on it.
AD4A is MICA EM seeker, are you talking about MICA EM or Meteor seeker?
Cause I think Fireball and I thought you were talking about Meteor seeker
Meteor in service since 2016 with a modified version of the seeker allegedly. The British always claiming to have the best possible mechanical scanned arrays we can also presume the Meteors is just as ‘good’ :)
Would be interesting to see if they rationalize the seeker for the Meteor vs AESA MICA the same as Mechanical scan Typhoon vs AESA.
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Best i could find.
EDIT : traduction :
“Jets from this 5th batch will be built under the F4 standard, development of which started in 2018 with the first increment of this variant [F4.1 in this case] has been qualified by DGA on march 2023. […] Those planes [built in the 5th batch] will also be made to be upgradable to F5 standard in the 2030s.” The quote is from french MoD, so there’s that X)
Oh my bad
Yeah i was talking about MICA EM’s seeker.
Although idk how much of a difference there is between mica and meteor’s seeker. Diameter is different (160mm vs 180mm i think), as well as some undisclosed upgrades ?
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Well, seeker for all 3 missiles (MICA, Meteor, MICA NG EM) are made by Thales so there shouldn’t be any rationalization about how MICA NG EM isn’t superior to Meteor’s non-AESA seeker.
I mean, for the purposes of the game. There were all kinds of arguments rationalizing how the Typhoons radar could somehow still compete against AESA. It is interesting to me that there seems to be this big jump from mechanical to AESA, skipping PESA in Western tech… but France got ahead of the game and had PESA long ago.
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Yeah, its stated that the Meteor’s seeker only has some tech derived from MICA’s AD4A seeker, but it could still be an upgrade in every single way. This is why it will be imperative to try and buff the MICA EM seeker in every way possible to give the Meteor better chances.
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To be fair, affording to the Swiss studies, Eurofighter with mechanical radar in 2008 configuration still somehow outperformed future 2016 Gripen E demonstrator with AESA, but perhaps that is an indictment of the Gripen platform itself
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Guy is saying the same stuff that got the German Eurofighter thread locked
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CAPTOR-M is actually a very good radar and the Gripen E radar properly had some issues due to being demonstrator
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sry for the self quote, just updated that one with translation, since sources were french only
The lock only came because some people couldn’t control themselves, had to get personal quickly and post insults, don’t start the same thing here. It doesn’t matter what others say, as long as it’s on-topic and contributes to a (constructive) discussion.
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yup
I have a feeling MICA seeker is going to be a copypaste of phoenix with a few adjustments on range…
Out of pure curiosity (I have no desire to argue or devolve into any sort of personal basis), do you know of any better Fighter-borne Mechanically scanned arrays?
I would also just make note that the majority of us are ‘rationalising’ the M-Scan Captor-M vs the RBE2 (as in the base PESA and not the RBE2-AA)
Also this MICA NG looks to be a beast.
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I know of superior AESA arrays that have a mechanical scan function. You see why your question is loaded, though… right? Why would anyone focus on a traditional style array when AESA exists? Let us move this conversation to DM’s though if you wish to understand my point of reference further.
That is fair.
There are a lot of cool developments but I will hold my breath to see how they gimp them for use in-game in the far future lacking any real data.
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