No, the top speed at low altitude was once estimated only 1.1 mach but this is a safety restriction I think. The supercruise altitude would be similar to the Eurofighter and others at ~30k+ feet (~10km) and up to 1.4 with 6 missiles or 4 missiles and a drop tank.
Top speed of the Rafale should be a function of protecting the RAM coating and the diverter-less supersonic inlet. Most of these are optimized for 1.8 to 2.0 mach at altitude. At low altitude this will be more so a function of heat concerns on the aircraft skin, as such top speed would be limited to a lesser number.
Guys you’re forgetting one of the problems, Rafale is the only top tier aircraft that is limited by 2 missiles as in stock, while other ones can enjoy their 4 missile loadout we will stuck with 2 MICA’s and Gun only.
This should be either changed to 4 MICA-EM or 2 MICA-EM+Magic2/MICA IR.
That is probably because dev internal was using MICA-IR for testing and forgot to apply magic 2 as they pushed the model to live. It seems they also created a basic “Rafale F3” build and then decided later to go with F3R based on the files.
The main idea of the AASM IR is to be able to fire it without exact visuals of the target and when the ammunition passes the obstacle (cloud cover, mountain), the IR tracker locates the target closest to the GPS point entered and directs the missile on it.
Do you have any source about it because i never heard of it and it actually contredict a lot of stuff.
Unfortunately the source I have comes from an internship at Safran where I was told that the weapon could work like this. Sadly I don’t have documents to prove my points.
It doesn’t contradict other operations, it’s just another way of operating the system.
From what I’ve been told it’s not used much because the risk of friendly fire is quite high.
It would be really nice if we could set periodic/maws to fire the chaff instead of the CMs. Usually not noticeable on aircraft with mixed stuff, but this one it is a bit annoying. May not use it often, but it would make it more usable.