Looking at the performance of the IRIS on the Elde id confidently say: both
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Watch them give the ASRAAM and/or IRIS-T seeker-shutoff in its current iteration without any other hardening.
Same feeling with the current MICA situation. Every time I see them (Rafales), they’re just doing the same at a distance (like doing chores). And now there are even more Rafales which ruins, for example, Arcade mode completely as they can spawn planes with MICA-EMs up to 6-8 times a match.
Rant
Your AMRAAMs don’t hit them at distance as they have more then enough time to notch and if you get closer than 15 km you get a MICA to your face while they’re still flying in a perfect notch. You can’t notch as good due to the MICAs much smaller 7° notch angle (instead of 15° like any other ARH missile) and have no chance to fire back from your own notch as your weaponry doesn’t allow it, even if your radar does. In a frontal engagement your chances are even worse as MICAs don’t miss due to TVC and uselessness of chaff opposed to your extremely sluggish AMRAAMs and AIM-9s, while the latter one is spoofed by a single flare in front-aspect. You only have a chance if you catch them off-guard somehow but otherwise, not really a fair chance.
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Dont forget that they are defending against AMRAAM with likely large calibre chaff and you are probably defending against MICA with BOL
I mean, do we really think that they are not just going to copy paste the IRIS T from the Elde onto to the EFT? Gaijin doing extra work instead of just copy slop would be insanely out of character
That’s an additional factor which could also explain why the MICA-EM is able to relock so extremely frequently in cases it somehow lost its target.
Don’t understimate them: They can put effort into things if you want to “balance” (break) things for some people under the pretense to “implement them more realistically as asked by the community”. This behavior is known from relationships as “weaponized incompetence” with the aim to not ask them to do the stuff they f*cked up anymore → less work for them in the future and they have a “precedent” why to not do that or fix it anymore.
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At the moment, its too soon to say.
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Ah yeah the IRIS T SLM 4km lockrange move
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Quick question: Do SPICE 250 (non-ER) really weight 130 kg? All I could find about that is 113 kg or “113 kg / 250 lb class”.
Might be the warhead not total weight
Nah, warhead is just ~20 kg of the total weight. That’s also the part that irks me: 20 kg warhead in a glide-bomb and this thing weighs 130 kg? 110 kg for airframe, controls, battery, seeker and electronics sound like way too much. With that weight the 100 km range will most likely never be reachable.
Ingame data
Edit: The warhead of the SPICE 250 ER (turbojet powered model) is even only in the “20 lb (~9 kg) class” according to its brochure.
Anyway, the current 130 kg for the SPICE 250 glide-bomb seem way to heavy in regard to its comparably tiny warhead and its really high projected range of up to 100 km.
For comparison: The “GBU-53/B StormBreaker” is a glide-bomb with nearly the same dimensions as the SPICE 250 but has a 48 kg warhead (150% bigger), similar electronics/seeker and a comparable range (up to 100 km) and only weighs 93 kg overall.
Something really doesn’t add up here (an educated guess by using the GBU-53s weight of 93 kg and subtracting 27-28 kg for the smaller warhead would put the SPICE 250 at a weight of only 65-66 kg, so only half of what it currently is in the game).
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Explosive mass =/= warhead weight. You’ve got to remember the warhead has quite a bit of metal around it for fragmentation and penetration.
The datasheet says it is a “125 kg category weapon”
https://www.rafael.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/spice-250-air-to-surface-missile.pdf
Pretty sure the SPICE 250-ER has a smaller warhead as it need to carry fuel and engine.
That’s the big question. The brochure for the ER says “warhead mass” and not “explosive mass”. But even though, the fragmentation mantle without the explosive mass of 20 kg would have to weight 64 kg on its own to give the bomb its full weight of 130 kg it currently has. For that, its blast/fragmentation damage isn’t really good enough in game. Additionally I don’t think it’s physically possible for it to reach its advertised 100 km at max. altitude with its launch speed limit of Mach 1.0 and the weight it currently has (except you launch it from a satellite in orbit lol). Where did they get the “explosive mass” even from? I can’t find anything about that anywhere.
The GBU-53 is a 113 kg (250 lb) category bomb too, but only weighs 93 kg. So AFAIK the categories are 50 lb, 100 lb, 250 lb, 500 lb, etc. so a 250 lb category bomb can be anywhere between 100 and 250 lb but usually not above (it’s relevant for carrying ability of pylons I would assume → “certified for bombs up to this weight”). That the datasheet says “125 kg” is, I assume here, because somebody did the easy lb → kg = ~2:1 ratio like with pounds.
That will be a factor of course.
Says 131 on the airframe
But things like batteries - heavy, actuators - also heavy. Wings are like a meter long each and appear to be solid metal rather than composite - heavy
Weight soon adds up.
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Interesting that explosive mass is only 8.4 kg
Edit: I guess that could be the penetrator warhead rather than the blast / frag one.
Is that the exact weight (which would change depending on the used warhead) or the weight-class?
And things like an aluminium-airframe (incl. wings), actuators and electronics, etc. aren’t as heavy as you make them out to be. Otherwise the same-size GBU-53 wouldn’t weigh only 93 kg with its 48 kg warhead. Al-Li-Alloys used for airframes and GFK aren’t that different in weight (2,6-2,7 g/cm³ vs. 2,0 g/cm³).
That is indeed interesting. It’s either a penetration warhead (like a small bunker buster) or a shaped-charge warhead, which would be much lighter than a blast-fragmentation warhead as much of that is empty room (the existence of a fragmentation mantle around the shaped charge would contradict the “reduced collateral damage” advertised in this case). I really assume the “131 kg” is the weight class of this bomb and not its real weight or it really has only that much explosive mass with an extremely heavy fragmentation mantle.
Might be a Penetrator. Could also be something like DIME and they don’t include the mass of inert heavy metal particles in counting the explosive filler weight
One of the cases was from a strike in Yemen and the other was from a strike in Gaza. I don’t know what kind of targets they were used against to guess if a penetrating warhead would be likely
The weight stencilled on the side a weapon is nearly always the actual weight of it. There isn’t much point in stenciling the weight class on the side.
If you want an example, then if you look at AGM-114 Hellfire missiles you’ll see each version has a slightly different weight stencilled on the side. If it were weight class they’d all be the same.
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Flo goes supersonic in a GAF twin seater during a mock interception with GAF QRA assets.
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Some amazing shots in that video, Flo pinned to the seat in the performance climb made me chuckle.