Legendary chance to bug report the better radar on the german EFT again
/j
And Spain has LWR
BOL IRL is meant to actually counter IIR. The cloud of Pyrophoric material (“chaff” that produces an IR signature on contact with the air) should create a large enough IR signature to physically block the aircraft from the seekers view
In-game they are very weak against IR and IRCCM missiles. The lumonisity is roughly half the size of a regular flare, which means that the seeker might just ignore the BOL, and the short burn time means that pre-flaring requires a lot more CMs, The only good thing about them at the moment is because they drop direct rear, they might actually be in the PoV of a rear-aspect gatewidth IRCCM missile. Though I’ve had more than a few regular IR missiles just ignore a BOL spam from something like a Tornado, even after throttling down out of reheat. The downside of that drop position though is that they can cause laddering
The only exception is seeker shutoff, because they are equally affected no matter the size and the drop position of BOL works quite well for them.
How they should be modeled in-game:
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Chaff is easy, just make it standard calibre. Should be stronger, but whilst all CMs are standardised, make it the normal size.
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“Flares” are hard. I think they should be unique. Short burn time, but much larger luminosity than a regular flare, maybe on par with a large calibre (I dont know where they should fall exactly but should be set to best known data, not the “its a smaller packet therefore its a weaker flare” BS we have at the moment) . Would be good to get the visual difference too.
Due to the fundemental differences in how BOL Flares work vs any other flares, I just run all the LCMs as flares and then all the BOL as chaff, then I just know what im dropping and doing. Im personally not too worried, as I very rarely need to drop flares in ARB/ASB, though I can see it having a negative impact on anyone doing the same CM setup but playing a lot more aggressively. It is about time BOL Flares were made worthwhile though and that would be enough to help in GRB vs the SAMs.
Then of course the AESA Typhoon IRL should be upgraded to 150 internal LCMs in the relatively near future. So it could get that upgrade at some point too
Not in game :3
So only UK has LWS
Yes, if just in game for now
Tbf all modern flares are made to counter IIR. MBDA who is in charge of the flares for the rafale claim it to work against the most modern seekers (and meanwhile they also claim their seeker to defeat all modern CM tho lol).
Just like BOL, spectral flares still aren’t a thing. Sure, I do think BOL should not be considered smallest caliber, my guess being that they saw gripen being unkillable when released because of the spam it could do and decided to nerf it.
With how BOL actually works (cloud behind the aircraft blinding it front and rear aspect), compared to spectral flares which are supposed to confuse the missile, I wonder if BOL are less efficient at side aspect compared to spectral - hence why the typhoon is upgrading its LCM capability when the BOL appears to be superior with how you talk about it.
Maybe gaijin could improve front/rear aspect of BOL, while improving « spectral » flares (usually LCM) to be more effective at side aspects ?
Spectral flares are designed to match IR emmision of the plane engines, so dual band seeker can not reject them easly. Older flares burned much hotter than engines, meaning if you had dual IR band seeker, it would compare IR emmision on 2 wavelenghts, and due to the difference, it would reject flares.
Yeah, its probably about time they just started setting flares and chaff on a more case by case basis anyway. Starting with the top tier stuff where there is more too it than just size.
Yeah, it 100% was, though imo, the burn time reduction which is accurate was more than enough to mitigate the Gripen. And if it needed more, they should have just removed 2x BOL dispensers. The solution was just idiotic to the extreme, given it just gutted the strengths of a few aircraft that only had a few strengths to begin with, like the Tonka F3.
Likely BOL is a LOT more effective in rear-aspect, but obviously less effective in side aspect But im out of my depth regarding how it compares to multi-spectral. The dispersed nature I think can also confuse an IIR seeker a bit, rather than being a single obvious hotspot. Though everything regarding ASRAAM (i.e, outranging the enemy and killign them before they can fire) makes me think that at the end of the day, anything short of dropping BOL between the seeker and the jet isnt going to do much vs an IIR seeker. MICA IR having a similar ability, makes me wonder the same about the Rafale. Sure, Spectral flares are better than nothing, but not getting shot at by an IIR in the first place is probably even better still. How much Spectral flares actually help, im not sure.
But I think the main reason for the increased CM count is actually to carry a lot more Britecloud than necessarily anything to do with flares and IR threats, or at least the ability to carry a load of Britecloud and still carry some flares internally.
Everything but the physical correct and not so hard to implement (and a bit more computationally expensive) voxel cone tracing which you could use to model nearly everything from IR to RF behavior ingame including absorption, opacity, reflectiveness, etc. ^^
Spoiler
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Yeah, would be good. Tbh, all CMs, flares (including how IR signatures are modeled to begin with) and chaff need a ground up rework I think
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WT needs an operation Health esque update where they just fix a ton of stuff in the code.
Yeah, that would be excellent, I can think of a LOT of stuff that would be good to get sorted. They really need to do an update with 0 new vehicles and instead just fix/update a lot of the older stuff.
I would kill for a total overhaul for IR signatures, how chaff works, etc, but also things like a UI overhaul/update with the ability to actually configure it (they keep adding more and more clutter and its annoying) and also an overhaul of gamemodes and map (especially for air, but ground and naval need at least a new objective type)
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Maybe also upgrade the servers to try and help with ghost shells…
Nah, gaijin cant afford it. They are only a small indie company with limited income (just ignore the cost of premiums, nothing to see there) :P
But an overall overhaul of client vs server side things would be good. Keeping to air and thus the thread, the position of clouds is another big one. It massively affects IR missiles and IRST (let alone the obvious visual impacts) and yet is different from player to player which is really dumb
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I feel like if 1 major a year was dedicated to bug fixes the game would be a lot healthier.
Stuff like BR Decompression, fixing Countermeasures, Fixing server v client side stuff…
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Definetly. Could still include new mechanics and maps too, but there definetly needs to be a reduced emphasis on just adding new vehicles and instead fixing some bug reports would “add” way more vehicles than they normally do per update anyway. Like i barely touch the Harriers at the moment, because of a number of issues, fix that, and you add 6? new jets to Britain alone and another 8? across the other TTs that have them
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Wouldn’t yield any money so they can’t have that, tbh, we’ve been asking for an update like that since 2019’ish… and we’re closer to 2029 now than to 2019.
I actually think it would, at least long term, but yeah. Gotta pump out those 50 premiums every update
A long term investment in the form of fixing the game and thus bringing quality over quantity would require the devs (and also shareholders) to think more than just “another new russian toy to dominate top tier with and 97.5 premiums per update”.
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Yeah… I guess we should be glad that all mods can be acquired for free and there isnt a paid tier of mods that includes the best weapons