Wouldn’t call it a downgrade. Aside from when fired from a Rafale, an AESAphoon equipped with Meteors will basically be unavoidable in BVR.
In both of their cases (AIM-120D, PL-12A), GPS nav was included to make their mid course navigation more efficient. Something you’d need to do because the engineers (and really, anyone with a brain cell) knew energy was finite.
This is not the same case as with the Meteor. It can travel further than both of them and still maintain a little over Mach 3 speeds while they’d be gasping for air at Mach 1. Of course, in a Meteor MLU, it could be included, which means its effective range would go up by a bit and its NEZ extended further.
Trying to use the Meteor like a MICA or R-77 will naturally disappoint people. That’s not its use case… at all. If you’re or anyone is going to take those kinds of shots, you might as well just use ASRAAM/IRIS-T/MICA EM or MICA IR.
I’ll also note that it still features 2 way datalink, as a rafale successfully managed to get one to switch target during its flight. That means that aside from a somewhat improved mid course navigation (which, considering that an INS probably wouldn’t drift much in the time frame even a long range missile would travel), the METEOR still is capable of doing those fancy long range missiles things.
It is however in need of a better seeker which would be corrected with the MLU getting an AESA seeker
You must be aware that seekers considered superior increase the detection range of the ARH and provide the enemy with more time to initiate evasive maneuvers. If the aircraft’s radar is excellent, seekers that are considered not superior are generally more powerful.
I don’t think you’ll be able to switch targets after launch in War Thunder. I hope we eventually can, but for now it doesn’t seem so. It’s probably just gonna be basic to start.
Going from the seeker it has (which isn’t bad at all) to AESA would be… something. I don’t see how that’ll help things (do educate me), though.
True, however in the case of missiles like the Meteor or even the R-37, the “time to initiate evasive manoeuvres” is still low, considering it’s screaming at them at Mach ~3-4 (or roughly Mach 5 for the R-37, in war thunder at least).
Seeker stuff aside, I am genuinely interested how they plan on implementing Meteor lol. The physical body screams high drag, but at the same time the missile propels itself against said drag and accelerates linearly and doesn’t drop off at all. It could be coded in to simply hit a “speed wall”, because if they don’t it’ll probably accelerate well past Mach 4.5 and into hypersonic regimes.
Dual-pulse is definitely the easier new propulsion system to develop, lol.
I would say it “depends”. If the ARH missile radar is capable of LPI operation (pulse compression with variable output depending on the distance to the target) it’s extremely difficult to even detect the missile before it’s way too late. The meteor seeker is said to have a “silent mode” which coheres with the nomenclature of “silent radar” which is used for “pulse compression” capable radars.
2 way datalink is not modeled in war thunder as mentioned by @kizvy.
I was just mentioning how, even IRL, the meteor missing GNSS doesn’t make it worse than missiles with GNSS but regular propulsion.
As for the missile getting an AESA seeker over a regular seeker (still IRL, not in game), it would make it much better at seeing through low observable aircrafts, as well as defeating counter measures and Jamming pods.
For the exemple of the rafale being shot down, it’s possible that if the PL15 had been a missile featuring a normal radar (and not guided by an AWACS most probably), it would have been decoyed by the SPECTRA jammers. That’s also why those same jammers are getting upgraded in the near future, to keep up with more modern radars.
It is said that the AMRAAM has improved its ECCM capabilities with every variant update, but has that actually been implemented in War Thunder? No, it has not changed. I simply cannot believe that Gaijin will add any additional value to the AESA seeker.
AMRAAM doesnt use a AESA seeker or any inservice A2A missile for the phoon afaik, and since gajin for the most part models AESA as just strong MECH i dont believe much would change + ECM isnt implemented (hopfully soon tho)
Isn’t two-way datalink in-game now? Since, you know, that’s sort of a thing for the AIM-120D/PL-12AE
Also the Meteor’s current seeker wouldn’t be that susceptible to jamming either way, and would include certain ECCM capabilities, similar to most AMRAAM variants.
Because there’s no ECM yet, so they don’t model those improvements to ECCM in each AMRAAM variant.
2 way datalink is indeed not modeled in game. Only GNSS is, which means that when the missile loses track it will turn on GNSS instead of IOG (meaning 0 drift, but isn’t that useful).
The meteor seeker is based on the MICA EM seeker which is still a 90s seeker. It probably saw some upgrades as the meteor is about a decade newer, but I doubt it’d be comparable to say the Aim120. However the MLU would feature the MICA NG seeker, which would be leagues better. As of now, I believe that in term of A2A missiles, there’s basically only the PL15 and very soon the MICA NG EM which feature such radar tech (please correct me if I’m wrong tho)
@miki3084 just to be clear I’m not strictly speaking about war thunder, I’m also mentioning IRL (known) performances fyi
It was my understanding the GNSS part of guidance is only to effectively put IOG drift to 0? It still reverts to IOG + DL if lock is lost, just that it flies with 0 deviation compared to others? This would be why it’s “harder” to notch.
Yeah, based on, not a 1:1 copy of it. It would’ve obviously had upgrades done. Of course, we don’t know what these are, so we can only speculate
Yep, the 7m is the margin of error for GPS, which is a set value (but is different based on the missile/bomb itself).
For IOG, the error would increase linearly. I believe IOG in game as a set value for how much it increases over time but don’t quote me on that.
The drift is also way over the top, meaning that in seconds, you might lose 50 or so meters.
2 way datalink in game would behave kinda like they do on the R27ER and AIM7P : if the missile loses guidance/track, the plane should be able to give it a new target for the missile to reaquire.
IRL, there are more use cases, like the rafale switching from one target to another mid course, and probably others I don’t know about