It’s confusing, but SPEAR is the UK’s current precision weapon pronouncement programme, “Select Precision Effects At Range”. The SPEAR 3 Missile is a programme to fulfil the 3rd requirement in the SPEAR programme, which is broken into 5 parts,
Paveway IV upgrades
Brimstone upgrades
SPEAR 3 Missile
StormShadow upgrades
FC/ASW, an in progress surface/airlaunched antishipping missile to replace stormshadow (in the antishipping role), Harpoon, & Exocet.
in conclusion they really need to rename SPEAR 3 (the missile)
The entire gimmick of spear 3 is that it’s supposed to be Brimstone parts mixed with MBDA’s Smart glider bomb parts, so as of right now it’s unlikely that it has a IR seaker, maybe later models. Although it’s all just hearsay as nothing has been released.
Innovative multi-mode sensor seeker for increased selectivity in complex scenarios
High-resolution Millimeter Wave radar
Semi-Active Laser
No mention of infrared. IIRC it’s now called “multi-mode” rather than “dual-mode” like it was initially on Brimstone because the radar seeker has both passive and active modes.
In theory, all radar scanning sectors in the game should be working/playable.
I decided to try all the top-tier radars available to me and see how their TWS works at the maximum scanning sector. I will time the time it takes for the radar beam to leave the upper left corner, end up in the lower right and return to the upper left. Imagine that there is a contact there that is tracking a target being fired at by a Fox-3, but at the same time you are scanning the rest of the battlefield with a radar.
As far as I remember, in our game the contact “life” time is 8 seconds.
AN/AWG-9 80deg 4 bars. ~4s
Н001ВЭП 50deg 4 bars. ~7.2s
AI.24 Foxhunter 60deg 3 bars. ~3s (or 6 if keep in mind bugged speed)
Capror-M/PS-05/Blue Vixen 140deg 2 bars. ~8.6s
KLJ-7 120deg 1 bar ~3.6
RDY 120deg 1 bar. ~2.5s
Of those radars that have/need TWS mode, only Captor has an unusable mode. And this is one of the fastest radars. No, I don’t know the exact figure, but I estimated the minimum scanning speed based on what I read on the Internet and elsewhere and on the fact that the contact “lives” for 8 seconds. And this figure is not even close to what we have.
Even the slow N001, about which I have heard only bad things, does not have a mode in which the radar will not have time to scan the entire area and return to the contact it is tracking.
Depends on the radar. Some are 12 seconds (ex: N001), some are 8 seconds (ex: APG-66v3), some are 4 seconds (ex: V004, RBE2), some are 5 seconds (AI.24W), and probably others that I don’t know about.
There’s a vid of someone in a typhoon simpit and the radar display seems to update the contact ranges roughly once per second, not too sure on the scan pattern and it could be that fancy feature that redirects the radar to known contacts for more frequent updates
Narrow: Same scan time, but split into more bars.
Wide: Longer scan time, split into more bars.
System by itself no longer stabilizes (will always rotate with the plane)
And it seems it will have a worse distance accuracy, from 10m to 100m.
Overall, a nerf.
Yes I’m having the same annoying problem sometimes, when I try reselecting any of the missile’s it just doesn’t work at all and I would eventually get killed before I would even launch
Looks like we gotta report the range part then because I think I remember a source that said comparable in determination of range to the radar or something to that extent.
You’re either going into TRK MEM which I have a report on (@Gunjob do you mind giving it a look?) or going into TRK IR which there’s another report for which I believe has also been reported.
Well, yes. But no.
Now the scanning beam goes “there and back”. That is, to return to the left edge and update the contact, the system now needs 5 seconds. Tomorrow it will require 3.
But the main thing I’m waiting for is that I hope for a link to the report in the patch notes. Or a link to a document that records the future values of the IRST operating parameters.
