https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/MV9UWiO9gFDe
thought I’d do this one just for laughs, this will hopefully allow us to make proper loadouts if/when the proper falcons are added
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Eh, its dead anyways if it faces anything between 8.0 and 10.0 that has a gun and can retain energy in a turn better. US vs US matches it’ll be eaten alive by F-106s and F-101s. Facing other countries it’ll be eaten alive by Sabers and Mig-15/17s. The gunpods are nice but they tickle enemies to death instead of doing any truly significant damage and 7.62mm guns in this game are trash for ground pounding.
Your AIM-4 Falcons are only slightly better than a Firestreak but worse than a 9B. They get more kills than the two absolute worse missiles in the game but they get less kills than the first proper dogfight IR missile in the world. For a plane that relies entirely on missiles to do the bulk of its work, ARB is trash. As much as I would love to fly these planes in Sim where I can think things are better for them, I have to think about it from the perspective of ARB.
Mig-21s are a problem but my experience with Mig-21s is that the vast majority of people who fly them are the same people that try to turnfight a Saber in it. They’re less of a problem than the Mig-19 mains but your biggest issue comes from the Yak-130 who gave the Mig-19 mains a plane that never compresses and has infinite energy.
the issue is, its an interceptor. Its got no right dogfighting and staying around to see out the fight. It was a massivly flawed aircraft irl that was forced to rely on missiles. Unreliable missiles too. It will have use against bombers, and i can see the appeal in Nuclear Mode as a high alt interceptor (no way…)
As long as those bombers aren’t Tu-95 or B-52 because those just one-chaff or rainbow the flares.
I am sure the riffle calibre anti-troop machine guns will 1 shot the 8 engine heavy bombers :)
TU-95 flares are ineffective from certain angles, and you always still have the rockets
I’ll have to challenge your notion of “massively flawed” there. It underperformed compared to expectations, and was rendered obsolete by the 106 rather quickly, but it was still the plane with the easiest and sweetest handling out of the century series that still had performance comparable to the F100 (with whom it shared it’s engine) while carrying the equipment needed for all weather operation.
So, that’s not quite right?
The thing about the Super Falcon (-F/-G) was it was optimized to be fired at a very high Mach number (1.5 or higher). It replaced a lot of instantaneous thrust off the rail with a larger warhead and a longer sustainer, because the idea was in the F-106 it would be going so fast at launch and the intended target couldn’t pull, that greater range was more important than maneuver speed.
So in game, where it’s often being launched off slower platforms (Mach 1 or less) it underperforms.
So in War Thunder terms the Falcon -A/-C/-D will do significantly better in the first 10 seconds off the rails than the later -F/-G, if they’re modelled correctly if fired at transonic or lower speeds. They are going pretty fast for those first few seconds and they’re reasonably maneuverable.
The real problem with the -A/-C is if modelled correctly their seekers were also kinda crap, problems that were fixed in the AIM-26B/AIM-4D respectively. (The SARH -26B added a prox while the IR -4D got a limited all-aspect capability; the AIM-4H, mentioned here earlier, never left test, but it was just an AIM-4D that also had a prox, similar to the Swedish Rb.28 Falcon; personally I’d say that’s a little much for the US plane).
We’ve seen Gaijin go out of their way to give premiums and other country vehicles viable play options that are… hypothetical at best in real life. My personal take on how to “fix the 102” would be to give it when spaded what was its historical late-service AIM-26B/AIM-4D combo (1x SARH and 3x IR). That still would make it basically an early F-4 level missile combo though (with half as many missiles, but not useless ones). Twelve of the rockets/AIM-26B should be an either/or on the center-pylon (so if you have one 26 in the front center rail as was a very common loadout, you only get half the rockets), and the rockets should be prox-fuzed like the F-89D’s so they’re not completely useless, to reflect not a real prox fuze but the greater real-life accuracy of the radar aimpoint to automatically factor in the trajectory drop. You did it for the premium, you should do it for the equivalent weapon in the tech tree. That’s my take anyway.
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would only be a single AIM-26 in service would it not?
also, could you please share your source for the super falcons design choices in leaving out thrust by assuming higher launch speed? that’ll make it way easier to explain to the many people who won’t understand the idea of the earlier variants being better most of the time gameplay wise
That’s all well and good really but that still doesn’t change the fact that the AIM-4s, even the early ones, are practically pointless. They won’t get more kills than the 106’s ones and with a worse seeker they’ll lose lock more easily anyways. They’re just straight up worse 9Bs and a different flavor of disappointment. Since both the 106 and 102 had 9H tests performed, it would be better to give them the 9H. Otherwise the 102 can get the option of One AIM-26B and 3 AIM-4Ds or 2 AIM-26Bs and no AIM-4s. Will be a much better aircraft than what we have now which will get mogged on by 8.0 Migs.
Tell that to an AIM-4 seeker head. I’ve fired AIM-4Gs at TUs from all sorts of angles and the 4G just sees the Sun and goes straight for it. Or the TU just rolls his wings at the last second and the 4G misses completely.
You could go higher than that. The issue is only the center racks were adjusted to fit the -26B by taking the rockets out. The other 4 side bays were unchanged. So you could do one SARH -26B and 3x IR -4Ds plus two semi-useless AIM-4A (as mentioned that was the 102’s general Vietnam-era config apparently) in the same front row as the -26B. Or two -26B and four -4A. (But yeah, I guess you’re not wrong if you ignore the -4As.)
From Arming America’s Interceptors: The Hughes Falcon Missile Family (secondary source I know but it’s a pretty solid article):
“Beginning in 1961, F-102s underwent modification to accept the GAR-11, which was dimensionally larger than the other Falcon variants employed. As a result, F-102s only gained the ability to carry the GAR-11 in the center weapons bay, giving a maximum load of two weapons. Modification of the F-102 to permit the carriage of the GAR-11 necessitated the removal of the FFAR tubes from the inner bay doors to accommodate the increased wingspan of the missile.”
your problem with the TU might be the angle from which you are firing the missile, since it’s aiming at a empty point in space because of the rear vertical stabilizer (the link in the report is in the opening post).
But there are a LOT more problems with the way the falcons are modelled in warthunder compared to how they were in real life; People complain about the pl12 and aim-120 not turning enough, but imagine if they objectively had between a third or a quarter of the G-pull they should have, had a seeker with half the viewing angle it should have, had a rear aspect IR seeker instead of an all aspect IR seeker, or had radar seekers that lost tracking within 150 meters of the target and with no way of filtering chaff when it should have, and then say the missiles suck ingame because in real life they sucked.
The falcons had a rough time in vietnam because they were mostly used by a platform with a botched job of integrating them, to the point half the missiles were rendered useless on takeoff - and even then they had a better sucess ratio than the sparrows that were the main weapon of the phantom from day one.
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The way I understand it, they switched from a single intense boost to a boost sustain rocket motor because they were designed to be launched at mach 2 (thus Super Falcons), and this avoided the aerodynamic heating from going over mach 3.
That’s not the reason why the overall impulse is much lower though; the problem is that in a era still relying on vaccum tubes, they added a lot of sophisticated control electronics (anti chaff circuits, relocking after launch circuits, home on jam circuits, dual plane manoeuvring) that brought a big weight and internal volume penalty to the overall missile, leaving little for the warhead and rocket motor. By the time solid state electronics and monopulse seekers were coming into play, the falcon missile program had already been cancelled.
So, AIM-4D stats are in the files already (I think some things about -4A and -4C are a little suspect but that’s another issue, again I don’t think they should be used here at all in a world where the -26B/-4D combo exists). And you can use Statshark to evaluate performance on the current stats.
So this is the top down view of the nominal low altitude engagement profile for the F-102 and the AIM-4D from the latter’s SMC for a low-altitude bomber intercept: 0.5 kft altitude, tail chase, target is maneuvering at <1G, launch distance 1800m, launch aircraft speed of M0.8, target speed of M0.73 (not a crazy scenario for WT either). The internally carried AIM-4D and the AIM-9B should both kill reliably under these conditions, in game as in real-life. In these specific parameters they’re basically equivalent. But the AIM-4G, which has 10% less energy than an AIM-4D to accelerate a 10% heavier missile because of that significantly bigger warhead it carries (which makes no difference if it hits a fighter but might help knock a bomber down), just can’t keep up. This is why players hate it.
AIM-4D: Momentum/impulse: 27,228 N⋅s. Mass: 59.9 kg
AIM-4G: Momentum/impulse: 24,056 N⋅s. Mass: 66.2 kg
It’s just math with those numbers, no magic: the AIM-4D will just perform somewhat better because it’s 10% more powerful and 10% lighter than an AIM-4G with a comparable seeker head.
If you look at the SMC’s for the AIM-4F and AIM-4G, however, it’s clear they assumed nominal F-106 launches would be at 30 kft+ with launch speeds of Mach 1.8 or better, so the trade away of some energy for the bigger warhead would be permissible. At those parameters the missile is already going so fast off the rail the performance difference due to the mass/energy differential between an AIM-4G and an AIM-4D (and an AIM-9B) in a tail chase is basically negligible (again, checkable in Statshark today).
EDIT: And as mentioned upthread, at these speeds and altitudes a -4D or a -9B would easily exceed Mach 3.2 at launch under those kind of conditions and given that skin temperature rises by the cube of the mach number, that can be relevant whereas the -4F and -4G’s slower motors can really never go above Mach 3 even if they were slung at the kind of closing speeds a 106 was theoretically capable of. Basically the -4F and -4G were designed for a very specific, high-altitude high-speed regime that only the 106 could really play in.
this is already promising, but we can’t be fully certain that the AIM-4D as it exists in the file right now is ready can we?
So they could always change the placeholder stats for the -4D at some point, sure. And yes, I like to think the initial inclusion on Dev of the F-102 carrying Super Falcons it never carried for real and would have performed poorly on that platform is because the AIM-4D (and AIM-26B) missile models aren’t ready yet.
I’m conflicted between explanations, considering they showed it off in the trailer I think they may have thought super falcons were the way to go. If they knew the main armament wasn’t ready… why not just wait to show it until the stuff is ready?