Let’s say the APG-77 was not available for testing before 1998 and YF-22/23 were in 1989/90 when the contest between them happened and YF-22 took the contract. Also , Northrop-Grumman bought Westinghouse at 1996 , it can’t be before that anyway. Introduction date officially was around 2005 , so the better Radar was introduced 1 year before the last F-14Ds flight…
First AESAs started to get introduced by 2000, however they didn’t much the power and their only gain was that they couldn’t really get flooded . But against the power of APG-71 they wouldn’t flood it either.
Imagine , APG-71 might be the epitome of PDs and AESAs were just starting initially they were not “better” they just had more potential and we got to have better AESAs in 5 years period…
however, from 1991 and for nearly 15 years nothing could actually match APG-71.
Them simply being in proximity isn’t enough. They have be be connected through datalink. From there, the RIO configures the connection.
The AN/APG-66 to APG-66 V2 achieves greater range through digital signal processing, not just by increasing antenna size. Radar range can be extended with technology, not only by enlarging the antenna.
To a degree, It more so that because you already know where to look the radar doesn’t need to make concessions or try to scan there are two generic limits for detection;
There needs to be sufficient signal returning to the antenna to be discriminated from Noise( this isn’t solely power based as phase and coherence could also be used to assist with noise rejection, and lower the floor but are not really quantifiable unless you had an example in front of us ).
And due to the use of a Pulsed waveform for range determination, the Repetition frequency / schema effectively provides an upper bound on time of flight after which there is ambiguity introduced as to which sent pulse corresponds to the return as a contact’s material / shape properties are not known beforehand.
Additionally depending on the Antenna and it’s mechanization angular determination could be suspended to increase the duty cycle (similarly ESA’s could increase the number of Zones / Transmit modules available to the tasking so increase power available at the expense of other tasks) and therefore effective radiated power, to help bring the return out of the noise.
I didn’t know so i asked… isnt that what youre supposed to do when you dont know? Something tells me that yall are way more well versed than i when it comes to this stuff. I lowkey didnt want to read dozens of papers explaining the AWG-9 when i couldve just asked.
The real reason is Gaijin can’t be bothered to simulate HPRF/LPRF radars accurately or give the F-14 it’s RIO tinkering abilities. In real life they AWG-9 wasn’t as bad in game. It wasn’t MPRF level (F-15 type radar), but it wasn’t like the F-4J’s radar.
Infact, I’d take the F-4J radar over the F-14 radar anyday in warthunder…
It’s fine. The AWG-9 is still partially classified due to Iranian still operating the F-14A. It’s a pain to even try to find the simplest of info about it. And unlike the Airforce, the Navy doesn’t promote their stuff in those nice formatted blogs. So we have barely any of those brochures to cross reference with either.
To answer your questions simply:
The AWG-9 only has HPRF (only tracking headon frequency) and LPRF (only tracks targets moving away, below, or slowly)
The other option would be for them to properly implement the IRSTS / TCS (ALR-23 / AXX-1, impacting the F-14A Early & F-14B respectively), but they haven’t for whatever reason, so we’re still waiting on an outstanding bug report from a few years ago, on the old forum.
Presently the F-14B doesn’t use its EO tracker as part of its STT automation. As such isn’t subject to the fix requested.
The fix for the aircraft mentioned in this report is only to resolve the automation rapidly changing between radar and IR/EO while in STT. It isn’t to grant full launch capabilities in those modes and doesn’t allow for it when manually switching to IR/EO modes.
