I was talking about before this new change o chaff, like between Seek&Destroy and now.
If you flew slow, not even that close to stall you could trick Fox 3’s with chaff without even being in a notch. I once had a Gripen spamming Derby’s at me from behind and it literally felt like flaring R60’s with the chaff. There was also some videos on YouTube where people hovered with Harriers in RB and were pretty much invulnerable to fox 3’s, this is because they’re less visible to the enemy radar when they “look” stationary in the sky, notching works similarly, the target plane is neither moving towards you or away from you against the background when you’re notching.
Notch+Chaff also worked for me like 9/10 times defeating missiles. How well a notch works really depends on how close it is, when you chaff and your own speed. The faster you are, the narrower the notch window is.
Lots of BVR duels since Seek & Destroy usually turned into stalemates because of this, and if you fight anyone who knows what they’re doing in top tier sim you’re unlikely to kill them with a Fox 3 in the first place.
There’s a really good Flanker player in top-tier whos averaging ~30 air kills per game and his play style is basically to rat, he’s not even putting himself into any kind of energy advantage because it’s already so powerful to just rely on multipath and the strong chaff.
Yes, I’ve tested it and checked the replay for the report. They do enter IOG like before, but mostly behaves like there are no chaff. I think you were very lucky or able to shake off missiles physically.
Chaff before this change was absolutely ridiculous, however I’m not even that against something like the notch being powerful in this game. Because it’s an evasive action that actually puts you on the defensive and an energy disadvantage, it has a cost and rewards the player flying BVR to its strength.
The issue I have is when the evasive action you take has no drawbacks, and just puts yourself at a disadvantage. Multipath is an example of this, despite you being at a significant energy-advantage - you pose no threat to someone who has mastered flying like a rat. It’s at a point where some players are not even concerned about people flying high BVR, they simply just rat on the deck because they know that any missile is gonna get multipathed or chaffed. This is why some people can rack up 40-60 kill games without ever exceeding 100 meters altitude in sim right now.
The Multipath change to 60m was really helpful though, flying like a rat is no longer consistent over very uneven terrain in my experience, so the lawn-mowers are no longer as disruptive anymore since they can no longer mindlessly approach you with no consequence over all terrain. 60m is still slightly too high in my opinion but I’m happy they changed it at all. Interesting part is that they didn’t just change MP value to 60 last patch, they added code so that they could now tune it per missile basis. So I think the next step forward is to lower it for the more advanced missiles we have, and possibly raise it for the much older generation missiles.
Even an Su-27 will win a dogfight with an F-15, if the Su-27 has like 50% of internal fuel, while F-15 just dropped external fuel tanks and has a full 40 minutes of fuel. F-15 only becomes good with 20 minutes of fuel, that’s when it has 1:1 thrust to weight ratio.
Mostly behave like there’s no chaff? Did you have instances where they locked chaff or were just fooled by it? I think the play is to chaff and slightly pitch up if the IOG theory is true. It would be similar to notching an ER, but easier
I’m just saying it sounds like the IRCCM situation all over again. People thought the AIM9M was impossible to defeat until they realised they had to change course due to it continuing to track “blind” when shutting off it’s seeker, similarly to how IOG works where it will continue going where it was manoeuvring despite being defeated. Is chaff actually stronger, or are Fox 3’s just behaving like they actually have IOG now like they should?
Are they supposed to lock onto chaff though? Is that realistic? (I’m asking since I recall people talking about this as if it was a bug and unrealistic)
Anyways if you want I’d be interested to go into customs with you and try notching some of your missiles, or vice versa
Of course it is not realistic, but understandable as a game system. Honestly, the only thing that’s different from reality is that the chaff acts as a fake target to displace radar lock, instead of creating clutter in the air.
Well I’ve reached a bit of a dead-end here without doing any testing. I’ve defeated missiles in notch a few times past 2 days but it’s possible I just ran them out of energy, feels unlikely though. My suspicion is chaff is still as powerful when it comes to their ‘luminosity’ or whatever the chaff-equivalent is, however they don’t divert course towards the chaff anymore, instead they stop tracking and go into IOG, meaning you have to defeat them a bit like 9M. This in my opinion seems to function more as “clutter in the air” like you explain it.
But I’d need to hop into customs with someone to see for myself
I consider ARH defenses to fall into two categories. Close range and long range. I’m not going to spend much time talking about long range since it doesn’t happen much in WT, but I consider long range to be BVR attacks dozens of km away where you have time to employ assorted techniques to drain the energy of the missile.
While you might find some conditions against certain missiles where a high speed barrel roll or tight turn at the last moment might be enough to escape, largely the missiles can be assumed to have plenty of energy and you need to try to defeat their seekers. The most useful techniques that I’ve used are:
Shooting first and cranking to hopefully have your missile kill the opponent and silence their radar (only works against SARHS).
Completely breaking line of sight to the radar with mountains/canyons/hills.
Diving at the ground and pulling up at the last moment so that the missile’s intercept path takes it into the ground.
Multipathing the missile by flying ~40-50m above the ground. The effect starts at 60m but you want to be lower than that.
Notching and deploying chaff once I’ve entered the notch.
I try to combine these. I want to shoot first and immediately crank on my way to the deck. With ARHs I ideally can dive behind a mountain after shooting first with my own ARHs.
Personally I think notching is a last-ditch technique at close ranges. Just turning away isn’t enough. You need time to hold your notch for your plane to fight its inertia and reduce its closure rate to near zero. That’s not always possible vs attacks launched within visual range. IMO notching and chaffing is much more viable vs distant BVR attacks.
I just tested some notching in a custom, you’re correct in that it’s nearly impossible to notch+chaff right now. We had a few misses where we weren’t sure what happened but it likely couldn’t pull in or something. I still think the old chaff was too powerful but this is too weak. Hope the report goes well
I’m going to drop in here with a couple comments of my own because to be frank I am honestly rather tired of this- though do bear in mind I am talking from a game design perspective and not a realism perspective.
This is a fundamentally unbalanced worldview, especially with how WT works with uptiers. Complaining that an enemy with situational awareness is able to defeat your missile still well out of range of IR missiles is honestly quite stupid imo.
A reminder that the F-15C MISP II, an aircraft with eight AIM-120As faces the F-16A, an aircraft with only AIM-9Ls- a missile that is easily flared and has a front-aspect lock range of only three kilometers.
Add onto that the fact that BVR is:
A: Honestly very boring gameplay-wise,
And B: that it in many ways invalidates any aircraft that cannot do BVR,
And I am sure that many of you can see the problem.
WT was not ready for Fox-3s, and attempting to make them better will only compound the problems they are already causing.
I don’t dislike this version because it offers the most realistic BVR combat.
If you take a kinematic approach, you can do the combat without any problems.
But on the other hand, chaff is completely disabled against radars like the F4E’s radar, which cannot distinguish chaff, and I have to say that this is unrealistic.
However, given that gaijin adjusts multipath uniformly with and without monopulse seeker, it may not be surprising that gaijin has introduced such a specification as a normal decision.
