So I had a look and spotted some behaviour from the seeker post launch. It appears to on occasion pulse between NFoV and WFoV. I’ll have a chat with a Dev.
Cheers for the replay files.
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Thank you very much for taking a look!
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I noticed the same, but be sure to discard those instances where your flares get hidden by your own aircraft in relation to the missile.
For example, a frontal top down aim-9L against an F-16 that fires a single flare downwards has the chance to not even see the flares, especially at shorter ranges. Similar situations could happen if you are doing a horizontal turn pulling towards the missile and flaring below the fuselage.
Yeah that’s true though for most of the times when I caught an unexpected AIM-9L is during notches vs stuff like F/A-18s who throw everything at one plane. Just for laughs here’s a clip of me getting jumpscared by an AIM-9L successfully acquiring me 5km away after missing an F-2A.
IMO, this pretty much shows it is working properly. Yeah the ones at 1:52, and 3:35 both are a bit weird. But in every other shot it acts basically as you’d expect.
In the gameplay, you’re pulling into your flares, which is exactly what you should do. Given the rise time of large caliber flares, and the heat of Su-27 engines on non-AB, they only need a bit more than 0.4s of rise to decoy a flare. If you pull in front of the flare after that time, which you do, its gonna go for it.
I’ve looked at it at 0.008x speed, and the flickering doesn’t actually appear to be whats causing it to go to flares.
There are 2 things i’ve seen:
- IR returns from targets outside the IFOV.
- IR returns from inside the FoV not returning signatures
Both of these are clear signs of server desync, and actually whats causing the flickering. However there’s something that’s not clear about it. There isn’t a strict order of consistency to this error. You would expect that the FoV would expand due to the missile not getting returns from its FoV, which in some cases, such as the used image is the case. However that’s not the case in all situations. As such, its likely that there is some inconsistency in the server replay past the actual inconsistency in what’s going on, as the server replay has been known to have issues with.
Additionally, why I think the flickering is largely an error with the replay, the seeker tends to very consistently snap back to the original target, even in situations where the flares often are hot enough, where if they were to actually be in the FoV, they would attract the seeker.
For instance, from the above image, the seeker goes back to the orignal target after roughly 0.8s, despite the fact that at the time, the flares are actually hot enough where if they were to be in the missiles FoV, as the replay showing it at full FoV would seem to say, the seeker would’ve prioritized them.
Further, the missile seeker still says it is tracking, and appears to be providing targetting updates on the original target, even while the seeker is not giving return signatures.
My assumption was server desync, there isn’t a good reason for the FoV to change post launch. It has no LOAL features, its LOBL only so wide FoV prelaunch > Launch > FoV narrows, if it doesn’t capture the target it shouldn’t start a search to my knowledge. But there could be more in the seeker behaviour I’m not seeing.
Something changed a few months back
Aim9Ls have turned into R73s- no burner, spamming flares and the 9L hits anyway. Before I never even cut burner and usually 1 flared them every time.
Maybe it’s intended behavior, but they feel very underperforming to me. How fast is the flare rise time anyways? I had R-73 flared at 350m in front aspect - I know, front aspect sucks, but FoV of .75 degrees at 350m is less than 5m. It seems to have worse rejection of the various flare vs engine spectra than something like 9L, or Magic 1, PL-5B in my experience. It’s self sabotaging - loves to bite on the flare more than the engine, and then can’t reacquire because it’s fov has narrowed on the flare
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Yeah. If it’s intended, its way different than how they used to be.
They used to be near impossible to flare under 2.5-2km in rear aspect and about 1km in side…ish aspect depending on the jet and flare patterns.
Now they are easily flared at 1km in perfect rear aspect.
If devs want to keep them like this, every jet that heavily relies on gatewidth IRCCM missile loadout needs to be dropped in BR by 0.3-0.7
Mirage 2k, Mirage 4k, F1C, JH-7, the later su-25 variants etc.
The only kills I got with gatewidth IRCCM recently were against people who didn’t flare