How do I dodge an AIM-7F when going cold?

The Academy - Players helping Players
,
1

Hey everyone, now I’m not new at the game, I’ve been playing for over 6 years and I’m not new to jets either, I have grinded the Japanese tech tree up to the F-16AJ and the British tree to the Gripen and Tornados. Only issue is that my friend just bought me the MiG-23ML and so far I’m loving the jet, it’s absolutely amazing and is so undertiered… except when going into contact with radar missiles, notably AIM-7Fs.

As an example, last match I had, bit of an uptier, 12.3 so not much. Did my usual thing killing people with R-24Ts from above, then started climbing again to look for other targets, I’m aware the SPO-10 has quite a lot of blind spots, so I’m constantly rolling the aircraft left and right to negate them, and low and behold, it eventually picks up a radar wave roughly to my 7 o clock, not locked. I try to find it again, and I’m locked so I look behind me, and see a missile 9 KM away (about 5 1/2 miles), and a good 10,000 feet below me (I was at roughly Angels 20). To counter this, I turned fully cold to the missile, by the time I did it was about 7 KM away, and I started climbing and jinking gently, trying to stop the missile from accelerating while keeping my speed up (I assumed it hadn’t yet switched to sustainer) and start chaffing, trying to blind the aircraft and the missile’s systems. At this point I was unsure what aircraft it was, and unsure on it’s exact position so may have done this wrong. the missile’s sustainer cut out about 1.5 KM away from me (0.9 ish miles) so I knew I was dead, but I tried to jink anyway and failed, becoming a fatality to the F-4S that launched it.

Does anybody know what I did wrong, and what I could have done better? Looking back on it, the best course of action would probably have been to go low and try to use the air pressure to slow the missile, but I didn’t know what missile it was at the time, and was hoping it was a Skyflash or E2 which don’t get sustainers.

Some detailed may be off, this is just how I remember it as I was pretty riled up from an earlier game + this one.

Thanks!
hjnbnb

2

You didn’t need to, just dive down to MP altitude and continued going cold. Since he fired really close there’s no point in trying to burn its energy since you’re at the NEZ (No Escape Zone). Plus IIRC and i may be wrong, the F4S’ radar suffers from targets going cold unless they’re faster than it or high up.

3

Not much you can do at altitude besides notch and hope for the best. If you’re playing RB I’d recommend staying treetop level in the MiG-23- with poor RWR and relatively short-range missiles altitude isn’t going to do you much good. Especially if you are using 24Ts, at low altitude players might just try to multipath while at altitude they’ll simply flare your missile. Plus premium players, Americans, and Brits at the BR are often pretty terrible pilots and will make no significant attempts to evade missiles in any manner, even R-24Rs and R-60Ms can simply be fired head on at a couple kilometers and they will hit.

4

Usually going high works, I dive down on people and launch my 24Ts from about 8 KM and it hits them, I usually dont fly tree top level because I’m not good at dogfighting. Only time I dont climb is when there’s F-14s on the enemy team. The only issues I’ve had in my MiG-23 flying at altitude is when people launch either R-27 or Sparrows at me