Yes, yes, here is a person who went from 5.7 aircraft with guns straight to 12.3 aircraft with radars and missiles (F-14 in a marathon). Don’t judge strictly, better help.
Questions: how does the Phoenix system work in principle, how to capture enemies and launch a missile?
I have no problems with a regular IR missile, it shows a capture circle, is captured and released. But I don’t understand anything about Phoenix. Once I poked all the radar buttons and accidentally launched a missile and it shot down the target. Other times the missile is also launched, and although the radar is tracking the enemy aircraft, the missile just starts flying in circles and falls.
What settings do I need, what mode and how should I switch the radar and in general what should I do to launch a missile at a target?
Radar missiles are a bit more complex than IR missiles. First of all the Phoenix is an active radar homing missile which means it has its own radar, once it gets within 16km of the target the Phoenix will go “active” meaning it no longer requires you to maintain lock and it can guide itself to the target. If you do fire a Phoenix beyond 16km, you have to maintain data link by either keeping the target locked or keeping the target within TWS or track while scan. If you don’t then the missile will use its inertial guidance to try and predict where the target is until it can go active within 16km.
Secondly the Phoenix’s radar is pulse doppler and relies on the doppler shift to lock on to the target, essentially the target needs to be moving. However this can easily be fooled by a maneuver called notching, basically flying perpendicular to the PD radar fooling it into thinking that the target is not moving. This is probably why your Phoenix started going around in circles, because it lost its target.
The best way to setup your radar for the Phoenix is to switch radar modes to TWS HDN with [Change Radar/IRST mode] keybind. From there you can cycle through different targets with [Select Radar/IRST to lock] keybind and just fire away.
bind the multi function menu first that allows quick access to the necessary functions and also contains the name of the settings you need to bind. There you can access everything related to radar customization and lock/fire stuff
With TWS mode. You don’t need a lock with TWS since its track while scan. Try it out in a test drive. Oh and TWS mode works best in head-on conditions.
TWS MODE DOES NOTHING I CAN FLY AS LONG AS I WANT IN THIS MODE AND THE ROCKET LAUNCH BUTTON DOESN’T WORK.An error occurred: Body seems unclear, is it a complete sentence?
Check them out for a quick, basic run down of key presses and procedure to use missiles. There are lots of different ones for the different missile types.
You probably want the “Active radar homing AAM” one (but I could be wrong as I’m not a missile guy)
Bind Multi-function menu is Controls-Common
Then in battle its MfM-1-5 to switch to TWS 7 to change the radar scale, 8 is for distance
MFM-1- 2 for selecting target and switching between multiple 3 is for hard lock.
You see the exact name of the function in this menu so you can bind them for quicker access. And more importantly easily figure out how it works
I think I figured it out, the problem was that these missiles are not guided from behind and closer than 5 kilometers, and in the test flight you appear exactly AND from behind AND closer than 5 kilometers.
I tried playing in a custom mission where the enemies were far away and were flying towards me and now everything works.
