In War Thunder, a radar lock is displayed by a plain box around the locked aircraft with range, relative velocity and movement information right next to it. Unfortunately, it does not inform the player, whether or not the locked aircraft is a friendly or a foe.
Suggestion:
Display IFF information next to or in the box that is currently being used to display a lock. Btw yes i know that the pictures in WT that I used here are with an enemy aircraft but you get the point
Spoiler
The following images are taken from DCS and are not pictures from real aircraft. This does not matter in this case as they’re only to be used as examples of how it could be done in War Thunder where radar locks are signaled the same across all aircraft
There are different variants of this so here are some that are easy to understand
Variants:
#1 F-15
The F-15 shows a cross through the “lock rectangle” signaling a friendly
The F-18 shows a text under the “lock rectangle” saying “F R I E N D”
Disclaimer: these are not for “historical accuracy” but rather just as an improvement of information that is available to the player.
Reasoning:
This would primarily help in sim battles where markers don’t exist. It might happen that a radar lock is acquired using ACM mode where IFF is not displayed or where a radar lock using the “regular” method is used but there are a bunch of friendlies in the area so it’s unsure which aircraft the radar locked. However this would also apply to BVR situations in RB where enemy and friendly aircraft might not be spotted.
Obviously this would only work on radars that have IFF capabilities in the used mode.
This is basically a re-post from the old forum but gaijin won’t let me get to the edit page anymore so i cannot use my script and had to copy all of this over by hand, thats why its not exactly the same.
Seems like a great idea, and I completely agree. Information provided by radars in this game is very limited (just range and closure speed, no altitude, speed etc).
Image of a radar with the extra information
IFF would be much more useful (and realistic) if you could just see the related information (friend/foe/unknown) on the HUD (or, in the case of WT, the lock box).
As I fly the Hornet in DCS, I would prefer the following (can provide images if requested):
Diamond around the target for confirmed enemy
Enemy HUD
Square for unknown (for the radars without IFF I suppose)
Unknown HUD
Square with FRIEND indication for friendly
Friendly HUD
Also, on the radar display, we could have something like this:
or for friendlies for unknowns (except the number) or for enemies (except the number)
The stem indicates direction.
So we don’t have to rely on double bars to understand what is going on. This could help prepare for the datalink update, too.
Additionally, we could have SHOOT cues, considering that the max/min range data are already in the game (in the form of range carets on the sides of the radar scope):
A flashing SHOOT for enemies/unknowns for radars with no IFF but able to provide a Launch Acceptable Region
A flashing IN LAR (in Launch Acceptable Region) for friendly contacts
Radar functionality and ease of use can drastically be improved in these ways in my opinion. As you may have noticed, I am heavily influenced by the F/A-18 (NOTICE: I have used only publicly available unclassified and unrestricted information), but I think this would be a good way to go.
Im hoping eventually we’ll get radar symbology in the cockpit itself, actually in the HUD. Currently absent. When that comes, I cant overly think of any reason why the external symbology couldnt match the internal symbology. Make it aircraft specific (or certainly at least have an option for it to be that way) But yeah, some extra symbology never hurts
I wish they did radar symbiology on the 3rd person HUD to match the aircraft that’s being flown. It would be a lot more work but I think would also be a lot cooler.
imagine this was never in till end of 2024 is crazy. had so many sim friendly fire due to this when using HMD to lock especially on something like SU27
Just had another match in J11A which ended up with a friendly fire, simply due to lacking this
Was in a pitched fight and I have 0 idea if the plane in front is an enemy, switching to N001’s slow scanning mode is simply too slow WVR, switched to HMS locked and fired, boom friendly…
nowadays both sides got typhoons and gripen, there’s no easy way to visually IFF either.
The fact that this was still ignored showed how sim has such low priority compared to RB
they can even simply put an X on the HUD (not even needed on plane-specific HUD, just general game HUD), or just add a bar on top during STT like how it exists in SRC or TWS
or 
for friendlies
for unknowns (except the number)
or 
for enemies (except the number)
