Well, Gaijin has done it. The Improved Baz came, but it is pretty much a copy&paste of the Baz but with AMRAAMs and CFTs. IRL the BAZ 2000 was an upgrade program made in 1995 to upgrade all Baz aircraft (F-15A/B/C/D) of the IDF/AF to the avionics and computer standards of the F-15I. The upgrade included but was not limited to compatibility with modern Israeli domestic PGMs, a highly upgraded cockpit with new MFDs and instruments, upgraded avionics and subsystems, and more.
Improved Baz cockpit:
With that said, as of currently in the devserver the Improved Baz has NONE of the domestic Israeli PGMs that it could carry IRL. In fact, none of the Israeli aircraft got their domestic PGMs, but for some reason, the new premium Brazilian AMX got Israeli Lizard LGBs before any Israeli aircraft did!
This is an awareness post I made to spread the word that Israeli aircraft need to get some domestic weapons to at least feel a bit unique compared to their American counterparts. Gaijin insists on trying to gimp Israeli vehicles as hard as possible, and I will not stand for this slander.
Here are a couple of weapons that the Improved Baz (and some other Israeli aircraft) could receive:
Popeye air-to-ground missile
It weighs a whopping 1370kg and you can choose between two seekers (TV or Imaging IR) and two warheads (340kg blast-fragmentation or 360kg I-800 AP). Ingame would come as 4 separate missiles like how the Kh-29 was handled. The introduction of the Popeye to the Improved Baz and multiple other Israeli aircraft will finally give blue force nations an equivalent to the Russian Kh-29 which they currently lack. And, I mean, it’s a giant doodoo missile, it will be very fun to use.
SPICE guided bombs family (SPICE 2000 and SPICE 1000 only)
- SPICE 2000:
- SPICE 1000
Smart, Precise Impact, Cost Effective. Includes the SPICE 2000, SPICE 1000, and SPICE 250 / 250 ER. SPICE 2000 and SPICE 1000 are add-on kits for 2000lb-class and 1000lb-class bombs respectively, whereas SPICE 250 is its own product. Much like Popeye, all SPICE bombs can come either with a TV seeker or an Imaging IR seeker, and they also have inertial navigation and GPS support (the latter could come in a future update, as it is completely optional).
With that said, the SPICE 250 requires a smart quad rack that can fit 4 of them on each pylon, and I only ever saw the F-16I and the F-15I use that so I believe the current ingame aircraft are unable to carry SPICE 250. Still, the addition of these bombs will highly improve the Improved Baz’s CAS performance.
Lizard LGBs and Opher IIR-guided bombs
While SPICE bombs came from Rafael, Elbit already had their own guidance kit family called Whizzard, which included the Opher Imaging IR-guided bomb and Lizard laser-guided bomb. Both of them are guidance kits and can be fitted to various warheads. Opher stopped at one generation and is generally less advanced and much older than any of the SPICE bombs, whereas Lizard caught an export wave and received multiple updated versions: Lizard 2 (present on the premium AMX), Lizard 3, and the most modern Lizard 4. The latter two are quite similar with the difference being Lizard 4 has a harness assembly as well as inertial navigation and GPS support. As I said before, GPS isn’t needed for operation (unlike, for example, JDAMs) so the Lizard 4 guidance kit could come to the game as well. Older Israeli aircraft like the Ayit and Kurnass 2000 would use Lizard 2 and 3 while modern Israeli aircraft like the Barak II and Improved Baz would use Lizard 4.
MPR warheads
These are not PGMs by themselves but could serve as a domestic addition to the aforementioned guidance kits. Elbit’s Multi Purpose Rigid bombs are AP bombs with a twist: rather than use pure explosives, those warheads are filled with tens of thousands of controlled fragments which massively increase the local damage. The way these warheads would behave ingame is that they’d have a lower explosive filler mass but a bigger armored vehicle destruction radius compared to their Mk.80 weight equivalents. For example, the MPR500 is stated by Elbit to have the same effective kill radius as the Mk.84, as displayed by this illustration and graph:
Spoiler
MPR warheads could be useful additions for Israeli guided bomb kits for usage in ground battles as they’d massively improve their kill radius, although they would only be available on modern Israeli aircraft as they are fairly new (introduced in the 21st century).
There are more Israeli weapons I could’ve brought up, like MLGB, Ice Breaker, RAMPAGE, etc… I want to go to sleep at a normal hour tonight. I hope Gaijin will at the very least give the Improved Baz one of those weapons and/or the correct cockpit so it won’t feel like a copy&paste of the F-15C MSIP II. Also, the Improved Baz should be able to carry Python 4s and Derbys, so Gaijin could possibly add those too.
