As the title says, missiles are too trackable currently. Both by IR and Radar. Covering the latter, it’s absurd a radar from the 60s-70s consistently picks up missiles more than the target that launched them, only recently have air based radars gained the ability to track such small targets and to my knowledge its mainly larger missiles such as cruise missiles. Same goes for IR missiles, even with the rocket of these burning so hot, the target is so small that the majority of IR missiles should be unable to pick up others.
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Missile engines can burn anywhere between 2,482 Celsius and 3,984 Celsius. Aircraft engines usually top out at around 2,700 Celsius at full AB. It’s as realistic as can be.
Modern missiles can track cigarettes so definitely not too small.
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Yeah, the fact that my radar prefers to track enemy missiles rather than plane with the RCS of a house is hilarious.
A modern missile isn’t tracking a cigarette 5km away and afterburner plumes are much larger than a missiles
Yes it won’t track from that far away but the missile heats up a significant portion of the air around its motor.
Also what missile are you firing at 5km away
9Ms hit head-on-45 degrees, and that significant portion isn’t anywhere near the size of what the engine creates
What?
Hence why the missiles only track other missiles when they begin to accelerate far enough away fron the enemy aircraft.
It’s all a matter of distance (all distances below are made up to make figurative point and calculations are made without much afterthought so take with a grain of salt).
A radar missile at say 5km away would have the same FOV as a jet at say 30km away. so if the radar is capable of locking that jet at 30km it also has the capability of locking that missile at 5km away.
Edit:
Hey! i was close in my guess! made som quick trig calculations and a jet with area 4m^2 at 30km would equal a missile of area 0.1m^2 at 4.7km in FOV ^^
Here is the gripens radar (and some haphazardly made calculations) for reference:
and these upgrades are not done to the physical radar itself but the software and processing units.
For reference; this specific radar was stated by SAAB to " comfortably pick up commercial airliners at 300km" in 2016 (i.e. the post 2015 upgrade but before mk.4). i’m making a guess here that a commercial airliner is like 40m^2 in area frontal.
Some trigonometry later and that is an FOV ange of ±0.000382 degrees and using that again backwards for the distance to a missile of 0.1m^2 gives us 15km distance to comfortably pick up an incoming missile of the same FOV. (This distance is probably even longer as its not just straight trigonometry to get there but also interferences/resolution/signal processing/etc getting more difficult to deal with at distance).
So its probably not as hard as you think it is.
But with that said, i still think you do have a point, currently missiles do have to big RCS and are to easily picked up. The radars in game should also prioritize jets over missiles if both types of targets are found within the ACM scan.
Edit:
wording and clarifications.
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