Was doing some max range tests on heli mounted air to air and noticed mistrals (already massively nerfed) guidance and or flight model seems really borked. Here’s a 4km test of igla and mistral vs the test flight jets.
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If you think it is a bug, you can do a bug report here:
https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder
Log with your GJ logs.
Unfortunately I don’t think its a “bug” per se but the really bad interpretation of mistral gaijin has going. We had an extremely thorough thread about mistral but its on the old forum… Sigh
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All the MANPADS missiles seem very weak to be honest.
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But mistral is the one that suffers most. It should be on par with ty90 but instead its like a gimped stinger. They based their nerf off an igla manual and applied it to all manpads
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I know dude. I guess it’s conveniently that way because Russian helicopters get fantastic ATGMs which they can use as AAMs in the Vikhr. British Apache is the only one that can come close.
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Lately Gaijin has had a nerf campaign of everything that is a French missile. Mistral, HOT-3 when the next nerf well I’m curious to know which ones it will be…
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Thank god i’m not the only one who noticed this weird behavior when the Mistral runs out of burntime. It just drop from 12G to like 6G which is very frustrating. It only does it with the Mistral too, other manpads are not affected they turn very well when gliding.
I got this footage from today where a teammate and i shot 10 Mistrals at a SU-25 and all missed because of this bug or whatever this is.
As you can see on the video there are plenty of times where the missile should have hit but because of that bug it just miss.
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I really can’t understand Gaijin, what does he gain by nerfing the French material like that, or refusing to buff it when necessary. Their snobbery makes me pity.
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Honestly i don’t believe it’s Gaijin purposefully making the Mistral behave this way. It’s more likely to be poor implementation or something in the Mistral file making this weird non-turning phase which is not present in others manpads files.
There are a lot of other things wrong with this missile like the burn time, G overload, the fact that there is 3 different version of it and much more but this has already been reported for a year now and nothing has been done.
Here’s the link to the (very detailed) report if you wanna check it out
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Well it has been a year, a with the SANTAL implementation, and nothing has changed, so I am very doubtful anything is going to be done about the Mistral. It’s French, after all… Despite the enormous effort that had been made by the Author of the report
I’m pretty sure it’s for balance reasons, if you make the Mistral 25G then the SANTAL will no longer be 9.3 but probably 10.0 and therefore, removing the only anti-air filling the gap between the AMX-30 DCA at 8.3 and the Roland at 10.0. As for the helicopters that would make the premium Tiger move from 10.0 to like 10.7 and every helicopter using the Mistral would go up in BR too.
That would be a mess and we all know the developers put balance over historical accuracies (just look at what they did to all MANPADS because of an Igla manual stating 10G). So as you say we may never see historically accurate MANPADS (except for the Igla lol) because they want to fill gaps in tech trees and keep them “balanced”.
But then how do you explain the presence of the Chinese helicopters that have missiles that are basically what the Mistral should be, but 8 of them ? Is it for balancing reasons ?
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No they just did like they always do release an op undertiered premium so everyone buys it and then make it go up in BR later. As for the TY-90 their excuse was that the control surface of the missile were big enough to manage 20G turn but not on MANPADS. Because apparently the developers knows better than the missile manufacturer MBDA stating 30G-32G for the Mistral 2-3…
Like i told you before it’s probably because MANPADS fills gaps in tech trees or maybe they don’t want to fix them because it looks like MANPADS files are a mess, but they never tell the truth about why they don’t do things anyway i gave you their excuse above.
So yeah it’s completely unfair that the chinese have 8x20G missile when other helicopter have 4x10G-12G gimped MANPADS, but until then we can only hope for a miracle because fixing MANPADS won’t give them money like the chinese heli did.
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Well for the Mistral they could do something very simple : Separate the Mistral in 3 missiles
- Ground vehicles like the Santal keep the Mistral 1 as in game, as to fill the gaps (meanwhile the strela at basically the same BR gets to have 20G and great IRCCM tho…)
- Air vehicles like the Tiger gets the Mistral 2 or 3 with significantly improved G load and IRCCM
That would still be better than the current situation. The mistral is almost useless in self defense situations when a plane goes towards you, and the 30mm gun is also very bad because of its limited range, bad damages, and large dispersion, compared for exemple to the American 30mms
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That’s a very good idea since only the Mistral 1 was historically intended to be used on the VAB SANTAL, and the same can be said about the Mistral 2 being literally created for the Tiger helicopter. The Mistral 3 can be mounted both on Tigers and ground vehicules like the MPCV Mistral, that would make a great successor to the SANTAL in the tech tree.
The only issue i see here is that the Mistral 1 is 25G, so it would need to stay artificially nerfed to 12G for the SANTAL to stay at 9.3.
But while buffing or adding new Mistral versions is great, i rather want the developers to fix all the bugs and historical innaccuracies before doing anything otherwise it will be a mess. I reported 3 times already a bug where the missile just goes from 12G to like 5G right after the burntime ends (note it’s the only MANPAD that has this issue, Stinger and Igla turn very well after engine cut-off) and they just completely ignored it. It cripples the Mistral a whole lot limiting the range to basically 4km, on top of the fact that the missile has a shorter more powerfull burntime than other MANPADS so it’s even more crippling.
So imagine if they fixed the burntime of the Mistral (in game it’s 4.5 seconds while in real life it reaches it’s max speed of mach 2.7 with a 2.2 seconds burntime) it would make it even more shorter range because of this bug ! Imagine a 2km range Mistral… Yeah no thanks. It’s literally designed to glide towards it’s target with reduced drag thanks to it’s cone-shaped head, and theres a bug in game that makes it unable to manoeuver after engine cut-off… Like, WHAT ?!
I could go all day long about the inacurracies and bugs but they just don’t listen anyway… I’m just losing hope at this point.
truth be told, those 25g are probably only achieved when the missile is at its maximum speed and energy state, so around 1 km from launch point.
Fixing it would be a buff, but it wouldn’t turn it in a “6 km no fly zone missile of death” type of missile. Also i’m hoping Gaijin will one day fix the lock range, it’s in my opinion as much problematic than the incorrect G overload
Exactly. The G load is an issue against jets while the limited lock range is an issue against helicopter. Both of them render the Santal pretty much useless. I have more kills using the DCA (Air only), not to mention ground kills.
After some non scientific testing, it appears to me that the Mistral is the Manpad like system with the lowest G limit, but also locking range, as when standing next to an Ozelot recently I noticed that it ALWAYS could launch 1 or 2 seconds before me against jets, while helis seem top be also at a slight advantage towards the Stinger
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The 25G pull can be achieved on the majority of it’s flight time. It all depends on speed, the faster a missile goes, the harder of a time it’s gonna have to manoeuver. So a missile pulling 25G at 930M/S is not gonna turn as good as if it was pulling 25G at 500M/S.
So i think the idea behind the Mistral is that it creates all of it’s energy at the beginning of it’s flight where it don’t need to manoeuver very well, so past it’s quick burntime it glides and lose some speed, making it able to achieve better manoeuverability at range (to an extent). Until of course it start to get too slow to manage 25G turns at the end of it’s flight. It all of course depends on the missiles flight path and the target’s behaviour too.
But we can imagine a poor turning phase all the way to 1km, then it has peak manoeuverablity between let’s say 1.5km to 5km, and then past that range the turns becomes gradually worse due to poor energy. That would explane the cone-shaped head too, designed to reduce drag so it can manoeuver better at longer ranges.
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