Phoenixes ‘‘purpose’’ as a comparative level is not a proper argument, as, even if it was ‘‘designed’’ to theoretically shoot down slow mover giant soviet bombers, all it’s IRL uses were on fast movers, on actual combat and on test sites. The AIM-54 has 78 confirmed kills, all of them was fast-movers, the bomber kills were TU-22s, very maneuverable.
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So how hard would you like for it to be to defeat Phoenix with notching?
I would like to have them performing as they did in real life. That’s it.
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And how hard were they to notch in real life? How successful do you think the notching maneuver would be if it was realistic?
Just to add a bit of nuance, I think several different failure modes are being grouped together here: radar-track loss, missile-seeker lock loss, multipathing and simple missile energy loss. They can look very similar from the cockpit, but they are not the same problem.
Notching mainly concerns the seeker’s relative/radial-velocity discrimination; chaff and aspect can make the target return blend into background or ground returns. A launch aircraft keeping a datalink track also does not guarantee that an ARH missile can continue guiding itself.
Before changing notching resistance, I’d test one variable at a time: keep missile, target, range, altitude and closure constant, then change only aspect angle and chaff. Repeat with and without ground below and save the server replay. That would tell us whether the main issue is seeker discrimination, multipathing or energy. I’d rather see small, documented changes backed by that data than a blanket resistance increase.
The exact in-game thresholds are not publicly documented:
Without ecm I think the strength of the current pulse Doppler radars will make all modern radar missiles unavoidable together with a chaff nerf as the radars will filter it out more effectively making going cold to be the only solution. This will make aesa Eurofighter the most competitive plane though, not other longer ranged missile slingers.
Some compromise must be made to realism to make balance more feasible in my opinion.
So like can jets/pilots even handle a +10g or even sustain it like people do in game tbh I thought that much gs hurts the plane and pilots? So shouldn’t these also be a consequence in game?
It’s not a mystery why long range shots don’t hit. That’s not the topic of the thread.
We’re debating if we should nerf notching to make long range shots more effective and what would be the best way to do it.
Data mine
Considering the discussion and doubts, I have an idea of what could be changed first:
Make Fox 3s always switch to IOG or IOG + DL, instead of locking chaff, regardless of the amount (lack) of ground clutter. They would switch to pulse mode only if being notched without chaff and there’s no ground clutter.
If you examine the missiles you notch on a regular basis you will notice the vast majority of them locks onto chaff and turns sharply, instead of flying above or below you like a dead sparrow. Especially at close range. You rarely actually have to deal with IOG.
This change would increase the average time spent on defeating a Fox 3, it would improve the effectiveness of data link, and it would level the playing field between the winning and losing team (high up vs taking off).
It’s not actually raising the difficulty of notching above a level the playerbase is already familiar with, but rather making it uniform.
Perhaps radar hard locks could also be improved this way, make them switch to TRK MEM instead of locking chaff and fix some radars so they can actually relock from TRK MEM. If we don’t have data link reconnect because it’s considered too strong, then make hard locks less brittle. Right now ESA soft locks maintain data link better than hard locks.
finally caught it on video. goes pitbull at 10-9km’s. and no, my initial assumption of it lofting so high that it gets in my rwr blindspot is in fact, not true. it just gives the warning late. i dont think its modeled this way since i never hear people talking about it, so i think its a bug of some sort. is it, or does the fakour just go pitbull at low range?
isn’t that already the case? when the launch aircraft is high (and i mean really high) and the target aircraft is low, it does not switch to pulse mode and therefore most of the time hits targets on the notch. i’ve done this like a billion times. (provided you give the missile datalink, low targets manuever a lot due to trees and terrain so iog will get defeated easily + has a chance to be notched unlike having datalink)
No
Right now it switches to IOG only if the target is decently below you and there’s enough ground clutter for the missile to not be able to see you in pulse mode.
If the target is against a clear sky, it switches to pulse mode when being notched, and if the target then drops chaff, it just locks chaff (higher RCS). That’s why you can notch missiles using 2 or sometimes literally just 1 piece of chaff.
If the missile is coming from the same altitude, or even from above, but you yourself are high up, it will also often not use IOG.
Most importantly, as the missile gets closer, it also switches to pulse mode, because it can burn through the ground clutter (similarly to how for example F-4E can lock targets down low if they are very close), and it also just bites chaff.
That’s in my opinion the main reason why notching is too easy, even at very close distances you can easily notch because the missile just bites chaff, and the main limitation becomes the missile’s pull.
It’s actually more efficient to wait for the missile to get close and notch it with minimal chaff usage. You still have to be mindful of the missile’s FOV though, so it has a chance to see the chaff.
If IOG always worked, the minimal distance to notch a missile and not die would increase.
I guess it’s the way it is because devs thought from a purely logical standpoint, that prioritizing a weak lock, but still a lock, is better than guesswork that is IOG. In theory a pulse lock is a higher information state than IOG guidance.
It basically just goes like this:
PD lock > pulse lock > IOG
and it uses the highest one it can at any given time. This change would make it so that the missile skips the pulse lock, if there’s chaff (more than 1 radar signature in close proximity) in its FOV.
Notice how much harder to dodge is AIM-9M, and it works on basically the same principle, just using IOG whenever it sees flares.
exactly what i said. it only works when theres ground clutter, where you are very high and the target is very low. it doesn’t bite chaff, it just uses its iog and datalink to guide itself so close that it can just see the plane anyway.
necessary for planes like j15t that have almost no countermeasures and no irl ew mechanics.
it could be interesting, actually. i’d like that in game. i HATE track suspension missiles, literally death sticks that cant be notched, chaffed, flared or multipath’d. zero thrust, full on flare flower and rolling away as much as i can, i just HATE that missile.
overall: you’re right, but i don’t think they’re gonna implement this any time soon. dont know if you read my previous reply about chaff having actual speeds rather than just being 0 out of the dispenser, it would be realistic and solves the issue you are talking about, where the missile will proxy on the chaff a lot more frequently even if it bites on it because its not far enough yet.
the issue my solution brings is that its hard on the servers for not that kind of mind boggling game changing meta. the issue of your solution is that it would be hard to put in game, the forums and bug reports will be filled with dozens of reports complaining their missile misses too easily because the target pressed w once or just increased thrust.
Let’s be honest, it shouldn’t have been added before EW.
I’m skeptical about this. Chaff will slow down very fast.
It really wouldn’t be.
Why?
They already work like that under some circumstances and they don’t miss, in fact they have the least chance to miss then.
IOG is not that easy to defeat. If you leave the notch gate for a moment or chaff not frequently enough, you have to start over changing your flight path. At close range you probably just wouldn’t be able to, there would be not enough time to meaningly change your flight path.
Also if the guy was just notching without chaff, it would still switch to pulse mode if it can and track him. If then he started dropping chaff, it would switch to IOG like an AIM-9M.
It would also reduce the amount of teamkills btw.
calculating thousands of matches with thousands of players calculating how fast chaff decelerates at what speed, what altitude and even what air density. i think thats why its not in the game in the first place. each aircraft would have millions of chaff that the players have the ability to spam.
this i’m standing by. though notching would be too hard this way because even the 9m locks on to flares when you get out of its fov. when you get out of the missiles fov, if it wont switch to pulse mode at all then itll just continue searching until it finds you again. against 1v1’s? hell yeah. but against missile spammers it would be just annoying. (though i guess you can always turn away and bleed the missiles energy, which is how they are usually defeated in the real world)
but i think i’m with you on this one. yeah, add this.
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Like I said before, it’s just math.
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The servers already do a lot of speed calculations, think of vulcan firing 6000 round per minute and each bullet has its own properties, all the missiles in the air, bombs like gbu39, or even just flares.
Flares do get velocity when dropped and you can spam them exactly like chaff and they are not an issue at all.
AIM-9M turns off its seeker for like 0.2s for each flare, that’s why it’s hard to dodge. Fox 3s stay in IOG way longer for each piece of chaff.
I’m not saying Fox 3 should be as hard to notch as AIM-9Ms are to dodge, but that they already work on a very similar principal, it’s just that Fox 3s don’t always use it.
No, it would continue to fly towards the IOG/imaginary target and search only in its FOV.
If you are far away, your chaff stays in the FOV longer and you don’t have to spam it as much, but so do you, and you have to change your flight path more.
If you are close, you don’t need to change your flight path much to get out of its FOV, but you have to spam more chaff, because it leaves the missile’s FOV faster.
IOG could also be made to be able to predict curved/constant pull flight paths, not only straight lines, so that you can’t just do a loop and you have to maneuver more, but that’s material for another step.
well then i don’t really know why gaijin isnt adding it.
i really doubt gaijin is going to change the notching mechanics only after EW is added tbh, or maybe never change it at all