So i encountered a lovely bug with F14D radar, altough this is replicable on every aircraft that has ACM and IRST. Basically if you lock someone with ACM and then switch so IRST and lose lock, the radar ends up in this chaotic seizure like state. The radar becomes COMPLETELY unusable as you can see in the video, turning it on/off, trying so switch modes etc. NOTHING fixes it. (Also i have a question, why does my radar sometimes switch modes on its own? In several battles it changed from PD to IR which breaks DL for the phoenix AND the radar as you can see, I want to control what mode the radar is on not the game doing it for me.)
Any explanation or help would be appreciated.
It does this when someone enters the notch angle and the radar cannot track them. On some other planes you can see a similar thing happen, if a target at high altitude enters the notch angle, the radar will switch from TRK PD to TRK
gotcha, annoying but ok i guess, do you have an explanation for the radar please? I literally think that no one has the same issue as me as i cant find this being talked about anywhere not even on reddit, am i just cursed?
On pulse doppler radars, they need a target to be moving towards or away from you in order to see them, because they use the doppler effect (if you don’t know what it is, the ELI5 is whenever something is coming towards you, the frequency will increase, and if they are going away the frequency decreases. This is why an ambulance siren changes pitch when they drive by you). So they use this to detect targets in ground clutter because it can tell you the closing speed of everything the radar sees. It can see that the ground has a closing speed equal to that of the plane’s ground speed, so it knows to ignore that. But that has a side effect. If a plane starts flying perpendicular to you (aka notching), then it has the same closing speed as the ground so it gets filtered out. So in the case of the f14, it switches to an IR lock because that cannot get notched since it uses the heat signature of the plane to track it. And other radars will disable their PD mode, because a non-PD radar track does not care about closing speed, however this means it is much more susceptible to being chaffed, and if a target is too close to the ground, it will not be able to track it because it can’t filter out the ground clutter without PD.
I know what PD is, when i was asking about the radar i meant the BUG that happened to me.
Oh yeah thats definitely a glitch. You can go report it here: Community Bug Reporting System