To be honest, what we really need now is MAW (Missile Approach Warning) and ECM (Electronic Countermeasures)
RWRs only detect radar missile, however some RWR sets ingame were able to detect IR missiles too, allowing for proper countering of, for example, the AIM-9M.
That, and the fact that to defeat a SARH missile, you need to defeat radar… but with what? Notching and chaff are limited, but ECM would add a whole new list of features to the game
I can see MAW working in game, but based on what I was reading about the AN/ALQ-100 and -126 it just automatically broke tracks or made the tracking radar think the plane was somewhere else and tricked radar proximity fuses into being duds. ECM of that type seems a bit OP on anything other than a B-52. I already find the Su-39 with IRCCM annoying in my F-4J as I don’t fly with a gunpod.
Do you have any thoughts on what type of ECM or how they would work in game?
Just as something to break locks and defeat radars… sometimes.
That technology is old too, for example if you look in War Thunder, the MiG-21SMT has a weird pod underneath it
That’s the SPS-141 ECM pod that carried countermeasures and radar jammers, and was used by vehicles as old as the Su-7B, which is literally at the start of Rank VI.
No RWR could detect an IR missile. There is simply no radar emissions to detect. You can only detect an IR missile with UV or Active Doppler sensors.
Examples of this are the Harrier GR.5/7/9 Have a rear facing active doppler sensor for detecting all launch types. And the Apache has UV sensors that detect the flash in UV from the motor.
But these of course are not modeled in game because NATO.
UV based MAWS are already available on the helicopters that have them. Only the GR.7 has an active doppler sensor to my knowledge, don’t think the AV-8B+ has that in its tail. Which is a new sensor type we don’t have in game and would need new code to be implemented.
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The installation of ultraviolet sensors on aircraft was carried out for the first time in Russia…
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I think US rank 6 aircraft also started carrying ECM pods, especially for SAM defense.
They’re definitely cool! I’m not sure what they would do in game, though. I’d be entirely fine with them working against AI AA, and I might give up a pylon to avoid midmap AA. I’m not sure I would notice them ‘sometimes’ working against radar missiles as I find the Sparrows pretty finicky already. I don’t know how effective other country’s radar missiles are. If WT had a well developed BVR situation maybe, but even on the big sim maps I rarely engage in any BVR combat as radar locks are too likely to grab a friendly near the LOS to the indended target.
I couldn’t find anything on how some of the podded ECM integrated with the RWR (other than that they could), but I would definitely be up for using pods to modify (especially augment with additional warnings) RWR behavior if that has any basis in real systems.
Sparrows are SARH. If you defeat the carrier’s radar, you defeat the missile. Plus, with ECM, the radar is counterable, so instead of going low you can just jam whatever is locking you, or even simply hide your location from a search radar so it appears like you’re somewhere else. ECMs would give another option in terms of counters against threats.
ECM is an extremely complex topic, and people tend to overestimate the capability of the sort of ECM systems aircraft currently in the game had.
For starters ECM that works against pulse radars is usually completely ineffective against pulse Doppler radars (and vice versa), and a lot of early ECM pods only jammed pulse radars. In addition the sector coverage by ECM pods is often pretty poor. For example a lot of American ECM pods were designed for use against SAMs, so had the antennas angled downwards, making them completely useless against radars above you.
To help visualizing what @Flame2512 is talking about here is the AN/ALQ-101-10 British ECM pod (based on a American design)
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With the confirmation of the F-111, the IR based AN/AAR-34 MAWS may turn up, It’s a rear quadrant only system.
Because that capability was provided by ECM systems integrally mounted to the airframe, not the pods.
Sure, I was just pointing out the limitations of pod based ECM. Even Sky Shadow has a 60 degree antenna coverage. Albeit not limited in elevation to ~20 degree like the 101-10. But systems that are integral are superior in coverage. This can be seen on Zeus (ARI 23333/1) for the Harrier GR5/7/9, has antenna in all directions.
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Again that depends on the aircraft and the system. Modern integrated ECM systems probably provide good coverage. By comparison integrated ECM on the Su-27 only covers a cone centered on the aircraft’s nose; and many bombers had ECM systems that only covered a a section of the lower hemisphere of the aircraft, because their job was to confuse long range surveillance radars and SAMs.
Modelling ECM accurately will be very hard because every system has different coverage and functionality, and due to the sensitive nature of ECM, that information is rarely released (even for old systems).
If anyone does want to discuss British E-War systems, I have a topic on that;
As Flame2512 mentioned as these systems vary greatly from country to country and airframe to airframe it isn’t an all encompassing topic as I only have information on British systems.
I’m wondering how many RWRs irl besides the SPO-15 show relative altitude of the enemy. Receivers are still getting tweaks, some of them even display distance now on the dev server (although with no actual scale), so I’m hoping this could make it to the game as well.
True. It’s technically already present in-game… in the American Voice Warning System. We need a direct display of approximate relative vertical position in RWRs.
Anyways, I wanna post a suggestion here too.
With automatic cycling of radar antenna disabled, we get free control over which vertical position we want to scan.
The problem is, we kinda need an indication of where the radar antenna is pointing relative to the horizon.
Either that, or show the minimum and maximum altitude that the radar scan zone will cover.
here’s an example. The radar scan is scanning from 2000m, to 4500m. Therefore, in the radar display, above and below the scan position indication there could be a min and max altitude scanned indicator :]