I think it very much depends on precisely which missile is being fired at you.
Strelas in optical guidance can only be defeated by terrain masking
Stingers can be flared, but it is difficult in certain aircraft and at certain angles.
But a large number of the SAMs in this region are SACLOS guided, and whilst they are supported by radar or IRST, they arent necessarily essential for their operation and whilst flares and chaff might break the lock and thus result in a missile missing, they also might not. Stormer HVM for example is pretty much entirely immune to flares in my experience.
Personally, when defending in something like the Jaguar GR1A, I make full use of the Phimat pod strapped to my wing, worse case scenario, I waste some chaff and will release some flares when defending because again, worst case scenario is that I waste a few, but im fairly certain most are defeated kinematically.
I would actually argue that the balance of spaa vs cas at 9.3-10.3 is in fairly good place all things considered. Especially compared to higher br spreads.
Yeah, its pretty damn close, just the odd aircraft here or there I think wouldnt hurt from a small buff. Such as the Harrier Gr3 getting a Phimat pod (and perhaps a 9.3 BR). Or the Jaguar GR1A gettings it’s Digital RWR. Not necessarily major buffs, but would just help slightly at times.
Likewise, SPAA could do with a few too, to stick with Britain because that is what I know, Stormer HVM has a great number of buffs available for it, from the performance of the Starstreaks to the Launcher getting IFF and NCTR. Also the Tracked Rapier is a complete mess still.
Let alone the whole discussion regarding ACLOS systems being modeled as such.
In the future, I would be very interested in seeing CBUs added
Also about the topic on CAS vs SPAA, I think the skill floor for playing these in the BR ranges the OP lines out are much different. It’s not hard for a bad SPAA player to kill a bad CAS player, and there are a lot of them. The guys you see expecting to just fly in a straight line 1km+ and directly in line with were most people are facing and expecting to do anything but die. But when you get to the skill ceiling, where its good CAS vs good SPAA the CAS player is gonna win most times. Good CAS players are only exposing themselves to SPAA for as short a time as possible and feel comfortable with weapon systems to not stay on target too long, or mess around clunkily with controls. The only way an SPAA player can do anything about this is to use sound to find the plane, and preaim in that direction.
https://files.catbox.moe/pgnltj.mp4
This guy fired on someone else earlier I knew exactly where he was, but he was actually paying attention and heard the direction I was coming from and preaimed there like he should, and we ended up trading. If he sat somewhere with some cover and wasn’t firing on people 10km away he could have avoided the situation. If I was a better CAS player I wouldn’t have stayed on course for so long and only sprayed maybe half of what I did before pulling out and I wouldn’t have died.
I don’t think anyone should expect to just fly up at alt and sling AGMs, it might work sometimes, but you are just building bad habits and expecting the other team to job for you. And this is how SPAA vs CAS balance should be, they create a bubble around the battlefield that is extremely dangerous to enter and you need to lawnmow and come at weird angles after first finding out where they are with some scouting on your part, or your team. Once you feel like the other team doesn’t have an SPAA/CAP presence then maybe loiter a bit at altitude to get some easy kills on helpless tanks.
And AGMs should never be able to be launched outside of these bubbles (hello KH38MT).
AFAIK, the only IR guided SAM in the game without any IRCCM is the MIM-72s that the Chapparals have. Everything else is fairly flare resistant, or outright immune as is the case for the Type 91s and Strelas.
Preflaring is effective at preventing a lock, however.
Meanwhile, chaff can break RADAR locks, which throws off the aim of the SAM player, but does not affect the guidance of the SACLOS missile directly. It is useful against hybrid gun/SAM SPAAs in that it throws off their gun targetting solution, but it isn’t essential by any means.
sounds like a skill issue from CAS people again or well it is on going if anything the SPAA systems need to be buffed to deal better with helicopters at top tier
I would like them to fix Stingers and Mistrals (better lock range against helis, G overload, give the stinger K its datalink ect.) But at the same time i know full well that gaijin likes to pull the monkeys paw and move them up in BR so I am fine with manpads vehicles as they are right now. Tbf they are by all means perfectly serviceable currently, they just take a little more finesse and patience compared to using something like OSA.
I see way to many people in stuff like the ozelot and mistral wasting missiles on things they shouldn’t.
Mim-72s are easy to flare, but Fim-92 seeker over performs massively which makes flaring it, even with your engine OFF (not even 0% throttle, I mean flat out off) near impossible.
All in game Stinger models have IRCCM, due to having a combination IR/UV seeker head, which allows it to fairly easily reject flares from most aspects. I’ve yet to do the testing to find the best way to flare them, but it’s kind of immaterial, due to a point I’ll get to later.
Turning your engine off does relatively little to reduce the heat it’s generating in the short term, feel free to watch the temps on the left side of the screen. A seeker that’s already gotten a lock is not going to be shaken by the target shedding a little bit of heat when the engine is still several hundred degrees hotter than the air around it.
And you don’t need to flare a stinger, because it’s agility is so bad that even fully laden attack jets can effortlessly outpull it. Just roll and pull at the same time, and watch the missile fail to adjust and miss every single time.
Also, saying the Stinger’s seeker overperforms massively is hilarious when, like all other IR seekers in game, it has a massively reduced range against helicopters. You’ll be lucky to lock them more than 3.5km out, and on snowy maps it can be as low as 2 km.
For manpad they have a combination of 9m and r73 seeker, fov one needs RANGE to counter (reduced reaction time/ probability of untracking) and 9m one needs pulls with path changes + continuous flares - Only achievable by dumping with a10 or su25, theoretically by 60 cm ones but they won’t last long, and would lost the flares for a2a msls.
Preflare has a similar logic, dump thirty flares for 15 secs in view xD what a trade
Yes. And strela turns his launcher…
For the poor crafts of 8.7-10.7… The speed bleeders and bricks… They need help xD
Only vehicles I really struggle with are M247, PGZ, and Ozelot. If they’re being played well you have zero chance of finding them before getting shot down. Most helicopters in the area don’t have thermals or don’t have flares and tracerless proxy rounds will just delete you before you even know what’s happening. Helicopters in the BR have had CCIP removed from their toolkit or have been moved up in BR to the point where only competent players can do well in them, but anyone who has at least bound the correct keys to use their SPAA can shoot down most helicopters without even trying. Just to clarify, I’m talking specifically about people who are playing these specific vehicles well, meaning they turn off their radar when they don’t need it, leave spawn and use hard cover, and don’t lock you until they know you’re in range. If they don’t broadcast their position like a newbie, you are completely screwed and there’s not really any counterplay.