its only radar stealth afterall
there are a few more but I was mostly thinking about F-5. That thing probably has the lowest heat signature among all jets.
One of them has two jet engines as well as the residual heat friction from flying through the air, the other is a hovering helicopter. But in WT it’s because of the engine thrust, which determines thermal “heat”.
Though most discussion of the F-117 is kinda pointless because anyone who actually knows sure as hell isn’t saying.
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is f-117 colder than a drone or a cruise missile ? Probably not, and those Manpads sure can take them out. IR signature reduction on stealth aircrafts helps, but it’s still physics at the end of the day, and even reducing the exhaust plume by 2 to 3 times isn’t enough against modern seekers. Also, as many mentionned, helis signature are broken in game.
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I’m definitely not the last to scream “russian bias” whenever i can, but if you expected stealth to work under 10 km against such a modern SAM with a PESA radar, i’ve got bad news for you : it won’t
Stealth’s best ally is distance, but in this game, most weaponry, and especially in GRB, is short distance.
Against Manpads, climbing should be enough, and the old radars used at this BR shouldn’t detect you where you spawn, so being sneaky while climbing can be a thing.
As for the pantsir problem, those 2 vehicles aren’t at the same BR for a reason
When it comes to radar stealth, i did some testing with my ITO, and in frontal aspect i would generally have a lock around 7km, while it would be 16-18 on a normal aircraft. It works, but it just doesn’t fight the SAMs it was designed to fight IRL in this game
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wheeze
Gaijin needs to quite modelling power output based on engine thrust alone. It leads to absolute leaf blower engine planes like the F-5 having the IR signature of nil and then harriers (especially Harrier IIs and the Shar) being as hot as the surface of the sun. What they should model it as is amount of thrust being length of the exhaust plume, with direction of thrust changing location of the exhaust plume, and actual engine heat being the thermal signature. Meaning if you engine has a lot of thrust but a low overall exhaust heat (cough cough Harrier) you don’t show up like a beacon to missiles anymore. And if your engine has low thrust but a reasonable heat signature (cough cough F-5) you are no longer able to 1 flare missiles while you’re afterburning.
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Yep. I really hope they overhaul this sooner rather than later. Especially with high thrust aircraft like Typhoon that make use of BOL on the horizon
They also need to remodel BOL from the weird tiny countermeasures it is now and just make it shoot out a pyrophoric mixture like it should.
yep, and restore the currently misisng 75% of the chaff
They need to fix the targeting stuff for missiles as well. Magic 2 is underperforming on account of how poor the simulation is.
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How hard is it to understand. Ozelot has an IRST targeting system and the Stinger has a datalink. As long as the player spots your jet, he simply IRST-locks it and shots the Stinger.
Same for Strela with its contrast seeker. Or simply hand-guiding (SACLOS) any SAM like Roland3 towards the black dot.
I fear Stealth charachteristics are pointless in War Thunder. The spawn zone is always fixed. The appearing dot is easy to spot. Even easier with thermal viewers. You can shot what you see. If you try to fly high to hide the dot…the contrails will be even easier to spot.
Its a DOA plane.
(Also keep in mind that in a certain actual conflict soldiers lock things like small drones and cruise missile with shoulder launched Stingers. The Nighthawk is surely alot hotter and bigger than these…)
And yes…its called Nighthawk for a reason. It would be easier to play this thing at night. No dot …
The stealth characteristics of the F-117 were further increased using various coatings of radar-absorbant materials (RAM) and radar-absorbant screens covering the engine inlets. Edges of doors and access panels such as the landing gear and bomb bays were also serrated to scatter radar waves. The aircraft’s infrared signature was also reduced by mixing hot exhaust gases from the turbofan engines with cool air and ducting the mixture through a flat “platypus” exhaust.
in warthunder it reduces but not enough
it shouldnt be impossible to get a heat lock on it but very difficult
Its because the game doesnt model heat signatures properly. its just heat sig = thrust with the exception of the F-117 which has a 0.5 multiplier applied to that “temp”. But an afterburning F-5 is still colder.
The affects you described can also be found with aircraft like the Harrier. The effect was such that when combined with a VIFF and the wing was placed between the nozzles and the seeker head, it was enough to prevent even Aim-9Ls for acquiring a lock given the right conditions.
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The thing with stealth aircrafts, I’ve read that their biggest weakness is ground to air missiles. Idk if that’s true or not.
from what I know (and I dont know a huge amount) ground based radars dont have any kind of size, weight or even power restrictions like they would to fit in the nose of an aircraft. So they can be far far more powerful than airbourne radars and so able to detect smaller objects. Additionally, a lot of stealth kit can be defeated when you have multiple radars working together, which is also most common with ground based SAM systems.
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Yeah sadly Gajin just ignored that, they didn’t overlook it, they flat out ignored it.
The Stinger is a very modern SAM. Expecting it to be fooled by the Nighthawk’s reduced IR sig is silly. Heli’s however for some reason don’t get locked by Stingers until 3 km.
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irl, SAMs don’t lock onto the engine, they lock onto the exhaust, unlike in Warthunder.
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