I think at this point gaijin knows 100% for sure that there’s something wrong with the energy retention of 4th gen russian jets, i just don’t understand why they don’t adjust it.
Russia lost its bvr dominance but nothing was done to improve its wvr.
They seem to have gotten pretty lazy with FM changes as of late. Each time they want to nerf a plane’s sustained turn rate, they just give it a metric boatload of drag by screwing with the Oswald efficiency, which brings the sustained turn rate to target values but completely murders the plane’s energy retention, which itself is next to impossible to bug report. First the MiG-29, then the F-111A, then the Su-27, now the MiG-23, Viggen and Draken - it’s all the same story. I guess this approach is just “good enough” for them, and the fact it can’t be bug reported conveniently means less work for them down the road. The only non-lazy FM rework in recent memory was the Mirage 2000 one.
Every report I’ve seen was solely about sustained turn rates, which Gaijin chose to match by massively increasing drag and thus gutting energy retention as well, which wasn’t mentioned in the reports at all.
Don’t know if it had anything of that sort. But IMO a far greater issue is its abysmal range, especially against front aspect and afterburning targets.
9M can perfectly do this, track target with the sun right behind the target. I don’t see why an IRST with an actual computers hooked up to it can’t do this