Its beyond rediculous the mental gymnastics y’all go through. Its exasperating 🙄
I guess in theory it could be possible the AASM IR has variable AOI and SAGEM is just trying to fill brochure space, but its easily the stupidest of explanations in this situation, and pretty effectively gets felled by Occam’s razor, with the more likely/simple explanation being that;
SAGEM means what they wrote
You are so resistant to anything that could be perceived as even the most minute of “nerfs” to any French equipment that you make up dubious explanations to try to justify not adjusting your position on the subject when presented with new information.
Its not even like a vertical only AOI would be a “nerf” either, since that is by far the most dangerous AOI for use in WT, as it mitigates the ground vehicles ability to use cover to hide, a makes SAM intercepts much harder.
All the AOI in the brochure you referenced are Vertical AOI. The difference might be to denote that the flight path of the AASM is different from a lot of other munitions with IR guidance, which would fly straight to the target, instead of go up from above in a bell curve.
Mental Gymnastics is taking one small snippet as gospel, bro, when the same company claims different things all the time that don’t even really contradict it
not that it matters much because a hammer fired low and long range will arrive with an angle of ~20° and one fired high and far will arrive with an angle of ~135° currently in game
It seems like thrust is lacking on AASM as a GBU-24 will reach its target before a simultaneously launched AASM will. Considering how overpowered Pantsirs are right now and how proficient they are at intercepting ammunition, I thus personally find myself using GBUs instead of laser AASMs because of that.
Honestly with how easily S1s intercept munitions, firing both is probably better than 2 AASMs. At least their separate trajectories will make it more difficult to hit them in time.
GBU-24 is flying directly to the laser, AASM is lofting and taking a less direct route. This is expected.
You can see in the distance travelled, GBU-24 was ~6.5km from release to impact with a direct trajectory, where as AASM was ~7.2km with a lofted trajectory…
Eee, no. Unless there are more things in the air, it will not a a problem for pantsir, it will launch 2 missiles in auto mode, and do nothing else. There have to be at least 5 things in the air to start overwhelming semi competent pantsir player.
If the AASMs were to employ the vertical drop, it will become an issue, as the radar reaches only 75 degree (iirc) up, above that it is one missile at a time without the TWS box (that is if it is not intercepted on the way).
I mean obviously the trajectory is to blame for it. The issue is that while GBU-24 gets up to Mach 1.0 when impacting the target, the AASM only reaches Mach 1.05.
Is this the kind of speed you would expect from a boosted bomb free falling on a target at an angle higher than 60° ? I don’t think so.
So my guess is either drag is too high or thrust is underperforming on AASM.
Terminal velocity for a 2000lb weapon is roughly around mach 1.0-1.05 ~ I’d expect a small weapon based on a MK.82 to be around mach 0.9 ~, most of its boost duration is used to loft it over the target area. So yeah 1.05 mach would be about right. Considering you launched at mach 0.85 as well, so the AASM needed to also accelerate up to 1.05 mach while performing a loft.
But on the other hand the AASM is lacking quite a significant amount of range, which is probably attributed to overall drag, as the boost time is correct (and the thrust should be somewhat close to reality as well). The terminal velocity should be impacted quite a lot by the aerodynamic of the bombs, with the AASM kit having a significantly different aerodynamical profile compared to dumb bombs
i’ll play the devil advocate here, but where have you guys seen that the AASM is lacking range ?
There are sime things wrong with this missile, like the weird trajectory for high and far shots, and the lack of loft on a low altitude shot, but range wise it seems quite correct.
And it’s not like range matters that much, since the missile takes a whole business week to arrive when fired from that far
The AASM max range is 80km from high altitude launches, and it falls at around 50km iirc (15km launch supersonic), meaning it’s missing about 35% of its range, which would be achieved with lower drag overall
In the AASM IR paper, it is supposed to recognize scenes that has a surface area of between 2 and 4 square kilometers. Using these scenes it was used to develop the ATR algorithms.
