Yes
Hello, I would like to ask what is this thing on the side of AASM-250?
My cursor points to it in the picture.
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Hello, those are likely anchor point for the REK(Range Extension Kit).
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french Grom-1?
The REK is the booster that we already have in game. The white thing seems to be the structural anchor between the bomb body and the anchor and the booster itself, although I am not sur
You got any photos of Indian Hammer?
So no then.
So moving targets.
Lets get a few things out of the way, AASM can clearly target a tank sized target, there is enough secondary information that calls out vehicle sized targets.
What does this targeting looks like?
Well. Lets play out an engagement;
Rafale with Hammer.
- Uses TGP to upload target data for a tank at a specific location.
- Comes into LOAL range.
- Fire.
- Hammer is now on its own.
- Hammer arrives at target basket 1.5km over the pre-planned target area
- Hammer begins terminal approach
- First IR image is taken shortly after entering the basket, ~1.0-1.2km to impact.
- Course correction now happens for the new target location over the next 500m of distance traveled.
- Correction complete for 1st Acquisition
- Second IR image is taken, ~600m to impact.
- Course correction now happens for the new image.
- Correction complete for 2nd Acquisition
- Impact
There are only two chances for a course correction, along with the distance needed for those course corrections. Each time its a static image, with no target vector or speed measurement, so each update will be to a new static location. A target moving with enough speed would outpace the ability for Hammer to provide updated locations with any hope of accuracy.
If it was a static tank that had moved to a new parking spot or a TEL thats been relocated to a new location this tracking method would ensure impact. But if those targets are actively moving, there is no chance.
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depends the speed of the target and the armor it has
It would be very situational at the end of the day.
Heavy armored MBT moving at max speed, sure. Light tank stuck in a brawl fight and not moving much, meh.
Second capture, if taken 600m away from target, is just 2-3 seconds before impact. it doesn’t give time to dodge, unless you are already moving by the time the second picture is taken of course.
At the end of the day if it was fixed, it would become a more specialized weapon, best suited for SPAA hunt or cap denial, except you wouldn’t even need to expose yourself, just fire with GPS coordinates at the enemy spawn / cap.
Either the devs go the full IR LOAL way and we will see Brimstones, or KH38 IR and AASM IR will be removed, or they’ll ignore the issue entirely. I suppose time will tell
You know you can LOAL with Hammer right now? Nearly all IR/EO A2G weapons have;
"boundaryTrack": true
To employ boundary tracking you need only fire at a “POINT” target, the weapon will fly to the point and if there is a target that can be tracked it will switch to “TRACK” and guide to terminal.
Example with AGM-65G which also has
"boundaryTrack": true
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yes and no. You still need to lock on the ground. You can’t lock via the minimap like GPS or GPS+Laser AASM for example
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Yes the code is attached to the seeker, but if you try this with Penguin ASM, this can be employed well beyond the 2.5km tracking range of the seeker.
So a point target can be set beyond track range.
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Misunderstanding.
i’ll rephrase : you can’t fire AASM IR in LOAL mode from behind cover like AASM GPS or AASM GPS + Laser
To be clear, i’m not advocating for this, since it would bring a quite obvious imbalance, but that’s what a “fixed” AASM IR can do. I’m not too sure it looks like a nerf i you ask me, more like a double edged sword
Yes I understand you now, you do need the seeker to have LOS to the location at a minimum.
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At first glance, it seems like a complicated tracking method.
Its actually really simple as far as tracking goes. The complexity is the ground automatic target recognition (ATR) used for the corrections. But the same method is used on a few weapons such as StormShadow/SCALP.
Yeah overall I’d say it might end up as more of a buff than anything. right now you can’t ripple the IR variant, so it takes valuable time to get several going (and you want several bombs to be fired when panthers can shot them down extremely;y easily), so the plane needs to be in a dangerous situation when firing them (with panthers, and I guess in June more advanced SAM as wel) in the area. Recently I have been having a better time dealing with them by bringing only SAL AASM and rippling several in gps mode towards their location, and the IR variant would be even better at doing this. If it gets changed to this mode of guidance, bringing 3 SAL and 3 IR would be a META. IR for first SAM denial, and the 3 SAL for other ground targets destruction
The bomb is a 250kg bomb with time to impact from last correction of 2-3 seconds. That’s more that enough against all target bar fast moving MBTs in game
You will still get some kills sure, but you will get alot of near misses. If my Paveway IV doesn’t hit within about 5m, it normally only damages the target and doesn’t outright kill it.
When stormbreaker?