The AIM-54 Phoenix missile - Technology, History and Performance

P/s: how to use the quote function?. When I clicked reply, it does not even include the poster I replied to

It says “on-off blinking noise jammer to confuse radar defences”. Obviously it’s impossible to know exactly what jammer was used, but it’s possible the F-14 / 5AIM-54 radar simply was not particularly affected by it.

Radar jammers (generally speaking - I’m sure there’s the odd exception) do not radiate in a 360° sphere around the aircraft. For example the Avro Vulcan had a lot of jamming equipment onboard, but most of it was focussed on defeating long range early warning, and SAM guidance radars; as a result most of the jammers were designed to radiate their energy downwards towards the ground, giving them very little use against aircraft at a similar altitude to the bombers. The term “radar defences” makes it sounds like the jammer was intended to interfere with ground based radars, so the setup may have been similar, directing most of the energy away from the F-14. In addition pulse doppler radars are inherently resistant to some types of jammers.

Another thing to note is it sounds like the target was flying in a straight line at a constant speed / altitude. Therefore if the F-14 was to lose the radar contact after launch the inertial unit in the missile would have had a pretty easy time guessing where the target was going to be based on the last known speed / heading.

Some people suggest to me that: since it is a blinking jammer, that mean it mean it turn on and off, so while it was off, AWG-9 could acquire range and velocity information .

What is altitude difference ranging ? How does it work?

Ah ok sorry

They changed the f14 tws bug in “its fixed”

Am I the only one having this bug? Because I thought only the F-14 had it but I just tested with the F-16C and it’s the same. When I press the freelook key while having a TWS lock it causes the radar to reset and I lose all targets for a brief moment.

You’re getting the radar lock line on the left side of the radar display, making it clearly not aligned with the plane being tracked by TWS. Weird, I’d just suggest rebinding freelook/radar lock to different keys and seeing if that behavior continues.

But feels like better to use, it hit more better than before, before the missile feels like going to nonwhere direction, now feels more precise

Something interesting I noticed when rereading the NASA doc regarding the ALSM (their plan to use the decommissioned AIM-54 for testing).

The document explicitly states that the graphs (which some people have used to justify the AIM-54’s poor speed in-game) based on “publicly available information” and use “a simple in-house trajectory analysis code”. It also specifies that “zero-lift trajectories were considered with no missile guidance”
image

Importantly, it states “the guidance capability of the ALSM
should be used to optimize the missile trajectory in reaching the required test conditions.” and that due to public data inaccuracies “higher-fidelity performance analyses should be conducted to determine the suitability of the ALSM test
platform prior to actual hypersonic flight research experiments.”
image

Which is important since the ALSM idea was to perform hypersonic (Mach 5+) research, something the graph shown below would suggest the missile is incapable of doing in a zero-lift configuration based on public data:
image

This snuck under the radar for me before, but actually supports the idea that the poor or even borderline lack of trajectory shaping of the AIM-54 in-game is SIGNIFICANTLY affecting its performance in a negative fashion, which should be obvious seeing as the AIM-54 has a significant amount of drag, a long burn time, and a large diameter motor, all of which suggest the missile depends significantly on aggressive lofting to reach high altitudes and speeds above Mach 5, something it is literally incapable of doing in-game.

Its gonna be important for gaijin to actually get trajectory shaping right as well now that more missiles with it are around the corner.

I tested the phoenix and I think they implemented the AOA changes the reverted like 2 week ago, now the missile che pull well at low speed

with the new tacview we can see how bad the speed is on the Aim-54

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it turn really good TBF

I fired a phoenix at 10000m, mach 1.1, it reached diving a max of mach 3.5, but what got me was the drag after the burner stoped. Bro went mach 1.5 in like 5 seconds

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i havent had any chance to see the turning capability yet.

Its definitely going to be interesting testing missiles with this new feature.

Its also probably gonna be pretty depressing in the case of the AIM-54

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Was it the A or C variant?

Also on the bright side F-14 finally got drop tanks!

Looks like the only change for the AIM-54C on the dev server is that fin AOA change that was cancelled 2 weeks ago.

Missiles motor is still not reduced smoke, still no increased max G load, still no trajectory shaping or aerodynamic changes. Seeker is also still a copy paste of the AIM-54A’s and the 54A also got the change, so the 54C is STILL STRICTLY worse than the 54A

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C variant

all of the new Fox-3’s feature steeper loft angles as well.