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

Machinery of War Discussion Aircraft
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1312

Everything is effective against maneuvering targets to extent sure.

Interesting wt reference. Well how much easier is it to dodge the r27? As opposed to real life? Being that the R27 is a technologically inferior missile with a very poor success rate? How is the r27 so much better being that it relies on a signal that comes from far inferior radars to that of the AWG9 and does not have the ability to transmit a signal of its own?

The aim54 should be the most accurate missile in game as it literally has its own radar which produces its own signals and illumination becomes stronger the more it closes the distance. As you said it has the ability to shoot down cruise missiles. You just forgot to mention low altitude cruise missile part though.

The aim54 has the ability to cut out relying on the middle man, the firing aircraft’s radar signal for guidance and the distance the signal must travel and potential for disruption. Additionally the aim54 has a far more advanced fire control to calculate the proper lead and tracking. Weight should not matter unless outside of the weapon employment zone. To top it off the aim54c should have a reduced smoke signature.

Lastly the F-14 should have the greatest ability to manipulate radar frequencies via radar intercept officer in the backs seat, and many advanced digital
signal processors to filter out those returns for the best target picture. It’s TWS has the greatest ability to mask that it is targeting anyone. None of these are properly modeled in game. For whatever reason.

How does it happen by magical coincidence to be able to shoot down fighters? It has a literal mode called ACM ACTIVE MODE for close range engagements. It is by intentional design to be used as a secondary measure for targets performing air combat maneuvering. That is what acm stands for.

So, The R27 it’s primarily designed for extended range. It is much heavier with the same exact control surfaces and not much of a stronger engine than the previously. But only a longer burning motor. That is why they are called the long burning alamos.
So why does it magically retain all its dogfight capability going Mach 3 less than 5 seconds off the rail at all altitudes and retains all its performance through out the entirety of its flight envelope?

Yes you are correct, the aim54 is intentionally held back as of now as well as the awg9. It’s not really a debate.

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1313

It should be noted the AIM-54A was never intended for shooting down very small sized targets. The lack of threatening bomber fleets post-inception of the Tomcat led to them modifying the AIM-54’s proximity detection devices and other components to better be able to identify and kill smaller targets. One of these changes was the warhead type… now it can focus the blast in a specific direction. These improvements can be found in the AIM-54C…

A 22-24G missile with a larger warhead can be as lethal as an AIM-7, but only within the certain speed ranges where 22-24G is possible. Currently in-game it lacks this improved overload capacity and is stuck at 17G. The turn radius for the missile and the available AoA is relatively correct… for single plane… but the missile has some more improvement left in her. It certainly will not be spectacular in war thunder as a ‘dogfight missile’… any semblance of ‘dogfight’ capability discussed from IRL about this missile can be dismissed / thrown out the window. For the high level of situational awareness and tactical gameplay the AIM-54 simply won’t be smacking people in ‘dogfights’. This likely refers to combat at very high altitudes compared to what we get in-game.

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1314

I don’t think he is implying the missile should be a “dogfight” missile.

Interesting point though.

The R27ER however is not a “dogfight missile” whatsoever and was never designed to be used at close range and be a “spectacular dogfight missile” though everyone uses it at all ranges to an insanely degree in WT over the regular R. Able to kill extremely high g maneuvering aircraft under 3km with an outrageous success rate and speed off the rail.

I don’t think irl the r27 especially the ER can ever be launched at the insane performance windows we see in wt. it cannot even physically leave the rail in almost all scenarios we are able to launch in game.

fascinating point you made.

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1315

Well how much easier is it to dodge the r27? As opposed to real life? Being that the R27 is a technologically inferior missile with a very poor success rate?

The R-27 is a relatively capable missile (certainly it is agile enough) that is hampered by the fact that most soviet missiles are very old at this point, and past their shelf life. That, and who knows how well they have been maintained. The actual use-cases of the missile is not important when discussing things like reliability and etc, as WT does not attempt to model “oh they forgot to keep the damp out for a period of 20 years between 1992 and 2012”.

How is the r27 so much better being that it relies on a signal that comes from far inferior radars to that of the AWG9 and does not have the ability to transmit a signal of its own?

The AWG-9 is powerful enough to fry an egg at a hundred metres, sure, and this provides it with many technical advantages, but it is a 1960’s radar. The ability of a missile to hone in on an illuminated target is entirely to do with the missile, given sufficient illumination there will be no issue. The fact that the R-27 cannot provide its own illumination is no fault of the missile: indeed, it makes the missile an order of magnitude (or thereabouts) cheaper.

The aim54 should be the most accurate missile in game as it literally has its own radar which produces its own signals and illumination becomes stronger the more it closes the distance. As you said it has the ability to shoot down cruise missiles. You just forgot to mention low altitude cruise missile part though.

All missiles in WT are essentially equally accurate, as the game doesn’t attempt to model missile stupidity or lock quality (I mean, in some sense it does, but a missile with a lock will not experience a technical failure, it will only ever fail kinematically). I agree that all missiles in WT seem to have a problem with low-altitude targets, but I have no commentary on this as I do not know if it is a consequence of janky lead computing or something else. It’s not unique to the AIM-54.

Weight should not matter unless outside of the weapon employment zone.

Of course weight matters, velocity is the fundamental equation of missile maneuverability, and acceleration is the means by which one obtains that: a = f/m. A heavier missile takes longer to get up to maneuvering speeds from launch (at any speed) because it has proportionally less acceleration. If you try and fire the AIM-54 directly upwards in a stall at a target that is quite far in front of you (or indeed, at a target in any direction while moving slowly), then you will see the missile essentially fall out of the sky (or shoot far up in the air, dependending on launch direction) because it literally cannot generate enough lift. The engine motor just isn’t strong enough to get it to speed.

How does it happen by magical coincidence to be able to shoot down fighters?

By the same mechanism it shoots down the bombers, but applied to a smaller target.

It has a literal mode called ACM ACTIVE MODE for close range engagements. It is by intentional design to be used as a secondary measure for targets performing air combat maneuvering. That is what acm stands for.

Do you have any information to suggest the ACM mode provides the missile with additional maneuvering capacity? Why would the missile have that additional capacity available only in a certain radar mode? All the sources I’ve seen (which is to say, the heatblur manual on the AWG-9 radar say that the ACM mode is the pure-active mode: the missile is launched in automatic-active mode and acquires the first lock it can, without any information from the mothership. This is of course as a rule quite a bad thing to do, but there is no reason why a missile would not have this option, and it may be useful for pilots in some circumstances. It is only the “dogfight” mode in the sense that you want the missile to go active very quickly in a dogfight anyway because usually you are quite close to a target.

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1316

That didn’t answer the question brother.

How much easier is it to dodge the r27? As opposed to to real life? Being that the R27 is a technologically inferior missile compared to the aim54 especially at range where radar signal and return degrades rapidly with a very poor success rate?

How is the r27 so much better being that it relies on a signal that comes from far inferior radars to that of the AWG9 and does not have the ability to transmit a signal of its own?

As much as I am a Soviet main and my heart belongs to the flanker, the R27ER is insanely over performing at close quarters and
Can literally dogfight better than most
Small IR missiles. Remember this is WT and jets are flying at insanely higher speeds and pulling maneuvers not even remotely possible.
The R27ER has been modeled to fit the game. Why not the aim54?
The R27ER is heavier and has the same exact control fins as the smaller version and goes Mach 3 in about 5 seconds off the rail.
It does not make any sense from a physics point of view that it performs on par and even better in most instances at close quarters over the lighter and smaller regular R27R.

No one is asking for the aim54 to be a”dogfight” missile. Just that it be modeled in accordance like everything else in which gj has intentionally chosen not to at the moment.

Why must the aim54 not perform up to the standard of how the game is overall modeled but is actually under modeled? It’s not even performing in accordance with reality.

(Sorry I am on the road and didn’t get a chance to read the rest. Will do in a moment. )

1317

Fine. It is a lot easier to dodge the missile in-game than in real life because you are in 3rd person mode and you can maneuver the plane perfectly in reference to the missile. Same as with the AIM-54. I did not think that needed saying. The R-27R is a more capable (that is, more agile) than the AIM-54 because it has more thrust and less weight. It is more agile by its very nature.
The signal of a radar is irrelevant for agility purposes, and WT doesn’t do signal strength computations as a practical matter. A lock is a lock, for guidance purposes.

I don’t understand your contention here, the AIM-54 is a big and slow-to-accelerate missile. When it reaches top speed it’s reasonably agile, but it does not reach top speed until literally 30 seconds after launch, of course it won’t perform perfectly when it is still undergoing acceleration, is not at perfect maneuvering speed, and is carrying up to 200kg of rocket fuel that is dead weight. I agree that maybe there are some other missiles that maneuver too quickly off the rails (I don’t know) but the R-27ER has a booster motor that gives five times as much acceleration as the AIM-54. Of course it goes fast off the rail, that’s the purpose of the booster motor. I mean, all the acceleration changes the launch envelope of the missile slightly: the R-27R is technically better for some short range launches because the 27ER will overshoot, but these are negligible concerns. You almost always just want more thrust. At the end of the burn (even well before then) the 27ER is going a lot faster, although technically you are correct the increase in mass makes it marginally less agile (importantly: at equivalent speeds, which they will not be, as the 27R is rather slow). By the end of burn there is only 30kg of difference, and in any event, it is not often the missile will need all of the AoA. It could always use more thrust!

The only differences between the 27ER and the R are the thrust and the mass, and also what I guess is a drag factor change (there’s a video that discusses this, but I forget what it is) which I assume is just to compensate for the additional mass. At any rate, these are negligible in comparison to the additional thrust. The 27ER just has so much more thrust than the R that you can get hits at much longer ranges, the 27R is not a very good missile because it will run out of energy quickly (it never had much to begin with) but that doesn’t change the fact that both of them are very good, very agile missiles. The ER just has an insane amount of additional thrust (the R has less thrust than the 24R!).

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1318

I really want reply in detail bro, but unable to at moment. Be on tomorrow.

I do not know what your point of contention is here. It is widely known and accepted historically and in the community that the Aim54s are held back in game and more capable of killing maneuvering aircraft and quite literally have a proven record of doing so. 78 kills in the Iran Iraq war and predominately were fighter sized aircraft. All done with Aim54A and a watered down stripped down AWG9 of the 1970s.

There is not a single R27 variant that ever existed that comes close to the Aim-54A’s combat record against fighters.
The Iranians are not modelling their advanced long-range Air to air missile off of the obsolete R27 now are they?

They are modelling the Fakour 90 off of the Aim54.

The Aim54C should be much better than it is in game as it literally is designed to also target extremely elusive and small low flying cruise missiles.
The Aim54 is designed for targets performing air combat maneuvers it has a mode for it. No one said the aim54 should excel at BFM.

The R27ER is not a BFM or “dogfight” missile either and yet here we are knife fighting with it in War Thunder. The R27ER is not even capable of being fired and leaving the rail in a dogfight pulling any relevant Gs. Its already overperforming the moment it slides off the rail in a dogfight.

1319

There’s likely to be a difference between LO,BL(ACM) and LO,AL(Active off the rail) modes as seen by the following excerpt, where BoreSighT modes. are mentioned separately to the AIM-54’s Active mode

F-14A IRSTS capabilites
F-14A IRSTS capabilites1437×960 168 KB

Note, that the Pulse Search being limited to Boresight modes and (Pulse)SST having Active mode available, and so is locked on before launch, though being a pulse mode lacks some types of recoverable data (Velocity rate) and so does not form a complete data set needed for a regular lofted launch profile as it doesn’t have a digital(six DoF) autopilot in the modern sense.
image
image1920×1538 183 KB

The difference would be that the missile can optimize it’s energy pre-launch if it is locked onto a target with its own radar where it can’t if it locks on at some point after launch.

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The AIM-54 is capable of hitting maneuvering targets, even targets which are maneuvering quite aggressively (relatively speaking). What it is clearly not capable of doing is defeating a crank-and-turn, a proven method to defeat essentially all missiles in game if executed under sufficient conditions. The sheer mass makes the AIM-54 much less effective at hitting these targets when under burn than other missiles, but it can still do it.

You are arguing that there should be some kind of compensation for the fact that the AIM-54 is a good missile, like it isn’t already a good missile: it is a good missile! It does all the things you’d want a missile to do, it’s just that WT doesn’t actually value the things you’d want a good missile to do (or doesn’t model them at all) and it does model things like raw power and technical maneuvering capacity, and the R-27R and ER have the AIM-54 beat rather handily for much of the burn time under this metric.

The Aim54 is designed for targets performing air combat maneuvers it has a mode for it. No one said the aim54 should excel at BFM.

This is not what the purpose of the ACM mode is, and it is not evidence of the capacity of the AIM-54 to hit targets moving as aggressively as they do in Warthunder. ACM mode for the AIM-54 is a technical condition for the launch parameters of the missile (like all the other modes): it launches the missile in so-called mad-dog mode: no guidance from the mothership, automatic acquisition. You’re literally using the AIM-54 radar itself like the ACM mode of the normal radar: acquire and lock on the first thing you see. That’s the purpose of the mode. Of course, it is for closer range targets, but that’s just because the missile itself cannot see longer-range targets, and all you’re doing is telling it to hit what it first sees. There’s no reason to not include this launch mode, because someone somewhere may find it useful one day.
The R-27ER is not a dogfight missile, it does not perform like a true dogfight missile (that is, the SRAAM or the R-73). It just has great acceleration, so it can accelerate up to proper speed very quickly.

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I agree that the missile doesn’t need to undergo the lofting conditions or anything else, but at close range that’s hardly relevant: if the missile is within 30 seconds of the target it should go straight at it anyway, right? It’s just telling the onboard radar to activate immediately and acquire the lock, and then away she goes. WT has some calculations regarding loft and maneuvering % allowed regarding distance and such, but is there a problem with that for the AIM-54? Unless you are suggesting there is, I would contend there is not.

1322

Yes and that is not the case in game at any altitude in game really so where is the disconnect?

Neither is the insanely overperforming R27ER that in game is magically already Mach 3+ (even in a climb) less than 10 seconds off the rail at sea level. A missile with zero proven combat record for hitting anything, let alone fighters.

But again, here we are.

Compensation?

The Aim54 is legit underperforming and it’s already been confirmed by the community. It’s not a good missile the tracking is modelled pathetically as well as the AWG9.

1323

Maneuvering target’s in real life : mid overload 5-7G’s.
Maneuvering target’s in WT : mid 12+G’s.
What you want from aim 54 in wt?

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1324

Its likely also adjusting fusing activation delays, Control surface unlock times and fine tuning the autopilot response as well, the same way the Sparrow (AIM-7E-2 & -7F) does to reduce the minimum range and allow for maximum performance instead of conserving energy for the end game since it really doesn’t need too do so due to the short range and other factors.

AIM-7 guidance -1
AIM-7 guidance -11434×2030 387 KB

There are absolutely unmodeled features for the AIM-7 / AIM-54 that would improve their performance for example the English Bias maneuver and Altitude Switching (own ship altitude, look up / down angle and target range) of the Autopilot’s moderation constants, etc. each would go a long way to improving their short range performance and at altitude.

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1325

I agree the AIM-54 is not a good missile comparatively in WT and the radar is painful to use, but most of that stems from how annoying the missile is to use (looking at you, TWS and the video camera) and how little WT values the benefits you actually get from the missile having the total thrust it does.

The game doesn’t attempt to or bother to check actual real-world kill counts for missiles, because that sort of thing is very hard to judge. Most missile kills happen against planes that don’t even know the missile is about to hit them, or are not maneuvering enough to kinematically defeat the missile because the pilot would be turned into mush. That’s not the case in WT, so missiles that are quite good IRL but don’t cross the “difficult to defeat at any speed” struggle a bit.

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1326

Refer to this post.

Additionally, the aim54 is just as easy to defeat as any other SARH that must rely on a singal from the launching aircraft. The Aim54 has its own radar, and the signal and return are stronger as it closes the distance and far harder to defeat. That is a big advantage to active homing missiles and why they are the standard today.

1327

The primary reason people switched to active missiles is because the mothership no longer needs to directly illuminate the target (providing a signficant advantage in a head-on joust) for terminal impact, not because of signal strength concerns. All ARH missiles today have (as I understand it) dinky little onboard radars compared to the mothership, that’s why they have to get information from the mothership for most of the flight rather than just doing all the calculations themselves. I mean, perhaps you mean electronic countermeasures, but I do not think electronic countermeasures like radar jamming are something we’re going to see in WT any time soon.

1328

You do know they are suspected to be turning up next patch alongside the AMRAAM and its counterparts since in a down tier strike aircraft are going to have issues, and the fact that various ECM pods, relevant graphics and audio have been accumulating in the files for a while now

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1329

So where is the source that states the missile is only designed to kill bombers and not fighters and just happens to by coincidence to be able though Hughs designed it to have an ACM active mode?

Where is there a source that states the R27ER is designed to be launched and any relevant Gs in a dogfight and reach mach 3+ in around 5 seconds at sea level and still turn better than lighter and smaller R though it is heavier and has the same exact control surfaces and size.

1330

Yes, well. Either way, I don’t think people switched to ARH missiles because they were better at defeating electronic countermeasures emanating from the target aircraft. Happy to be corrected, however.

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1331

They designed it to have an ACM mode because why the hell wouldn’t you have that mode in there. You’re the one that’s supposing it’s designed to kill fighters when every single available source in the US Navy says the AIM-54 came from the Missleer program, which was specifically designed as a fleet-defence fighter and designed to shoot down heavy bombers and cruise missiles at extreme ranges.

I didn’t say it was only designed to do those things, I said it was primarily designed to do those things, and is good at hitting fighters because you tell the missile to hit the target and it does so and that’s that, it doesn’t really care what it hits. You know it wasn’t primarily designed to hit fighters because of the extreme range, extreme cost, and extreme warhead.

It is far more likely that the ACM mode exists because it was technically possible and theoretically useful in limited circumstances and so why wouldn’t you have it in there than to suppose that the entire F6D-1 Missileer/F-111B program was also concurrently designing a missile (the same missile) that they thought might also be useful at very short ranges and they wanted a radar mode that made use of that.

If you have a design document or official piece of communication that says anything other than “The AIM-54 is designed to shoot down heavy bombers and cruise missiles at extreme ranges” I’d be very happy to read it, but by my understanding the usefulness of the missile against smaller targets was just a natural consequence of it being a missile that was going very fast and with a very large warhead.

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