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!).
2 Likes
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
1 Like
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.
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.
4 Likes
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.
1 Like
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.
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.
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
1 Like
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.
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.
1 Like
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.
1 Like
Not totally correct.
the further a radio/microwave signal must travel the more it degrades in the earth’s atmosphere such as water vapor. By eliminating reliance on the mothership’s radar and placing a radar on the missile itself cuts out the time and the distance the signal must travel to and fro from the target, mothership and missile.
Additionally, since the Aim54 has its own radar the signal and return it produces is shorter and shorter as it closes the distance therefore making the signal STRONGER and less prone to disruption.
Additionally, missiles use high PRF signals because they are best used in close in distance or what we use here as “head on”. The missiles travel much faster than the firing aircraft and its closure rate is drastically increasing and therefore targeting is far more precise. High PRF is limited to systems that require close-in performance. That is why most Active missiles and SAMs utilize High PRF.
Those are advantages to using active missiles, I agree. Clearly we disagree about the usefulness of the ability of the attack aircraft to turn away from the opponent relative to the technical considerations of signal strength. At any rate, this is mostly academic. The AIM-54 has all the advantages of an active-radar missile that you’d expect to in game, modulo the shitty radar UX that is a genuine bug and I think should be fixed.
1 Like
With their own onboard radar and sufficient INS / IOG / GPS autopilot, a broken track doesn’t necessarily mean a defeated missile like it would with SARH guidance(assuming there is no revision to add auxiliary modes that would support them similarly), once the track is defeated and the Jamming ceases since a Relock or transitioning to Home on Jam or Angle track is possible, which would allow for said missile to complete the intercept assuming the kinematics were permissive.
They could also have some other advantages like forcing an onboard (Noise, not track breaking) Jammer to remain emitting while allowing for the Shooter to move on to another target as the Missile’s own radar maintains the required illumination automatically in place of the Shooter’s own. But this heavily depends on the capabilities of both sides and thus the specific systems in question aboard both offensive & defensive aircraft, and would be complicated by decoy’s and Stand off Jamming platforms like the EA-6 or EF-111A for example.
1 Like
Right, that’s a good reason to use an ARH missile too, I’m not doubting it. I just don’t think that these things are as important as not having to illuminate the target yourself (which is to say, not having to point the mothership roughly at the target) during terminal guidance. That seems like a really big benefit compared to a missile that requires illumination, for all the obvious reasons.
1 Like
Got to go guys I will reread some things I skimmed through and come up with questions if they arise. Good talk.
I think we can all agree the aim54 needs work as well as the AWG9
Imo the F-14 and the Su27 should be the most feared in the BVR department but only the Su27 is unfortunately.
2 Likes
