I think 9Ls may have had another nerf. It has been previously established that 9Ls should ignore flares when the target is on reheat in most cases and most aspect, especially in rear aspect. In game, it was pretty much only rear aspect though that this was the case. As in any other aspect, the 9L would favour flares heavily. No matter if the target was on reheat.
Just had a perfect shot at a full reheating Mig-23 in rear aspect, in theory the 9L should have traveled straight and true, instead, a single flare was suffecient to defeat the 9L in rear aspect. The target remained on the full reheat the entire time.
Here is clips of the shot. Everything I know, this should have hit.
The MiG-23 has large caliber countermeasures, it seems the flares completely obstructed the fov of the missile due to how he maneuvered. This would likely have even stopped an R-73 (at least momentarily). It’s true the AIM-9L should not be decoyed when tracking a reheat plume, but there is also historical precedence for the missile being decoyed by different types of flares.
It’s not dependent on the caliber of the flare in question (it is slightly impacted by the size but only as it applies to the actual burn rate and sustain time of the flare in question) but the chemical composition of the pyrotechnic compound(s) and how that interacts with the response of the detector in the missile’s seeker.
The SAM SPAA’s name is M48 Chaparral, the missile’s name is MIM-72. Just like how the name of the US toptier SPAA is XM1069/ADATS and the missile’s name is MIM-146.
It is important to note that the MIM-72A itself (the first MIM-72 variant) is not completly equal to the AIM-9D, as it has additional electronics and wires that optimize it for SAM use, hence the reduced maneuverability to just 16.5G as you said.
However, the MIM-72 had many variants which vastily improved upon each other in many areas. The definitive variant of the MIM-72 is the MIM-72G, which includes a new AN/DAW-2 seeker using the FIM-92’s Passive-Optical-Seeker-Technique (POST) technology (not the actual Stinger seeker, just uses the same IRCCM/ECCM technology), bigger 12.6kg M250 blast-fragmentation warhead, M121 smokeless motor, and many other smaller upgrades. The MIM-72G has a range of 9km. Thanks to that, we can assume the MIM-72G is capable of pulling as much G as the original AIM-9D, or more likely, far more than that.
edit: according to this archive I found, the M250 warhead has 6.6lb (~3kg) of Octol explosives. Ingame, Octol has a TNT modifier of 1.59x.
3 * 1.59 = 4.77
The M250 warhead has an explosive weight of 4.77kg TNT equivelant. Ain’t no Su-25s shaking off any hits from that thing.
There’s a huge performance jump from the R60s to the R73s. I was wondering, what’s the performance difference between the 9Ls and the 9Ms? Would it be noticeable?
