Something I wanna point out that I see keeps being repeated here.
Trajectory shaping doesn’t necessarily mean a missile will take more time to reach the target. Yes, the distance travelled is larger, but not only does drag decrease as altitude increases, rocket motor thrust INCREASES an ambient pressure decreases (something that does not appear to be modelled in WT and is particularly advantageous to longer burn motors like those seen on western missiles). The whole point of the term “trajectory shaping” is that the missiles trajectory is varied to change variables to match the desired outcome.
Good example of this is seen below, where the AIM-54 fired in a regular 30 degree loft (afaik these aren’t even true trajectory shaped shots, simply parabolic shots) has a notable increase in max speed, AND a much longer time spent at high speeds than when fired at 0 degree loft. The difference between 30 deg and 45 deg is also massive as can be seen that the 45 degree loft results in the missile remaining above M3.0 for over 100s of flight time while the 30 deg launch which achieves a marginally higher speed only manages to stay above M3.0 for around 30 second:
Kind of like the difference between taking a shorter road and driving the speed limit or a longer road and driving at your cars speed limit
We are not there yet which is why Smin says it is too advanced for the CURRENT game. Also for the IR yes it’ll be too advanced. IIR seeker would be op of an irccm almost impossible to evade
I’m not asking about now. Gaijin said they plan to add ARHs to all nations at once. Which is a difficult task. I am wondering if they view MICA as an equal enough competitor to other nations ARHs
I think gaijin shot themselves in the foot with that declaration tbh.
Theres some major balancing issues with adding fox 3’s to all nations at once, with the 3 most problematic nations (afaik) being france, russian, china, and maybe japan.
France has HOBS capable fox 3 with the MICA, and afaik never put it on lower performance airframes, making it very difficult to balance
russia never really put fox 3’s on lower performance airframes
china started with PL-12’s which afaik are more comparable to C variant AMRAAM’s, which is a side effect of being late by 10-20 years in putting a fox 3 on an aircraft…
Japan apparently never had fox 3’s on anything but the F-15J, F-2, and onwards
Other nations like Germany, Sweden, the UK, etc… have gen 3 airframes (F-4F ICE, AV-8B+, Ja37D, Tornado, etc…) to stick AMRAAM’s on, allowing them to balance flight performance and weapon performance. This was something gaijin often did in the past for example, like when the MiG’s fought vs the F-4’s, but in recent times, they’ve been putting the highest performance weapons on the highest performance planes (R-27ER’s and R-73’s on MiG-29’s, AIM-9M on F-16C) while everything else gets left in the dust.
As it stands with the current “predictions” on whch aircraft will come and what missiles will be added, the likely scenarios if they are in fact bringing fox 3’s to all nations at once are that either some nations will have their fox 3’s gimped on arrival (france/china) or some nations will have dead on arrival planes (F-4F ICE, AV-8B+, Tornado)
Yeah, imo it is an impossible task, but regardless of what gaijin did, ppl would complain. Ppl still complain about the AIM-54 even though its a terrible dogshit copy paste missile in-game that you borderline have to fly into willingly to die to for example (because gaijin is allergic to actually trusting primary and secondary sources and rather make assumptions based on their mistaken beliefs)
I was suprised to see them say they’d add fox 3’s to all nations at once since its not realistically feasible imo, but i guess they are trying to find the solution with the least whining from players.
I personally dont think any new fox-3’s should be added until the playerbase spends 6 months+ with the hypercrutches gaijin currently provides the playerbase when it comes to radar missiles, such as the massively abused, meta defining, and totally overbearing levels of multipath error that affects radar missiles in-game atm.
If players cant deal with an AIM-7M or Super 530D without having to abuse multipath, theres no way in hell they’ll be able to cope with AIM-120’s and MICA’s unless gaijin once again nerfs the shit out of them to pander/handhold the vast majority of the playerbase in top tier air that survives solely on a diet of crayons and lighter fluid.
Fair, forgot about the MiG-21-93. I think that’d be russias best option if they wanted to go for low performance airframes only at first. It’d also make @The_Lieutenant very happy
I wouldn’t consider the MiG-23-93 to be a “low performance airframe” though, seeing as in WT it can easily keep up with the gen 4 fighters and VASTLY exceeds almost anything of equal or lower BR. This was a massive issue with the MLD vs F-4J since gaijin had gimped radar missiles so badly at the time (if nobody remembers, they had increased notch size on the radar missile by 10-15x depending on the missile leading to a teamkilling epidemic as the missiles couldn’t tell the difference between a nose hot M1.5 aircraft at 10km and a butterfly looking for flower nectar 300km outside the radars max range), this was beyond the fact that the MLD could simply notch until the F-4J ran out of missiles or space and then completely annihilate it in a dogfight with literally no issue.
Just an FYI, Smin cleared up that neither he nor anyone else from Gaijin claimed all nations will get ARHs. The devblog only said “other game nations” and not “all other game nations”.
yeah, its either a misunderstanding on our part as a community or walking back of a claim. Either way, I think this is better, I think stuff like the F-4F ICE, AV-8B+ and Tornado should get Fox 3’s before anything else in-game
Thanks for clarifying
At the time of reading the blog I interpreted that to mean
For fighters of the other nations or all of them. I can see how it’s a bit ambiguous and can just as easily be interpreted to mean
For the fighters of some of the other nations
I’m honestly curious to see if gaijin will finally remove the multipath hypercrutch they have in-game. Its recently been confirmed its a “balancing decision” but quite frankly, I disagree very strongly with it. Firstly because its bad game design imo to give a blanket get out of jail free card to all players, to the point where the “balancing decision” seems more like an exploit than anything, but secondly because it has an outsized negative impact on planes the rely on radar missiles as their main weapon type, and this particularly affects western aircrafts which tend to carry more radar weapons and have somewhat inferior flight performance to russian aircrafts.
It also just would be incredibly idiotic to watch a MICA or AMRAAM get slammed into the ground or pulled off target at 100m altitude the same as an AIM-7-E2 from 20+ years earlier… Its already moronic watching the AIM-7M do it when its min alt is stated to be 5m, making the current implementation of multipath at most a 1900% nerf to the min alt of the 7M…
agreed, but notch should also be more consisten on old missiles then
I can’t count the amount of time i dodged aim7 by going cold and it hits me while the signal comes straight from 90°
And let’s not mention the 27ER, where notching that thing basically is more uncertain than playing loto
The issue you might be running into could be the fact that in look up situations the MLC filter is turned off, making it much harder to notch the missile and requires chaff to assist in those situations. The missiles also just have very very small notch windows (something like ±20m/s iirc).
There’s also the possibility of missiles slamming into you even after losing lock if you didn’t change your flight path enough between the time the missile lost the lock and the missiles intersection of your flightpath.
In general though, the concept of BVR is more positional than just trying to notch everything. Cranking, going cold, reengaging, etc… Notching is more supposed to be a last ditch effort thing than a go to, and will likely become even harder with future missiles.
I think the easiest way to help ppl understand the concept is to tell them to think of a BVR fight as a long range dogfight rather than attacking or defensing against a missile. The attack/defense mindset is more like HUD BFM where a pilot tries to just max pull towards the target at all times while positional BVR is more like deciding between 1 or 2 circle, verticality, decisions on when to cash in energy to pull lead, etc…
Its kinda like dealing with the AIM-54 in WT, if you’re only defending them when you get an RWR warning, you’re probs defending them wrong and way too late…
