The hardcoded loft angle itself is only part of the loft code and effectiveness of the loft. You need a good mix of all variables to get good loft.
MICA-EM has a bad 5° loft angle, but is actually above average on target elevation (-5°), and target angular velocity (2.5°/s). This is why if you check SS, it actually maintains its loft the best, it just doesnt loft much in the first place.
Spoiler
If just its loft angle was bumped up to something more sensible, itd probably have the most effective loft code in-game for long range shots, as the other missiles are also quite bad in their loft codes, just in a different fashion.
i would lie to you if i said i figured what these terms mean
That being said, MICAs loft is weird in the sense that it flies up in a straight line, then makes quite a hard turn to start its descent, while AMRAAM A seems to have a nice, regular curve
A regular parabollic curve isnt necessarily ideal. To some degree, the longer the missile stays at altitude, the more kinetic energy it will have at its point of impact, and the less it has to rely purely on kinetic energy to account for enemy maneuvers.
It is so unable to keep itself in the air it crashes 13.5km away from launch point. To add insult to the injury, it flies at Mach 0.28 at 12km, and the only maneuver it is able to accomplish at this point is falling irremediably towards the ground, like some space debris pulled toward a black hole. You can forget about any 30G, same can be said about the 50G at 7km (only reaches M0.42 at this distance)
In comparison, the orange one is the current missile, but with the diameter fixed, the engine fixed, the loft added, and the artificial limit of 50km removed, it reaches a speed of 910 m/s (losing 90m/s to drag alone) and becomes subsonic past 10km
Meanwhile for a high altitude shot : the missile would give this :
Can’t reach Mach 4.5, dies at 37km (and if it hadn’t it would fall to the ground anyway). The one fixed with the current drag meanwhile overperforms slightly by 0.18 mach, although i think all missiles overperform slightly at high altitudes if i recall correctly. It would reach 80km in a bit under 115s.
That’s the angle i tried to set at 89° on the left
But sometimes it got some quite erratic behavior, especially depending on the distance to target for some reason, although it seems the missiles are aligned at the start :
Spoiler
Green is AMRAAM for reference.
It would seem the TVC wants to put the missile in a 45° climb right off the bat
So, instead of tweaking thrust output, you increased drag to limit top speed at 750m/s ?
This is, considering a deltas of 1000m/s and all the other buffs ? What is the max Mach exactly (what’s your baseline to say it overperform by 0.18). Seems to not overperform as much as Fireball got. He said it would go over Mach 5
Yes, to show how impossible it would make the missile perform in other areas. Not that the output was done the following way :
Gave the missile a Cx as close to 0 as possible, and adjusted the output to 27.7KN in order for it to reach 1000m/s following DirectSupport’s document. I will say i have no idea if it works that way or not, but one clue which suggest it does is that the missile with null drag was losing almost no velocity
Yes it considers all the above parameters
The baseline is a 1600km/h, 11000m scenario on a coaltitude target which seems like a realistic scenario for an air to air scenario, you could potentially make it go even faster of course. In order to reach mach 5, you’d need to fire at 12000m and 2000km/h.
Note however, that in such scenario, the 750m/s with a Cx of 5 missile would also be >mach 4.5 before falling out of the sky at 45km, so it still doesn’t work.
The explanation would be :
A : the mach 4.5 value is taken for a realistic Air to air engagement with an AAM loadout for a Rafale that is pushing it (can a Rafale do so at 12000 m ? not sure)
B : MBDA shenanigans (unlikely tbh, i doubt mica can really reach hypersonic speeds)
C : Gaijin physics
In this case, maybe using the “max speed” hardcoded value and setting it up to something that corresponds to mach 4.5 at high altitude could work, although it’s a very ugly way of dealing with the situation imo
If you want to play with the missile yourself, here’s the configuration i use :
I did not touch anything in the “advanced” tab compared to the MICA in game, which i suggest you create the missile from if you to test it out yourself
I don’t think it’s a realistic assumption. You can give it such a strong booster with an insane Cx. I think fireball and other’s point is to say that the actual deltaV is lower (and thus thrust is), or you’ll ultimately make the missile fall out of the sky as it’s aerodynamically even worse than a brick with such a high Cx.
So, when you say that it’s Mach0.18 overperforming, you mean that it goes Mach 5.18 or Mach 4.68 ?
The booster values directly comes from the Delta V and the engine burn time given in the source from DirectSupport
The only way you can slow down the missile to reach such a low speed as 750m/s for a VL launch is by setting the CxK value at 5, which is why i think the 750m/s max value given in the MBDA slides is incorrect / very conservative. MBDA was marketing the missile as having a max range of 12km in the same years for example, while now it is 20
Okay. So that’s nowhere near as overperforming as what was claimed by others. And considering that, as you said, most missiles also overperform in such areas, it suddenly doesn’t look as far fetched
interestingly, the AMRAAM A, stated to “mach 4 max speed” “opverperforms” (quotes because i don’t really think it overperforms, it’s more that like any other missile, it can get higher than its max speed) by the exact same amount for any scenario :
M4.18 at 11000m + 1600 km/h launch (+ M0.18)
M4.6 at 12000m + 2000 km/h launch (+ M0.6)
MICA :
M4.68 at 11000m + 1600 km/h launch (+M0.18)
M5.1 at 12000m + 2000 km/h launch (+M0.6)
unless of course AMRAAM is supposed to be faster and i’m not aware of it. Point is, Gaijin intended the missile to be Mach 4 max, as it’s what they state in their stat card.
other remark, but is the game consider the mach number only for high altitude or low altitude, or both depending on the altitude it’s launched at, or Real-time altitue of the missile on it’s flight path?
