R-73? No. The range on the 73 is far too short to shoot first against my opponents.
R-77 could do the same tactic from my anecdote, but the problem with the R-77 and long range attacks is that it’s all bark and no bite. You can gain value from missiles that miss by forcing the opponent to respect the missile, but it’s nice to have a missile that punishes the opponent if they fail to respect the missile. The immense drag on the R-77 just completely defangs the thing and gives it a pitifully small engagement range. There are ranges where a spamraam can be fired and the opponent can do nothing but immediately go defensive where an R-77 fired from the same range gives the opponent time to lock and fire back on their own before defending. It’s a lot harder to defend against the spamraam too. They can threaten you from further away and you have less time to properly notch or reach multipath height. It’s night and day catching someone rear aspect when I’m flying USA vs flying Russia. When I launch a SPAMRAAM up someone’s six from within pitbull range, I basically give them an ultimatum to notch/multipath or die. But with an R-77 often the opponent can just outrun the missile by keeping their foot on the throttle if they were going fast enough in the first place.
Forget the g-pull. I’d rather have range and speed every day of the week. If I could replace all of my R-77s with the lower BR and lower G pull farkour-90s I would in a heartbeat.
Having worse FMs and missiles. That’s one hell of a kick to the gut.
It’s a shame how badly Gaijin treats it’s favored country, I expected much more from bias.
There is only so much they can do on their end to prop up the russian tech, if you want good flankers in the future with capable missiles/avionics, you’re better off forgetting russia and investing in china
Or they could just make Russia more competitive, the biggest thing would be flight model buffs, for missiles there isn’t much they can do aside from tweaking the R-77 or adding a stopgap, but the flight models are the most obvious and easy things to buff.
Nothing russia has done in the last 40 years will come close to being Meta in war thunder, their last bead of hope was probably cold war ECM tech (if added in time) and the R-27ER and those days have been and gone in terms of effectiveness, russian aircraft don’t have high amounts of countermeasures, neither do they have avionics and airframes that come close to NATO, that’s not even me being a shill, simply just being realistic. Russian air will not see the light of the meta unless gaijin decides that the R-77-1 is a magical wonder missile or that Russia deserves fighters with Aesa before anyone else.
Being realistic would mean Russian flight models would be some of the best Ingame, instead of bricks. For missiles, there isn’t really much they can get rn, they could tweak the R-77’s to make them a bit better. There is also Active Radar Homing R-27’s, but in terms of realistic additions, it probably won’t be until the R-77-1 when Russia is back to being competitive, as it’s much better than the first R-77. In the future there is stuff like the R-37, R-37M and R-77M. And some obscure R-77 varients. The flight models though are a big thing, atleast if they’re fixed it won’t hinder future jets like the Mig-35 or Su-30, jets that solve issues like countermeasure count, radars, and would be added in an era where Russia has more competitive weaponry.
All of this is nonsense… you are saying this as if the balance in game is somehow tied to year of release when it isn’t. It also assumes gaijin is perfect in their representation of ussr/russian aircraft and that they can’t be buffed…
There’s this little concept called the battle rating system. Planes of equivalent capabilities are supposed to have the same BR, and superior ones are supposed to have higher BRs. Gaijin needs to stop pretending that the 27SM is an equal to the F-15C and up the superior american plane’s BR.
A specific peer to the Flanker isn’t necessary to increment the F-15’s BR. It’s blatantly obvious that they’re not equals, and the flanker can’t go down since it wouldn’t be fair for flankers to club phantoms and tornadoes with fox3s, so the only remaining option is for the blatantly superior american birds to go further up.
China… Literally has the Russian export flankers with indigenous missiles and tech? The only “advantage” I could think of is the AESA sets. Even then Bars and Irbis are perfectly capable sets. I don’t even know what your thought process was posting this.
Now you’re literally just yapping and coping dude. The Su-35, 30SM, SM2, 29K are all adequate performing and competitive airframes.
Russian avionics and airframes maybe behind in some aspects, that doesn’t mean they’re not still competitive platforms. Your argument is functioning in a solely binary environment from “literally the best on earth” and then “abysmal dogshit” at the other end with no in-between.
Come on, it’s widely known and regarded the the PLAAF and PLANAF have the best flankers in the world, especially since the Zhuhai airshow has demonstrated the new J-15T, which only furthers the gap between the current best Russian flankers;
Furthermore, China ordered an amount of Su-35S fighters to compare the effectiveness of the design and consider ordering more if they deserved merit, however various aspects of the Su-35S disappointed the PLAAF officers and pilots, who judged that it was sufficiently worse than Chinese counterparts to order more, now one hand this was down to lacklustre radar performance compared to Chinese AESA sets and rated lower in ECM and Avionic technology.
On the other, the only place where the Su-35S merits over the J-16 it was compared to was the capability of TVC engines, which are being worked on in the latest generation of WS-10s anyway,
Overall you simply cannot say the Russia has the best flankers now, they fell behind around the time that the first J-16s were finished and are now sufficiently behind to the extent that it’s not really a competition anymore.