Proof?
The 120D has literally become the most powerful medium-range missile. It is amazing. Everything is beyond my expectations, and I can realize everything I imagined for a BVR fight.
20-30km is very much easy to dodge, that’s why the range advantage of the AIM-120C/D doesn’t say much unless the seeker is tweaked to be harder to chaff. At 20-30km whether it’s a PL-12, an R-77 or an AIM-120 you are gonna be defending in the same exact way.
This is why the HOBS meta matters a lot right now, every single missile allows you to fire and defend at medium to long ranges, except for the MICA, but the point is to always get closer to your target and eventually what will define who has the advantage is having the ability to launch HOBS at close range and immediately defend, even better if you can hold DL while defending.
Yes, that was implemented in the D variant.
I don’t see any changes to the seeker itself, can you provide any evidence of this?
FYI, I mean provide actual changes to the seeker recorded in the datamines.
1 Like
it was not
1 Like
The seeker is the same and HOBS doesn’t exist either.
It only works on the F15GE; on the F18-E it’s useless because the F18 lacks speed, and that’s the only reason why the AIM120C and D work on the EF and the F15.
im legit about to crash out, there are alot of people on reddit acting like aim120d and pl12a have some sort of advantage during datalink, its literally the same as it always was, gnss does nothing in this case, people were doing this prepatch with c5s much the same. like wth
5 Likes
The thing is, GNSS actually does have a big impact. no IOG drift means angle gating can catch you much more easily, when the missile is being datalinked it seems to be much stronger too.
That compared with high missile count makes AIM-120Ds quite oppressive
1 Like
GNSS with DL is a gamechanger against helicopters.
You can’t hardlock them but AESA TWS somehow picks them up and keeps them on track.
1 Like
oh wait, that makes sense.
That’s actually awesome
1 Like
Why would iog drift come into play with datalink outside of two way information that is utter nonsense, iog drift isnt some flat inaccuracy number that affects inertial guidance its the cumulative error that happens during flight, with datalink iog drift should be 0 datalink is literally midcourse guidance, iog shouldnt do much of anything during midcourse guidance. And iucould datalink missiles into a notch well before aim120d was added. I swear to god 90% of people is just discovering what has been the meta since su30sm2 and ef2k was added and its infuriating
5 Likes
…you could do that without gnss much the same, hardlocks have been almost completely left in the dust with aesa radars being as common as they are, i barely use hmd anymore, tws should be where you are 99% of time the time
The AIM-120D on my super hornet does what my AIM-120A/B/C on my other hornets can’t.
If that’s the datalink, the gnss, the aesa. Whatever. It’s just good.
Hardlocks never really worked vs helis unless you were within maybe 3km.
Hardlocks are to be avoided as much as possible on Aesa aircraft
The funniest part about all of this is that nothing actually did change guidance properties wise between the C-5 and D, so yes, people discovering this is fully placebo since even the D has “re-acquire targets” set to false, there is no new datalink or otherwise modeled with the D.
The literal only thing it has is that it lacks IOG drift, thats it beyond the tiny weight increase.
5 Likes
I’m not up to date on the mechanics of the datalink but if I remember right if you lost connection to the missile you lost the uplink.
Isn’t reconnecting the connection what the two way datalink is “supposed” to do?
aim120d is good youre bad
just a c-5 with more battery life (doesnt matter ingame) and the c-5 is regarded as one of if not the worst toptier missile ingame