Check how the missile loses its target at 0:09 and 0:48, then reacquires the lock while ignoring all subsequent flares.*
I’ve seen this happen hundreds of times.
What’s the logic behind it? If different flares and engines have varying strengths of heat signatures, what are they?
Timestamped
Were you sat on reheat?
In a rear-aspect shot, vs an AB (or equally hot) target you need to flare quite heavily and defend heaivly to defeat the missile, a casual line of flares is more likely to just help lead the missile to you
There are only 3 types of flares in game BOL, Standard and Large. Everything just uses the same (i think soviet) flares for standard and large and there is no variation between nations. BOL is nerfed to be about 1/4 the strength of a standard flare.
Heat signatures are wierd… They are based upon engine thrust output not “temperature” and flaring has everything to do with “thrust to flare ratios” which I dont even fully understand (I dont think most CMs or TMs do either) and so there can be some wierd edge cases like the Harrier, but I can see you arent flying one of those.
I cant quite tell what you were flying in that clip
How does it answer my question? I’m not asking for some general IR guide or tips
In my clip the plane wasn’t inside IR missile’s FOV, i assume the flare had enough luminosity and “rise time” has passed, but the missile switches the target after that.
Full ab while still in cone with not enough flares popped + bread crumbing. The moment you popped those succesive flares (what you should have done in the first place) the seeker was already only seeing your jet
You didn’t move enough to off put the FOV between you and the flares to the missile.
What kind of question is this?? An infrared missile will lock onto you if its seeker happens to be looking in your direction. It can transition from a flare to an engine the same way it can transition from an engine to a flare. It is also possible, especially for seekers with large FOV like the R-60, to fly through the flare, and once it’s past the flare, the seeker just happens by chance to be staring straight at your engine.
The video is pretty small, but another thing I noticed (might be seeing wrong) was that you ended up going left, dropping flares and then going right again. I feel that contributed as well.
I’ve read the replies, and none of them answer my questions:
If you don’t know the answers to these questions, that’s fine—I’m not judging—but please don’t clutter the topic with irrelevant replies.
Thank you in advance.
They go for the hottest target. Which can vary from aircraft to aircraft. Range, angle, altitude. etc. IRL, Aim-9L could not be flared by a large calibre flare when fired at an Afterburning aircraft in most aspects. especially rear-aspect.
The IR Signature of aircraft is based upon the thrust of the engine, and the temperature of the exhaust is not modeled. Flaring a missile is based upon thrust to flare ratios. We got a small insight into this in a disucsion specifically for the Harrier. But it applies to all.
here is a tech mod response when he enquired directly with the devs
The ins and outs of this system arent really known, even by most of the forum staff.
To me, it looked maybe more like server desync / the replay being a little buggy rather than anything else.
What you should have done. Dropped out of afterburner. Dropped a rapid little burst of flares (4-8) and broken hard right (as that was the direction you were heading) drop an additional 2-4 flares if you felt that the missile was still tracking you.
Thank you for your detailed reply.
It would be helpful to know the exact values or formula—without them, there’s room for potentially untrustworthy business practices.
Yeah… The Harriers have been a major focus of mine to try and get them the love they need and one facet that they are suffering is a crazy hot IR signature due to the amount of thrust they have (which has been increased this major update)
The result is that it takes 8+ flares and throttling down to defeat even the weakest IR missiles reliably.
As part of that, Im trying to get more details on how the system works. The Variables, etc, maybe even hoping the CMs will do a proper dev post for it, like they’ve done on other topics of community interest before
because they’re a constant seeker that will seek the biggest and latest heat source until it blows up.
flares don’t stop the energy nor make missiles blow up (I think chaff does though)
missiles can reaquire targets and heat is based on thrust in game so depending on how much throttle you are on you will need more flares to distract a missile
It just makes the missile/radar see a million and one targets (with a pulse radar). Window was used in ww2 to make the Germans believe there was a much bigger force in some places than others. You’d have a Mosquito or something fly over an area, drop a bunch of Window and the Germans think it’s a bomber squadron… until it dropped really low that is.
It’s also worth noting that ir missiles have different sensitivities. More sensitive missiles can lock from further, like R27et. But they also have a specific sensitivity value for flares vs engines. So early missiles like Aim9b are way more likely to lock a flare vs aim9L.
I meant missiles use radio sensor to detect when it is near a surface of something, even IR missiles.
Piece of aluminum alloy ribbons that disperses after 1 second is probably not enough to trigger the radar fuse
It works on radar because the moment it is launch it is still whole
Well I have gotten non critical damage by spamming chaff. Might just be me mis attributing it to chaff tho
In that case. It was probably the missiles prox fuse going for the chaff at the last minute but you still just about being within the prox fuse range. Resulting in minor splash damage.
IRL i.think missile can and will trigger on CMs like flares, but in game they fly straight through