Just to drop my 2 cents here. You do realize these fights are highly skewed toward the Eurofighter/Rafale right? They’re made to force dogfights otherwise there wouldn’t be a fight in the first place. And even there, the Rafale lost 3 fights out of 4.
That’s like putting an amateur boxer up against a pro, tying the pro’s hands behind his back, and then celebrating because the amateur managed to win a single round, even though the pro still took three victories despite being that handicapped. Yeah right lol
When stealth aircraft like the F-35 can go all out in full-size trainings like Red Flag, you get absolutely disgusting kill-ratio in the ballpark of 20-1, and that’s against modernized F-15s/F-16s equipped with AESA radar+tough AA environment.
The circumstances of the fight are not the point of the post.
The point of the post was to disprove the obviously false statement the “it would not even be a competition”. It was proved to be a competition by the Rafale and Eurofighter beating the F-22, not the scenario around it.
The rest of your post I want to argue with but that not very on topic so I’ll let you have your little moment.
This post is also for everyone else who replied to that post and didn’t understand what I was getting at.
If the Rafale still loses 3 fights out of 4 against a F-22 that is artificially handicapped to such an extent, then yeah, the man is right when he says it’s not even a competition in any scenario that truly matters.
Let me remind you the F-22 Raptor scored 241-2 in his first Red Flag and still scored 40-1 in more recent Red Flag. Great job, you shot down 10 of the 180 Raptors built, meanwhile you lost 400 Rafales, which is almost double the total number of produced Rafales.
And considering it was leaked that Gaijin is working on the F-22, it begs the question how will they even balance that?
Are we playing the same game? Dogfights barely ever happen today in WT toptier air RB. Not only is it suicide to do it against the many R-73 slinger you can meet, but you immediately get third partied and sniped by an IRCM missile you can’t evade due to slow speed.
The fact dogfights are dead is exactly what made the first iteration of the F-15E so strong. The first iteration wasn’t even that good of a dogfighter, handily losing to the F-16C in pure dogfight, yet its ability to utterly dominate BVR thanks to its broken speed at high alt made it King of Kings.
It seems you and I have a very different play style. I normally wait until everyone is done slinging their ARHs and then go dogfight people in the merge, works effectively if you can avoid 3rd parties.
In my personal experience the F-15E/I was (and still is, just to a lesser extent) absolutely toxic if you wanted to play around your radar missiles, which is why I switched yesterday from 4 R.530Ds to 2 R.530Ds on my M4K.
Yeah… that’s a gigantic if. One of the only times you can avoid third parties is when you can drag someone like 20km away from the main battle. And even then, with these big 16v16, you might get a bad surprise and have someone third party you anyway.
Other than that, it’s these rare matches where you end up 1v1 against someone. There you can truly dogfight, IF the two survive the ARH spam to actually merge.
The F-22 is going to take everything that makes the F-15E already annoying to fight, turn it up to eleven(faster airframe+stealth), and then couple all that with what will be the best if not one of the very best dogfighters in the game.
The F-22 will have counters in the form of long range IR missiles that can be co-guided using datalink (think MICA IR). Although radars may not be able to get an effective enough lock for a radar missile they certainly will be able to detect and direct from a great enough distance.
Another example of different playstyles and experiences right there. Third parties, although unavoidable, can easily be tuned down if you know how to make yourself an unappealing target.
FAT doubt. Look at how stealthy the F-117 already is. The F-22 is going to be a LOT stealthier than that. Some estimations put it up to 10 times stealthier than the F-117. You’re going to be defending against AMRAAMs before you can even hope to detect anything, let alone co-guiding with datalink lol.(Any cloudy map as Gaijin love to do would also make the MICA IR useless, the same way the R-27ET doesn’t work when that happens)
Time will tell and we’ll see who’s right but I have a feeling your high opinion of the Rafale may be clouding your judgment.
The F.4 too has low observability technology, certainly not to the level of the F-22 but better than you may think. You also cannot ignore the Rafales superior sensor suite and missile armament.
Detection is different than a quality radar lock. If the radar output data is good enough to give rough distance and speed it is good enough to provide datalink. Things like that could potentially occur hundreds of km out, there is no such thing as radar invisibility.
The same could be said about your opinion on the F-22. Only time can tell. Until then you have a good one.
I’m not ignoring anything, I know about all this. The Rafale is one of my favorite plane. But I’m not such a chauvin either that it makes me incapable to see its shortcomings.
Not my opinion, just fact. When the F-22 scores 40-1 against some of the best airborne AESA radars that exist, this should ring a bell for you about what the stealth of the F-22 can do, but apparently, it doesn’t. No offense but you would be absolutely deluded if you truly believe the F-22 would score such a high KDR after getting detected “hundreds of km out”
Last but not least, having 1-2 planes dominating everything has never stopped Gaijin. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the Rafale F1 comes next patch, and in 6-8 months when the F-22+Su-57 show up, you’re still going to be flying the same F1 against them. The same way Germany has to survive right now with the F-4FICE against the F-15E.
Do you have any numbers/estimates for the range of said radar? Also the F-22 has a very good EW/ECM suite, so it is easily on par with the Rafale there
Pretty much yeah, a large majority were against Syrian MiG-21s and MiG-23s which were only capable of carrying R-3s (AIM-9B copies) due to the Soviet’s reluctance to give proper weaponry to nations that lost it frequently.
It is overperform so it got nerf?
If yes then well deserve
If no it can perform like that irl
It shouldn’t been nerf
But hard to believe really that such plane can go mach 2 all the time at high alt even when turning