near_blind

So Jester definitely has a bit of a Sparrow fetish and will occasionally track them on TCS during their fly out. It shouldn't effect your radar or the quality of your track, the radar and TCS are not necessarily coupled. The state of radar guided missiles is also a bit... iffy right now due to ED playing with a couple of things over the last couple of months (like EW).

Not quite. For the AMRAAM, the missile has an understanding of where it is in relation to the target courtesy of the IMU. When launched the radar passes a predicted intercept position to the missile for it to fly to before going active. This position is constantly updated by the launching platform and passed to the radar throughout time of flight. If the radar loses the target, then the missile flies to the last known position and then turns on. The DCS AMRAAM doesn't quite work like this yet, as they haven't modelled the IMU yet. The debate is whether the AIM-54C, which has a similar architecture to the AIM-120, receives these updates and is aware of its own position internally, or whether it needs to receive explicit steering and activation commands from the radar like the A model. If the C *does* behave like the AMRAAM, there's nothing to say that it doesn't receive a positional update as part of the SARH guidance, and that it can't fly to that position and flip on with loss of guidance. Generally considerations such as these are to be satisfied as part of the crew's decision whether or not to shoot. Once the weapon is off the rail, the engineers are trying to maximize the chance of a kill rather than have the missile make IFF decisions.

HB is busy, people get distracted, things fall through. IronMike might have been active in plenty of threads the past few weeks, but none of those threads involved having an answer for the countermeasure question.

It's not 100%, but I've absolutely seen a Phoenix on a correlated track find its target. It's much lower PK because the missile is generally out of position and due to how PN works right now will take an almighty bite towards the target, bleeding most of its speed. The bandit needs to be inside the missile's radar range and cone, the specifics of which I don't remember off the top of my head (10 NM and 40 degrees maybe? I'm sure someone will correct me). Obviously if the target's path radically deviates from where the AWG-9 thinks the target will be, the missile probably isn't going to be in a position to acquire it.

Make sure your probe switch is set to 'All' not just 'FUS', otherwise the wing and externals won't fill and you won't be able to receive more than 12,000lbs of gas.

I would love to get ahold of the AIM-54 that exists in your imagination. It sounds like a real hoot.

So ugh... who's bringing the Forrestal?

https://web.archive.org/web/20130720010705/http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2006psa_winter_roundtable/watts.pdf#

Unless you're flying formation with an IL-76, I'm not sure that will negatively effect the missile in the way you're hoping it will.

Radars have a concept call range resolution, which is how well the algorithms that run the radar can break out individual targets at a given range. The AWG-9 is a rather old radar, so it doesn't have particularly great range resolution, and will struggle to break out targets that are close together at long ranges. In very oversimplified terms what your radar is actually seeing is a blob where each of the twoships are. RWS as a radar mode doesn't do much processing, where it gets a radar contact it creates a blip at the proper range and azimuth. As it sweeps over the blob it creates a brick wherever it makes contact. It might generate one brick as it sweeps over, it might generate two bricks, so on and so forth. TWS is a mode that does a lot more processing, it's trying to to take multiple radar hits, and fit them into a pattern that will allow it to determine their velocity and vector, but this also means the radar is making guesses. Because each two ship is close together, flying at a similar altitude, direction and speed, TWS makes the assumption they are two small objects but one big object. As the two tracks get closer, or when the two aircraft break formation, the AWG-9 will eventually be able to see them well enough to determine they are in fact individual objects.

Two weeksTM, be sure

Agreed. As missiles and sensors gain more depth, the way CM works only becomes more glaringly problematic. I know ED and co has put in a lot of good work with the AIM-120 and AIM-7 last year, but with the latest changes to chaff and ECM it feels like we're right back in that 'gladiatorial combat' that they promised to move us away from. Hopefully it gets addressed sooner rather than later.

Kinda, or at least that's the impression I've always got reading through the early public materials for the F-14. I don't think that's what nobuttons is saying. The F-14 as an aircraft is certainly built to do more than down bombers, and whatever it's genesis the AIM-54 had excess capability enough to drop fighters. There are, however, a number of quirks about the AWG-9, especially the PD modes, that speak to the engineers working on it having definite assumptions on what it would be used against. The AWG-9 has two distinct operating paradigms: PD and Pulse. All the PD modes focus on acquisition, tracking, and guidance at extreme ranges, the compromises chosen to get the radar functional with the technology available at the time seem to effect the radar least when the targets are flying straight at the Tomcat (like a stream of bombers trying to shoot missiles at the boat behind the Tomcat). These suit the Fleet Air Defense role, and those compromises were known as was the reality that the doppler notch and I guess other weaknesses like the rate gating left the system vulnerable towards small, maneuvering fighter type targets that the F-14 was likely to face in it's other primary role as an Air Superiority Fighter. That's why you have Pulse: compared to the quantum leap of the PD modes, it was a known technology with strengths and weaknesses that were well understood, and had proven at the very least capable in a combat environment. The Navy could also leverage a roster of crews that were experienced with the system after a decade of the Phantom being in service, and it was felt a good RIO could work the system such that he was more likely to be able to find a target than a contemporary noise filtering algorithm (the unspoken obverse not withstanding). Remember that during period that the F-14 was designed and initially operated, there was a very different understanding of how air combat worked. The prevailing Navy experience from Vietnam was that against fighters at least, the fight was still very much a swirling, low level visual affair. Kills would primarily be made with the sidewinder and maybe the gun, the Sparrow would be used to grab whatever could be got on the way in and out, ROE and performance permitting. It's not the best analogy, the Navy of this period was more proactive about both missiles and the crew concept, but If you read materials and congressional briefings for the F-15 during this time the USAF is bending over backwards to insist that fighter is a primarily visual fighter and the ***giant*** APG-63 in the nose was merely there to provide situational awareness and guide the fighter to the merge for AIM-9 implementation. It isn't until AIMVAL-ACEVAL and the aftermath that the US Military seems to really grasp what the proliferation of capable all aspect missiles would mean, and begin to pivot from the idea of the swirling dogfight to tactics that exploit their superior sensors and missiles. It wasn't unreasonable thinking either: during the late 60s and early 70s the US has essentially monopolized the concept of the medium range missile. Of the three likely category of the opponent they would face: there was the Soviet VVS which was using cannon and AIM-9 knockoffs, the soviet PVO which was using all sorts of missiles of disparate use and short range compared to their size of cost, and export fighters, which were VVS aircraft but worse. RWRs were not widespread, and where they existed they were rather rudimentary. Neither was fighter launched chaff really a "thing", the concern was the ubiquitous rear aspect heat seeking missile. For this environment Pulse STT, the AIM-7E/F and the attitude that kills would be achieved via good ol' tail chasing isn't entirely unreasonable. It wouldn't be until the mid 70s where you start to see increasing numbers of things like MiG-23Ms and MiG-25s with somewhat credible all aspect medium range missiles, escalating in the 80s with the Foxhound, Flanker and Fulcrum. During that time the role of the AIM-54 transitions from the silver bullet reserved for vital fleet air defense to a more ubiquitous tool. I don't have any specific literature from the 80s, but I've seen some things that suggest by the late 90s the AIM-54C was capable enough that the PD modes had become the primary tools for air supremacy, and the missile would make up for any deficiencies with the AWG-9. Two other thoughts I have, but couldn't figure out where to place. One, the two biggest weaknesses of the F-14: the engines and the radar, were originally supposed to be expedient stopgaps to get the type into service. The TF-30s were meant to be replaced quickly by the PW F401s (original F-14B), and the radar/firecontrol was supposed to be replaced by some to-be-determined digital set before the end of the 70s (F-14C). The Navy passed on both of these due to budgetary issues. Two, is that the nearest competitor to the AWG-9, the APG-63 was received a number of changes post AIMVAL-ACEVAL that transitioned it from a tool the fighter jocks were going to use to perform high aspect intercepts and shoot fleeing MiGs, into a capable, and more importantly flexible with all sorts of goodies and TWS and stuff. The Air Force had the political will and budget to force those upgrades through, and apparently the Navy did not. There is a reason the -63 forms the basis for most modern US mech sets post 1990. alright, I'll stop talking out my ass now and leave y'all to it.

Did you move your weapon selector back to off after engaging the air target?

What were you shooting at? Right now ED is playing with how ECM interacts with missiles, and it's lead to some weirdness. If you shoot an AIM-7M or F at something that has an active jammer, the missile will go dumb because it doesn't have Home On Jam. Su-24s and Tu-22s have been the biggest offenders. The AIM-7MH has HOJ for what it's worth. Also the AIM-7M's chaff resistance was changed to match ED's, so the AIM-7Ms ability to reject chaff has been halved.

It is my understanding these are all features, not bugs, based off SME feedback from F-14A flight crew.

Next major update is scheduled for sometime late this month.

Bug implies that the missile isn't behaving as intended. To my knowledge there's been no indication that the ARH->SARH fall back has been implemented in the API, the feature can't be failing if it doesn't exist.

In game yes. IRL the missile behaves like r4y30n describes.

No problem, the AWG-9 is a bit counter intuitive compared to more modern sets. TWS - AIM-54 acts kind of like an AMRAAM. The missile flies out to the target getting updates from the radar, going active when near the target. PD-STT - AIM-54 acts like a giant Sparrow, needs illumination from the radar all the way to target. The missile will never go active in this mode. P-STT - AIM-54 receives no guidance from the AWG-9. If you shoot an AIM-54 in this mode the missile receives basic steering cues (which way to point its own antenna) and is launched active off the rail. In this mode the missile is entirely dependent on its own seeker to find targets. This only works at short range and is intended as an emergency "get this thing off my jet so I can maneuver" option. I'm not 100% sure on what the consequences for switching between TWS and PD-STT while missiles in flight are. Perhaps @IronMike knows.

The radar needs to be in a PD mode (TWS or PD-STT) to be able to talk to the AIM-54 while it's in flight. The radar cannot talk to an AIM-54 in pulse, so by going P-STT before the missile had received the active command from the radar (track began blinking on the TID), you trashed the missile.

I think I'm going to lend more credence to the professional fighter crewmember who has is familiar with the doctrine and history of the AMRAAM because its part of their day job, over the internet poster who believes HB has designed the AIM-54 as part of a conspiracy to wreck their online K/D rate.

I can't say I've had that experience. Using a ten degree CCIP pass from medium/low altitude, ideally dropping at least two bombs usually nets very favorable results against light and unarmored targets, and will even take out medium and heavy armor with a bit of luck.

MH has HOJ.

I've seen the same issue firing AIM-7Ms against Tu-22Ms. No chaff was involved, missiles went dumb off the rail.