SgtPappy

I just read this very interesting post on the AIM-54 - not sure about the person's credentials but he is certainly convincing! Link: https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-the-US-Air-Forces-F-15-Eagle-fighter-carry-the-extremely-long-range-and-high-speed-AIM-54-Phoenix He mentions that the missile would sometimes have to fly in such a way as to arc back towards its own loft trajectory. Furthermore, BIO mentions that TWS had some issues with false contacts and I believe Heatblur stated that it is by design (or that it simply won't change) that TWS is not suitable for maneuvering targets. I expect the more targets that are being tracked, the easier it is for the TWS mode to drop accurate tracking.

A good strategy I find is to make the F-14 overshoot. Enter a high speed merge and try to force it into an overshoot in some dimension by maneuvering out of plane with it. Then take the opportunity to reverse with a high AoA 1 circle. Take advantage of the fact that it does not slow down easily nor can most F-14 pilots follow in a rolling scissors quite as well as a well-flown Hornet, Mirage or even Eagle. Grab some altitude, don't just merge at the deck and use the vertical. It might take a few tries to learn it, and don't feel like you can't just extend with speed and try again. I have met some terrible people with horrendous sportsmanship who will actually respawn and shoot you down with a missile if they think you're "running too much" but luckily they're the toxic ones and are fewer in number than those who want to learn.

Yesterday, I found that simply firing in either TWS or STT of any kind (all with Jester) at 10 nm or less, co-alt with the bandit and you will still have time to turn away from an AMRAAM. Unless they do the same, they'll get hit by the AIM-54C. I have rarely been able to trash this missile with an orthogonal roll since the update so it's actually very good real close. But I suppose this is a little besides the point of this thread.

Just remember UWBuRn that the AI countermeasures are far more potent in general than human countermeasures. You can see this by launching an AIM-9M for example at 2 nm head on and they can spoof with almost no maneuvering and maybe a few flares. Try this on a human and it would never work. Their missiles too may or may not be less resistant to countermeasures as well. I can notch even today's tougher AIM-54s from the AI flying right at the deck, firing in a look-up situation by forcing the missile to go up and then notching + chaff near the ground all the way to merge. However against my friend online, no chance of this at < 5nm.

This looks like the exact book I'm looking for! I think I too, will bite the bullet and get it!

That's exactly what I thought, but I still need to look into a basic calculation for the range binning that the AWG-9 and likely the AIM-54 will use - something tells me it's a lot smaller than 10,000 ft! Are there further API improvements meant to address this? And damn, I don't think I'd ever be brave enough to try what you did in the tacview!

Do you think this look down is accurate? I always believed that you really had to be close to clutter but it seems look down at all spoofs the missile even if you're 10,000 ft above the ground or water.

Apologies, perhaps I misremembered, but it appears you are right. I checked old tracks and found that whenever my buddy in the F-14 fired AIM-54s and AIM-7s, they were easily spoofed because he was higher than me, if even by a tiny amount. When we tested yesterday, he flew right at the deck and I could spoof them if and only if I climbed and then dove to force them into a look down state. After today's patch, the AIM-54 no longer gives a warning at all with its own radar but I guess that's a different discussion. I also checked other tracks and it appears that enemies who spoofed my APG-63 had mountains at a similar altitude. What I did not realize is just how far the spoofing occurred, that is, I thought one had to be very close to the ground, say 200 ft, for this ever to work, not a few thousand feet from terrain. However I am luckier than I thought then because I just tested the AIM-7s and S530 and found that I could indeed spoof them even at high altitude/look-up, however it happened a lot less than if I split-S'd towards the ground. The effect is far more pronounced for the AIM-54 where it will not at all eat chaff unless I really dive. So with the new API, it seems that the SARH missiles are still lagging behind the AIM-54 since I can never spoof the AIM-54 in a look up situation but can sometimes do so for an AIM-7 - both at very close, 3 or 4 nm range. I suppose this makes sense but I still don't know either way if chaff can be used per my previous posts .

Understood, that sounds very risky. I can see why it's much more preferable to notch per what I've heard from retired fighter pilots - at least against older threat radars. Thanks!

Thanks Skysurfer. Do you have any tips? I have been doing this exact maneuver the whole year and it worked every time until the recent API change patch for the AIM-54. It still works vs the S530 and AIM-7.

What is fallacy is the idea that the chaff is a high clutter background "mask" that planes hide behind when attempting to defeat PD radars. Although I realize it is possible to still reject chaff based on the bandwidth of the return (it's all over the place compared to a plane and the aircraft will move away from a bundle quickly if not maneuvering), a maneuvering aircraft in the beam, constantly popping chaff could really create an angular pull-off given a large enough resolution cell, PROVIDED there is no fancy ECCM or beam shaping. At the end of the day, I'm wondering about consistency - in the context of DCS, then no working AIM-7 or S530D should miss when I pop chaff and split-S while beaming those radars in a look-up situation yet they do. In fact, none of those radars should ever lose lock but we see that all the time, even just beaming while far away, looking up sometimes even. So even then, we are simply inconsistent, no matter what the truth is about chaff. If missiles of this class truly only can be notched then they should ALL only be notchable and ONLY in the look down situation today but that is not the case. What I have shown below is not proof that chaff MUST work in the beam with a maneuver without jamming, but it is simply to show that using chaff could possibly break lock with a beam maneuver. That is, can we really conclude from what information we have today that chaff does not work against a PD radar ever looking up? I would think no but I certainly would not mind being proven wrong as this question has taken up almost the entire year for me and this plus the associated texts' calculations are what I've managed to find so far. "Radar homing Guidance for Tactical Missiles" - D. A. James: "Chaff can, however, be more effective if the target is crossing at the time of acquisition, since the target has no component of velocity towards the missile and the chaff Doppler frequency may fall within the search ambit of the Doppler frequency gate. Even under these circumstances it may still be possible to reject the chaff echo on the basis of range as the chaff separates from the target, by using pulse-Doppler; the seeker would discriminate between the target and the chaff, each in its own range interval, by the broader frequency spectrum of the wind-blown chaff. " "Monopulse Principles and Techniques, 2nd Ed". - S. Sherman, D. Barton - "An aircraft self-protection technique, when under track by a weapon-control radar, is to release one or more chaff bursts while executing a turn that brings the aircraft radial velocity to zero (relative to the air mass). If the radar cross section of the chaff exceeds that of the target, the chaff echo may capture the radar track, allowing the target to move, unseen, out of the beam. The weapon system must recognize this event and reacquire the target to restore the needed guidance data." DTIC paper "Self-defense of large aircraft" - Yildirim, Z. - "Some radars ignore a chaff cloud because its velocity decreases rapidly. To defeat this problem, aircraft should dispense a series of chaff clouds, rapidly and in a sequence according to enemy radars’ capabilities. It produces the illusion that the cloud is traveling at nearly the same speed as the aircraft. The rapidly dispensed chaff clouds will ”walk” the radar behind and off the aircraft as in Figure 52. Chaff backscatter must become larger rapidly when in the same radar resolution cell with the aircraft in order to break lock-on." Agreed, except that other active radar missiles have much more classified ECCM and are much more modern and weren't designed during the Vietnam War and I believe that's where this breaks down. This is why my interest lies in earlier hardware because we can discuss a bit more without running into that "classified more or less forever" wall.

I am so hyped! Good work Heatblur!

I agree about the AMRAAM and yes, if the AIM-54 is looking down in basically any capacity, it's notched. That much I can confirm. So maybe it is just me for now but there was a time when simply beaming it even in a lookup situation would completely defeat it (probably not realistic either). Popping chaff made that easier. Now it seems chaff and beaming and even maneuvering in that beaming plane does absolutely nothing if and only if it is looking up. If you have the time, you can see the tacviews. Now I'm not able to truly conclude this is unrealistic but I'm leaning towards it is not based on my limited knowledge about radar resolution and the effect of chaff on an old missile like this. But something just seems off - if the F-15, Mirage, Hornet and Viper all lose radar lock from a beaming, maneuvering plane dropping chaff at 8 nm in clear air at co-alt, the AIM-54 with its old seeker and tiny aperture/array should not be any better at 5 nm for example. It's a matter of consistency I suppose, the way I see it.

I posted in the other thread (link: https://forums.eagle.ru/forum/englis...bility-of-kill) before I realized there's a discussion on the AIM-54A specifically here. Firing from above, down onto the bandit, the AIM-54 is very easy to notch. However, it becomes pretty god-like when looking up, even with chaff, beaming, etc. so that tactic should be used when attacking enemies. I am however not 100% sure this should be the case. Tacviews attached here for reference. Based on some simple back of the envelope calculations (also posted in the previous thread), I would expect the AIM-54A to be fairly chaff-hungry at the appropriate ranges since the resolution cell is so big and I don't believe such an old missile with mech scan had any ability to beam sharpen. For convenience, here's the calculation and please if anyone has more to add to this or if it's just plain wrong, speak up: The AIM-54 radar diameter is slightly smaller than the missile diameter at about d = 0.380 m. At X-band, let's say carrier frequency, f = 9GHz, then wavelength, λ = 0.033 m the angular resolution would be θ ~= 0.033/0.380 = 0.08766 radians = 5.022 deg. This is pretty big, and so the cross-range of the resolution cell at, say 5nm would be R = θ*5nm = 0.08766*5 = 0.438 nm = 0.813 km which is pretty huge. With such a large cell, I would expect chaff from, say, the standard USAF RR-170 cartridge (3 million dipoles, maybe 25% of which are X-band) would give an RCS of ~80 or more m^2 and that would be enough to pull the RCS centroid away from the aircraft at that range while the defender is beaming, rolling, pulling G's to create more RCS variation and defeat the missile predictive track. The AIM-54 is a very early mech-scan (i.e. no beam shaping) seeker so I find it a bit hard to believe that it won't eat chaff at that range. Not sure if this is the intent of the current missile modeling. But I'm up to be proven wrong, this is just my feeling based on what I know. AIM-54A tests.zip

Just did some tests and I'm checking back - it appears if you launch the AIM-54A (also tried a test with the AIM-54C) and you're looking up at the target, it cannot be spoofed by chaff with beaming and split-S from seemingly any range. The F-14 might lose lock but the active off the rails AIM-54 will keep seeking. See the attached tacviews for reference. Of course this is not a comprehensive of completely conclusive tests, but it is consistent with what my friend and I tried online when I was above him - the AIM-54 simply will not lose track except by look-down, beam shots i.e. notching (which admittedly is still very easy, unlike for the AIM-120). If this is accurate that is a big bonus for the F-14 as long as it flies really low as the bandit defends but from what little I know during my research, I'm having a rough time believing that this should be the case. The AIM-54 radar diameter is slightly smaller than the missile diameter at about d = 0.380 m. At X-band, let's say carrier frequency, f = 9GHz, then wavelength, λ = 0.033 m the angular resolution would be θ ~= 0.033/0.380 = 0.08766 radians = 5.022 deg. This is pretty big, and so the cross-range of the resolution cell at, say 5nm would be R = θ*5nm = 0.08766*5 = 0.438 nm = 0.813 km which is pretty huge. With such a large cell, I would expect chaff from, say, the standard USAF RR-170 cartridge (3 million dipoles, maybe 25% of which are X-band) would give an RCS of ~80 or more m^2 and that would be enough to pull the RCS centroid away from the aircraft at that range. The AIM-54 is a very early mech-scan (i.e. no beam shaping) seeker so I don't find it sorta hard to believe that it won't eat chaff at that range. Not sure if this is the intent of the current missile modeling. But I'm up to be proven wrong, this is just my feeling based on what I know. AIM-54A tests.zip

Something I noticed however is even the A-model Phoenix is far less likely to be notched when launched looking up at less than 20 nm - heck I had trouble from 30 nm trashing its seeker. I tested it online with a friend and offline against AI and I can only orthogonally dodge it, run it out of energy or die if its looking up at me within say, 15 nm. I seem to have trouble using chaff against it while its looking up even if I'm split-S'ing.. don;t know if that's just me. However, it will forget about you if you beam and force it to look down at all it seems - even if you are about say, 1000' above the ground. I would think you'd need to be much closer to the ground to notch it, but then again it is old, probably has no beam sharpening capabilities and therefore has a large resolution cell.

Thanks, Flappie. I realize that the only way to get all your buddies' loadouts without affecting yours is to manually copy and paste them into your unit payload .lua files... Oh well. Would be nice if the payload one day could save with the mission files themselves, just like any other parameter of the mission (other than scripts).

Thank you for the responses. Flappie, yes my own custom loadouts will show up in the editor and in-game. Thanks for validating it on your end. It's too bad it will save only one. Frederd, thank you for the confirmation. Is there a way to extract my custom loadout file and send that to the co-author of the mission?

Apologies if this has been posted but I cannot find anything that's identical in issue. A friend and I are working on the same mission file as we want to have several different areas where the opposing aircraft are armed to our respective likings. However, if I load their mission in ME, I cannot see any of the custom loadouts and the aircraft have no highlighted loadout selected. I can start the mission and the custom loadouts will appear on the aircraft. This leads to the issue that if I make my own custom loadouts and send the mission out, no one will be able to see their loadout until they actually spawn. Essentially it makes missions authored by more than one person impossible when anyone has a custom loadout. While there are work arounds (i.e. telling my friend what I want in my custom aircraft), I do not believe that should be the solution as information from one mission should be stored easily when sent to someone else in the common case that they want to tweak their own mission while carrying over already-completed work.

As a big F-4 and F-15 fan, I am very excited for the MiG-23ML which is right in between - a bit better in almost every way than the F-4E and a bit worse in every way to the F-15 of the late 70s, early 80s. Also excited for the new mission, Alpenwolf! Good work!

I think you can close this thread now. The solution is to not have "AWACS" as a task in addition to "AWACS-a" in the AWACS aircraft's waypoint actions. My old missions needed this but now it is unnecessary and the AWACS will work fine with an orbit and default actions.

There has been an improvement with the last patch actually. The same lazy 4G rolls don't work anymore at less than 12 nm launch. Is it easy to dodge in general? Yes but you have to work for it now as it should be. This is what makes the 1980s fun!

Indeed, thank you ED! I spent 2 hours yesterday just enjoying the amazing scenery and Bekaa Valley of the new Syria map. Great work to ED and Ugra media.

Attached is my track. Funny thing is, I can contact AWACS in some of the other servers so they must have set it up right. The changes to ME have certainly made my previous method obsolete. AWACS not functioning.trk

Not sure if this is exactly the right place to put it but I have had no luck with any AWACS that I have setup in mission editor. Before the patch, they worked in every mission but now, I can tune into their channel for example and hear that they are on station but I cannot request to talk to them (the AWACS option does not appear in the menu anymore). Did the method of making them work in ME change or is it just broken? I tried this with the F-5, the F-14 and F-15. No luck, although I can talk to other airbases. This happens in both the Syria map and Caucasus.