GGTharos

I think it is a fair question. Here's what we have: R-77: Fuel mass from same documentation as R-27 AIM-120A/B/C1-5: A document that lists the explosive content of ammunition for the purposes of safe storage and fire-fighting lists the propellant masses for those missiles. Also for AIM7/9/54, certain SAMs I think and some AGMs as well. The rocket propellant mass is listed separately from warheads etc. We have had this documentation for years now, first posted here in this thread, but I do not recall by who. The weaknesses in this documentation is that the burning time, and especially for multiple-grain configuration is not known, only the total mass. But it reduces guessing by a lot - now you only have to guess ISP and burn time for each propellant grain, and there are some basic rules for those, including the fraction of boost:sustain grain.

Fuel mass and if possible rocket motor configuration and burn time.

The lattice fins have advantages and disadvantages, as has been written in this thread - the R-77 range 'problem' is dominated by the fuel fraction (mass of propellant compared to mass of the rocket), not the rudders.

The airframe will perform the same way as a 120C. No, it's probably a capability increase. The airframe is probably capable of 'doing better' but whatever else is there wasn't - and it could be anything, datalink, IMU, power supply. Really anything. As well, perhaps the 50% range increase is all about an F-22 chucking the missile at M1.7 from 50000' ... who knows? AIM-120D was intended to receive a larger motor as well, but it never did.

Can you imagine what he would do blasting his radar, which is several times more powerful? Always. The whole not wanting to give a warning thing is a very gamey approach, IRL you don't care so much. Yes, it's nice for the weapon to be stealth but no such things exists right now (even IR missiles can be detected, at least visually) and IRL tactics aren't built around 'not giving warning'. You guys need to stop misinterpreting what he said. He clearly means the lift/drag coefficients.

If a fighter radar won't saturate your RWR, the piddly little fighter-mounted noise jammer won't do it either. Dedicated offensive jammers, maybe.

There is, but you will have to dig much deeper (by yourself, I don't care to do it for you ) than 'missile stats'. The state of manufacturing capability will tell you a bunch of things, but you have to have some understanding of the underlying technology. It's still an estimate, but it's an educated one. I don't think so, his point was that the R-77 and R-77-1 will have similar aerodynamic performance. One problem is that we don't know the fuel fraction or thrust or burn time or configuration of the R-77-1 rocket motor. As well, power to the fins can be increased to produce more g. Lattice fins have advantages and disadvantages, for the R-77 IMHO the main disadvantage is its rocket motor, not the fins. The R-77-1 very likely corrects this, and of course there are other upgrades on top this in the electronics and other equipment.

Because it's old. We're not sure what changed between the 54A and say something like the R-27 or AIM-120 - maybe IMUs were particularely ineffective at that time. The specific thing that the SA/DL appears to be solving is an inaccurate IMU. There are other possibilities instead of or in addition to the IMU that may have to do with the analog processing of various doppler/speed gates etc. It may also have to do with transmission bandwidth.

If you find those, let me know - I don't care to dig up what is basically old news

The quote is 'AMRAAM does 80% of what METEOR does at 50% of the price'. I suppose in this case 'better' might be situational.

Without some sort of ECM support or massive countermeasures or both, systems like PATRIOT and S300 are not SAMs you want to get close to. They should be very effective in the absence of something like off-board jamming used in suppor the ARM shots. Think EA-6, EF-18G, or the systems onboard B-52/B-1B. The basic tactic would be to put the HARM shooter between the SoJ bird and the SAM, so the ECM and HARM come along on the same azimuth, reducing the SAMs signal to noise ratio. I would still require multiple axis attack because you still want to saturate the system. Defeating these systems is a mission all of its own.

It doesn't, and it works fine most of the time. Except for the times it doesn't.

AIM-54A (not to be confused with the C) very rapidly received upgrades after its introduction because it really did have problems specifically with chaff and clutter among other things and those needed to be addressed. And yes, the 7M/MH will have the advantages that come with digital capability, but the 54 is also big. It's a huge missile, and having room for electronics really counts, even for old analog stuff. Should it be better at CM rejection than a 7M? Hard to tell, as you can see the TWS on the tomcat is finicky and the missile itself is analog (though with much more modern capability compared to say the 7F which used con-scan) ... it would constantly receive instructions from the mothership and according to the manuals it could definitely listen to them if it lost track. It really does have a datalink, but the way the system functions is quite a bit different from the 120 for example - while we don't know enough about the why, we can speculate a bit. The 54A will fly with its seeker on from launch, the datalink steers the seeker towards the target, and the missile uses that plus any reflections form the target to form its mid-course guidance. The 120 will do this purely on position updates, while the 54A looks and samples until it's told to go active.

Just like the R-27

Exceptions don't make the rule, and the rule is 'Pk does is not affected by the supporting aircraft when the missile is autonomous unless the missile loses track' the emphasis being the exception, and even then we don't know what the missile can/cannot do to recover the track by itself. There are already statements regarding the sparrow's capability for recovering track-breaks caused by split-S, I doubt the 120 would be any worse.

I'm saying that 3rd parties do not have access to the missile guidance code, AFAIK. They inherit whatever ED does. Given that you can see some missiles follow what's done to the 120 and some do not, they're probably not using the same guidance functions - all made by ED, but they leave the legacy things in as they develop newer capability.

I'm not part of any 3rd party development, and so I don't know what happens behind closed doors with regards to the missile API, but it would be beneficial to expose the progress you are making to those developers. Eg. when the missile is launched, there should be probably be a standard method to transfer data from WCS to missile, so the missile can act accordingly. My understanding is that there is no 3rd party missile code at all (only configuration) but they do have to keep up with what you do internally for guidance. Because there are cheapshot tactics

No, what I mean is that except for this, you don't need to support the missile in terminal. Certain people want to make it seem like the missile is not worth much without the DL when terminal, which is not correct.

No I don't think so, but to be clear this is what I think, specifically for AMRAAM: MADDOG/VISUAL: Missile launched without support beyond knowledge of launcher's g/direction bias. There will never be any datalink that this missile will consider, and the weapon system will not generate it. Normal launch: The missile is will consider the DL until autonomous. The WCS will continue to emit the data-link until the 'drop dead' time (About 99 sec). The missile may 'listen' to it if it loses track. The DL is normally used to sort out initial targets for acquisition by the missile, including picking out the desired target in a formation. HOJ: ???? - a lot of cases, pretty much none of which are correctly covered in DCS for a variety of reasons. Removing the PN variables and loft a denied range target is scraping the tip of the iceberg, but even this isn't entirely correct for all cases - eg. if you have a valid track and it begins jamming, the WCS already has good track data to launch with and can be transferred to the missile. Likewise if the missile is launched after ECM begins. Range can also be calculated by other means. And this is just for our simple little range-denied jammer in DCS. Maybe I misunderstood what ha been quoted time and again from the manuals: At a certain computed range, the DL is discontinued and replaced with a homing signal.

Which tactics? Where are they written? Like I said, I have it in the manual, it's stated as such. As I said, there are gotchas but an instruction like 'the Pk is not affected by continued support' isn't ambiguous in any way.

In fact LOS rates are a major part of a lot of loft algorithms. Having range makes mid-course a lot more efficient. Fun fact, with an all-digital missile like the 120, it could calculate distance based on its lofted flight. It's not great because it's missing the complete vector information, but it can now consider how much 'oomph' to put in its turns. I bet you could do similar with an analog missile, just not quite as easy. Again, no, it does not. Clearly stated in the manual 'Pk is not affected by continued support from the launching aircraft once the missile is autonomous'.

No, he has it right. It is very clearly written in the manuals that we do have access to that once PITBULL, Pk is unaffected by continued support from the launching aircraft. While there will be 'gotchas' in there, the statement is quite clear. Pk is affected when launching beyond seeker range.

Great, and now at the same time let's make sure old ECM isn't quite so effective vs. newer platforms. Or at minimum it can become 'otherwise engaged' by other platforms taking up its resources ... as well, missiles launched with good track data shouldn't care that that jamming has commenced, they already have range - that's for loft only, which will still cost in efficiency if the target changed course, but not as much.

No, it isn't severed. The missile stops 'listening' to it unless it loses track. The Su-27/MiG-29 WCS discontinues the DL, yes, the AMRAAM platform does not.

Wrong thread?