S-8 Rocket range?

[Stratos]

What will be a good range to employ effectively the S-8 rockets? 2.5 Km is good enough? Or should I get closer?

 

BTW the range differes between the KOM Armor piercing and the FP2 High Explosive variants?

[chromium]

At the moment rockets doesn't employ fragmentation damage, therefore using rockets efficiently is a nightmare. You almost need to hit directly the targets to have effective results.

 

IRL, you would like to shoot with the distance and the profile (dive, running, lofting) that will let you get the best result, given the target type and its defence capabilities.

 

Sometimes the best results could be obtained by barriage fire,so you would employ the rockets with less accuracy (es. running fire, distance >3km). Sometimes you want the highest hits concentration, and you may want to attack with a steep dive profile at distance of 1.5 km.

 

BTW, there slightly range difference cause KOM are lighter than OFP2. Check your firing settings to ensure that at least the pipper in auto mode would be placed correctly.

[Stratos]

Yeah, the inhability of those missiles to kill anything that was not directly hit it's really annoying, and very unrealistic, wish ED can solve that long time problem, If not, no idea for what will be useful the Mi-24. I made a small list with the different rocket for the knob selector, now I need to find the sweet spot for those rockets to hit.

[Raptor9]

For those interested the Unguided Ballistic settings are as follows:

 

0 - S-8KOM high-explosive or S-8OM illumination

1 - S-8TsM smoke

2 - S-13OF high-explosive

3 - Not used

4 - S-8OFP2 fragmentation (again, frag effects not modeled correctly)

5 - UPK-23 23mm gun pods

6 - Not used

7 - FAB-250 free-fall bombs

8 - FAB-500 free-fall bombs

9 - KMGU-2 AO-2.5RT high explosive mines

10 - KMGU-2 PTAB-2.5KO anti-armor mines

 

I believe ED increased the explosive effects of the 30mm HE rounds to compensate for the lack of frag damage effects, so fragmentation modeling may not be present for other weapons and aircraft munitions as well.

[King_Hrothgar]

Rockets have a fairly decent blast area currently. It's true that fragmentation isn't modeled, so ED exaggerated they blast radius instead. With that said, you shouldn't expect to kill any modern tank with an 80mm HE/frag rocket even with a direct hit. They are most effective against infantry and unarmored trucks. I typically do barrage fire, letting all 40 go at once from 2-3km away. You do need to keep in mind that they are an area of effect weapon rather than a point weapon. So unless absurdly close, you should be trying to carpet an area of targets instead of trying to pick off individual units.

[Stratos]

But those S-8KOM shoud be useful against APC and IFC like the BMP or MTLB right? Never tried those barrage fires, but will like to see a track of you doing it.

[ShuRugal]

Yes, the KOM will kill APCs and whatnot. You can even kill a tank if you get a couple to hit the same one.

 

But if you want to kill armor, equip S-13. More precision, longer range, much greater damage.

[chromium]

King_Hrothgar, 3-4 OFP2 should kill a Ural 375 if falling within a 15 m range, and doesn't happen even at 5-6 m (tried many, many times with tacview records). For example (of many), if you look at FM 3-140 manual you will find that training standard for effective area weapons employments are even less accurate than 15 m. Obviously the targets shouldn't be armored targets.

 

ED increased warhead to the entire rocket weight, but AFAIK there is no blast radius setting. The blast power is directly connected with radius, but the inflicted damage isn't obviously the same for all the range of the explosion.

 

I suggest you, if you're interested, to run some shot test with a medium disperse hit pattern and see in F10 map the inflicted damage.

 

I was working for a fragmentation damage mod, but sadly when you launch multiple rockets (even a single couple) only one of those is tracked by the event handler... so it's impossibile to employ some kind of fragmentation damage. I'm waiting for a 2.0 release version to try to understand if something could be done in that direction.

Edited December 20, 2015 by chromium

[CyberCopter]

I have found that to get a reliable kill (direct hit) the release range is only about 333 meters. Not realistic and definitely in the radius of and return fire (and blast radius?). One source I found said the minimum range is 1300 meters, some others quoted 2000 meters. One thing is certain you won't achieve many direct hits at those ranges in DCS. At 2000 meters keeping visual contact with a small target is a challenge.

[razo+r]

3 hours ago, CyberCopter said:

I have found that to get a reliable kill (direct hit) the release range is only about 333 meters. Not realistic and definitely in the radius of and return fire (and blast radius?). One source I found said the minimum range is 1300 meters, some others quoted 2000 meters. One thing is certain you won't achieve many direct hits at those ranges in DCS. At 2000 meters keeping visual contact with a small target is a challenge.

Rockets are not really ment for directs hits and if you do want direct hits, you will need a lot of rockets to get a direct hit. They are not precision weapons.