Damage model of ships radars vs HARM

[Capn kamikaze]

I'm only talking about the HARM since I don't generally fly any Russian stuff, but it seems that ships radars are practically immune to being taken out of action by the HARM, at least that is my experience with them.

 

Obviously you're never going to take out even a small ship with HARMs, but taking out their radar should be doable, I've had cases where I've taken 4 HARMs, attacked FFG class ships, had all 4 hit watched them go in, and had to go back to base and get another 4 to finish the radar off.

 

No, I don't have a track, this happened a while back, I was just wondering what other's opinions are of this IMO a ship mounted radar should be no more protected than one on a land based SAM site, so have you experienced the same?

 

Is this a case of the HARM being too weak, which we already know it is, or also a case of ship damage models not treating their radars as separate damageable items but as part of the ship's health?

[QuiGon]

Ground units and ships don't (yet) have a modular dammage model AFAIK. You can either dammage/destroy the entire unit or notihing at all, but not specific components.

[Harker]

Ground based radars do stop functioning and SAMs might stop engaging after their health goes below a certain point though.

 

I don't think that the HARM is undepowered, just that, like QuiGon says, a ship's radar is tied to the whole unit's health bar.

[Spurts]

I've seen it take two HARMs to take out a single SA-10 radar site. That doesn't seem right at all.

[Pikey]

It's a simple health system, and that is what is fundamentally wrong with DCS damage modelling until... (tomorrow? please? at least for ww2?)

Your 30 health radar mast is defeated by your 15 damage Harm x2 or your 10 health AGM-122 x3.... But your 1500 health ship survives 25 HARM strikes to take it to 50% which is where the radar goes off....

[Northstar98]

Yeah the simulation of all ARMs is a bit botched once the missile leaves the aircraft - they always go for centre-of-mass and not the actual emitter they're targeting (when they absolutely should).

 

Adding to this the lack of a component level damage model for ships and we have a compound problem.

 

ARMs like the sidearm don't really have the punch to take-out vehicles and ships, it should however have the punch to at least shred (if not outright destroy) antennae which in turn would stop the RADAR from functioning, even if the thing it's attached to isn't destroyed.

 

I would argue it's a fairly major problem, but I don't think we'll see improvements until we see large overhauls for things on land and sea (if indeed that happens).

[BIGNEWY]

Hi

 

Yes with the current damage system we are limited, in the future unit damage models will be looked at but we have to complete WW2 war bird damage models and then other aircraft first.

This will take some time but we will update you all in the future of any progress.

 

thanks

[nighthawk2174]

Hmm any chance as an interim solution (I know ED has a very very very long history of being all or nothing but maybe just this once) of making it so if a harm hits a ship its radars get destroyed/disabled?

[Northstar98]

Hmm any chance as an interim solution (I know ED has a very very very long history of being all or nothing but maybe just this once) of making it so if a harm hits a ship its radars get destroyed/disabled?

 

Hmm personally as an interim I think we should improve ARMs, so they actually track on emitters/antennae rather than centre-of-mass, then once a new DM for ships comes along we'll be all set.

[cosmicdoubloon]

maybe a somewhat usable workaround for now using the editor would be to set up some triggers so that when a ship is hit by a Harm (or 2/3 depending on mission requirements) it disables the radar. My thinking would be something like:

if : missile in zone [AGM-88, target ship] (make this a small zone so that it would only be triggered by a missile impacting the ship) - action : Unit emission off

 

for multiple missile impacts it would change to:

first trigger

if : missile in zone [AGM-88, target ship] (make this a small zone so that it would only be triggered by a missile impacting the ship) - action : flag increase [1, 1]

second trigger

if : flag equals [3] - action : Unit emission off

this would cause every HARM that impacts to increase flag 1 by a value of 1. When flag 1 reaches a value of 3 (3 successful HARM hits) the AI turns the radar off

[nighthawk2174]

Yeah that would help as well (and should be added ontop of what I recommended imo), it doesn't seem like it would be hard to do, maybe tedious at most. For ARM's you'd just need to add an "offset" value to each unit with a radar, which is added to the arm's targeting logic so it tracks this offset point instead of the CM. For ships it'd be more difficult as they have more radars but i'm sure if you can have one offset point, you can make it so it'll target different ones dependent on aspect.

[Harker]

Good idea with the triggers. I'd also add the On Hit event type if possible, to it only triggers if there's a hit at the same time. This would avoid triggering it if the HARM was taken down last second or if it overflew the ship (since trigger zones don't have elevation limits) etc.