icecold951 Posted June 24, 2021 Posted June 24, 2021 I was just making a naval action between a US Carrier group and a Russian one, part of a campaign. I currently have four groups of four hornets with full loads of harpoons. 16 planes, four missiles each. 64 harpoons. All timed on target. Can't get through those defenses. I'm ready to add a couple more flights, but I'm already seeing issues with how many objects are being simulated here. I mean....The Russians were kind of in the same boat. but their missiles fly higher and are more realistically able to be tracked. Which leads to the Harpoon problem. It is impossible to detect and track a harpoon over the horizon with ship radar. The prime advantage to the harpoon is it's sea skimming attack gives a ship only about 15 or so NM to detected and engage. It is impossible for ship radar to do this over the horizon. That isn't being simulated in this. I just don't see why not. It isn't as if it should be difficult to make it hard to track at range. I know it doesn't simulate the curvature of the earth, but they could simulate the issue with radar return signature. It is like they want the harpoon to be worthless. And the reality is they are anything but worthless. The attack profile is specifically designed this way, and not the the US had no capability to make the same types of missiles Russia prefers. And do the US ships not feature TASMs? I tell my ships to fire too, and they don't. TASMs were around in 99, and easily have the range. 200 miles, simulating the fuel issue of having that many planes up and needing to land them again before they run dry.
Flappie Posted June 25, 2021 Posted June 25, 2021 Hi. Can you please attach a track showing what you describe? ---
icecold951 Posted June 25, 2021 Author Posted June 25, 2021 1 hour ago, Flappie said: Hi. Can you please attach a track showing what you describe? When I get home later, sure. 6pm or so EST. Good timing, asking. I was going to delete it later and skip that portion as just unworkable in my campaign. During testing, it air starts to save time. I even upped it to six groups of F18s. Do not accelerate time though. That causes planes to have midair collisions, all following Panther 2 to an attack trigger zone. I'll move the waypoints and trigger zones to save time, unless you would prefer the raw original effort. But that takes approx 25 minutes to reach attack range, plus the time for the harpoons to attack. And that much data might exceed the 5mb file size limit. I don't think this is a bug. It is the long time issue regarding Harpoon missiles in DCS. They just don't get attributed the one advantage they are supposed to have, sea skimming. It should be impossible to target one more than about 15nm out. Radar would have to see over the horizon to do this. But from what I see, you'd have to burn up a CPU to add enough to get past this defense. And it would be an unrealistically high number of aircraft out in the ocean without large tanker support. Landing that many planes after a mission would take to long, even in CASE I. Also, several slowed down and went into the water. I suspect those were extreme range shots and simply ran out of fuel. But as of last night 96 missiles couldn't get past one carrier and three escorts. Missiles timed on target. In case you don't know, and you probably do, timed to reach the enemy together so they in theory swamp the defenses. The only possible actual bug that I see is the US ships not firing as instructed. They should have TASMs that could reach the enemy at that range.
icecold951 Posted June 25, 2021 Author Posted June 25, 2021 (edited) 9 hours ago, Flappie said: Hi. Can you please attach a track showing what you describe? Multiple points. 1, I was right about file size. 9 MB. can't attach it here. I can and am attaching the miz file. 2, I was in error about missile numbers for last night's test. I had failed to actually give the two additional flights a push task of attacking. So their 32 additional Harpoons never actually launched. And it was actually enough to finally get through the defense enough to do the job. Blew the Kusinstov away. A possible glitch here. All the missiles targeted the same ship. That probably really shouldn't happen, as Harpoons can't be specifically targeted that way. They find a radar track in their cone and attack it. They should have acted more like a mad dog AIM-120. The carrier is the bigger target, but some of them should have gone after other ships. 3. The defenses engaged at in excess of 20nm. That probably is unrealistically far, given curvature of the earth blocking radar detection that far off. I do believe there is a mission editor function that can limit the attack range, though I've yet to use it. Still, that defense probably breaks physics. 4. At no time did the US ships obey the order to fire on the Russian ships. I'll be examining that one a bit. On one hand, one should expect any real fleet to be a very hard nut to crack. On the other, that is still probably an unrealistic defense capability against such an attack. And it was against a fleet size that was probably not realistic. Only three escorts. In the end, a proper mission of a fleet action is extremely demanding on any computer system. I recommend if you try it, you view the final attack in map view. It locked up my computer trying to watch it with missile view. Oh, and a reminder that any attempt to use time compression tends to result in mid air collisions. Anti ship test.miz Edited June 25, 2021 by icecold951
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