lmp Posted January 11, 2022 Posted January 11, 2022 2 hours ago, Caldera said: All we need is reverse firing medium range missiles slaved to the RWR and it is game over for the aircraft behind. The practical way of achieving this (or something similar anyway) is with high off boresight, lock on after launch missiles rather than rearwards firing missiles. You avoid the control issues stemming from launching with a negative velocity, accelerating through zero to a positive velocity. And if you want you can launch them forwards or 90 degrees to the side (from the notch for example) or wherever you need at this point. Nobody is building rearwards firing missiles, but everybody is building high off boresight ones for a reason. However regardless of how you do it, you'll be sacrificing a lot of range. In a normal launch the movement of the shooter contributes to the energy of the missile (and considerably), in your scenario, the missile needs to expend a lot of energy to even start flying in the right direction. So it can be done, but at the cost of (a significant amount of) range. However in practice I can't see why it would ever be your plan A, rather a last ditch effort to create problems for a bandit who sneaked up on you or forced you on the defensive. Since the MiG-23 Soviet/Russian fighters have IRST capability which help eliminate Doppler radar blind spots and in the modern world of datalinks individual sensor limitations become less and less of a problem. In the end the guy on your six will still have a big advantage.
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