Aim120 can be trashed with a barrel roll and chaff headon

[Muchocracker]

7 hours ago, okopanja said:

I would say it was increased since the guidance could not be made more accurate, which also appears not to be the case with IRL. For the kill radius please listen and read to the actual interviews of pilots. I made some available in 29 FF section, and one of them even contains damage report. Focus was not really on amraam but you can see hopefully it will help you  understand why the current modeling in this respect has nothing to do with the reality. 

Do i have to be a broken record? This thread is not about the warhead's kill radius. Make another thread and make arguments for it there. 

If you have some new evidence that missiles can perfectly compensate for target glint and live adjust their tracking filter weighting for maximum reaction time then by all means. Post it. 

[Reslox]

On 7/12/2025 at 7:52 AM, Merrek said:

Noone is trying to dispute anything. In this thread, among other stuff, you can find, that - only AMRAAM is prone to the maneuver described by GRY Money - debunked. I am also trying to raise the issue that this is NOT a MP AoA roll, as it contains no AoA and happens in SP. How many times do we need to write that down?

I am not talking AT ALL about MP AoA roll in any context other than comparing this cheating unsporting unrealistic abused exploitative move (not even working in SP) to something that could and most probably would actually work IRL and also works in game. These are completely different maneuvers, with different techniques and results (dodging missiles from all direction vs one direction only, etc.) Have you actually read what I wrote or are you simply putting words in my mouth?

What angers you? I have never ever done the MP AoA in my life and I have just performed one single instance of the "sync" roll and I'm immediately reporting on it! Are you mad that at the moment you can't to this against an R-27 (in a few weeks/months you will be able to) or that I proved something that was deemed impossible?

Of course, it's risky. And it works against Aim-7 and will most probably work against every missile in the new API with any reasonable tracking delay. And it is 100x more realistic than the current state of the notch, with which you have no issue at all, right?

Jeez.

This is honestly the last type of answer, I'd expect. Can you please focus at the thing at hand, instead of attacking me? Imagine someone else's name in the post, if it helps.

For the last time: You can dodge missiles in DCS head-on with some expected success probability. This is not due to MP, desync, lag, ping, or teleport. This can be done against AI in SP. This maneuver has its ground in maths & physics and is totally completely different from the infamous MP "loaded" AoA whatever roll, which relies on sudden spike changes in key aircraft performance metrics (I wouldn't know, as I've never performed it, but I read what other people wrote and watched all videos), while beating missiles in the physics-first way, requires an extremely smooth, calculated, cold-blooded approach and some luck. Can we please debate (I'm really interested in people's opinions on this) what do you think of this maneuvre, how do you perceive it and if it can be distinguished from the infamous banned MP roll, could we ever see its use in PVP servers as a last-resort maneuver ? That's the issue, not to trivialize the "old" freakin maneuver. I guarantee you those cheaters would never pull this one off.

The only Gifs, tracks or tacviews I've seen so far are performing an aileron rolls and not barrel rolls, it's really clear that it is a bug that MP desync exacerbates but its also present in single player. Documents of both recommended defense maneuvers and missile performance show clearly displacement of (over 100m in the defense maneuver docs) of both the horizontal and vertical plane when performing High G Barrel Rolls is necessary, so to claim that this maneuver is an effective means of defense when there is barely any displacement of the actual flight path is naive at best. Whether this is a consequence of how radar returns are modeled or last second missile guidance corrections cocking up at the last second is for ED to figure out.
I speculate from the tracks and tacview footage provided in the thread that the missile is trying to lead and intercept the target's current flight path even though with the closure rate, current distance, and the target being in the center of the seeker should be a clear hit with a pure pursuit.

[Merrek]

16 hours ago, Reslox said:

The only Gifs, tracks or tacviews I've seen so far are performing an aileron rolls and not barrel rolls, it's really clear that it is a bug that MP desync exacerbates but its also present in single player.

No, you can't tell from my GIFs, how much of vertical maneuvering there is and that's the idea. The last thing I'm going to do is teach blue how to use their planes to dodge amraams. Moderate Gs are pulled in conjunction with the "resonant" roll. If you don't understand, what the key ingredient in the maneuver is, don't speculate or mistify. It has nothing to do with desync, what would I desync with on my computer, not even a dedicated server? And if it's so easy, why don't you repeat it with only the aileron roll?

F-16 and F-5 can dodge amraams because they have superior roll rate. If anyone wanted to abuse this, they'd set up a saturation for the joystick Y axis, so maximum roll is held, without any skill or thinking and I'm not going to promote that. Depending on the missile energy, which can be roughly estimated (altitude, speed, lofting or not), you just need to fly directly towards it and set the correct speed, roll rate and Gs. It's really that easy. If I wasn't working 12 hrs a day, I would've posted the "3 amraams in a row" GIF a week ago. It can be studied and practiced. But why spend tens of hours on a maneuver that's banned anyway, because "experts" can't differentiate between the rolls?

Yes, the previous maneuvers before all the "fixes", if you can even call that, were only aileron rolls, that any noob could replicate. Now it takes some thinking and practice, that's the only difference. The maneuver can't be performed by chance or luck unlike before. If MP desync was penalized by instant disconnect of the abusing player, then you'd see who can perform the proper dodging barrel roll (won't get disconnected) without sudden AoA spikes, 8+ Gs and unexpected motions performed only to fool the game that can't even plot the next pixel, where the plane is going to be and missiles can't track something that disappears. This proper "synchronized resonant" barrel roll is one single fluid motion with perfect parameters, nothing chaotic or random.

There is a huge "displacement" of the current flight path, unlike what you think, and that's why it is possible to create 25m+ separation from the missile at merge, even if it's amraam.

The tracks and tacview footage is old news, before the changes in missile tracking logic and proximity fuze range. No information there. And I'm not providing any tacviews to be studied and abused. I merely wanted to:

1. prove it's still doable against AMRAAM
2. prove it's doable against Aim-7 and probably will be doable against every missile on the new API
3. provide an explanation using some kind of physics and logic beyond speculation

If you study the amraam closely, you'll identify it switches to the pure pursuit in the very terminal stages of the interception, singles of km. How do you think pure pursuit works, if target is maneuvering nonstop? The tracking delay will always be an issue IRL and also in the new API missiles, if nothing else, then only because of the inertia of the missile itself. Then start including all the electronics and software, etc., I wrote it all before, have you read it?

The reason, why the missile misses you, could be best described as follows:

1 - the missile is trying to lead your nose (velocity vector to be hardcore)
2 - you start performing the maneuver at the proper distance from the missile (again, this needs to be judged and practiced, observing contrails, etc.)
3 - missile starts maneuvering with you, after the tracking delay
4 - you're keeping the "resonant" roll rate and tight barrel roll with realistic AoA and Gs
5 - the missile starts trailing you, aims below your belly
6 - if you've kept the roll rate in the ideal window, you create and offset in the missile tracking of about 90-180 degs on the barrel roll circle (front view - missile POV)
7 - if you can keep this to the "merge", you've successfully created a distance offset between yourself and the missile
8 - if this distance offset is bigger than the missile's proximity fuze range, the missile misses you and doesn't explode

The missile does track the whole time, but it is chasing the "old" you, where you were 0.7 seconds ago. How much distance does a fighter flying at 1000kmh+ move in 0.7 seconds? How much is the proximity fuze range? What if the maneuver is not "flying predictably straight" but a barrel roll deliberately constructed in such a way, that when you are "up", the missile is "down"? How many words one needs to use to describe it so it's understandable?

[Reslox]

6 hours ago, Merrek said:

No, you can't tell from my GIFs, how much of vertical maneuvering there is and that's the idea.
 

You can clearly see once you begin your aileron rolls, you perform them in the same axis with barely any meters of displacement (docs show a single roll ends with at least 100-300 meters)
For reference an accurate High G Barrel Maneuver :
Maneuverable counteraction to missiles EN.pdf

 

6 hours ago, Merrek said:

This proper "synchronized resonant" barrel roll is one single fluid motion with perfect parameters, nothing chaotic or random.

Doesn't exist, its a maneuver born out of a simulator that has yet to fully develop an accurate missile guidance system. To pretend that its a real thing that can be employed in IRL as I said is naive at best.
 

6 hours ago, Merrek said:

The tracks and tacview footage is old news, before the changes in missile tracking logic and proximity fuze range. No information there. And I'm not providing any tacviews to be studied and abused. I merely wanted to:

1. prove it's still doable against AMRAAM
2. prove it's doable against Aim-7 and probably will be doable against every missile on the new API
3. provide an explanation using some kind of physics and logic beyond speculation

Not providing tacviews or tracks doesn't prove your point at all and in fact makes it look worse at your attempts to confirm that "is a real maneuver" requires reproduction and study.
And there is no point in studying the missile behaivour in DCS since as ED said they have to fully finish an accurate guidance model, maneuvers IRL can apply to DCS but not the other way around.

Whether this happens on how the target velocity vector information is given to the missile, delay in ms of both internal missile logic + simulated hardware hickups or simulated frame time or missing documentations of software algorithms for late stage missile systems is for ED to deal with and study. 
This maneuver has always been an exploit, nobody cares if it's an AoA desync roll that causes teleporting or "resonant roll" as you call it, there is no evidence that a maneuver like that would work IRL and as far as feedback comes from, examples and documents from reality are the go to in order to achieve a believable state not things born out of DCS, it would be like training AI datasets on AI hallucinations.

[Merrek]

Using missile POV to infer my maneuvering is brilliant... Enjoy, Sir. Still waiting for your demonstration how to perform it, which would greatly increase your believability factor, that you actually know what you're talking about.

I never said high-G. I talked about moderate Gs. You said aileron roll. So do it.

Edited July 22 by Merrek

[stefasaki]

On 6/29/2025 at 1:18 PM, BIGNEWY said:

Its best we see a track replay if possible 

thanks

took a bit of time but here's the track, it's a bit longer than most bug tracks but it's the first engagement anyway so I think it should work for you. I think I found the culpirt anyway: in this case the missile exploded exactly as the lateral distance was 15 meters, the total distance was higher however as the missile was offset also vertically (and above the stated proximity fuze limit). Let me know if you need another track but I'm pretty sure this is the issue.

 

On 7/12/2025 at 11:12 AM, Merrek said:

Hi guys, I've only recently discovered this thread in conjunction with all my missile research (mainly around Aim-7).

I'm a huge fan of realism and simulating things as closely as they possibly could be compared to real life. I love the idea of somewhat realistic missile tracking delay, which will always be present. Radar waves travelling back and forth (fast, but not instantaneous). Electronics processing speed, software/algorithmic processing speed, Kalman filters, other calculations, etc., not to mention the inertia of the missile itself (it "wants" to continue flying straight or parabolically, displays some resistance before every maneuver). All this was discussed here before, so just a reminder.

The maneuver GRY Money originally described is indeed in theory (and IRL) doable against any missile. Although in DCS, is it tied specifically to the missiles running on the new API? I don't know, you tell me. Very soon, we should have R-27 family running on this API as well. Currently, it's the Aim-7 and Aim-120. I tested the maneuver against an Aim-7 and it worked using a Flanker and an F5 (gifs attached) in singleplayer.

I also tried it once in multiplayer and I'm not doing it again, until the community educate themselves, realize this is not the treacherous AoA MP roll, which leads to desync and intentional teleportation (we've all seen this and hate it) and come up with a solution, how to distinguish between the two. There are many key differences between these maneuvers, so they should be easy to identify and I will present some of them here. But I won't risk being called a "cheater" just because I literally did my own research, practiced for a few hours and made it work, while someone else is lazy to even read and calls it an AoA MP roll (performed in singleplayer with literally no AoA - see the irony here?)

Let's call this maneuver a "sync roll". I find it amusing, because it is one single fluid motion, trying to get in sync with the missile tracking delay. I literally pulled raw data from TacView, exported with huge sampling rates (100-500Hz), analyzed in R, visualized in Tableau and came up with a number (fraction of a second) for the Aim-7 tracking delay. You could call it reverse engineering. Then I calculated the parameters of a perfect roll using mathematics and common sense. Only after all this I opted to practice in SP against AI and after a few tries, the first success came.

Let me be clear - this is an extremely difficult maneuver to pull off, even if you know exactly, what to do. Success rate (at best) is 20-50% and it only works directly head-on. It's not about achieving some arbitrary threshold of AoA or pulling too many Gs, it's the complete opposite. I've been able to do it with as low AoA as 4 (!) and pulling less than 5Gs in one fluid motion.

The key metric, however (as mentioned in this thread already) is the roll rate. Not every aircraft rolls sufficiently enough, for instance, my beloved MiG-29 can't perform this maneuver. Blue planes should have very little trouble doing it. There is no gauge for roll rate inside the aircraft, so it's only about practice, experience and feeling. You need to keep the perfect, "resonant" roll rate with sufficient precision in the correct range, or you will oversteer and run into the missile. If your roll rate is too slow, the missile will catch up. We're talking a max deviation of ~20-30 deg/s from the ideal value (which differs for every missile depending on its tracking delay, so the maneuver needs to be adjusted and practiced independently for every missile type). The smaller the tracking delay, the faster the roll rate needs to be. You see, any id*ot in multiplayer can snap or jink the joystick to disappear in ping/lag/whatever, but I dare the most experienced and best DCS pilots to try out the method described here to dodge a missile head-on in singleplayer in anything else than an F-16.

Key differences between the banned/unrealistic/cheat MP AoA roll and the supposedly hyperrealistic SP sync roll:

 

criteria	MP AoA roll	SP sync roll
where	only in MP	SP and MP
why	breaking a threshold of unpredictability	holding a very narrow roll rate window in sync with missile tracking delay
who	any loser who snaps a joystick	requires study, training and perfect execution without a key gauge - roll rate meter
what	extreme AoA (20+), extreme G (8+)	casual AoA (<6) and G (<5)
duration	possibly tens of seconds	5-7 seconds
character	snapping, unpredictable	one single very smooth fluid motion
result	desync, teleport	missile tracks, but misses as separation > proximity fuze range
missile aspect	from any side	exclusively head-on, including pitch adjustment to fly directly toward
success rate	100%	20-50% at best if practiced and executed to perfection
type	proper cheat	speculative last-resort maneuver if there's no time to even notch

The reason, why the missile misses you, could be best described as follows:

1 - the missile is trying to lead your nose (velocity vector to be hardcore)
2 - you start performing the maneuver at the proper distance from the missile (again, this needs to be judged and practiced, observing contrails, etc.)
3 - missile starts maneuvering with you, after the tracking delay
4 - you're keeping the "resonant" roll rate and tight barrel roll with realistic AoA and Gs
5 - the missile starts trailing you, aims below your belly
6 - if you've kept the roll rate in the ideal window, you create and offset in the missile tracking of about 90-180 degs on the barrel roll circle (180 would correspond to the missile aiming directly below your belly, 90 degs is to the side)
7 - if you can keep this to the "merge", you've successfully created a distance offset between yourself and the missile
8 - if this distance offset is bigger than the missile's proximity fuze range, the missile misses you and doesn't explode

I've had cases when I did manage to create an offset, but it wasn't enough and the missile exploded damaging the aircraft (although still not killing me completely). Realistic offsets can be created ranging from 15 to 35 metres at the "merge".

To sum it up, I totally agree that this is not a bug. Instead, it's a feature. For me, this is actually the most realistic missile behaviour we've seen in DCS so far. It is much more realistic than the dreaded supernotch (so easy to perform in western aircraft) and would most definitely work IRL. The only reason there is no real 1st hand data on such a maneuver is, because no airforce to date and no pilot (who'd want to survive and live) is stupid enough to fly directly into a hot missile's path, if there's any other alternative, such as turning cold, trying a notch or even ejecting prematurely to ensure survival.

I'm not judging if this is "fair" (not all aircraft in DCS can do it, not every missile is prone to it) or if it should be "banned" (that's up to server owners). Just please, don't call it AoA MP roll, because it works in SP and contains almost no AoA deviations from 0.

There are ways to distinguish between an intentional cheater (sudden, snappy, jinking motions, unrealistic AoA, prolonged Gs, ...) and a legitimate maneuver that must have taken its performer many hours to master and even then contains a considerable portion of luck (one fluid motion, casual AoA, small Gs, consistent roll rate). All these can be seen and verified in TacView.

If it was up to me, unless there is video evidence of a teleport, or the aforementioned table is not sufficient to distinguish if it was legitimate or not (frontal aspect, borderline G and AoA, ...), the presumption of innocence must hold. Of course, if you see a player making unexplainable sudden deliberate maneuvers in MP, dodges missiles from the side (or even from the back), can't tell you why/how he did it and can't demonstrate (replicate) the maneuver in SP, you know you've got a cheater on your hands.

If, instead, the missile was dodged head-on, the maneuver displays realistic AoA and Gs (achievable IRL, not breaking the airframe or the pilot) AND you get a lecture on missile tracking delay, you may be dealing with a highly curious, speculative individual, always challenging him/herself, learning new things and sharing with others.

Cheers!

P.S.: attached are my GIFs from SP training (over water), the last one is the single MP attempt - no desync, no teleport, missile tracks till the last moment and displays exactly the same behaviour as in SP training (although after reviewing it, I pulled slightly more Gs, so the missile reacted also with a higher G load)

I've been able to routinely perform this maneuver in both the flanker and the mig-29, you just need some rudder input to increase the roll rate.

aim120_proximity_fuze_range_bug.trk

[BIGNEWY]

3 minutes ago, stefasaki said:

took a bit of time but here's the track, it's a bit longer than most bug tracks but it's the first engagement anyway so I think it should work for you. I think I found the culpirt anyway: in this case the missile exploded exactly as the lateral distance was 15 meters, the total distance was higher however as the missile was offset also vertically (and above the stated proximity fuze limit). Let me know if you need another track but I'm pretty sure this is the issue.

 

I've been able to routinely perform this maneuver in both the flanker and the mig-29, you just need some rudder input to increase the roll rate.

aim120_proximity_fuze_range_bug.trk 827.05 kB · 0 downloads

Thanks, its late here but we will check it out in my morning.