Shrikes and Bullups practicality in dcs.

[normanleto]

Hello, guys. After couple of months flying of phantom, do you guys find Shrikes useful at all?

I cant find any reason to risk using 4 shrikes instead 6 very accurate mavericks. Same goes with bullupps. I played with them to learn but using them in MP cold war servers is rather asking for death in most situations.

Also a supply or limited availability is rarely enabled in MP servers, so Mavs are usually there in unlimited stock.

Am I alone in this observation?

[mondo]

Shrikes are currently a bit buggy but they do work in same instances. Personally I take mavericks in most instances.

[normanleto]

Do you know any details about current Shrikes bugs?

Shrike is older gen missile than Maverick, even range-wise agm-45 is way worse from my experience. Too close for comfort.

 

[mondo]

There's some info on the ED discord and it. If you go to the bugs channel and search for shrikes there's a few issues and one of them has a table. But it's not something that ED has updated so the test information is just what players have figured out.

[Whiskey11]

On 1/23/2025 at 5:06 AM, normanleto said:

 

Shrike is older gen missile than Maverick, even range-wise agm-45 is way worse from my experience. Too close for comfort.

 

Ahh the inevitable duel between SEAD and DEAD... Shrike is... with default DCS and without the SAM Site react to ARM feature... a terrible weapon.  Their usefulness is significantly lower than if you used Skynet IADS scripting or the React to ARM feature where you can get the radar to turn off.  Remember the Shrike, while capable of damaging radars, is a suppression weapon.  If the SAM Site stops emitting, that's a successful deployment.  If it happens to destroy the radar in the process, it's a REALLY successful mission.  If you want it dead, you'll have to actually hit it with something guaranteed to find the target.

As with all ARM, the hit rates for a Shrike, STARM, or HARM, are really low relative to other weapons.  Plan accordingly.

[Kalasnkova74]

On 1/23/2025 at 3:46 AM, normanleto said:

Hello, guys. After couple of months flying of phantom, do you guys find Shrikes useful at all?

I cant find any reason to risk using 4 shrikes instead 6 very accurate mavericks. Same goes with bullupps. I played with them to learn but using them in MP cold war servers is rather asking for death in most situations.

Also a supply or limited availability is rarely enabled in MP servers, so Mavs are usually there in unlimited stock.

Am I alone in this observation?

No. The Shrike doesn’t easily fit DCS MP scenarios. 

IRL, the Shrike was employed as a suppression weapon to keep SA-2s from transmitting during the critical minutes a strike package(s) needed to hit a target. Weasels and Iron Hand flights planned positions of known SAMs and the strike times, so the Shrikes would be lofted at emitting radars right as the bombers started their runs. Whether the missiles hit or not wasn’t the point, although wasting a site’s control van was an appreciated outcome. That happened about 15% of the time based on the books I’ve read. 
 

So, if you’re flying in a multiplayer session & acting as a Weasel for your buddies strike, the Shrike will work well enough. But if you want to delete a SAM site solo , it ain’t the tool to use. 

[Dragon1-1]

Also worth noting that in Vietnam, Mavs were nowhere near as good at attacking SAM radars as the Shrike. The A model had no zoom, and the B wasn't much better, so while the kinematic range might have been longer, the effective range was really short. There was basically no way to lock an A model Mav on a SAM site without entering its WEZ. Plus, there was no guarantee the Mav won't veer off at the last moment and hit a "tactical bush", this is not modeled in DCS, but was a serious problem with early contrast seekers. In modern-ish scenarios, Shrikes are effectively obsolete, but in its heyday, Mavericks were unusable for tangling with anything with more range than a ZPU.

IRL, if you had modern Mavs, there'd be little to no reason to take Shrikes. You can see the site if it's in Shrike range, and if the radar is in a million pieces, it certainly counts as effectively suppressed. Shrikes are lighter (being basically a retuned Sparrow), but this only comes into play if you're planning on dogfighting with them.