No tone with AGM-88

[Hog_driver]

All right, so I set up a simple Wild Weasel mission against an SA-2.

I carried both HARMs and Shrikes. When I was flying towards the radar and armed Shrikes, I could hear the high-pitched tone, but when I armed HARMs, the tone was gone. I use the "official" (I guess it was made available by Heatblur) F-4E.lue file in the F-4E Entry folder.

Am I doing something wrong?

[Wingmate]

As far as I know Heatblur hasn't put out a .lua file that allows the F-4 to use the AGM-88 (I could be wrong but I have not seen any official .lua mod in a quick search), and modded weapons don't always work the best.

[Hog_driver]

I don't remember where I downloaded it from, but somebody mentioned that it was provided by Heatblur.

Anyway, there's a video by Growling Sidewinder in which he uses HARMs and gets a good tone with no problems. But it was published almost a year ago, so maybe something has changed since then.

[Zabuzard]

Our F4E is not supposed to carry HARMs.

If you got hands on a mod that allows you to carry it, it is not official.

Either case, whether a weapon works or not is decided in the C++ code, not in Lua. Lua allows you to visually add anything you want to any pylon, but that is not enough to also make the weapon "work". That requires the actual aircraft code (C++) to understand and explicitly support the weapon. Which is something only Heatblur could do, not modders.

If a weapon happens to "just work" regardless (often the case for dumb bombs), its coincidence and any future update to the aircraft might "break" it.

[Hog_driver]

1 hour ago, Zabuzard said:

Our F4E is not supposed to carry HARMs.

I see, thanks for the explanation. So it seems it used to work better, now there's no tone. The missile still destroys radars, but has to be fired kind of blind. Too bad.

[Zabuzard]

39 minutes ago, Hog_driver said:

I see, thanks for the explanation. So it seems it used to work better, now there's no tone. The missile still destroys radars, but has to be fired kind of blind. Too bad.

I have no experience with the mod, but did you witness the tone in-game before?

Or did you only see it in a video? Cause some of those videos are edited, adding sound effects. I've seen that a bunch of times before.

[Hog_driver]

I installed the mod a few days ago, but tried HARMs only yesterday, never got the tone.

The video I mentioned is this one:

 

[Zabuzard]

30 minutes ago, Hog_driver said:

I installed the mod a few days ago, but tried HARMs only yesterday, never got the tone.

The video I mentioned is this one:

 

Yeah that's what I meant. I believe this video was edited and did not have the tone in the actual gameplay either.

(I remember people talking about it on Discord when the video came out)

[Hog_driver]

I see. Thanks, good to know. So, now please add the tone to HARMs and the matter is settled

[Zabuzard]

33 minutes ago, Hog_driver said:

I see. Thanks, good to know. So, now please add the tone to HARMs and the matter is settled

I doubt that will happen as it would mean HB needs to officially support a weapon that this aircraft could never use (even if someone would hang it on a real F-4E).

I understand you wanting to cosplay another Phantom variant though. Cool that the mod at least lets you fire it and it works even though the aircraft has no code to support it.

[Hog_driver]

Well, I guess as a workaround I'll carry a Shrike to get the tone, and the rest of the missiles will be HARMs

[Dragon1-1]

That would hardly be weirder than some of the other things real militaries had done when they had to.

[thodre]

On 5/10/2025 at 12:57 PM, Hog_driver said:

Well, I guess as a workaround I'll carry a Shrike to get the tone, and the rest of the missiles will be HARMs

Try shrikes - it's a close call vs an sa-2, but it can be done and you are well inside the range of a Vietnam scenario tech-wise. Go high and fast, they'll usually launch some seconds before you can, loft the shrikes then haul ass while still presenting yourself as a target - nothing more satisfying than a burning Fan Song

[Hog_driver]

8 minutes ago, thodre said:

Try shrikes - it's a close call vs an sa-2, but it can be done and you are well inside the range of a Vietnam scenario tech-wise. Go high and fast, they'll usually launch some seconds before you can, loft the shrikes then haul ass while still presenting yourself as a target - nothing more satisfying than a burning Fan Song

Yeah, the Phantom is an interesting module, challenging as well. I'm just learning to fly it, don't have much time, but I'll play a bit with the Shrikes as well.