Home on Jam missiles in DCSW?

[Beamscanner]

Do we have any Deception Jammers in the sim at the moment?

 

No. But most SPJ's are deception jammers IRL. By design, SPJs trade off directional gain for more angular coverage, which means less power on target. The spacal limitations of the airframe also mean that the jammer antennas are relatively small compared to their typical counterparts, more so for lower frequencies, and thus are less efficient at converting electrical current to EM waves.

 

It's already difficult to have a positive jammer to skin (J/S) ratio as it is, trying to spread the power you have over a large portion of the spectrum (ie barrage jamming) would lower your J/S even more at any one freq in that spectrum. Meaning you'd need either more direction gain toward the victim, more throughput power, or (in most cases) both.

 

So if you can't beat out threats with raw power, then the other alternative (the more common one from fighters) involves deceptive techniques.

Edited January 11, 2016 by Beamscanner

[Croaker47]

Thanks for the answers, guys. I'm only just now getting to jamming methods in the thing I'm reading, so I only know the utter basics. The jamming in game looked a lot like strobes to me, and that didn't look right compared to the SPJ examples in the text. Thanks again for clearing that up GG/Beam.

[GGTharos]

SPJs can use any jamming technique ...

 

Like BeamScanner said, they don't /have/ to just respond to an STT (or launch) threat, but IMHO at least for now I treat SPJs as doing exactly that.

 

There are limitations to deal with:

 

- Limited number of threats can be jammed, the factors affecting this are things like power available, timings for radar/RWR blanking (so that you don't interfere with yourself - sometimes that isn't possible) and one of the ways to not overwork your jammer is to basically respond to STT threats only.

 

- There is a limited AZ in which a threat can be jammed. As an example, although the TEWS can jam a total of 8 threats, it'll deal with 2 per quadrant, so two in each 90 deg sector (I don't recall where I read those numbers. I could be wrong). For a flanker, the Sorbitsya's can jam 6 threats in each hemisphere (60 deg cone fore/aft), or if used in special modes like terrain bounce, possibly fewer for practical reasons.

 

- Some jamming techniques can do fun things like alter the Vc. It looks legit if you don't pay attention, but an RF missile that uses say, APN, might go off somewhere where the target isn't until it gets gimballed out.

 

By comparison what we have in DCS is a jammer that is 'always on' and always magically jams EVERYTHING.

Consider HoJ missiles: Once you drop lock, you might think the jammer will go silent. But as far as the game is concerned, as long as your jammer is operating, the 'Jammer' flag is set to 'ON', and anything that can see it, does.