....Er, what? Why would doing anything to our anti-ground structure missile have any effect at all on air to air duels, much less make their missiles not work any more?
The enemy missile weaponry utilizes semi-active radar homing. Take out the illumination, and it fails. Besides, we're loosing due to the SAM's, not their rocket fighter.
We're loosing against the ground
and the enemy fighter. Here's the quote from the battle report.
In their rare face-offs on this front, Type 20s are unable to use the superior range of their missiles at the opening of fights, as the MRAAM IR warheads are only capable of locking onto hot exhaust ports. As such, Z-1s are often allowed to fire their missiles first, which gain a reputation for their deadly accuracy. However, if even a single Type 20 survives the initial volley, the flight of Z-1s are doomed to be picked off one by one by MRAAMs and autocannon fire. As such, Z-1 pilots quickly learn to fire their missiles and climb away, where Type 20s can't reach them. In spite of the disintegration problem they're still much faster than most jets, and entire wings of Type 20s are taken down by Z-1s taking advantage of their superior climbing ability to ambush them from above. Plane VS plane engagements on this front are in favor of Z-1s.
In short, our plane is a better fighter, but it doesn't normally matter because our missile can't be used until we're behind them and they can climb up higher then us so we can't attack them anyway. We need a missile we can use from the front in the initial pass. It can be radar guided or lock onto their radar (I admittedly didn't think of having ours home in on their radar but I still think radar guided missiles of our own would be more generally useful), either way. But using an
anti-ground missile against fighters is not the answer.
That is not the choice presented to you. The choice is between an Anti-radiation missile, which is in essence a warhead that targets their radar system and a radar guided missile. The ARM is better, as it doesn't need the fighter to illuminate the target. The target will illuminate itself if it wants to fire.
Edit : misread that. The problem is not with the missile, but with the fact that our fighters are outmaneuvered. Fix the fighter, and the missile will be usefull.
The current Missile still won't be useful because it can only be used from behind them, by which time they've already killed most of our flight and are now climbing to safety. The Anti-Radation Missile is even less useful because it's designed to be used against ground targets, not air targets.
I'd prefer to just design some LEO/High orbital dropped bombs instead of trying to fix the anti-radation missile, honestly. Just blast them from outside the range of their SAMS.
But for fighter duels fixing our plane's speed issue won't let us start winning because we need a working weapon, not a better plane. We're already winning any air duels that turn into dogfights after the initial pass, that's why they're sticking to killing us all in said initial pass and then refusing to dogfight afterwards. Until we can get equal odds in the first pass, that's not going to change.
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Topic: Stellar Arms Race, USAA: 1972 Design (Read 9664 times)