reported AIM-120C losing targets easily for chaff even at close ranges

[Fri13]

12 hours ago, Nealius said:

I'm afraid tracks will not help much because the sim recalculates, and thus the "dice roll" chance of that one or two chaff packets will give a different result each time the track is replayed. Despite constant demand for replay tracks for debugging, they are entirely unsuited for debugging precisely because they recalculate everything instead of replaying exactly what happened. Ergo, the bug symptom may not appear at all simply because the replay system is junk.

 

I don't know exactly how much tracks can be trusted, but I do trust them for the cockpit functions like switches and buttons, but nothing about the outside of cockpit like flying.

 

If at any given time time compression is used in the replay or the play, the track goes wonky. This is as far I know, the track file records only the input and not the positions.

So if your joystick move +5 values to one axis then that is recorded but not that what was starting value and what is the new value after +5 addition. Why over time the track file becomes unusable as small errors cause huge errors in time.

 

In other way speaking, it is like a INS drifting. No matter the state, INS can be very accurate in a 5 minute time window, but the tiny errors that gets generated in those 5 min period will lead huge errors in 60 minutes time. So 3-5 meter inaccuracy on location or 0.05° error in direction will change to kilometers or multiple degrees in an hour.

 

Why at least I see often in longer than 10 min replays that my aircraft does something totally different, crash on the
 ground, fly to different direction, release weapon at totally wrong time etc. All without time compression used.

 

Why I don't even consider attaching track file when it is a hour long or similar, changing aircrafts, respawns etc etc...

 

 

[Fri13]

44 minutes ago, DCS FIGHTER PILOT said:

I suspect it was for balancing. 

ED does not make changes to balance things for the gameplay...

And they shouldn't.

If they can't make things realistic, then they can find a balance to get it realistic kind but only because limitation in the code...

Not because gameplay would be unbalanced.

 

 

[TaxDollarsAtWork]

1 hour ago, DCS FIGHTER PILOT said:

I suspect it was for balancing. 

They commented and said something along the lines of Chaff being too powerful at the moment because they couldn't really model Chaff+ECM effectiveness the way they wanted to

 

A few months ago they tried to play around with it but it brought about weird ECM related bugs

 

All we can hope for is some kind of better EW emulation like the a certain sim which won't be named

[Terzi]

I find it hard to believe that we still have problems with most-widely used missile in the digital combat simulator.

But we do still have problems with most-widely used missile in the digital combat simulator.

 

I have hard times killing 3rd gen fighters if I don't support the missile until pitbull. Well I can already hear some of members here saying "of course you can not complain if you break the lock early". But these missiles in real life are much much smarter and lethal than they are in DCS.

 

And I see that notching in DCS today became a god-like protection. This isn't how physics work. It isn't just the doppler shift zero velocity issue. There is still reflection and lots of valuable information in it. The missile will try lots of things, it has a memory, datalink and will do various estimations.

[DCS FIGHTER PILOT]

4 hours ago, Terzi said:

I find it hard to believe that we still have problems with most-widely used missile in the digital combat simulator.

But we do still have problems with most-widely used missile in the digital combat simulator.

 

I have hard times killing 3rd gen fighters if I don't support the missile until pitbull. Well I can already hear some of members here saying "of course you can not complain if you break the lock early". But these missiles in real life are much much smarter and lethal than they are in DCS.

 

And I see that notching in DCS today became a god-like protection. This isn't how physics work. It isn't just the doppler shift zero velocity issue. There is still reflection and lots of valuable information in it. The missile will try lots of things, it has a memory, datalink and will do various estimations.

Notching and chaffing may work once, maybe twice if your lucky, but if you rely on it to defend against ARH missiles, you will eventually die. At least that’s how it should be but alas in DCS right now, any fool can notch an ARH missile, drop one, maybe two pieces of chaff, and get away without a scratch.

[Csgo GE oh yeah]

It's becoming a bit of an exploit indeed. 
The notch seems pretty huge , and combined with the enormous attraction for chaff you can even quite reliably spoof missiles fired at you from only a few miles while maintaining lock with your aircraft the whole time. 

 

Vs the F14 you're better off notching the planes radar before it goes active , but vs any amraam carrying aircraft it really doesn't matter.
Sloppy notch at any point (even 0.1 seconds before impact is spoofed. 

It's fun if you like every fight to be a dogfight with aim9's, but if you're an energy fighter who relies on having the better firing parameters/more energy , then it gets old pretty fast.

But i don't want to b*tch about amraams, i feel much worse for everyone flying a russian aircraft because those missiles are beyond pathetic. 

Edited February 6, 2021 by Csgo GE oh yeah

[Coxy_99]

7 minutes ago, Csgo GE oh yeah said:

It's becoming a bit of an exploit indeed. 
The notch seems pretty huge , and combined with the enormous attraction for chaff you can even quite reliably spoof missiles fired at you from only a few miles while maintaining lock with your aircraft the whole time. 

 

Vs the F14 you're better off notching the planes radar before it goes active , but vs any amraam carrying aircraft it really doesn't matter.
Sloppy notch at any point (even 0.1 seconds before impact is spoofed. 

It's fun if you like every fight to be a dogfight with aim9's, but if you're an energy fighter who relies on having the better firing parameters/more energy , then it gets old pretty fast 

 

Its a bug not an exploit jesus

[Csgo GE oh yeah]

You can exploit bugs can't you ?  
And from what i hear from GGTharos, it's working as intended according to the team. So NOT a bug. 
At least that's how ED sees it right now. 

Edited February 6, 2021 by Csgo GE oh yeah

[Coxy_99]

Then every bug in dcs must be an exploit right?

[Csgo GE oh yeah]

Only if you can exploit it . 
And once again, ED does not see this is a 'bug'. 

Stop being so cranky , go get something to eat or something. 
 

Edited February 6, 2021 by Csgo GE oh yeah

[Coxy_99]

Try SARH chaff bug over 3 years exploit................... I need say more.

[Csgo GE oh yeah]

Yes, i did mention the sad affairs of russian missiles indeed. 
"But i don't want to b*tch about amraams, i feel much worse for everyone flying a russian aircraft because those missiles are beyond pathetic. "

Just stop posting, you come across as an angry drunk . Put down the vodka.  

 

[Coxy_99]

Not really just pointing it out aim-7 suffer to well not right now as there active to lol meme.

[Csgo GE oh yeah]

Yes, agreed. But at least we still have the (altough kind of crappy right now) amraam. 
Russian jets only have R77 and ER's , just terrible. 

[DCS FIGHTER PILOT]

46 minutes ago, Csgo GE oh yeah said:

It's becoming a bit of an exploit indeed. 
The notch seems pretty huge , and combined with the enormous attraction for chaff you can even quite reliably spoof missiles fired at you from only a few miles while maintaining lock with your aircraft the whole time. 

 

Vs the F14 you're better off notching the planes radar before it goes active , but vs any amraam carrying aircraft it really doesn't matter.
Sloppy notch at any point (even 0.1 seconds before impact is spoofed. 

It's fun if you like every fight to be a dogfight with aim9's, but if you're an energy fighter who relies on having the better firing parameters/more energy , then it gets old pretty fast.

But i don't want to b*tch about amraams, i feel much worse for everyone flying a russian aircraft because those missiles are beyond pathetic. 

 

It’s almost like ED is forcing us to Bfm.

Edited February 6, 2021 by DCS FIGHTER PILOT

[Rich]

I'm just going to reiterate my point I made a few months back and say that nobody from all sides is happy with the current implmentation of chaff, and it should just be removed until ED is ready to rework it into something that resembles reality.

 

[IVAN01rch]

Why does status of this bug switching between "not a bug" and "investigating"?! It puts ED into some not very good light. Like ED does not know or have not decided how the hell this AMRAAM should work. Or the worst case ED is seeking to please "I wanna undodgebale kill button" mommy boys. 

[Blinky.ben]

9 hours ago, Terzi said:

I find it hard to believe that we still have problems with most-widely used missile in the digital combat simulator.

But we do still have problems with most-widely used missile in the digital combat simulator.

Let’s be honest here the Aim-120 will never stop being a bug report or having problems in people’s opinion. A huge amount of people here have no idea other then it’s been drilled into them American made means an unrealistic missile. Some people demand that the Aim-120 should be nothing but a God missile that actually shoots lasers (sarcasm) a very large group of people believe it should be 100% resistant to any type of counter measure or tactic which is just laughable to anyone that actually works within a industry involving some type of modern radar (yes this doesn’t include all the Wikipedia warriors) . Some people believe it should be the best compared to any other missile in game but still have some chance to be spoofed (which could be correct but can also be wrong which most here won’t accept but no one here knows the answer either). Others heard it can go 60nm and don’t know why when they fired at 100ft it didn’t go that far so scream for it to be fixed, most seem to be happy with its current range. But no matter what ED does with this missile it will always be a bug report because there will always be a someone that demands it must be the greatest and run many many test so they can find the one time they didn’t win the fight and report it as a bug. Thankfully there are some very knowledgeable and reasonable people that call BS in the beta testing community that ED listen to with their own locked reporting forum, and let’s not forget the SME’s who guide ED in the right direction that again cause someone lost a fight so they can’t accept what the SME has to say.

 

So again this missile will forever in someone’s opinion have problems and will always remain in the bug forums.

[DCS FIGHTER PILOT]

It’s pretty clear that some people don’t know what’s going on here. First of all, this “bug,” is not unique to the AMRAAM but effects all current ARH missiles in game including the Sd-10, Aim-54, and R-77. It’s unfortunate that the title of this thread has the word Aim-120 in it as it should encompass all ARH missiles in DCS right now.

With that aside, those of us that are “complaining,” are not asking for an “undodgebale kill button,” but rather as close to an accurate representation of a 21st century ARH missile as possible that does not get spoofed by a handful of chaff packets. For as of right now, as I have shown and will be happy to show any of you again, all it takes is for some amateur nobody to notch (and not even perfectly mind you,) and drop a few pieces of chaff to make any ARH missile tracking on them to go utterly stupid. Do I have any proof of any real world data to prove this is utter BS? No, but there is literature out there that supports the claim that ARH missiles such as the Aim-120 are very hard to spoof with chaff. Believe it or not, the engineers of these missiles are smart enough to realize what types of maneuvers targets will be performing and the countermeasures they will be employing against the missile and account for it in the design. In addition to this, as time progresses, the technology of radars and electronics continue to improve. 
 

 

To end, frankly, there are many of those out there in the DCS community that are afraid to go up against a “beefed up,” ARH missile  because they don’t know how to properly defend against it using kinetic defense tactics. As a result, THEY are the ones who go and complain to ED to get the missiles nerfed in the areas of kinetic performance and EW resistance.

Edited February 7, 2021 by DCS FIGHTER PILOT

[Blinky.ben]

1 hour ago, DCS FIGHTER PILOT said:

To end, frankly, there are many of those out there in the DCS community that are afraid to go up against a “beefed up,” ARH missile  because they don’t know how to properly defend against it using kinetic defense tactics. As a result, THEY are the ones who go and complain to ED to get the missiles nerfed in the areas of kinetic performance and EW resistance.

 

Your kidding right? You honestly believe it’s only the people that go up against it want it nerfed? No your right no one ever complains for it to be over the top with unrealistic expectations.

 

just to be clear my last post had nothing to do with bugs or what it should be. It was me pointing out to someone asking why this is still a ongoing issue and me pointing out people will always find a way for the 120 to be a problem. Don’t go the down close minded opinion only people who go up against it are the only ones here with an agenda. These forums are littered with agenda based facts from both sides. Hence why there will forever be a issue with the 120.

Edited February 7, 2021 by Blinky.ben

[Jack1nthecrack]

6 hours ago, Rich said:

I'm just going to reiterate my point I made a few months back and say that nobody from all sides is happy with the current implmentation of chaff, and it should just be removed until ED is ready to rework it into something that resembles reality.

 

I agree, chaff should be removed because it currently is not correct.

[nighthawk2174]

3 hours ago, Blinky.ben said:

Let’s be honest here the Aim-120 will never stop being a bug report or having problems in people’s opinion. A huge amount of people here have no idea other then it’s been drilled into them American made means an unrealistic missile. Some people demand that the Aim-120 should be nothing but a God missile that actually shoots lasers (sarcasm) a very large group of people believe it should be 100% resistant to any type of counter measure or tactic which is just laughable to anyone that actually works within a industry involving some type of modern radar (yes this doesn’t include all the Wikipedia warriors) . Some people believe it should be the best compared to any other missile in game but still have some chance to be spoofed (which could be correct but can also be wrong which most here won’t accept but no one here knows the answer either). Others heard it can go 60nm and don’t know why when they fired at 100ft it didn’t go that far so scream for it to be fixed, most seem to be happy with its current range. But no matter what ED does with this missile it will always be a bug report because there will always be a someone that demands it must be the greatest and run many many test so they can find the one time they didn’t win the fight and report it as a bug. Thankfully there are some very knowledgeable and reasonable people that call BS in the beta testing community that ED listen to with their own locked reporting forum, and let’s not forget the SME’s who guide ED in the right direction that again cause someone lost a fight so they can’t accept what the SME has to say.

 

So again this missile will forever in someone’s opinion have problems and will always remain in the bug forums.

As was discussed in the other thread on this the AMRAAM should be incredible resistant too chaff.  I just don't see how it could defeat the missile outright based on all the documents i've read on this.   Beyond this there are pilots on various discords who have talked about this and the opinion is always the same chaff has very little (likes less than a .01% chance according too one guy) chance of ever outright defeating something like an amraam.  Helping get into the notch sure.  But not what were seeing right now.

Edited February 7, 2021 by nighthawk2174

[Blinky.ben]

1 hour ago, nighthawk2174 said:

As was discussed in the other thread on this the AMRAAM should be incredible resistant too chaff.  I just don't see how it could defeat the missile outright based on all the documents i've read on this.   Beyond this there are pilots on various discords who have talked about this and the opinion is always the same chaff has very little (likes less than a .01% chance according too one guy) chance of ever outright defeating something like an amraam.  Helping get into the notch sure.  But not what were seeing right now.

 

Might want to check my post again, not sure why I’m tagged in this. Has nothing to do with what I said.

 

But sense I am tagged in it, The statement you posted sounds like a fair statement. It does state air defence radar seekers that to me sounds like air defence sam sites which is a fairly different piece of equipment cause of how the entire system works and being supported by a much much more complicated system/network compared to a missile only using its own radar (which I believe is what we’re talking about here). But I would suspect this to be fairly true for the Air to Air missiles but not to the same extent. However there is so much more to it, cause even tho people seem to think Doppler is everything it’s actually not, cause there is ssssooooooo much happening to the pulse before the Doppler processing has even started. So with that in mind yes I would agree there are many situations chaff would have little effect for sure but not completely made useless, like I stated before there are many things happening before Doppler or range gates have even started to be processed

 

as for this bug, I mostly just ground pound in the F-16 and JF-17 which both are using the same guidance files for their BVR missiles. But I don’t do too much Air to air so I haven’t gone through the motions enough to see what’s being reported here. but I’m being successful with missile hits in both aircraft in servers like GR. But I would have absolutely no idea if the other guy was using chaff or ECM. There was this one guy tho that dodged all 6 120’s but I again they might have done everything by the book for dodging missiles. 
 

my personnel opinion I believe everything that involves radar is just too much to program, so is changing such things like chaff resistance to help simulate other factors that are not coded isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe better then it is now from reports but maybe not at the same level of real life cause of other un-simulated factors

Edited February 7, 2021 by Blinky.ben

[Exorcet]

On 2/5/2021 at 8:00 PM, Nealius said:

I'm afraid tracks will not help much because the sim recalculates, and thus the "dice roll" chance of that one or two chaff packets will give a different result each time the track is replayed. Despite constant demand for replay tracks for debugging, they are entirely unsuited for debugging precisely because they recalculate everything instead of replaying exactly what happened. Ergo, the bug symptom may not appear at all simply because the replay system is junk.

I don't know specifically about how DCS tracks are coded, but chaff shouldn't act differently in tracks, even if they use randomization to determine if they spoof the missile. Computers use pseudorandomness rather than true randomness and you can easily incorporate repeatability into your randomness by using random seeds to generate randomness. Ie, every time you run a mission DCS will generate a seed that predetermines all randomness ahead of time. The seed will be saved with the track so that all random events will unfold the same every time the track is played (unless there are errors in the track).

 

Also the methodology for tracks, ie recording inputs, doesn't make them unsuitable for replay. The issue is that ED's method of recording input is fragile or just broken. DCS isn't the only program to use input recording. It save space when recording and it shouldn't be any less accurate then recording positions.

 

Anyway as far as chaff goes at the moment it does seem to be a bit ridiculous in OB. I'm a few versions back on stable and things seem a lot more reasonable, with AMRAAM having very good hit rates as long as it's fired with 20-30 miles of AI fighters. It will occasionally go for chaff, but it's not common. For now, I'm not updating stable until OB chaff goes back to how it is in my stable version (and the other radar missiles get some added resistance like the 120, even in stable the AIM-7, R-77, and R-27 just seem to latch on to chaff instantly).

[Csgo GE oh yeah]

10 hours ago, DCS FIGHTER PILOT said:

It’s pretty clear that some people don’t know what’s going on here. First of all, this “bug,” is not unique to the AMRAAM but effects all current ARH missiles in game including the Sd-10, Aim-54, and R-77. It’s unfortunate that the title of this thread has the word Aim-120 in it as it should encompass all ARH missiles in DCS right now.

...........

 

Is it ? From my understanding they use their own chaff value (it was better than the amraam even before the change), and the 54 does not suffer from the ECM thing ?
Or am i wrong