Chaff

[N1thecaptain]

So chaff distracts the enemy aircraft's radar when they lock on to you, right?

And even if the radar is locked on to the chaff, the enemy's missile can still go for you instead because it's semi active, so it can still sort of go "I don't think the thing the radar is telling me to go to is actually the target, I think that other thing is the target" right?

Is there even a point in using chaff then, if the missile can still go for you? Wouldn't it just be easier to bring flares only and just notch the radar or fly super close to the ground (if you're close enough to the ground even pulse doppler doesn't help against ground clutter) when you get locked?

Or is there something I'm missing?

[Jaes]

Chaff can confuse SAHR missiles, but you need to dump several pods in order for it to work.

Most folks have a tendency to just drop one or two CMs because that's typically all you need to defeat an IR missile. With Chaff, you need to drop more like 3-5 and try to concentrate it so when you drop it, you hit that CM key 3-5 times as fast as possible. Your Chaff needs to essentially override the profile of your aircraft as the "strongest" radar signature to successfully confuse a SAHR missile.

You should still also be performing counter maneuvers to confuse the tracking further. Depending on the position of where your opponent fires the missile, your Chaff may not be in the LoS of the SAHR seeker head and ends up ignoring it entirely so it's always a good habit to assume the missile is tracking you and maneuver accordingly.

[nirvana_sth]

Originally posted by Jaes:

Chaff can confuse SAHR missiles, but you need to dump several pods in order for it to work.

Most folks have a tendency to just drop one or two CMs because that's typically all you need to defeat an IR missile. With Chaff, you need to drop more like 3-5 and try to concentrate it so when you drop it, you hit that CM key 3-5 times as fast as possible. Your Chaff needs to essentially override the profile of your aircraft as the "strongest" radar signature to successfully confuse a SAHR missile.

You should still also be performing counter maneuvers to confuse the tracking further. Depending on the position of where your opponent fires the missile, your Chaff may not be in the LoS of the SAHR seeker head and ends up ignoring it entirely so it's always a good habit to assume the missile is tracking you and maneuver accordingly.

lol don't mean to be cringe, but its SARH (Semi-Active Radar Homing).

[N1thecaptain]

Originally posted by Jaes:

Chaff can confuse SAHR missiles, but you need to dump several pods in order for it to work.

Most folks have a tendency to just drop one or two CMs because that's typically all you need to defeat an IR missile. With Chaff, you need to drop more like 3-5 and try to concentrate it so when you drop it, you hit that CM key 3-5 times as fast as possible. Your Chaff needs to essentially override the profile of your aircraft as the "strongest" radar signature to successfully confuse a SAHR missile.

You should still also be performing counter maneuvers to confuse the tracking further. Depending on the position of where your opponent fires the missile, your Chaff may not be in the LoS of the SAHR seeker head and ends up ignoring it entirely so it's always a good habit to assume the missile is tracking you and maneuver accordingly.

I just use ECM series, I have it set to drop ECM 3 times 0.2 seconds apart every second. On the F-4 Phantom II, it sort of does a double drop, so each time you do 1 drop, it drops 2 chaff and 2 flares. So that would mean it drops 6 chaff total in that 0.6 second timespan. I also always do evasive maneuvres when I see a missile coming, sometimes even when I'm not sure it's coming for me, because I'd rather lose 300 km/h of IAS than 6K SL.

But since you can't choose to just drop chaff and not drop flares or vice versa, is it still not just easier to just bring chaff and notch the radar and/or fly low enough that even pulse doppler doesn't work?

[nirvana_sth]

Originally posted by N1thecaptain:

So chaff distracts the enemy aircraft's radar when they lock on to you, right?

And even if the radar is locked on to the chaff, the enemy's missile can still go for you instead because it's semi active, so it can still sort of go "I don't think the thing the radar is telling me to go to is actually the target, I think that other thing is the target" right?

Is there even a point in using chaff then, if the missile can still go for you? Wouldn't it just be easier to bring flares only and just notch the radar or fly super close to the ground (if you're close enough to the ground even pulse doppler doesn't help against ground clutter) when you get locked?

Or is there something I'm missing?

depends really.
for SARH there are usually a few ways to dodge them:
1- use Chaff when you are being locked and manoeuvre (no before and not after)
2- notching (make the locking plane face your 3 or 9 o'clock) and fly low
3- wait till missile is near you then manoeuvre and Chaff (dont Chaff first).

Chaff on its own its not as effective, you'd have to manoeuvre too.

[FizzyElf]

Originally posted by nirvana_sth:

2- notching (make the locking plane face your 3 or 9 o'clock) and fly low

How would making the enemy fire a missile to your left or right cause it to no hit? unless you plan to out run the missile's turn rate by diving once its launched.

[nirvana_sth]

Originally posted by FizzyElf:

Originally posted by nirvana_sth:

2- notching (make the locking plane face your 3 or 9 o'clock) and fly low

How would making the enemy fire a missile to your left or right cause it to no hit? unless you plan to out run the missile's turn rate by diving once its launched.

im not 100% sure how it works, but by doing the notching technique the lock will be broken.
apparently the radar detects you as ground clutter when the incoming plane is facing your side at 90 degrees angle.
the SARH requires the enemy pilot to hold the lock until your plane is hit, you break the lock nothing will hit you.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by FizzyElf:

Originally posted by nirvana_sth:

2- notching (make the locking plane face your 3 or 9 o'clock) and fly low

How would making the enemy fire a missile to your left or right cause it to no hit? unless you plan to out run the missile's turn rate by diving once its launched.

Originally posted by nirvana_sth:

Originally posted by FizzyElf:

How would making the enemy fire a missile to your left or right cause it to no hit? unless you plan to out run the missile's turn rate by diving once its launched.

im not 100% sure how it works, but by doing the notching technique the lock will be broken.
apparently the radar detects you as ground clutter when the incoming plane is facing your side at 90 degrees angle.
the SARH requires the enemy pilot to hold the lock until your plane is hit, you break the lock nothing will hit you.

Notching is a countermeasure for pulse-doppler radar. Which a lot of the top-tier planes have and use because it works better against low-altitude targets.

Pulse-doppler radar detects how fast things are moving towards or away from the plane. And if the result is that they're stationary, it either can't distinguish from ground clutter or outright filters them out as ground clutter, not sure which. Flying tangential to the detecting plane is the same as being stationary for these purposes.

Hence, notching makes PD radars lose you.

[Jaes]

Originally posted by N1thecaptain:

I just use ECM series, I have it set to drop ECM 3 times 0.2 seconds apart every second. On the F-4 Phantom II, it sort of does a double drop, so each time you do 1 drop, it drops 2 chaff and 2 flares. So that would mean it drops 6 chaff total in that 0.6 second timespan. I also always do evasive maneuvres when I see a missile coming, sometimes even when I'm not sure it's coming for me, because I'd rather lose 300 km/h of IAS than 6K SL.

But since you can't choose to just drop chaff and not drop flares or vice versa, is it still not just easier to just bring chaff and notch the radar and/or fly low enough that even pulse doppler doesn't work?

Personally, I think you're putting a bit too much "Gamer" into this thought process. CMs are there to increase your survival chances when you're in a position of being shot at. Be bloody generous with your CM distribution, because it's always better being alive than dead. That's what it's there to achieve.

Chances are, the match will end before you need to worry about not having enough CMs or you'll be in a bad position and the CMs are just delaying the inevitable.

For example, if you're low enough to the ground to be able to confuse PD radar, there's nothing stopping me from sending an IR at you, force you to bleed speed, and finish you with a gun run if you manage to the defeat the IR shot. Being that low to the ground greatly reduces the options you have available to maneuver which makes you predictable and easy to gun down. Being that low to the ground is a desperation move rather than a practical strategy. Sure, it may work for you here and there, but you're overall just painting yourself as an easy target to be shot down by another method.

It's important to take into consideration all aspects of the engagement you're currently in order to come up with the best plan of action. Changing something as simple as your flight path at the start of the match can put you into great positions to reduce the likelihood of you being engaged by SAHR missiles or at least reduce how many hostile aircraft you'll contend with at any given point so you can pick off your targets one by one.

This is Ward Carroll if you weren't aware he existed. He was an F-14 RIO and also a training instructor for Navy Pilots. He has quite a few insightful videos about mindsets and habits for conducting an engagement with modern aircraft (mostly the F-14 because that was his thing naturally, but the engagement procedures he goes over applies to any aircraft). I would highly encourage checking out this particular video on how to manage a BVR engagement. It helped me develop a mindset/procedure for BVR engagements and SARHs in general that helped increase my own effectiveness in a given match.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38FGpJ_6Js4&t

[Jaes]

Originally posted by nirvana_sth:

lol don't mean to be cringe, but its SARH (Semi-Active Radar Homing).

I think the bigger cringe is I kept doing SAHR instead of SARH lol

[nirvana_sth]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Originally posted by FizzyElf:

How would making the enemy fire a missile to your left or right cause it to no hit? unless you plan to out run the missile's turn rate by diving once its launched.

Originally posted by nirvana_sth:

im not 100% sure how it works, but by doing the notching technique the lock will be broken.
apparently the radar detects you as ground clutter when the incoming plane is facing your side at 90 degrees angle.
the SARH requires the enemy pilot to hold the lock until your plane is hit, you break the lock nothing will hit you.

Notching is a countermeasure for pulse-doppler radar. Which a lot of the top-tier planes have and use because it works better against low-altitude targets.

Pulse-doppler radar detects how fast things are moving towards or away from the plane. And if the result is that they're stationary, it either can't distinguish from ground clutter or outright filters them out as ground clutter, not sure which. Flying tangential to the detecting plane is the same as being stationary for these purposes.

Hence, notching makes PD radars lose you.

this one.
also, notching would work against normal radars too, right?

[nirvana_sth]

Originally posted by Jaes:

Originally posted by nirvana_sth:

lol don't mean to be cringe, but its SARH (Semi-Active Radar Homing).

I think the bigger cringe is I kept doing SAHR instead of SARH lol

:D

[Jaes]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Notching is a countermeasure for pulse-doppler radar. Which a lot of the top-tier planes have and use because it works better against low-altitude targets.

Pulse-doppler radar detects how fast things are moving towards or away from the plane. And if the result is that they're stationary, it either can't distinguish from ground clutter or outright filters them out as ground clutter, not sure which. Flying tangential to the detecting plane is the same as being stationary for these purposes.

Hence, notching makes PD radars lose you.

PD attempts to filter out ground clutter for a "clear" radar picture for a successful radar lock and subsequent missile tracking so when you perform a successful Notch, it treats the target as ground clutter to be filtered out. It's borderline semantics, but it's important to know why this occurs as there's another aspect to PD calculations that can be advantageous to you if you're on the defense and this is a good opportunity to bring it up.

If folks have wondered why when they're tail chasing a target with PD enabled and they're not achieving a successful lock, it's because the target is moving at such a similar speed to you that the PD radar calculation can't determine what it's looking at is in fact something it should filter out. PD calculations primarily determine the speed of an object in relation to your own speed so it's possible to confuse PD radar by achieving speed parity in a tail chase scenario.

Your target needs to be going notably slower (still faster than 0) or notably faster than you in a tail chase scenario to achieve a successful lock so you can use this to your advantage if you're managing your speed well in relation to your attacker as well as knowing when they'll likely be able to achieve a PD lock. The best time to PD Lock a target is a target that's moving towards you, aka a headon.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by nirvana_sth:

this one.
also, notching would work against normal radars too, right?

No. Notching doesn't reduce your radar return or anything, and 'normal' radars don't filter out stationary objects. It shouldn't accomplish anything in that case.

However, non-PD radars are generally easy to foil by flying low. They can't pick planes out of ground clutter most of the time.

Originally posted by Jaes:

PD attempts to filter out ground clutter for a "clear" radar picture for a successful radar lock and subsequent missile tracking so when you perform a successful Notch, it treats the target as ground clutter to be filtered out. It's borderline semantics, but it's important to know why this occurs as there's another aspect to PD calculations that can be advantageous to you if you're on the defense and this is a good opportunity to bring it up.

If folks have wondered why when they're tail chasing a target with PD enabled and they're not achieving a successful lock, it's because the target is moving at such a similar speed to you that the PD radar calculation can't determine what it's looking at is in fact something it should filter out. PD calculations primarily determine the speed of an object in relation to your own speed so it's possible to confuse PD radar by achieving speed parity in a tail chase scenario.

Your target needs to be going notably slower (still faster than 0) or notably faster than you in a tail chase scenario to achieve a successful lock so you can use this to your advantage if you're managing your speed well in relation to your attacker as well as knowing when they'll likely be able to achieve a PD lock. The best time to PD Lock a target is a target that's moving towards you, aka a headon.

Is that so? That seems weird. An object with a pulse doppler of zero seems like something you obviously do want to detect, and I wouldn't think the zero doppler would stop the radar from being able to detect the return signal.

[nirvana_sth]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Originally posted by nirvana_sth:

this one.
also, notching would work against normal radars too, right?

No. Notching doesn't reduce your radar return or anything, and 'normal' radars don't filter out stationary objects. It shouldn't accomplish anything in that case.

However, non-PD radars are generally easy to foil by flying low. They can't pick planes out of ground clutter most of the time.

Originally posted by Jaes:

PD attempts to filter out ground clutter for a "clear" radar picture for a successful radar lock and subsequent missile tracking so when you perform a successful Notch, it treats the target as ground clutter to be filtered out. It's borderline semantics, but it's important to know why this occurs as there's another aspect to PD calculations that can be advantageous to you if you're on the defense and this is a good opportunity to bring it up.

If folks have wondered why when they're tail chasing a target with PD enabled and they're not achieving a successful lock, it's because the target is moving at such a similar speed to you that the PD radar calculation can't determine what it's looking at is in fact something it should filter out. PD calculations primarily determine the speed of an object in relation to your own speed so it's possible to confuse PD radar by achieving speed parity in a tail chase scenario.

Your target needs to be going notably slower (still faster than 0) or notably faster than you in a tail chase scenario to achieve a successful lock so you can use this to your advantage if you're managing your speed well in relation to your attacker as well as knowing when they'll likely be able to achieve a PD lock. The best time to PD Lock a target is a target that's moving towards you, aka a headon.

Is that so? That seems weird. An object with a pulse doppler of zero seems like something you obviously do want to detect, and I wouldn't think the zero doppler would stop the radar from being able to detect the return signal.

awesome, thanks.

[N1thecaptain]

Originally posted by Jaes:

This is Ward Carroll if you weren't aware he existed. He was an F-14 RIO and also a training instructor for Navy Pilots. He has quite a few insightful videos about mindsets and habits for conducting an engagement with modern aircraft (mostly the F-14 because that was his thing naturally, but the engagement procedures he goes over applies to any aircraft). I would highly encourage checking out this particular video on how to manage a BVR engagement. It helped me develop a mindset/procedure for BVR engagements and SARHs in general that helped increase my own effectiveness in a given match.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38FGpJ_6Js4&t

My only top tier plane RN is the F-4F Late(AKA the F-4F Peace Rhine), which could mount and use AIM-7 Sparrows IRL, but can't in game. So I can't do BVR, I have to rely on my AIM-9J's only. That's why I fly so low, I'm difficult to detect for radar, hard to spot since the spotting system just doesn't like to tell you about targets any more than half a meter below you, and since I flank around off to the right or left, I can slowly turn and get behind pretty much the entire enemy team without losing any more speed than I can get back in a second or so. Then, I look for targets that aren't paying enough attention, Fox 2, and then there's 1 less enemy.

The main reason I made this thread was because I didn't understand how chaff works. Not because I was dieing to Fox 1 missiles. Most of the times I die, it's because most of my team died in the furball and I'm forced into a 4 or 5v1 on my own.