I mean, let's be honest here. It doesn't matter what A2A missile you're talking about. AIM-7, AIM-120, AIM-9, K-13, R-27 etc, etc... They all have pretty abysmal shoot-to-hit ratios in proper combat, where statistics are available.
Well there is a reason why the word Miss starts the word missile... much the same as anger backwards appears in the word pregnant, but while there was an enormous gap in missile performance from pathetic for BVR missiles to acceptable enough to want to keep using them for progressively better and better IR guided WVR missiles, the AMRAAM did seriously improve BVR performance from F'ing useless to OK against unaware poorly equipped enemy targets... 40% kill rate against a target who is not aware they are being attached is OK because they have thousands of AMRAAMs and most enemies don't have thousands of planes...
The point is that in the 1990s when the performance of the R-73 was revealed it became a bit of a hittile because you couldn't really out manouver it because of its thrust vector engine and high off boresight visibility of you. Older missiles get outside its 12 degree FOV and it lost lock and you were safe... much much harder to do with Archers.
The AIM-9X was supposed to be the solution... their own hittile from which nothing could escape... its seeker was too sophisticated and the missile was too smart... when it clearly isn't.
I mean I know the US Navy likes to talk up the air to air combat performance of Libyan Su-22s, because no one wants to admit to shooting down a largely defenceless plane for dumping its fuel tanks... no honour in that right?
Vietnam was a good indicator of that. I don't think anyone should be surprised that an AIM-9X missed its target. Regardless of what any missile designer says about how fool-proof their design is, or how revolutionary the seeker-head is, at the end of the day, it comes down to the situational elements and the launch parameters.
No, it is more than that... the first IR guided missiles homed in on the hottest thing within their narrow field of view... which meant the target aircraft could manouver to place the sun in the missiles field of view and would be safe... or a single flare would do it as long as it was brighter than the engines... so IR guided missile designers set their missiles to not home on the hottest thing they see and instead of a single hot point they adapted them to guide to patterns of heat in the air, so the plane designers started launching variable heat flares in bunches to create patterns for the missiles to hit... the IIR seeker of the AIM-9X was supposed to deal with that problem... recognise a group of flares as being a group of flares as opposed to the aircraft shaped object it locked on to start with...
The only thing I can think of is like Shtora works with wire guided ATGMs... create a heat signal so intense it blooms the sensor so it can't see anything...
Regarding an AIM-9, ambient temperature becomes a huge player, especially when the seeker would have to discriminate between the aircraft, the flares it is dropping, and the sun-baked, middle-eastern ground. People may say that the 'x' variant has some state-of-the-art FPA seeker which can do A, B and C, blah, blah. Nothing's perfect, and I think this example with the Su-22 re-enforces that status quo. As sure as the sun rises and sets, designers of military equipment while talk up their product like any other business. Ultimately, it means nothing, and no one should be surprised when it turns out that a design claim doesn't align with reality.
You are saying it is no surprise, but people talking up the F-35 and F-22 should now realise that all those aircraft have that could reliably kill an enemy target now is their gun, and while the F-22 isn't a terrible dogfighter... the F-35 is.
I am not going apologize for my post. I initially glossed the photo over, but it was trotted out as some sort of actual Syria today event.
Clearly it wasn't and I am sure that an Erdo-turd fanboi spread it around (not any of the posters on this forum, so don't get
triggered) because he thought those flares were anti-aircraft missiles. They are that dumb.
I don't think you need to, what you said was basically correct for anyone mistakenly thinking these were actual photos of the attack...
I would say we should be asking AMCXXL how the photo he posted is related to the information he posted... was it supposed to be evidence or just entertainment...
Either way I agree... no need for anyone to get upset or need to apologise about anything.
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