ORIGINAL: DrRansom
ORIGINAL: NakedWeasel
ORIGINAL: DrRansom
This is exciting news for more advanced cruise missile attacks.
In response to this big jump in capability, are there plans to make air defenses more survivable in 1.10?
Are you somehow suggesting that the fantastic Russian SAM's like the S-300+ and S-400 are in some way not capable enough?
They are capable, but, there are ways for the game to make them more capable in a way which reflects their unique capabilities.
As you well know, the Russian SAM TELs have extremely short set-up / breakdown time, ~ 5 minutes, allowing them to redeploy within the response time of a SEAD mission. I would like to see a specialized mission for highly responsive TELs which reflects this capability.
To describe it further:
The mission would allow the player to assign a squadron of TELs (SAM, ballistic missile, cruise missile) to a specific task, e.g. air defense or surface warfare, but with the provision that only a fraction of the missiles will be emplaced at any time. The other missiles will move around randomly, then find a new hide. Maybe the mission divides the squadron into 3rds, 1/3rd ready to fire, 1/3rd moving, 1/3rd hiding. When a launcher fires, after a period of time it begins to move again.
This automated mission would make targeting modern SAM batteries appropriately hard, as it emphasizes the mobility defense that those systems have. By putting it into a mission, it makes it easy for scenario designers to assign that behavior to non-player ADNs.
But, it would require a ton of work and I don't know if anything like this is on the developers radar. I'd be nice to see it, but we have so much promising stuff coming along I'll be content to wait.
1. You obviously aren't talking about anything bigger than an SA-17.
2. Constantly moving them does not save them from Anti-radiation missiles like HARM and AARGM. Nor will it save them from a saturation attack from a TACTOM/JASSM(ER)/MALD-J strike. Eventually, the S-300s and S-400s run out of big expensive missiles to shoot down more numerous strike weapons launched to destroy them, and that is that. The West smells what Russia is cooking, and they have developed super effective strike weapons to serve up more cowbell. I'll see your road convoy of SA-20's protected by SA-17s and SA-22s, and I'll raise with TACTOM, JASSM, JSOW, SDB II, LRLAP, Spice, Delilah AL/HL/GL, Popeye, JSM, Taurus KEPD, Apache, Storm Shadow/SCALP, AASM Hammer, and HOPE/HOSBO. And this is just the stuff we know about/in-use. Wait till the next gen stuff comes online, like the railgun, and lasers.
3. Strike weapon and stealth technology is outpacing SAM system technology. Take into account long range "smart" missiles and bombs, and the SAM site is indeed going to get smoked, in short order. There have been quite a few test scenarios made by people like myself that proves this fact. Throw a small number of F-22s into the scenario, some equipped with SDBs and AMRAAMs and the S-400 becomes a smoking hole in the ground with a single sortie. This does not require OECM jamming, or hundreds of other strike planes or cruise missiles- this is a single squadron of F-22s with nothing more than a single sortie.