Problem regarding "air superiority aircraft patrolling hostile airfield"

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DracheTek
Posts: 46
Joined: Sun Jul 05, 2020 11:55 am

Problem regarding "air superiority aircraft patrolling hostile airfield"

Post by DracheTek »

From what I have experienced in flight sim games (namely DCS), if one side has all its ground based air defense down(BLUE hereafter), and opposite side(RED hereafter) air superiority/multirole aircraft is patrolling above its air base, here is what happens:
BLUE aircraft taxi out of hardened aircraft bunker->BLUE aircraft get spotted by RED aircraft visually->BLUE aircraft get shot up by guns and dogfight specified missiles on the ground and runway access point is very likely obscured by the smoking wreck

and here in CMO the following happens:

BLUE aircraft taxi out of hardened aircraft bunker->BLUE aircraft become "host" of runway access point. The runway access point is classified as "RUNWAY" in weapon release authority->RED aircraft cannot engage "RUNWAY" using guns or air to air missiles because they are not authorized->BLUE aircraft SPAWNS in the air with full initial speed and afterburner throttle->aircrafts of either side starts dogfight->RED aircraft sustains heavy losses and very likely airfield surround is breached.

Which picture is more realistic?
Fido81
Posts: 158
Joined: Sat Jul 13, 2019 10:53 pm

RE: Problem regarding "air superiority aircraft patrolling hostile airfield"

Post by Fido81 »

Neither is accurate as far as I can tell.

I ran a totally unrealistic scenario with F-15Cs on CAP above an airfield when some Mirage IIIEAs were sent up to challenge them. The F-15s first detected a Mirages as it passed ~1900 ft AGL and ~315 kts TAS (316 ground speed if that sorta thing matters to you). When they were on station during takeoffs, the F-15s shot down the Mirages before they'd formed up into two-plane elements (not that it was a fair fight...the Mirage AAM was rear-aspect IR, and that just isn't competitive with AMRAAMs when both sides are under computer control).
DracheTek
Posts: 46
Joined: Sun Jul 05, 2020 11:55 am

RE: Problem regarding "air superiority aircraft patrolling hostile airfield"

Post by DracheTek »

Tested it again using SU-27 for RED and F-16 for BLUE.
SU-27 at 36000 ft have absolutely no idea about what happens on the ground. So I added a CH-5 UAV staged 5 nm away from the airfield to simulate the surveillance, and set the RED AAW patrol height to 2000ft.

As a result, the UAV can notice an aircraft taxiing out in ~30sec, but I can still not assign gun strafe or air to air missile to this grounded aircraft. In theory there should be a time window of 2~3 min that the BLUE aircraft can't do anything, and what I wanted to do is to exploit this vulnerability to some degree.
Fido81
Posts: 158
Joined: Sat Jul 13, 2019 10:53 pm

RE: Problem regarding "air superiority aircraft patrolling hostile airfield"

Post by Fido81 »

SAMs and AAMs typically have a minimum altitude (indicated clearly on their database entry) below which they cannot engage targets. C:MO will not allow weapons to fire outside of these engagement parameters, so I'm pretty sure your experience is the program working as designed. If this is a behavior you'd like to see, you could ask the developers for it, but my guess is that they'll ask for an example of it having occurred in "real life" (not in DCS) before considering implementing it as a feature.

Besides that, you might have better luck either
a) targeting the runway access point or runway with munitions designed to attack them (like Durandals or 'dumb' bombs) while planes are on them
b) enabling air-to-ground gunfire/strafing in doctrine settings, and attacking the runway access point or runway with those guns while planes are on them
DracheTek
Posts: 46
Joined: Sun Jul 05, 2020 11:55 am

RE: Problem regarding "air superiority aircraft patrolling hostile airfield"

Post by DracheTek »

I already know that AAM can hardly engage ground target, but I cannot assign gun strafe to runway access points. Air cannon should be very versatile, and pilot should be able to do anything they want with it. I can see the idea is that: in terms of data structure, aircraft that is taking off is an attachment to the airfield, and those weapon that typically cannot scratch airfield cannot be assigned to the airfield. English is not my mother language, and I may not be able to express myself too well, please bear with it.


Anyways, I ran another test using SU-27 equipped with S-13 penetrator rocket. It comes out fairly well, none of aircrafts takes off in the 2 min vulnerable interval. But this process involves a lot of manual order manipulation, which kinds of defeat the purpose of "Tell troops how to do and see how it comes out".
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