Fire-n-forget missiles

[bladesinger79]

Played this game for many years. Played Harpoon for an equal amount of years. I should be ashamed for asking this question:

In the databases, how can I tell what missiles have fire-n-forget capability?

I deserve to get ridiculed for not knowing this, some of you may demand I turn in my CMO card. But details can make the difference between victory or death.

[thewood1]

Generally, if it has an Active Seeker Head or has an IR seeker it is fire and forget. There are a bunch of nuances around it though like if the missile also has a datalink for mid-course correction or some form of inertial navigation (INS).

[TempestII]

IIRC, only IR guided missiles (and maybe those Soviet A2A ARMs) are true "Fire and Forget" or "Launch and Leave" weapons. Fox 3 AHM shots in CMO and actual combat realistically require some form guidance (as thewood says, it may be DL or INS) to get them close enough to their target which is when they'll activate their onboard radar. Of course, that doesn't necessarily have to be the launching aircraft's onboard radar with things like CEC and IRSTs. The other cavet is "Maddog" mode where the missile is launched off the rail without any guidance from any aircraft radars which causes its own risks, and IIRC, isn't in CMO at this time.