air warfare & close combat

[Cik]

aye. it also means that new arrivals to the fight start with an advantage, as they should. as the duel continues and the first engaged planes descend, anybody who reinforces either side will start with a noticeable advantage; they will be out of parameters of most of the combatants and at a higher energy state (due to altitude)

unfortunately for the first combatants, this is a very bad situation to be in, as if they attempt to extend they will probably just be nailed by a heatseeker from any of engaged parties.

it's why dogfights in the strictest sense have long been a bad idea. you're at the mercy of anyone who happens by after the second turn or so. and who knows if it will be the enemy or friendly? especially in certain eras, dogfights are a vortex that are very, very hard to escape once things go south. it's why many doctrines emphasize not getting into them.

of course, if you play your cards right it's an advantage. making sure you have reinforcements close by and then pouncing descending enemies makes for easy kills, especially coupled with the restrictive cockpits of most early jet age fighters.

[DrRansom]

These changes would also let early model aircraft more easily gang-up on any advanced plane which over-extends itself. E.g. a F-22 shouldn't get into a dogfight with MIG-21s, lest superior numbers allow the additional planes to catch the F-22 out and get an easy kill.

[DrRansom]

To add to this discussion, in this January's AIAA Sci-Tech conference, there is a paper out by AFRL researchers on the optimal evasion strategy for an aircraft against medium range air to air missiles. The optimum strategy for medium range engagements is a steep dive followed by a last-second hard turn. The steep dive decreases the energy height of the missile and, in the medium range case, leads to greatly increased miss distances.

For CMANO, the equations of motion for the simulation might be helpful for calculating missile energy burn. Specifically, they make the missile drag a quadratic function of the commanded acceleration. I don't know how CMANO accounts for drag (maybe fuel burn?), but this might be a way for the simulation to penalize hard maneuver commands, if that isn't already included.