[FIXED] Missiles firing when out of range (v1.01 B1121.6)

[Excroat3]

See the attached save. The South Korean F-35s, armed with AIM-120C-7 missiles (which have a 60nm range) are firing at targets 100+ nm away. The missiles, as expected, are running out of fuel and falling far short of their targets, and the F-35s continue to fire. I have looked at the WRA for the AIM-120C-7 as well as the side doctrine and can't find anything out of the ordinary. Is there something simple that I'm missing? Thanks!

[DWReese]

Nope, you're not missing anything. I've brought it up before. In fact, it's a holdover from CMANO.

In the last CMANO update BEFORE CMO came out, I started seeing SEAD units firing off HARMs at real long distances. Like yours, they ran out of fuel and fell to the ground.

From what I have been able to figure out is that when an aircraft goes on the OFFENSIVE, there has been new approaches as to how that is now handled. I say that because CMANO never used to do this.

As you have seen, even if you have the Doctrine set to PESSIMISTIC, it will still fire as soon as the target in area of uncertainty box bounces around and is suddenly within IN RANGE. When that happens, your missile is fired. It's almost instantaneously. Within seconds, the target bounces around again, and it your missile is now out of range and it will die because it ran out of fuel.

I have even tried to restrict the range of the firing unit. That works, but it really cripples the firing unit, especially with air-to-air missiles.

So, if the devs could make the firing aircraft a little less trigger-happy, that would probably solve the problem. Otherwise, like you experienced, a lot of missiles will be wasted.

Somewhere in the Tech Support section I reported this a couple of times, but as far as I know it was never addressed, as evidenced by your report.

[Excroat3]

That would make sense, but I'm not sure if the contacts are actually bouncing around. There's ground radars, an AWACS, and 10+ F-35 radars + IRST on these contacts, and I didn't see them jumping around with large uncertainty boxes. However, my radars were being jammed, and I was running the scenario as max speed, so they may have been jumping around just too quickly for me to see.

[serjames]

I can confirm I have AMRAAMs and ARMS behaving in exactly the same way. NON ambiguous target. Launching WELL before they are in range.

[DWReese]

Try to fire the missiles MANUALLY at the target. The WRA can't fire, then it will tell you why.

Change your targets to AUTO DETECTED and see if the unit will fire. The WRA will tell you why it can't. You are going to have to play around with it.

Of course, it is possible that you situation is different than what I have been reporting.

Good luck.

[Excroat3]

Here are my results from trying to manually allocate missiles from a single group of F-35s. Keep in note the range of the AIM-120C-7 is 60nm

Group 1: 4x J-10C, 75nm away from my F-35, on the same bearing. 1/4 aircraft are targetable, the remaining 3 are out of the weapon DLZ.

Group 2: 6x J-11BSH, 90 nm away from my F-35, on roughly the same bearing (+/- 10 degrees). 4/6 are targetable, the remaining 2 are out of the weapon DLZ.

Group 3: 6x J-16, 92-97nm away from my F-35, around 10 degrees off the bearing of the F-35. All 6 are targetable.

Group 4: 4x J-11BG, 94nm away from my F-35, on the same bearing. 0/4 aircraft are targetable, all are out of the weapon DLZ.

If you load the save, I am using Flight 2307 and 2308 to make these specific observations, but the same thing can be seen with the other groups of F-35s, some who are even farther away.

[DWReese]

I see exactly what you are talking about.

I'm believe you, but you are preaching to the choir.

It is up to the devs to fix it. I have a whole slew of these examples as well. Hopefully, they will listen to you and address the issue. As the other poster mentioned, it affects ARMs as well.

[BrianinMinnie]

I believe I'm in the pews in front of the choir, just last night, playing a quickie scenario, I did notice my AIM-120's firing before the targets were in stated range. normally when playing for real, i'll set my AA missiles to Less than max range miles to get better hit ratios, in last nights case I just let the default decide when to fire. it did seem that some ships Sams also were firing before best range too, but I didn't check for verification.
It seems Ex, Ser and DW aren't on something, but maybe on to something....[8D]

[Scorpion86]

I encountered the same issue here. Them F-35s are mighty trigger happy with their AMRAAMs!

[Rory Noonan]

Logged for investigation. #0013602

[Dimitris]

This has been fixed in the current public version (B1134.3).