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Dron22

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Jan 15, 2009
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Is there any benefit of having your aircraft fly high other than AWACS? I always fly all my aircraft as low as possible except AWACS?
Do you ever order your aircraft to fly at medium or high altitude and if yes why?
 
I'm using E3s and A-50 only when situation requires endurance. Otherwise - fighters can fly higher so they can detect surface groups earlier. There are no other incentives of flying higher than 10 meters in this game.
 
I'm using E3s and A-50 only when situation requires endurance. Otherwise - fighters can fly higher so they can detect surface groups earlier. There are no other incentives of flying higher than 10 meters in this game.

Ok thanks, just as I thought. If you don't use E3's or A-50's than you have to use active radar search on fighters, which makes you easy to detect!
 
And using active radars on AWACS makes you harder to detect? Radars are so poorly modelled that AWACS has the same/almost the same capability to detect smaller targets as fighters. Add to this that fighters have omnidirectional sensors and are much faster than AWACS (like some sneaky bastard just sent an AAM in your direction and you have to "run away, run away!") and you have a winner. I'm using AWACS only near airfields - sending them on patrol not farther than a mile. So when something actually will sneak on it, I'm just ordering it to land, AWACS accelerates to Mach 3-4 in vertical dive and lands in about 10-20 seconds.

Actually I'm usually building traps like this: one fighter on max alt with radar on, and 50 miles ahead few pairs of fighters on passives. As AI is stupid it will send fighters straight to the active emission source. Then it's a matter of IR detection (send your best IR detectors first) and you have a shooting gallery.
 
And using active radars on AWACS makes you harder to detect? Radars are so poorly modelled that AWACS has the same/almost the same capability to detect smaller targets as fighters. Add to this that fighters have omnidirectional sensors and are much faster than AWACS (like some sneaky bastard just sent an AAM in your direction and you have to "run away, run away!") and you have a winner. I'm using AWACS only near airfields - sending them on patrol not farther than a mile. So when something actually will sneak on it, I'm just ordering it to land, AWACS accelerates to Mach 3-4 in vertical dive and lands in about 10-20 seconds.

Actually I'm usually building traps like this: one fighter on max alt with radar on, and 50 miles ahead few pairs of fighters on passives. As AI is stupid it will send fighters straight to the active emission source. Then it's a matter of IR detection (send your best IR detectors first) and you have a shooting gallery.

Ok thanks for the tip, however that tactic does not work so well when you play Russia and your enemy is using F-35s!
 
If you don't have AWACS you also put a fighter on high alt with active radar behind the strikeforce flying low. That way you will detect planes with the high flying scout and the undetected lowflying strikeforce can bring down the foes before they are spotted.
 
From my experience - if you try this on stealth vs stealth, the active plane will act more as a bait and the detection will be mainly based on IR. AFAIK they don't count include curvature of the Earth in the detection calculations.
 
How exactly does detection and identification work in this game? There's been a few missions where I encounter a "small surface contact" and sent in a plane to try to ID it...but it seems like no matter how high or how low I fly, or how close I get to it, my plane will not ID it. It's only when I decide "screw it, when's the last time I saw a civilian craft in any of these missions?" and open fire, is the small surface contact revealed to be a hostile (usually a Skjold).

Also, what determines whether a stealth plane gets detected by radar in this game? Is it simply a matter of chance? Does this chance increase with multiple overlapping radars, or with proximity to the radar source? How often is this chance applied (like say, once every minute the stealth plane spends within enemy's radar range)?