A little under a year ago F4UT began taking a long hard look at the weapons in Falcon, their hit values and the way in which they damaged or destroyed the target.
We knew there were situations where some air-to-ground weapons took out some targets, but not others. Some appeared grossly over-powered; others grossly underpowered. In the air too there were issues: missiles in some cases defying the laws of physics to reach their targets.
Starting with A-G munitions, what was needed was an examination of each weapon system; and an analysis of the multitudes of ground targets too. That meant for each weapon -- where necessary -- adjusting its blast radius, damage value, explosion type, weight and then correlating that to the different objects (foot, wheeled, tracked, naval).
The man who stepped into the breech was Ed Keifer. He examined mavericks, guns, AAA, CBUs, GBUs, dumb bombs and cruise missiles. It involved looking at nearly 4,500 entries in the Falcon database and correcting in some way shape or form almost everything. The exception was aircraft as they seemed acceptable.
Some examples: the maverick's (AP type) kill values for various types of tanks was very much the same. Bridges and buildings were too easily destroyed by some weapons.
In SP3, with the same single CBU-87 you get the same amount of T90/M1 tanks destroyed as compared with a T55s in same group pattern. This seems odd as the T90/M1 tanks have the best armour. In SP4, a single CBU-87 will not even take out the T90/M1 and with others like T72/80 there will be fewer destroyed compared with T55 tanks. Damage is scalable, as in RL. Now CBU-58s are best for foot or wheeled targets. You get more foot/wheeled kills per CBU if you use the correct ones compared with SP3. Before in SP3 there wasn't good scaling from foot to tank because of a hit-point bug.
New damage modelling for CBUs and Mavericks
T90s harder to kill
Tracer fire has also been altered. No longer is it so disproportionately lethal for aircraft at lower altitudes. FLAK remains the same though, so be careful.
Not everything can be fixed. Problems still exist: for example the infamous exaggerated Burst Altitude setting for CBUs remains, although it has been somewhat mitigated with data edits. To resolve this completely requires an edit to the executable.
Work wasn't confined to air-to-ground weapons. Missiles required attention too.
"Bird", a former Eagle pilot who has played a leading role in F4UT in testing and developing this aspect of the simulation, explained what had to be done.
"My general observation on air-to-air missile performance is that Displayed Rmax and Rmin are generally inaccurate with missiles typically scoring hits well outside both values.
"My goal was to make the values displayed in the cockpit accurate ...ie: a missile launched outside Displayed Rmax and Rmin should miss. A missile launched outside Displayed Rne should miss if the target makes timely defense maneuvers. Whether the Displayed Rmax, Rmin, or Rne for a particular missile at a particular condition is accurate is outside the scope of my concern. I take any discrepancies as the 'fog of intel', but the missiles should perform reasonably close to the displayed range envelope."
To correct the Rmax problem, Bird adjusted the drag and flight time to limit kinematic range. This means that missiles are now much less likely to chase down aircraft that perform timely beams and dragging manouvres.
For the Rmin problem, guidance delay was altered to represent both the arming and ballistic delay typical of air to air missiles. What you will notice with SP4 is that missiles are much less likely to be able to track targets going through high-G turns inside of Rmin.
Another touch was also to reduce the Pk value of the missile. This adds an element of doubt through launch...guide...fuse and the kill process.
Corrected range values for missiles
Bird: "The results observed have been satisfactory to me. Unlike the past where I oftened looked at the ACMI and said: `There is no way that missile could have got to that target.' -- I now find myself saying: `Well, the target did beam and then dragged with good speed ... Yeah, that should be a miss.'"
My thanks to "Bird" and Ed Keifer for their help in preparing this article.
