That’s as a good way of summing it up as I have ever seen.
That kind of deception jamming is as much for the radar locking you up as the missile.
Many times you are trying to break lock on the FC radar before missilelanch.
i.e. with a range gate pull off technique, your jammer “captures” the FC’s by transmitting an over-powered signals its own that the FC radar system “thinks” is the return signal, and then begins to alter the jamming signal so that the range to target is shifted from the target’s actual range from the FC radar. Eventually the jammer just “drops the whole charade”, leaving the FC radar with out a lock.
The FC radar operator must reacquire the target again and lock it up, the jammer captures the signal again…and around and around we go. The idea being not to let the FC radar get to missile launch.
Of corse the FC radar operator can try shifting frequencies, increasing power, etc. So it is not a sure thing by any means…but it helps.
How to mimic, vice simulate, in DCS? Well, it really only needs to be mimicked for human players. For the computer, a look up table that gives a % prob of break lock and feeds it into the FC or missile tracking numbers should work. For a human player, they would need to see range to target suddenly change before a break lock. I’d imagine that is fairly easy to mimic.
TK actually had Deception jamming in SF - most of the early Navy Jets had internal Deception types and they were not as effective as the noise jammers initially.
Even just Vietnam is very complicated with the war between EW and the SAM radar operators and changed a lot over just that period
That is pretty much how it looks on a MiG-29 or Su-27 radar display when you are getting jammed. You see multiple false contacts quickly jumping across different ranges on the same bearing. Pretty convincing smoke & mirrors if you ask me
Continuing on the subject, I’ve heard that the Viggen in DCS can actually act as a jammer aircraft on top of the ELINT capabilities. Can any one confirm this? I don’t play with it enough to know how it all works, but I’ve seen some people claim they’ve used it to jam enemy SAM sites and whatnot.
I think it may be more of an issue of getting detailed information than of programming- signal processing modeling isn’t that difficult to do even in MATLAB or Simulink, provided you know what you need to build at the system level. Granted, calculating transmitter and receiver size and direction may take a bit more horsepower, but it’s something we’re already doing. So there’s that.
You might be able to guess a bit based on published papers and research, but yeah, I wouldn’t see a lot of info being that readily available. But then again, I’ve never really looked either…
Oh man, I’ve been wanting to jump into an ECM topic for awhile now. Like everyone, I’d like to see a more robust modeling of some sort of EW. But here’s my big thing. The effectiveness of jamming, be it barrage or especially deception, can change dramatically over the lifetime of a platform. In addition, even those with top super duper extra secret clearances who work in the field don’t really know how well their ECM will do until after the missiles start flying. Therefore:
Any improved implementation of ECM in DCS should allow for a mission designer configurable effectiveness table. Preferably one that allows everything to be broken down by platform vs platform. I see it as a matrix of sensor vs jammer, with everything rated on a scale of 0-9, where a 5 represents a default level of performance, a 0 means the jammer is totally ineffective, and a 9 means the sensor is useless.
Even with access to classified sources, ECM performance isn’t a fixed thing. Modern ECM is designed to be configurable so it can be adapted to meet new threats. Sensor operators can gain experience in burning through / working around jamming. Deception jamming can be 99% effective one day, and then worthless the next after sensors are upgraded.
More importantly assumptions can be completely wrong. It’s not technically EW, but the case of AIM-9P, specifically designed to reject flares, turned out to absolutely love Soviet flares.
Finally, locked in ECM performance might just not be fun. I get the feeling that the growler/sparkvark offered some pretty effective protection to strike packages, but DCS is less interesting (to me at least) if there aren’t missiles to dodge.
Anyway, that’s my thing. Yes, please model ECM in a more robust manner, but let us tinker with it to model incorrect assumptions, platform evolution, and just to make scenarios more interesting.
Typically you can only test these things against the countermeasures you have access to ha.
I don’t know why classified keep coming up - classified or information classified not for the public domain is irrelevant for a public domain game. IMO All you need is behaviour based on what is public-ally available because that is reality for the majority. Then mix in with a few educated guesses.
Remembered this old interview with Ezlead flying EA-6s - specifically regarding Track on Jam technique that SA-2 operators had developed.
I can’t remember if it was August or September 1972. We were briefed that intel thought that the Soviets had given the North Vietnamese the home on jam capability for the Fansong radar(the SA-2 SAM radar). We(my ECMO and I) were on station off of Haiphong. We were about half way through the mission when my ECMO sat back in his seat and said "It’s home-on-jam!" He hit all 5 kill switches for the jammers. I rolled the airplane over on its back and we picked up the SAM visually. I pulled back on the stick into a split-s manuever. We went right at the missile until we were about 1000 ft away from it. We then did a high "G" barrel roll around the missile and it went on past us. IT zig-zagged looking for a new target for about 3 seconds and then exploded. In the meantime I continued barrel rolling. When I looked out the front window all I could see was the Gulf of Tonkin. I leveled the wings and did a 6 "G" pull-out. We leveled off at about 3000 feet(we started at 25000 ft) heading south. Mike(my CWO-4 ECMO) said "Well, let’s get back up there". I said "To hell with this,we’re going home!" Mike said "You know ,we have to finish the mission." After I thought about it I said "Yeah,you’re right". I turned back north and climbed back up to 25000. We got shot at 2 more times that same mission. I got pretty good at barrel rolling that heavily loaded EA-6 that day!
The next day the Squadron CO called us both into his office. We were wondering what we had done wrong now. He told us that he had gotten a message from the CAG(the strike leader) from the previous days mission. The CAG said that he had watched the whole thing from his BARCAP position. He said that when we climbed back up the first time,he thought we were pretty gutsy. When we climbed back up the second time,we were nuts. When we climbed back up the third time,he thought our CO should have us committed to the looney bin. Anyway,he put us in for a DFC. Our CO said he highly concurred and forwarded the recommendation with his approval. Long story short we got the DFC. The ECMO’s got together and came up with a procedure on the ECM gear so that you didn’t have to split-s to get away from a SAM again. Something about sliding ---------- and --------- while still maintaining the jam. (It still might be secret.)
If I was still working in the gaming industry, I’d be sending you a job offer right now.
This is the distinction people fail to get with game development. Yes DCS by title is a “simulator,” but it is first off a commercial entertainment product. Realistic falls on its face, if people don’t don’t believe that something works that way. As a dev you can run yourself into the ground trying to make things realistic, that the player has no clue on, and does not care about.
ED is skating on this line… They will not model something classified. They strive to be realistic and if they determine realism compromises security, they won’t model it.
Yet their world is so realistic.
Honestly, I can’t fault them on this. The stupidness of their world in no way compromises national (any nation) security. At the same time, their glorious cockpits give them street cred for realism. Let them use the excuse then…
…to do whatever the hell their passion takes them.
As one of those people in my former life, I can say that, as a generality, I think you are absolutely correct.
That is an interesting idea…and something that ED doesn’t necessarily have to do…users could do the “research” by flying a set of specific profiles then adding to a database that would grow and become refined over time. Just a thought.
I agree 100% that at the end of the day, it is irrelevant. However, the reason that “classified” keeps coming up is how quickly, you go from open source –as you said, public domain–to classified information when you start digging into EW.
My opinion is the same as yours…do some open source research, add in an educated guess or two, work out some simple properties, and make some cool visual effects on the users’ radar screens to mimic what they might see in the RW.
Yes it is! And I applaud them for their policy.
For me…I know what a tree should look like…how it should look in the different seasons…how the bark is different from the leaves…how an evergreen is different from a deciduous tree…and so on for buildings, airplanes, ships, etc. What I see is the primary attribute that effects my perception of DCS’s realism.
I have no idea how a range gate pull off jammer looks different from a velocity gate jammer on my F-15 or Mig-29 radar screen. @schurem’s aforementioned “multiple false contacts quickly jumping across different ranges on the same bearing.” sounds about right for a RGPO jammer…and a VGPO? To me, and I would suspect the majority of Mudspikians who haven’t flown one of those aircraft, it doesn’t matter because we wouldn’t know the difference. In other words, DCS World would be no less realistic.
It does…and I’ve had it activated a couple of times but I wasn’t really looking for its effectiveness.
I would fly a couple of missions to test it out for you, but @Troll has sent me back to basic Viggen flying school …something about three landing in a row without destroying the aircraft before I can get out of the traffic pattern.
I’ve got the Mig-29 ad Su-33 now…will have to give it a try.