Anyone else notice the Hornet’s HARMs are almost useless now? They miss emitting targets half the time.
Yet on the Viper they work great?
yep I wondered where they went. Neither hit during this flight. I thought it was because I used SP mode. I’ll try again in TOO
I’ve always felt that way… does the HTS ranging make a big difference to how the missile manages its energy?
I can’t speak to real life, but in the sim the main difference is if you’re launching at extreme ranges you’re more likely to get to the target without falling into the dirt with HTS.
When I’m firing at something that’s 15 nm away while I’m at angels 20, though, that’s not a concern.
I’ve seen two prevalent “failure modes”:
One: HARM goes long. I fire at a target, the HARM lands about 1 mile past where the target is. Not to left, not to right, not short, not “general area”, specifically sails over the target as if the pitch down wasn’t quite enough. Yet fire 4 at the same target and you may see all 4 HARMs land within about 10 ft of each other at that same 1 mile past where-no-one-is-or-has-been-before spot.
Two: HARM has midlife crisis and decides it would rather be an airliner. It will not only not fly down, it will climb and then fly at a flat attitude, losing alt only when energy is depleted, then maintain same level attitude as it eventually belly flops into the dirt. It may or many not actually fly on the target bearing, that’s 50/50.
I will take off from Oman and off Khasab fire at a SAM at Qeshm Island and the missile flies over the island, over the water, back over the mainland and appears to pine for the mountains (no fjords on this map) and try to get there before it loses E and splats miles inland from shore.
This is recent behavior. A year ago the HARM worked as you’d expect, maybe missing an emitter that turned off by just getting nearby or falling short if you fired outside height/distance/speed parameters, but never this.
I haven’t flown the Viper since the first time I noticed the Hornet doing this, I have to swap my throttle grip from Hornet to Viper to do that so I tend to do it once every few months only, but I’ve heard anecdotally from others the Viper hits spot on still. I do NOT know if they tried HARMs w/o HTS to know if the issue is HARM-only guidance or if it’s the Hornet specifically.
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I’m familiar with behaviour #1, they’ve been doing this for at least six months I think? I’ve never tried ripple firing them though - I just assumed the radar operator switched the set off - it’s a bit disappointing, this sounds exactly like a bug rather than something intended 
Now I have to jump in the Viper again and see if it works how it should… maybe tomorrow I’ll have a chance?
Totally spitballing here but I imagine the system in the Hornet doesn’t allow for as much accuracy as the system in the Viper. I haven’t tested myself, but I would be willing to bet using the Viper’s PB or EOM mode would yield essentially the same results as the Hornet’s PB mode now that DCS SAMs are “smarter” and shut themselves off when Magnum’d. Once shut off, the HARM only has the waypoint and last known INS/GPS location of the emitter it was homing on, which isn’t going to be very precise if at distance or a brief emission.
With the Viper’s HTS pod there’s a confidence rating in the top right of the display when you hover the cusor over an emitter. If you’ve got the TPOD on you can lock the emitters and see how close or far the TPOD gets to the actual emitter as the confidence rating changes. I’ve had misses when the confidence rating is low; most of the time I’m shooting when confidence rating is high, and baiting them to track and/or fire on me until my HARM impacts.
To me this makes sense. The HTS adds more precision to the HARM system, and the USAF idea is closer to DEAD than SEAD. Why leave the emitters up for someone to deal with later when we can just destroy them today? Meanwhile the USN doctrine is to suppress for however long the strike window is, plus they’ve got aid from Growlers jamming the crap out of the radars too.
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Found it! Not sure what made me think of this: My First love. 1985 was a great year 
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Did 4 harm shots in the Hornet last night at various speeds and altitudes. Two in SP, two in TOO and all hit their targets dead on. Well one hit the revetment that the radar was parked in but it still damaged it enough to take it out of service. Plus that’s the point of revetments lol
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The ones I was shooting at were mobile/tracked/wheeled.
Maybe the error is HARM behavior after losing the emitter. It NEVER heads to where the emitter was, it always picks some other random location. It’s like the one MAJOR thing that was to differentiate the HARM from the earlier Shrike is quite simply NOT modeled in DCS:
Remembering where the emitter was when it shut off and continuing to that point.
I don’t expect it to hit a target that shuts off its radar and drives away. I DO expect it to hit within a football field of where it HAD been parked, though. If a fixed site shuts down, it should hit close enough to hurt anyone standing around the site even if it does not impact the radar directly.
The way the HARM appears to act is instead more like the way SARH AAMs behave in DCS–which is the way I believed the Shrike worked and was the major impetus to replace it with the HARM in the first place!
However…why would it matter if the HTS told it where to go or its own seeker? When I’ve got a target diamond at the lower edge of my HUD showing where the seeker is looking, because it’s not out at max range, it’s CLOSE, within 20 miles, wouldn’t you think the HARM is going to fly to that point even if the emitter shuts down anytime between launch and impact? Shouldn’t it be at least as accurate as a dumb bomb dropped using CCIP? Why does it “remember” better if the HTS told it vs its own internal seeker?
The HTS is for the long range SAMs that you need to shoot at as far away as you can, like a 3/5/10. If it’s a 6 or 8 or 11, I shouldn’t have to worry.
Again, it’s not that it’s merely less accurate–it’s that it’s wildly inaccurate after emitter shutdown when fired by a Hornet but behaves as expected if the HTS Viper fired.
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I believe the current HARM in DCS is the AGM-88C, which doesn’t have GPS/INS. That showed up in the D version, which never saw series production and replaced with the upgraded E version.
A more advanced HARM update program is known as AGM-88E AARGM (Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile). The AARGM is a further improved Block VI missile, which uses not only the AGM-88D’s GPS but also an MMV (Millimeter Wave) active radar seeker for terminal homing in its new WGU-48/B guidance section.
IIRC the early HARM’s ability to engage emitters that shutdown, was basically using the gyros current range and bearing correction and hoping for the best. If the emitter shut down shortly before impact that might be good enough, else it wasn’t going to get you close enough to do anything. The fragmentation warhead in the C was also a response to the large CEP’s that could result from the emitter shutting down.
Unless the HTS does a few more things than I thought it could (completely possible), when the emitter shuts off the C model HARM should be equally inaccurate regardless of the plane firing it. Now if we move up the E model HARM that’s an entirely different story and the HTS should provide a massive increase in lethality.
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That’s probably the main issue. HARM isn’t particularly suited for those. Even if they do hit, in real life the frag would damage the radar dish to put it out of action, but in DCS these are basically APCs so a HARM hit doesn’t do a whole lot.
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Well when they impact a mile or more away, the warhead is irrelevant unless it’s in the 10kt range. Moving 200 yards shouldn’t result in a mile miss.
I know the C doesn’t have GPS or a mmw seeker, but it does have INS, yet it acts like if the emitter shuts off the INS does too. It actively changes course, albeit not always by much, guaranteeing a miss.
Imagine an LGB dropped with good accuracy in AUTO mode suddenly missing by a mile when the lasing is cut off mid-flight, while a dumb bomb dropped at the exact same time hits within 50 ft…it makes no sense.
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Been flying DCS for over a decade and this one slipped right by me. I’m a mouse-cripple I suppose.
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I switched over to that system about a month ago because I got fed up with VoiceAttack/VAICOM. Love it.
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@jross I remember ordering F15 Strike Eagle for the Atari 1200 in '85. Everyday for two weeks my first act after getting home from school was checking the mail. IIRC it was on cassette and took about 45 minutes to load. (Much like MSFS 2024 now that I think about it! 
)
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Nice. Need to give that a try. I suppose that depending on the aircraft, you also need to bind transmit buttons for Com1, Com2, ICS, and generic coms "\ ", so that you are working with the correct radio.
Not familiar with simple comms. My setup is: Ctrl + 1/2 = transmit COMM1/2 and 2 throttle buttons to do the same (Up/down = VAICOM transmit, Fwd/Aft = COMM1/2).
I know that VAICOMM doesn’t work for many people but for me it is much faster than keyboard/mouse or the above mentioned technique (still requires me to look at the menu, in my case). I don’t have to look at anything, just say it. No time to do deep research on this but it appears that short, concise, phrases work best (so I try to keep them that way).
Now, managing VACOMM is the annoying part; keeping the menu commands up to date. Pretty sure there’s an easier way I just need to sit down and find it.
VAICOMM for me works about like voice recog. does anywhere else; my phone is pretty good. Wife’s fancy car, not so much - it’s next to useless.
And we had to play it - in the SNOW! While walking up hill, both ways!, to get get to the PC
But seriously, I feel almost spoiled now, graphically anyway, such that some non-graphics related things today really stand out (in a bad way)…
spending a few days aligning the CAS process (some inconsistencies) and… the animations of the ground ‘infantry’…really?, in 2025?
However, my pilot body animations are ‘cinematic’ (but I don’t do much 3rd person flying so it’s lost on me). Seeing Jester pick his nose is kinda cool though.
“graphics sell games” - somebody, 30 years ago.
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Was he just running around in afterburner the whole time and running out of gas on each mission? 
Rookie.
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Can’t say for simple coms, but for the rest it works with your standard radio PTTs. All you need to add is the up/down/select/back buttons for menu navigation and selection. When the comms menu is open those keybinds are prioritized over other bound functions so you don’t need modifiers or extra available buttons. On the Hog, for example, I have the four radio switches where they should be (radio hat on the throttle side) then have menu selection on the coolie switch, which still functions as the normal coolie switch when the radio menu isn’t open.
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