Thanks ! What was the reason that the F-16 was not given any BVR weapons other than the ADF variant that served with USAF.I mean esp since even the Mig-23MF/ML had BVR weapons
I know its off-topic I apologize
The F-16 design was a kneejerk reaction to US experience in Vietnam with big heavy F-4s entering combat against small agile gun armed MiG-21/-19/17/15 etc.
The F-16 was designed from the basis of the MiG-21 with a margin of superiority... so 30% better this and 30% better that... etc.
It was supposed to be a sophisticated but cheap multirole fighter that was being developed against aircraft like the big heavy expensive single role F-15C fighter.
At one point it was expected the F-16 would be cannon armed and have only wing tip Sidewinders as armament as a cheap light simple fighter.
Eventually they saw sense and it became a more capable multirole fighter bomber with a multi mode radar.
In USAF use it would always operate with the F-15 and BVR missiles had a fairly poor record anyway.
The F-16 was born to be a cheap light dogfighter to take control of the air back from small agile MiGs.
The MiG-23 was a bomber interceptor that used larger missiles to bring down heavier aircraft...
It was thought a waste of money to integrate AIM-7 into the F-16 when AMRAAM was being developed. Also, F-16 was originally designed as a sort of "hi-tech" MiG-21: fast, agile, focused only on air combat, mainly WVR.
AMRAAM was not seriously pursued until after Desert Storm and the access they got after the end of the cold war to MiG-29s and R-73s and they realised how much shit they would be in if war had started. Until then BVR missiles were just paid lip service in NATO but after that it was the focus because the no escape zone of the Archer meant even if the western aircraft got a shot off it was probably already dead and in terms of numbers NATO could not afford to trade plane for plane.
Archer of today has a quite outdated seeker, even in its M variant.
Archer is not the best available but is still easily able to bring down enemy aircraft in large numbers... against most targets it is more than enough.
Archer of mid 80s had an average seeker for the time, sensitivity wise and decoy discrimination wise. It was really first generation of all aspect seekers for soviets then. Of course, its off boresight acquisition envelope was best there it at the time. Using AIM9 production rate during the 80s for comparison, archer might have been available in decent numbers, at least a few thousand if not almost ten thousand by end of Cold war. But then again, aim9 was carried by majority of NATO planes. Archer on the other hand was enabled for carriage by less than 2000 WP planes (15%). So in that regard maybe "a few thousand" is a more realistic figure.
Where is this opinion coming from? The best western missile of the period was the Lima and Mike model Sidewinders and the Archer had a seeker every bit as good and those missiles, so I don't know what you mean by average.
they didn't need millions of missiles... NATO didn't have thousands of aircraft they could afford to lose.
During tests in Germany after the cold war no western plane could get near a MiG-29 so would be in an even worse position with Flankers... if the cold war had continued into the 1990s previous generation fighters would have received upgrades to get R-73, but NATO would have still believed it had the training and the best weapons for the job...
So that's some 2000 WP fighters using archer vs some 6000 NATO fighters using aim9L/M at the end of Cold war.
2000 fighters that 6000 fighters couldn't get near without being shot down is a massacre waiting to happen.
Without air cover NATO forces are much less formidable.
HMS was a great addition, but to use it one really needs to be a few km away. Situational awareness, radars and BVR combat would have taken its toll on archer wielding planes before they'd get to such short distances. Even if kill ratio would favor HMS+archer combo in 1 on 1 situations, in reality it'd really be 12 vs 12 before combat, 10 vs 8 after BVR phase and then there's numerical superiority to compensate for lack of HMS and maneuverability.
Hahahaha... you do realise that R-27 is every bit as good as Sparrow and that the E models the Flankers carried outranged the Sparrow by quite a margin.
Most importantly the Soviets had the passive radar model of the R-27 in service in the 1980s... so those F-15s marking targets for their Sparrows to fly towards and hit would be easy targets for passive radar homing R-27s... they wouldn't even know what hit them... they would just keep getting hit by R-27s without warning while guiding their shorter range slower Sparrows. So in reality any F-15 that tries to engage Soviet aircraft at BVR will likely be shot down... and once inside WVR the rest would likely be shot down... it would be a massacre...
And r-27t did not initially have the same seeker as initial r-73. They had an older seeker and were upgraded to r-73m class seeker well after the cold war, once r73m tech was ready for production.
No, they initially had the 36T seeker in the R-27T, but the extended E model has the same seeker as the R-73... the MK-80. Neither are IIR, but are good enough to end the flight of any NATO aircraft of the time.
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