Ok, this is the way it would be supposed to work.
A Semi active homing missile needs CWI from the FC radar to be guided to the target. The reflection of the CWI on the target will come back to the nose of the missile.
So first thing (and I am talking about the OHP guided system here and not a Spy radar associated with it - so no AEGIS system that will give a PIP - Point of intercept - and then radiate only on the terminal phase of the missile) is that the ship needs to track the seaskimming missile to handover it to the FC Radar. Without this you will be very lucky to have your FC to have a lock on it since the beam is very narrow. For a sea skimming the best radar is the surface search since the missile is very low above the water. That is why without radar (air or surface) you should not be able to lock on anything. In the game, you can have a lock (fire available) on a link track but good chance that it will miss or have some weird behavior. Even with the Air radar because the update of the track is less than the search one since the rotation of the antenna and the resolution is a lot less than a surface or an air-surface search radar, it would not be as good.
Once you have hooked a sea skimmer at fairly close range (inside 18NM), you should have a good track since it should have been handover to the surface search radar. Then the CWI should be right on the target.
As per the North Atlantic Convoy scenario, we are faced with a very very fast missile coming at us. In real life the only thing why this system would be able to deal with that threat (and in a very limited way) is because this AS-4 Kitchen is a high diver missile, so you see it from a very long distance. The Aircraft would not be able to fire it from 4000ft like in this scenario. In the game, the AS-4 is going right away to the waves top which is wrong and that is why once you detect it, it is mainly already too late.
That is explaining the weird behavior of the SM-2 (I think) for this. Why it is doing a semi-circle going in the opposite side before coming back, is the fact that the very small amount of time the Fire control solution has, makes it thing that the threat is coming so fast that by the time it's launch, it thinks that it will be passed (dead reckoning).
I am pretty sure that this weird behavior is not happening against a subsonic sea skimmer in the game (not that I remember of anyway), because the system has time to calculate.
And guess what, in real life a STIR FC against supersonic sea skimmer will have a really hard time (again I am not talking about AEGIS, which I can talk for a very long time).
But yes the game might have some little bugs as well.
If the persons who are creating scenario thinks about all those things, then the scenario will be realistic (until such time flight profile of the AS-4 willl be fix, or at least having the backfire firing from 10 000 ft minimum).
As of now for this scenario and using 1.03B and 3.0, as soon as you detect the EW of the AS-4, have a lot of chaff (and I mean chaff) away at short regular interval and aim for the last missile of the stream for the SM-2 so that the FC as a better calculation. It works very often because I did a lot of testing......
Hope this help
My 5 cents
Mau
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