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Originally Posted by PeriscopeDepth
The MiG-25 was the fastest combat aircraft on the planet still in service until the F-22 IIRC. It dragged the missiles in burner, which is REALLY effective. Maneuverability had nothing to do with it, it's pure kinematics. It's how I beat most ARH shots in the modern flight sims I play. 
I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree.
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If you like your sims, fire up Falcon AF and put an F-14 against the MiG-25. It will show you what I am talking about. The MiG is not getting away from the missile, but can only avoid it. Make sure they are Ace pilots.
Now put an F-14 on you in the F-16 and test. Think putting the AIM-54 on the perpendicular and draw a half cone in the sky prior to impact. The AIM-54 will always miss. Try it with an AIM-120 and the story changes - you are dead meat! :p The only problem is, if the F-14 is at medium range or less, he always follows up with another shot, so don't find yourself low and slow - make use of that afterburner and prepare for missile #2! If the F-14 clocks in to 10 to 15 nm, he may let loose an Aim-120 - make sure you send back the favor becuase if you don't, he will guide that thing in to the point where the missile goes terminal for little chance of escape. If your missile is inbound to him, he has to break his lock to avoid it, giving you a margin of error to get away from the inbound AIM-120.
Basically, I fear the Pheonix for its ability to reach our and touch you and it will still have its kenetic energy from extreme ranges because that thing has a controlled burn on the rocket motor. This means you can be at 40 nm from the launch point and the missile will still have 100% kenetic energy and a burning rocket motor to home in on you even at 75+ nm. Using a a dragging method on the Aim-54 is not going to help you much if the missile still has a burn on the motor - it is smaller and lighter and has more thrust to weight than your aircraft so nothing you can do is going to stop it.
However, forcing its hand through exploiting its desire for lead pursuit is how it is defeated. A bomber has no chance since it is slow and lumbering, but any fighter aircraft has a very high likelyhood of avoidance through making this very heavy missile (Its archilles heel) into radical vector changes. Giving it a nice narrow line to follow (The result of parallel flight paths) is the best method for getting killed by this thing since not even a MiG-25 can outrun it - it would be out of fuel practically before doing so, and the engines in that thing burn up at Mach 2.8.
-S
PS. The F-22 is not as fast as an F-15 from what I have read. It can out-accelerate an F-15 when the F-15 is in full afterburner and the F-22 is still in military power (imagine that?), but at around Mach 2, some sort of shockwave forms around the inlets of that thing (Due to the stealth design of the inlets) preventing it from going any faster. Then again, it is classified, so this may not be true. This still makes the MiG-25 the fastest combat aircraft that is known in operation (though I bet Aurora or Switchblade is much faster). Being this fast is not a big deal though because an F-15 can not go quite as fast, but it has many times the range at speed as the Russians found out - The MiG-25 can go a little faster, but runs out of gas very quickly - this allowed the F-15's in Egypt to catch up and still shoot them down after the fact - as shown in Egypt. The F-15 stopped all MiG-25 recon flights over the deserts and effectively put the MiG-25 out of action as a useful recon plane.
PPS. The MiG-25 was a waste of Russian expenditure anyway. It was designed as an interceptor to the XB-70 - soemthign the US never made. That is why it was so short ranged - it was designed to shoot down only one plane that the US never ended up making and then it would return to base immediately.