I discovered another issue with American Aegis and SM-2's. The new issue is about SM-2's intercept altitude and climb rate. This problem is especially acute against high flying supersonic antiship missile such as SS-N-19 shipwreck. Due to the primitive missile logic design in Dangerous Waters.
Missiles would only hit a target when they are co-altitude with the target. This is what I observe:
1. Shipwreck's profile: vertical launch up to about 10k then level off. When closing to about less than 10 nmi, it would gradually descent and dump tons of CM's.
2. SM-2's intercept profile against shipwreck: horizontal launch(even though VLS is supposed to be vertical launch), cruise at 2-3 mache and gradually climb to 5-7k ft. At the last moment of interception, it would do a high angle pitch-up to catch shipwreck at higher altitude.
3. Russian SAM's fare far better because the initial vertical launch put them at much higher altitude and they are 2-3 times faster than SM-2. This can put them into co-altitude with target much quicker thus having much higher chance of success.
This problem is especially obvious at long range intercepts. At long range, SM-2's success rate against shipwreck (before shipwreck's CM phase)is below 15%. Russian's SA-N-6 grumbly's chance about 40%. I have created 2 identical scenario (one with a US task group and the other with a Russian ships). The Russian group even has one less escort warship. The difference is so obvious. If you want to test it out, I can somehow upload the scenarios.
If you compare the success rate of sm-2 between vanilla 1.04 and RA1.48, I believe the key that makes them so different is the altitude gained from initial vertical launch. In 1.04, all US VLS ships can do vertical launch but in RA, US ships cannot do vertical launch any more.
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