I've found you can dodge them rather well as long as you react quickly and stay out of their zone of no escape and exploit the terrain.

I try to keep a distance of at least 1 kilometer around any area where I suspect AA Launchers, either in altitude or horizontal distance. Another important thing is to frequently switch positions and don't fly over your target.

What InstaGoat said.

And the flares (not chaff) do work, you just have to use them at the right time.

Helicopters really are this vulnerable. Reconnaissance, teamwork, and common sense are your best defense against SAMs. If all else fails, stay low and use your flares.

Really? I had to keep myself from loosing it at work. Im dying laughing on the inside. Are SAM sites and AA's nerfed in real life? NO. Is staying still and deploying flares a good idea in real life? NO. What this is, is you just need to LEARN to FLY. Pay attention to your radar, and your environment (terrain). You don't want to expose yourself to enemy AA, unless your a gunship, and even than still, its dangerous if your not good at flying. Another thing, you have to be moving to deter an incoming missile. Ounce a missile is fired, try defeating it by getting out of a straight path that is easy for a fast moving missile to follow. Lastly, since dodging a missile is not always a guarantee, learn to auto rotate. There's not one time i died in A3 because my engine on my heli got disabled. In other words, Learn To Fly.

Try evading also.. just deploying flares will not divert the missile, it will disable the guidance and just continue it's pattern unguided and if your route hasn't changed it will hit you

Flares are well working and AA missiles are great. The only problem ATM is the range of Aircraft is below the range of AA so AA are a real danger.

Anzu's War Games server seems to be modified to increase the effectiveness and range of both enemy shoulder anti-aircraft weapons and AAA/Tigris missiles.

Go any closer than 1.5 kilometers, and you're sure be be shredded by 20+ AA missiles. I must admit, it is likely a little more realistic, as previously they were merrily considered mosquito bites. But the side effect of Anzu's increased AA effects, has pretty much disabled any effective use of chaff/flare countermeasures!

The stable vanilla game likely does one thing correctly, static tripod implacements of AA can easily ignore chaff/flare countermeasures and strike the target, while shoulder/portable AA missiles have difficulty targeting around chaff/flare countermeasures. This is likely due to the static tripod implacements allowing more propulsion within a projectile versus something requiring to be more portable and lighter in weight.

The origins of this bug I think are related to Anzus specific game modifications, as it seems he desires more reality, while sometimes forgetting about playability, or the lack of sensation while looking through a 1 foot by 2 foot window or display. When tinkering with code, it's easy to sometime sway to far in one direction, but for the most part I enjoy Anzus's server, until they start ordering civilians around like puppets. ;-)

Tip for the reporter:

1. Fly below radar and go slower when approaching a new landing zone. (Flying low & slow, allows also for effective safe landings incase the aircraft does take damage!)

2. Never fly directly over the area of operations, unless all AAA/Tigris are deactivated. (Pilots have a death wish if they choose to ignore this, but still might be able to fly low-and-slow on the out skirts of the area of operations, prior to Tigris being disabled.)

3. Once Tigris are down, it's likely flying very fast at very low altitude runs over the area of operations is possible and almost safe, as shoulder fired missiles cannot view enough of the sky when you're flying low for effective targeting.

Yup. Currently on ANZU's servers, chaff & flare are pretty much useless or futile!

Count your chickens too, as typically when hit by AA missiles the aircraft has a tendency to explode in air due to the wings and body containing jet fuel, with (I'm guessing) 99% fatality of pilot and/or passengers! The fact that every anti-missile strike doesn't immediately or subsequently cause the aircraft to either explode or immediately break apart within ARMA 3, is completely amazing! Doing so, would further encourage pilots & players to strap-on parachutes while being transported! (But also, one should be able to strap their backpacks below them, if they had to eject.)

It kinda gives me the question of the Igla. The Igla effectively hit targets UP TO 8 KILO's AWAY! So why is it the Titan can barley do that? Whats the max lock range, 800 meters? I mean, its kinda sad. I remember in Arma 2 i took out a Hind in wasteland 7.4 Kilometers away. It seems they downgraded AA capabilities in A3.

Although I tend to agree a kilometer (or half mile) range, guessing playability as the reasoning.

A safe pilot would land 9-10 kilometers away with a more realistic AA targeting range, or one to two kilometers outside the range of threat.

Just what I want after coming home from a realistic day's hard work; only to simulate within a game walking 9-10 kilometers, only to be simulated shot dead and having to perform the same redundant 9-10 kilometer (or 5 minute) walk all over again!

And this is only with shoulder or portable fired missiles and not including the five minute simulated flight! ;-)

I'm a safe pilot, i usually land 1 click (MAX) away from the hot zone. Why? Walking 10 clicks is a bitch. Also, it involves me flying more tactically, and using my skills, which, is fun to show off to those helpless corpses in the back until they are able to go the rest of the way on their own. So, to my standards, AA are not OP, flying just takes a set of skills to ENSURE survivability. That is all.

helicopters are fragile machines you know

That too ^

The "10 clicks" (or 10 Kilometers) we're talking about, is the approximate realistic range of shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, as to why we're discussing having to land up to ~10K away.

Currently, AA are not fired unless pilots are flying within 1K of the area of operations, making it possible to fly in at around 1K from the area of operations.

I love realistic simulations, but if it were anymore realistic, the game would then become a second job or second life. And most likely would risk quitting their jobs just to play ARMA.

But I would really love to see, the risky pilots flying and their aircraft to explode and disintegrate in air! And if the aircraft does disintegrate from around the pilots & passengers, usually the pilot & passengers are still alive and can deploy a parachute.

Realism sucks butt. It's just a model that is inherently complex and that you can use to model your complexity from.

Complexity is fun. Realism is not. The latter simply makes things easier to relate to in some circumstances.

@DarkSideSixOfficial:

You can't just implement real life parameters in Arma 3. In real life, gun fire can be heard several kilometers away and e.g. the air-to-air missiles AMRAAM have a range of up to 120 kilometers. 155mm Artillery up to 70 kilometers, etc.

I coincide with Goblinbutt! Think it would be better stated as,

"Realism sucks butt. It's just a model that is inherently overly complex, and one that you can use to model your own deranged complex reality from. ... Complexity is fun. Realism is not. The latter simply makes things easier to relate to in some circumstances."

When living like all the other hard workers within society, working 5 days & 40 hours a day, coming home to play a game demanding you to walk another four hours before having any fun would likely equate to hell or strong meditation.

Had you guys been real Army folks (or girls ;-), you'd realize the five free minutes fun minutes (AKA R & R) you get from working your 7 day a week 360 days a year job, were probably better spent elsewhere! ;-) (And very likely, we would have also seen open or active bugs or feature requests asking for BIS/ARMA to display their Bibles, regardless of religion, while walking these four miles!)

I like realism. However I hate the above scenario if you're a more mature person working a day job. The likely best solution, equate the physics proportionally to average time spent by average player whom works within a productive lifestyle! As long as the equation of physics is realistically proportioned, I (& likely many others) are not going to complain!

"helicopters are fragile machines you know" ... haha, not in A3. I've used 5(!) ATs on this one: http://www.incgamers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/arma3_e32013_screenshot_07-1024x640.jpg

... 5 rockets... with HE heat. Scifi stuff.

@IceBreakr:

Latest version or somewhat earlier? Choppers were extremely resistant to everything but AA missiles when the game was released (e.g. 120mm tank gun). But this is fixed.

And still. HE =/= HEAT.
Or do you mean with "HE head"?
Anyway, I guess you took the RPG HE rockets. These are pretty weak against any kind of armor. Take the usual RPG rockets against any kind of vehicle. The HE are against infantry.
Sure, in RL also HE rockers would mess such a chopper up. But these discrepancies are there because of the "health system". Same issue with the rocket launchers against tanks. These rockets should not be able to completely destroy a modern MBT at all - yet they can, due to the health system.

But I see some very good improvements in the latest Dev versions regarding vehicle armor. Can't wait for these changes coming into the stable branch!

You do know that HE is more effective against air vehicles than sabot rounds, don't you?

Regarding choppers taking a lot of missiles/rockets to destroy: I once shot 2 PCML missiles (150 mm HEAT) at a Kajman and it could still fly. The third one destroyed it, though. So, basically, helicopters are more armored than APCs in the future?

I know, depends on the caliber again, but yea. The weapon effects I explained were meant to be the ones in Arma 3, not RL. As I said, in RL those rockets would mess a chopper up.

And yes, this should get tweaked. I hit a Ghosthawk with a 125mm HE shell from the T100 tank gun (1.14 stable branch) and nothing happened.

Most (if not all) of the vehicles are already available in real life anyway. Some are just newer and less known vehicles. So there should be plenty of data available, so there is pretty much no need for speculation.

While imho many of the aircrafts aro too vulnerable to small arms and .50 cal, many of them can take too much damage from large caliber and missiles as our reports prove.
But it used to be way worse when the game was released, it just needs a little more tweaking.

[In 1.00 any chopper could take several hits from AP/HE 120mm tank gun shells and ridiculous amounts of any kind of 30/40mm autocannon fire.]

Usually when programmers create routines (ie. main & functions), they're just created to exist or to say this can be performed. And not necessarily to be accurate or completely correct (ie. look really pretty), and with C++ can basically assume it's going to be a hog of system resources. ;-)

Hence, you can likely see by the effect of the ARMA 3 Alpha and Beta programs, the aircraft (and vehicles) would have just templates for destruction or templates for interior details, which some would later be removed and replaced later with more something more refined.

I'm still waiting for the glide scope to be implemented on the remainder of the helicopters! (Glide scope was or is available on the Ocra last I knew, and is almost essential for effectively flying the helicopters or aircraft. Also took me a little while to understand how the glide scope worked.)

Maybe effect of several ammo could be adjust to have something more realistic. But you can't tell AA is too effective because you die.

I mean, AA, and all AA missile have several range.

1. is no escape zone. What you do you will die.
2. No effect zone, what you do you will survive.
3. Alternate zone, you are closer and closer , hard manoeuver will be needed to avoid missile trajectory.

But, the two point to work on are : as other reporter said, maybe adjust the effect between all kind of ammo. Secondly it could be the way how flares / jaff are affecting the missile trajectory. I think for this second point we could really improve the game.

Well a note to you all, this was my opinion :D I understand what most of you say and I will keep all of this in mind. But it was my opinion so "DarkSideSixOffical" there is no need to get all stroppy like a two year old, I do know how to fly, and i fly helicopter quite a lot in servers. Id consider myself a "Good" pilot, so i don't need to learn anything buddy ;) i just had a little query with the AA, that's all. Arma 2 was never like this in Arma 3, so i just wanted to know other peoples opinions, not a load of hate and abuse from people like you. Thank you to everyone else :)

@AJ77777: A2 was childsplay and totally unrealistic. Dispensing flares in that game would guarantee that you would live. This is very much unlike real life or some of the more realistic flight sims. Show us your logs in DCS:FCS or Falcon 4.0 or other relevant sims before claiming that you're a great pilot.
I'll have to assume that your lack of experience as a (virtual) combat pilot is the true issue here. That is, unless you can prove that you have the experience to dodge missiles. Most average joes can't dodge missiles at all without using flares. It's quite easy if you know how it's done in real life. In A3 it is still relatively easy. (on unmodified servers)

to dodge a missile successfully you need to place the incoming missile to your aircraft's "3-9 line", so you can force the incoming missile to have maximum drag, while maximizing your movement on the missile's perspective. while traveling on a high speed, place the missile on your direct left or right. wait for the missile to close in to your radar's inner circle. that's when you should start deploying countermeasures.

The FT can be a useful vehicle to bring discrepancies to the attention to the devs, but making a pretty subjective title with "too OP", or "too weak" with multiple exclamation points and a very biased reproduction (flying tank) just makes your expectations look skewed.

If anything the results of a AA missile hit ought to be significantly improved, as they're typically pretty catastrophic for the target upon impact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SPkXcWjUaY

The game pretty much always defaults to auto-rotation.

If you found a problem with countermeasures not working properly, you should think about making a separate ticket for that.

Would be nice to have some minimal damage requiring ejecting from a fixed wing aircraft. From what I recall, quite a few pilots have successfully parachuted to the ground after their aircraft had disintegrated around them from a AA or SAM/AAA hit!

As far as the comments; people need to quit smoking dope, which results in being overly sensitive or paranoia. (Too many girls within Army wanna be forums! ;-)

Ditto concerning L3TUC3's comment concerning the topic not being easily comprehended. A title should be brief and easily descriptive. The title should not contain any abbreviations unless absolutely needed, as it's more appropriate to write the abbreviated word within a paragraph, along side initially defining the abbreviation for any readers whom are not knowledgeable of the abbreviation. (ie. In other words, what looks cool to you might not look cool or very useful to anybody else. ;-)

I was thinking about the fixed wing no need to eject issue
maybe it should catch fire at a far higher health percentage than other vehicles, forcing players to eject (along with an alarm if possible)

arziben: I completely agree. Fixed winged aircraft, as with any aircraft, have an ability to catch fire with a large period of time of possibility for ejecting. I think the developers may have this already stubbed in with the black smoke trails, but with no real timer until the vehicle is completely destroyed. Probably because they haven't calculated the margin at which time the vehicle should be destroyed, or smoke indefinitely? I mean, we are getting into guess work as to probabilities. Currently the vehicle either smokes indefinitely or explodes alongside killing the pilot likely just prior to the explosion. In reality, pilots and passengers are still alive while getting fried (depending on clothing) until the likely impact being lethal.

@AJ77777 : If you want to know what people think go on BIS forum and open a topic, here it is a FEEDBACK TRACKER FOR DEVS, to help them to IMPROVE the game. You should change your ticket in solve or at least change the resolution "status".

@arziben : i also disagree you don't need an alarm to eject, in the real life it is the pilot choice to eject. Several alarm / failure add could be better for the realism.
More over it is OFF topic and there is the fixed wing feedback tracker. I just say that in order to don't create a new problem on this thread.

You're right izaiak but I'm just going to add on that OFF topic that, maybe if ai pilots jump on one hit by a missile, we should to :p (also, instead of flames, restrict control of the aircraft to simulate damaged hydraulics etc.) which comes back to the fact that fixed wing need more damages modules/sections that could be damaged and destroyed.

ON topic now, helo should actually suffer from greater damages when hit (not necessarly fatal) but at least 3 or 4 "modules" of the aircraft being put on orange/red, an helicopter is very compact when you think about is, and even a concentrated explosion could damage multiple components.

^ additionally, helicopters don't move nearly as fast, to a missile hit is much more likely to be more accurate.

At least for smaller helicopters as far as I know... You would easily get killed/heavily wounded in a Hummingbird (has no protection-pretty much a civilian helicopter) by the flying shrapnels of the rocket. And sometimes/mostly the helicopter will be torn apart of such small size.

This only counts if you are hit in the center/cockpit of the aircraft. If it hits the tail you could just lose ATRQ controls.

And yeah, some "wobble"-effect and difficult flying due to damaged parts/hydraulics would be nice. A outbreaking fire in bigger choppers might not be a bad idea either.

Btw, the missiles are not "OP" at all. They actually are "under-OP" as if you would say.

Yup. I too would really like to see fires on jets/helicopters, while giving pilots and passengers a chance to bail-out as appropriate.

It's true, the ejection function is essentially useless right now. The jets are either perfectly okay, or they explode and you die. It would be nice to see some improved damage model, even it the jet just "dies," (loses all power and maneuverability) and if you don't eject within x number of seconds then you die too.

About four months ago, I was flying the simulated jet and was automatically ejected out of the jet while the jet either broke apart or exploded. (I can't quite remember, but simulated body fatigue/injury could have also triggered this.)

Funny thing is, I unfortunately didn't pack a chute as I vividly recall frantically trying to pull the rip cord.

Yes, it would be much more realistic if aircraft (and helicopters) either randomly or systematically disintegrate, ejecting players or forcing players to eject due to lack of control.

First of all, a few important things to note:

1. If it's guided, it's a missile.

1a. If it's unguided, it's a rocket.

2. The side you're facing in relation to the AA is important.

2a. Lock-ons from behind will almost always hit if you don't take immediate evasive manoeuvres.
2b. Contrasting, lock-ons from the side or front will almost always miss.

The behaviours pointed out in 2a and 2b are normal and realistic as can be. Flares don't do a good job of masking your heat signature if your heat signature (exhaust) is right in the missile's sight.

On the latest developer version, there are no SAM rocket effects during daytime.

In other words, no smoke trails can be seen while flying over and having 5-10 SAM (surface to air) missiles/rockets flying towards my aircraft!