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So I've got a couple of questions. I bought this book called F-15 versus MiG 23/25 over Iraq 1991. I was looking for sources about the MiG-25 and sadly this is the only book I found on the MiG-25 available to me. I say sadly because even though it tries to be neutral and objective in it's assessment they still say a lot of opinionated things against the 23 primarily. However it is still not as biased as Strike Fighters can be. I was looking for sources on actual missile performance because the game simply dismisses early Russian BVR missiles as additional weight to the aircraft at best. In the book I found an account of an Iraqi pilot who shot down an F/A-18 (which was going in full afterburner) from 30km away with a single R-40R missile. Unfortunately there are no mentions of whether the F/A-18 pilot was aware of getting shot at (which I assume he would be since RWR exists) and if he was performing evasive maneuvers and/or deploying chaff. Now considering this account I would expect the in-game R-40R to hit something occasionally. Considering it was able to hit a state of the art fighter plane of the mid 1980s when itself was designed in the early 1960s To support my claim that the game simply denies the existence of Russian technology I present you with a test I conducted today. In this test I flew a flight of 8 MiG-25PDS with all of them armed with 4x R-40R's (except myself I had 4x R-60TMs and 2x R-40Rs) against a flight of 4 MiG-29s. The hostile MiGs were completely unaware of our presence, so I descended from about 10 000m to around 3k lining up behind them, I went full burner reaching up to Mach 1.35 while the hostile MiGs were going around 450Km/h. From a distance of about 30km I ordered both my flights to start firing with me joining as well. We fired a constant barrage with varying salvo sizes from distances of 30Km down to around 15km. The picture I added says it all I think. The hostiles didn't even bother with maneuvering too much, they just popped a couple of chaffs and all our missiles simply missed. Out of frustration I fired all 4 of my R-60TMs at one of them, using salvos of 2 missiles from 8-6 km they all missed again just to play with me a little bit more. This issue I have observed not only with the AA-6 (R-40R), but also with the AA-9 (R-33) missile on the MiG-31 though that missile is veeery slightly better, or at least the range is. If you're going to say that these missiles were designed to shoot down bombers/AWACS/strike planes etc you would be wrong with at least the MiG-25 as it is a fighter/interceptor so it was intended to use against fighter planes as well, and evidence that it CAN do so exists as I have shown with the Iraqi example. I would expect the MiG-31 to be able to use it's missiles against fighters as well as I refuse to believe the Russians would think their interceptors would not themselves be intercepted. When it comes to my R-33 experience I very often fire 4-8 missiles at a single Su-25/24 with zero hits. Only kills I get are E2Cs, P3Cs, MiG-21s and 27s.. So with the rant over I'd like to say that if you want to improve your experience then you should edit the missile performance for the Russians. Everytime I fly US planes It just feels like complete easy mode with missiles getting very good hit chances and planes being extremely stable and agile, never have I been able to get one of them into a spin in combat, which after transitioning to Russian planes I have done a decent few times before getting used to it (MiG-21 especially, but also 25 and 31). Now finally I come to questions. I'd be extremely happy if someone suggested some MiG-25/31 tactics. I've been basically avoiding dogfights as they're suicide with most NATO aircraft, but since BVR missiles are so useless then that almost makes these two planes useless. Now that I intend to change the missile stats I might want to see what I can do with them instead of firing them from decent range before finding out they missed and running away. I'd also like to know how a MiG-25 can tell what kind of missile is fired at it and from what direction. The one I use in game has that thing that is basically a picture of a plane with 4 LED's around it, in the MiG-21 they light up roughly showing you where the missile is. But it doesn't seem to work in the 25 and there are accounts of Iraqi pilots dodging 3/4 IR and RADAR missiles before being shot down, always deploying the correct countermeasure. But I don't know how they knew what to deploy since there's no standard RWR display like on the MiG-31. Last question. The export PDS variant in the MiG-25 package found here in the download section does have chaff and flares, but the non-export one doesn't. Do we simply not know IF they had them or is it sure that they didn't have them. Because I assume that if the export version had them then the Russian version would have them. I think I'll add them because it seems sort of nonsensical that this would be the case. But if someone knows anything about this then pretty please share the information. For me historical accuracy is more important than adding things that the plane didn't have just because I have a hunch it did or I simply want them there. For clarity I mostly play the Black Sea Crisis mod and I'm using the MiG-25 in single mission, but I primarily used it on a non modded version of SF2E. In Black Sea Crisis I fly the campaign with the 31. All settings except Radar and HUD displays are on hard (those two are on normal). The AI is set to Easy in BSC and in non modded SF2 games I play on Hard AI. The test against the MiG-29s was conducted in BSC. Sorry for the EXTREMELY long post. I feel like I needed to have this rant and if you find something wrong with what I said then please feel free to let me know.

Alright so I tested the RSSW pack and I also tested the stock R-40R against the MiG-23MLA. Against the 23 I achieved my first kill ever with the stock missile. 15 of them were fired in that sortie. With the RSSW pack I achieved 3 kills with both the R-40R and the R-40RD, both have shown decent countermeasure resistance even at long ranges. Also I only tried the RSSW missiles once against the 23s where the stock missile got two attempts to achieve a single kill. So I decided to do the MiG-29 test with the RSSW R-40R and was able to achieve 2 kills (admittedly I had to restart the sortie three times to achieve this, so it doesn't make the missile OP either). So the RSSW pack transforms the MiG-25 from an unguided missile carrier to a very worthy opponent. Thank you very much for this Snailman, I think that where the missiles are right now is about how I would expect them to be. They can hit even more modern planes, but you have to get lucky and in a very good position. Unlike previously when it was literally impossible. If I had something like an R-27 (and an Su-27) I would probably wipe out the entire flight of 29s in my first attempt, but because this missile is technologically very inferior it took a couple of tries and some luck to get the two of them. So this is exactly what I wanted. I only remember how many missiles were used for the MiG-23 fights with the stock and RSSW R-40Rs so percentages for the remaining tests are not to be taken too seriously. A lot of the missiles fired at the 29s were used in very bad parameters, and I only estimated the number of missiles fired. The R-40RD test is not shown because I remember too little of it, but the missile is definitely much better than the base model. Against the MiG-23MLA The stock R-40R achieved a 6,7% kill probablity (not including one failed sortie) The RSSW R-40R achieved a 19% kill probability Against the MiG-29 The stock R-40R achieved a 0% kill probability The RSSW R-40R (likely) achieved a 5% kill probability (all three sorties included, only one was succefull with both kills in that single sortie, in which a 12,5% probability was achieved)

Thanks for the info. What I meant in saying that the PD was also thought to be a fighter plane is not that it can dogfight, It has trouble outturning the planet let alone a different fighter plane. What I was implying with this is that it was thought to be able to shoot down fighter airplanes as well. Otherwise why call it a fighter in the first place. Also the MiG-31 does carry an internal gun, I once killed a MiG-29 with it. First I made him dodge my R-33s and R-60s which wouldn't score a hit, but got him into a bad position, and then I just sprayed him with the gun. It's no dogfighter but if you're careful you can do stuff with it. I also shot down an Su-27 and dodged three R-73s in a dogfight. I mean it's definitely not the norm with this plane but it's somewhat usable. The 25 however is just trash in all regards except it's speed. It's missiles can't hit anything at all and only carries 4 of them, dogfight is impossible, radar is terrible. I'll try snailmans and MiGBusters suggestion to go lower. And also RSSW pack. I simply refuse to believe something this useless would even be implemented.

Hello guys, Thank you very much for the answers much appreciated. I'll try to address most of you in this one post. Starting with Gepard. I don't disagree with anything you said, but I believe the PD version was also meant to be used as a fighter/interceptor combination. I'm really sorry, but I can't remember where I've seen this information though I suspect it was in a documentary about the defection of Belenko. It was a translated documentary originally in Russian, and I don't intend to watch it again just to find this quote, sorry . MiGBuster You kind of caught me by surprise with this. The D version is indeed a decent upgrade from the standard R-40R. I read a lot of my information about the R-40 from wikipedia, and only just now found out what a mistake it was as it basically says that the D upgrade only appeared on the heat seeking version - the R-40T. That made miss this kind of important detail in the book as I just saw what I wanted to see. Thank you very much for bringing this to my attention. But despite this I would imagine that shooting literally 20 of the unmodernised R-40s would not result in exactly 0 hits. Stick Thanks for the recommendation I'll take a loot at it. Snailman A lot of what you ask I have already answered in the original post, but I'll write it up here answering everything. The MiG-29 I attacked is the one in the BSC mod, the MiG-25 I flew is the one that can be found here in the download section, I used the complete Foxbat package. The export version of the PD to be precise. I only used weapons found in the BSC and Foxbat mods (I'll give your mod a try though, looks very nice). The engagement started at 3000m ASL although we probably descended a little bit at the end of it. Missile launches started from a distance of 30km and the last ones was fired at a 15km distance. Our speed at the start of the engagement was 1.35 Mach, the 29s were doing aroung 480Km/h and were at the same altitude as us, maybe slightly lower. In total 20 R-40Rs were fired, the 29s didn't really do any evasive maneuvers, as I said they just popped a couple of chaffs. Emp_Palpatine Well known old facts. Well known to you probably, but as you can see I'm a relatively new member so I'm just finding this stuff out :). I've seen complaints around the forum about missile performance but I've never seen something so extremely bad as the R-40s and R-33s are. To answer your side question I don't actually know, I just assumed that if the pack runs then it's all fine and dandy. Modern enviroments are harder definitely, but it's not that bad once you learn to fly 2m AGL below all Radar known to man

Thanks, I wanted to avoid doing this stuff, but at this point after downloading and installing all these mods and expansions modifying the game myself doesn't seem to be any more time consuming. So I'll just do it I guess.

Tried the North Cape mod. It has no red side campaign that I can see. That's getting a separate merged install of pretty much all the strike fighters expansion packs, downloading and installing the expansion mod and downloading and installing the North Cape mod all for nothing :).