Why do missles have a random hit chance with flares?

[progamer 14]

Is this realistic or some form of stupid balancing?

[maturin 12]

Uh... could you elaborate, in better Canadian English?

Just because there's a flare in the air doesn't mean the missile won't continue to follow its original target.

Absent access to complex information to create an in-depth IR tracker simulation, randomness if completely correct.

[Qosmius 10]

uhm, just because you get flares out doesnt mean the missile will follow the flares all the time. it is a countermeasure to try to lure the missile away from its main target. not always succesfull

[progamer 14]

That's what I wanted to know.

[maxton0600 10]

I am not affiliated with BI but I have played ARMA before it was cool (Operation Flashpoint 1.95 or sthg.) and I have to say that the hit chance seems a bit random but at least in ARMA 2 it depends also on number of flares fired and their timing combined with speed of missile.

You can try out evading missiles in ARMA 2. You can relatively simply flare out Stinger or Igla type even from short distance since they are pretty slow. When it comes to missiles like Sidewinder you are likely to get shot from short distance even when spamming flares. If you go far enought however you will most likely evade single missile but not two if fired on short sequence. Then we go to Tunguska type missiles which has different tracking solution and very high speed. From my experience it is hardly avoidable with jet even spamming flares doesn´t do much good. While evading it with helicopter seems pretty simple, for a reason unknown to me Tunguska have harder time hitting helicopter on a distance than a plane + flares seems to work.

[maturin 12]

Fun fact: countermeasures shouldn't work against the Tunguska's missiles at all, since the gunner manually guides the missile. Strangely enough, flares can momentarily confuse the FCS on the 30mm.