It's time to fix DAGRs.

I absolutely despise the DAGR missile. It's both useless and overpowered. I'll explain in due course. I'll break my argument up into several parts: Damage, Capacity, and Guidance. I'll outline the way it is now, and how it should be.

First, a little background.

DAGR stands for Direcet Attack Guided Rocket. It's a moderately recent development by Lockheed Martin. The idea was to take the widely-used Hydra 70 2.75" rocket and fix it with a SALH (Semi Active Laser Homing) guidance system, allowing for pinpoint strikes. It was meant as an alternative for the AGM-114x Hellfire, using a nearly identical guidance system, having a very similar footprint/range, but with a much smaller, lighter warhead. Because of its small warhead, it could be used to destroy an enemy pickup truck without causing collateral damage to the surroundings, even in an urban or suburban environment.

is an example of this precision put to use. I will be referencing this video many times during this post. In the video, there are various clips of target practice, showing very accurate shots into targets.

Because of its lesser cost and smaller mass, 4 DAGRs could be carried where each Hellfire missile would go. DAGRs are fired from 2x2 boxes, seen

.

The Wikipedia page for the DAGR claims that it carries only the M151 10lb HEDP warhead, but I have a feeling it can also carry the many warheads used in Hydra 70 rockets.

Damage

The damage caused by DAGRs is really messed up. In real life, the M151 HEDP warhead is exactly what it says it is: High Explosive, Dual Purpose. This means its main target is soft targets; infantry and light skinned vehicles (unarmored). It can also be used against buildings and thicker skinned vehicles (very light armor, up to MRAP level). Shooting anything with much more armor is pretty much useless. APCs and LAVs may suffer damage to weapons, optics, and wheels, but besides that there is little point in shooting them. The only potentially vulnerable parts of MBTs are optics and secondary weapons like RCWS.

BI didn't seem to get the memo. DAGR seem to be pretty efficient at knocking out tanks, taking as few as 1 shot to "kill" (read: disable) a tank (this varies with range, sometimes it takes as many as 5 but even that is too easy). Against cold-war era armor it might make sense, but this is 21st century armor. LAVs and APCs are killed even more reliably.

On the flipside, DAGRs seem to be almost useless against infantry (which should be their main target). Rockets must land in extremely close proximity to infantry in order to kill them, and sometimes it seems to not damage them at all. It's almost as if BI has modeled the warhead so that it projects all its damage forward, like a HEAT round.

So what needs to change? Extremely simple. Copy and paste the config from the Pawnee/Hellcat's DAR rockets. If they represent unguided Hydra 70s, the DAGRs should have identical damage characteristics.

Capacity

This is simple. It's just plain lazy on BI's part to copy and paste the Pawnee's rocket launchers to the AH-99. Not only that, it's not how they're carried in real life. One hardpoint can carry a case of four. We saw this in the clip from the "Background" section. Allowing the AH-99 to carry 28 DAGRs is like allowing the A-164 to carry 12 Mavericks (I forget what the air-launched, guided AT missiles are called in-game). It just can't be done in real life. It allows one single AH-99 to lay waste to an entire mission's worth of armor in a matter of seconds.

Guidance

SALH guidance is pretty simple. You point a laser, fire your missile, your missile sees the laser, missile hits laser mark and blows up whatever you pointed your laser at. This is very useful because you can do things such as move your point of aim to follow a moving target. GPS-guided weapons can only shoot at a fixed point, but laser guided weapons will follow your laser wherever it goes. You can also tell the weapon to wait, follow a certain path and then look for your laser to achieve top-down attacks. It allows you to very accurately tell the missile where you want it to land, using optics to point the laser in exactly the right spot. The only drawbacks to this system is that the missiles require constant input in order to hit the intended target, and weather can interfere with laser performance.

What we have in Arma doesn't act similar in any way. All you have to do is press your lock button while facing a target (not even aiming at it), and the missile will lock on. After firing, it will track the target wherever it goes, even if the target is unlocked.

By taking a shortcut, BI has made an overpowered and unrealistic system.

So what do we need? There are two ways we could do this. The "easy" method would just be to require the player to stay locked onto the target until missile impact. This isn't ideal, but it's better than nothing. It means only one missile can be in flight at any given moment, and that they can't just go spamming missiles, wiping out the enemy's entire supply of armor in seconds. The second way is the ideal way. It is simply to copy the way the fixed-wing UAVs self-designate for LGBs, requiring the player to turn on and then lock onto their own laser in order to guide their ordinance.

Side Note: the Kajman needs this too, I just haven't talked about it because its missiles are much more reasonably/realistically powered.

In conclusion

I know the term "balancing" is usually frowned on in the Arma community. But in real life, balancing exists, just not in the way we think of it. Yes, NATO doesn't say "it's not fair to ISIS to use 30mm HEDP ammunition in our Apache's M230 chain guns, so we'll switch to 20mm training rounds". But what happens when you carry 30mm HEDP rounds? They're heavy. You can't carry as many of them.

What about radar? This is a bit harder because there are many types. But the classic sweeping pulse-doppler radar has its own drawbacks. For example, the ground just shows up as a massive amount of noise to the radar. They can't typically see ground targets. They can't even track low flying aircraft. Additionally, because the radar is technically doing little but spewing out ludicrous amounts of radiation, pretty much any vehicle big enough to have GPS systems can carry an RWR (radar warning receiver), a passive system that detects and classifies radar-emitting threats. So yes, you gain the ability to see aircraft at long range. But only if the aircraft is flying high and you also tell everybody within your detection range that you're looking for them.

What about millimetre-wave radar like the AH-64D's Longbow Fire Control Radar? It's much closer to the magic "radar" than traditional radar, but it is typically limited to a certain field of view in front of the helicopter in order to search the target area (i.e. the area in front of the helicopter) more effectively (less angle means smaller sweeps and more frequent updates on targets). It also is either set to AA or AG search modes, so unless you switch it to search for air targets, they won't show up on your radar. And if you're searching for air targets, you can't see ground targets.

Magical chemical armor penetration (HEAT rounds)? Guess what. They can't be fired from a rifled barrel because the spin screws up their explosion. So they all have to have fins, and all tanks have to have smoothbore barrels.

The point I'm getting to is that if BI made a point to realistically simulate more of the systems in game, the game would actually balance itself out better. Everything in real life has both advantages and drawbacks.

My least favorite thing in any game is when the skill is taken out of the picture. And making the A-164's cannon very weak but making its missiles just one tab-lock and click away to kill any armor is just silly. Suddenly the skilled pilot is worse than the noob because he tries to make use of his cannon but can't kill anything and gets shot down. The noob just uses his click-to-win missiles and RTBs. In real life, using Mavericks (I forget what they're called in game) is not at all easy. You have to first find the target with your own eyes or the TGP (which is like doing an I-Spy whilst looking through a straw with one eye and your other eye closed), and then once you've slewed the Maverick's seeker head to the target, you must get the missile to "see" the target (essentially jiggling it around or just getting closer). It requires very careful control, and also the ability to study an extremely low-resolution image and know what your target is.

is a video showing the process I am describing. Similarly, if players have to manually guide their missile to the target, it adds an element of skill that makes a practiced helicopter gunner significantly more useful than an unskilled one.

I hope that with the Expansion coming sometime this year, the BI devs will be open to more significant changes to the game such as this one.

If you have anything to add please do so. I have also dredged up a few tickets from the feedback tracker, about DAGR adjustments, an AH-99 Attack Variant, adding a laser to the AH-99, and finally a more general ticket on helicopter FCS.

Cheers

Edited January 18, 2015 by the_Demongod

The page you linked to the Hydra 70 rocket types lists an HEAT round (M247) which can be used in the AT role. You then point out that the DAGR in game does too much damage to heavy armour and not enough HE damage to grouped infantry.

Perhaps the DAGR's in game are the M247 variant designed for AT use?

The page you linked to the Hydra 70 rocket types lists an HEAT round (M247) which can be used in the AT role. You then point out that the DAGR in game does too much damage to heavy armour and not enough HE damage to grouped infantry.

Perhaps the DAGR's in game are the M247 variant designed for AT use?

There are various reasons still. The M247 warhead is no longer produced as far as I'm aware, because rockets are inherently inaccurate and therefore there's no point in having a HEAT warhead.

Even if it did have the HEAT warhead, HEAT does more explosive damage to the internals of a vehicle, but it's not as effective at penetrating thick armor. Hydras are only 2.75" thick, so their HEAT warheads wouldn't be able to penetrate much armor anyways. Even MBTs only use HEAT against APCs and light armor, and their rounds are almost twice as wide (~120mm) (IIRC the amount of armor a HEAT round can pierce is related to its width).

There are various reasons still. The M247 warhead is no longer produced as far as I'm aware, because rockets are inherently inaccurate and therefore there's no point in having a HEAT warhead.

Even if it did have the HEAT warhead, HEAT does more explosive damage to the internals of a vehicle, but it's not as effective at penetrating thick armor. Hydras are only 2.75" thick, so their HEAT warheads wouldn't be able to penetrate much armor anyways. Even MBTs only use HEAT against APCs and light armor, and their rounds are almost twice as wide (~120mm) (IIRC the amount of armor a HEAT round can pierce is related to its width).

Perhaps the M247 is still in production in the Armaverse? Who's not to say that the DAGR is now similar in performance to something like the PCRV-7 FFAR that the UK uses?

The idea of strapping semi-active laser seekers to small diameter rockets is a market niche that has really taken off in the last few years.

Also, it's been a while since I've flown the AH-99, how many DAGR's does it take to actually outright kill an MBT in game? From memory it's more than 1 or 2.

What we really need is a heavier variant for the AH-99 with hellfires. Then it would be perfectly okay for them to properly model HEDP DAGRs. I would much rather them add in other weapons than try and change an existing weapon to be something it's not in real life.