Making Mischief: VTOL VR Electronic Warfare in the EF-24G
- Aaron "Ribbon-Blue" Mendoza
- 13 hours ago
- 8 min read
The electromagnetic maestro of virtual reality combat
While Electronic Warfare (EW) in VTOL VR may not be Technical White Paper accurate with a mountain of declassified documentation to back it, you have to find the balance between a 1:1 battlefield tested and sourced representation of EW and no representation at all. That being said, I feel like the portrayal of EW in VTOL VR may be one of the best attempted in flight games.
While many aircraft in this simulator have externally mounted self-protection jammer pods or AESA radar based electronic countermeasures, the electromagnetic maestro of this flight sim is the EF-24G Mischief.
After this aircraft's introduction as downloadable content on December 21st, 2023, the virtual reality battlefields of VTOL VR now have to contend with a high speed, swing-wing, two seat electronic warfare aircraft. Its capabilities allow it to survive in environments even this game's fifth generation stealth fighter would have difficulties operating in while enabling all aircraft in the area of operations to be even more effective and better defended from certain types of threats. The Mischief redefines how VTOL VR can be played.
The "Tomcat" They Warned You About?
The moment anyone sees something shaped like the legendary F-14 with radar cross section reduction design cues and touchscreen displays, it is hard not to think about the old Grumman proposals for advanced variants of the F-14. While nostalgia makes the vibes around these potential upgrades seem like it would essentially be a navalized F-22 Raptor, even the proposals for a future Tomcat placed them more as an advanced multirole fighter. I believe that the developer of VTOL VR built off these proposals while benefitting from the reality of how fixed-wing combat aircraft have evolved technologically in the past decade.
For air-to-air combat the EF-24G maintains the interceptor like speed of the F-14 Super Tomcat with its known weapons like the semi-active AIM-7 and active radar homing AIM-54C. However, it can also carry more technologically advanced air-to-air missiles like thrust vectoring, high off boresight short-ranged infrared missiles and more advanced AIM-120D AMRAAMs.
In anti-surface capacity, the EF-24G carries weapons familiar to the F-14B "Bombcat" and F-14D Super Tomcat: unguided bombs, laser guided bombs and GPS guided bombs.
Its ability to use targeting pods to visually find it owns targets is beneficial to itself, but thanks to its modernized avionics that allow it to datalink to all friendlies in combat, the EF-24G can perform stand-off attacks on identified targets with anti-ship cruise missiles, land attack cruise missiles and small diameter bombs. The only thing it is lacking in is shorter ranged optically guided, IR guided or laser guided missiles that would make it effective against engaging small, potentially mobile ground targets.
The Mischief is a highly effective suppression of enemy air defense platform. In a missile heavy configuration, it can carry up to 10 anti-radiation missiles (ARM). It can carry four different types of ARMs including the short range Sidearm and longer range variants of the AGM-88 HARM. It is important to highlight compatibility with the AGM-188 MARM. This missile can not only attack emitting radars with a top-down attack profile to increase its effectiveness, but the EF-24G can launch these missiles with home on jam functionality. This makes the AGM-188 able to seek out and destroy radar decoys with little input from the aircrew and gives the missile a limited air to air capability as it will also track onto ECM being emitted from aircraft.
You can make a quick comparison of the EF-24G as the highspeed parallel of the entire F/A-18 Super Hornet family. Though it has more of the DNA of the EA-18G Growler than may be expected when looking from the outside in.
Immense Electronic Warfare
The "E" in the aircraft's designation denotes electronic warfare capability; the capstone of the aircraft.
Electronic Warfare has been a difficult subject for many combat flight simulators. It is often simplified in lieu of the deeply complex facet of the wide spectrum battlefield it truly is. Simulators that pride themselves on being as accurate as possible dare not get too deep into the understandably touchy subject. Developers simplifying complex systems while hyper fixating on the accuracy of what players see as less important systems is the type of juxtaposition that only seasoned flight simmers could truly delineate. But let's be real, if the general public ever gets an absolutely accurate portrayal of EW it means various intelligence agencies have failed to do their jobs and said developers may have a knock at their door sooner than later.
That being said, the VTOL VR representation of EW is detailed enough for me to genuinely suggest reading some of the community created manuals for concepts related to it. Specifically pages 40 through 50 of the EF-24G Mischief NATOPS to completely wrap your head around EW and start to understand its finer details.
The electronic attack and detection capability of the internally carried AN/ASQ-289 Combined Electronic Warfare Suite coupled with AN/ALQ-245 electronic warfare pods allows the EF-24G multiple methods of EW attack and identification.
As with real world electronic warfare the focus is on the radio spectrum composed of a wide frequency range from 3hz to 3,000 GHz that are organized into 'bands' or general ranges of frequencies. In VTOL VR the core of the EW system is the three frequency bands: Low Band (30hz-2GHz), Mid Band (2GHz-8GHz) and High Band (8GHz-27GHz).
These methods across these bands include Noise Jamming that degrades emitters by bombarding them with continuous pulses of energy, Signature Augmentation that makes the emitting aircraft appear as a different aircraft to deceive hostiles and Digital Radio Frequency Memory to create false radar contacts to complicate the identification and targeting process of the effected emitter. It is possible to go much deeper into effective jamming over distances, burn through ranges, power output levels, etc.
Effective EW can disrupt search and track radars, degrade missile approach warning systems, make GPS systems drift - in player vs player matches it can even block radio communications.
The Mischief can also easily find and fix radar emitters passing their coordinates onto other friendly units via datalink. Both the identification and electronic warfare capabilities of the EF-24G can be further extended by with deployment of datalink equipped ADM-160J MALD jet powered decoys. We go into more detail about them in a separate article.
All of this combines to let a single EF-24G Mischief to become the central point of disrupting the opposing forces' radar, navigation and communication capabilities. Its jamming capabilities can both help protect singular aircraft or create entire corridors of electronic warfare interference to enable strike packages to operate within an intergraded air defense system.
Fast SEAD / DEAD
The considerable ARM magazine of the aircraft combined with its EW capabilities can make the EF-24G an monster of an opponent for air defenses. In the Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses or Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses role the EF-24G can handle the bulk of radar detection, ECM suppression and kinetic attack on its own.
A core system in this is the FRAZ (Frequency/Azimuth) display. The FRAZ works in concert with the Tactical Situation Display (TSD). Whereas the TSD is used to monitor and attack all detected enemies via datalink, the FRAZ is more akin to the HARM Targeting System in the F-16 Fighting Falcon or the HARM Display of the Legacy F/A-18 specifically in Target Of Opportunity mode.
The FRAZ visualizes detected radar emitters on a screen separating their frequency strengths between low, mid and high bands of radar energy. This makes it easier to keep track of different radar types, their states of alert and offers a fast way to lock sensors or weapons onto high priority emitters that switch from search to targeting.
Rather than trying to manually sort through radars on the TSD, a crew member can use the FRAZ to quickly highlight a radar of interest and illuminate it with any type of available electronic countermeasure in just two or three button or trigger presses. In situations where interceptors are attempting to target the EF-24G or a far-off surface-to-air missile site switches on to attack friendlies, FRAZ enables the Mischief to reach out and interfere within seconds.
Single Seat or Multicrew
With great capability comes great flight crew workload. Managing every offensive, defensive, navigational and electronic warfare related system is a lot to handle. Even more so when you are being shot at or trying to keep track of dozens of friendly and hostile contacts. Getting a "helmet fire" in the EF-24G is a very real side affect of combat in the aircraft.
The Mischief relies on cockpit modernizations on par with the Saab JAS-39E Wide Area Display or the Boeing F-15EX Eagle Large Area Display. Large touch screens able to configure and resize multiple system displays with a few finger presses. The ease of switching screens and prioritizing certain data is a vital tool for the common high threat environments in VTOL VR. The simulator's ability to save up to four specific screen configurations - referred to as L1, L2, L3 and L4 - can also simplify switching the aircraft into specific roles. Rather than rebuilding the layouts every time the aircraft is cold started, perhaps the player could set L1 to be focused on navigation with L4 focused on electronic warfare.
This may be a less-than-popular opinion but one of the highest hurdles to clear with multicrew aircraft is needing to have a second person that is guaranteed to fly with you every time you feel like it. Civilian and combat flight simulators usually automate the position of a co-pilot or weapon system officer to allow a single player to fly aircraft that are required to have two or more crew members.
VTOL VR went the route of the F-15EX in this case with the pilot able to use all systems without the need of a dedicated electronic warfare officer (EWO) in the backseat. However, the experience of having a human EWO is night and day. Within a handful of sorties together, crew coordination makes the EF-24G even more effective. Traditionally the EWO would be managing electronic warfare systems and coordinating with allies with the pilot focused on aviating and weapon deployment. However, with all systems being the same in the front and back seat, the pilot can also take up other tasks depending on the situation.
While the EWO is passing GPS coordinates to other allies and creating new coordinates for ADM-160J decoys to follow, the pilot can take over electronic warfare duties. Or, in a close-range dogfight, the EWO can even take over thrust vectored IR missiles with their helmet mounted display while the pilot maneuvers against hostile aircraft relying on the 20mm internal gun.
After flying the aircraft solo and with various back seaters over the course of a few months, the aircraft has proven itself to be one of the most complex but rewarding aircraft to fly in VTOL VR. Being an absolute missile truck in the F/A-26B Wasp is one thing and sneaking around stealthily in the F-45A Ghost is another thing, but there is something irreplaceable about the role the EF-24G Mischief plays. I am hard pressed to think of a different aircraft in a different simulator that provides the same experience.
Again, when looking through the perspective of how EW aircraft and their capabilities are shown in flight arcade games and flight simulators, it truly stands out when you take into consideration the finer details of its capabilities. This leads me into an entirely different thought on how VTOL VR provides an idea of how present day peer vs peer combat plays out, but that is a discussion for another day.
About the Writer
Co-founder of Skyward Flight Media. After founding Electrosphere.info, the first English Ace Combat database, he has been involved in creating flight game-related websites, communities, and events since 2005. He explores past and present flight games and simulators with his extensive collection of game consoles and computers. Read Staff Profile.
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