F-2 Weapons — Built Around Four Anti-Ship Missiles

The F-2 was designed around anti-ship attack. The wing is 25% larger than the F-16’s precisely so it can carry heavy anti-ship missiles a long way (The F-2).

This page is what it carries, from publicly available material.

1. Eleven places to hang things

The heavier it is, the closer to the fuselage it hangs. Wingtips are for short-range air-to-air missiles only; anything the size of an anti-ship missile goes to an inboard station. It follows the aircraft’s centre of gravity and the bending load on the wing — and it is how to read a photograph of a loaded F-2.

Fixed armament is a single 20 mm M61A2 cannon, a rotary gun firing from six spinning barrels. There is a magazine, and when it is empty it is empty.

2. Air-to-air missiles

The AAM-3 (Type 90) was developed to succeed the AIM-9L, with all-aspect capability — it can be fired at a target head-on rather than only from behind.

The AAM-5 (Type 04) replaced it, and does two things well. First, thrust vectoring: the rocket exhaust itself is deflected, so the missile can turn hard immediately after launch, before it has any speed to turn with. Second, a very wide seeker field of view, which means it can be fired at targets the aircraft is not pointing at (high off-boresight). Paired with a JHMCS helmet sight, the shot goes where the pilot is looking. Being an imaging infrared seeker, it is also harder to decoy with flares.

The AAM-4 (Type 99) is the medium-range active radar weapon. After launch the missile tracks with its own radar, so the launching aircraft can turn away instead of holding the target illuminated. The later AAM-4B is known as a missile with an active phased-array seeker.

3. Anti-ship missiles — what the aircraft is for

Four ASM-2s. That loadout is the F-2’s signature; the F-4EJ Kai it replaced could carry two of the same missile.

The ASM-2 being a turbojet rather than a rocket matters. A rocket coasts once its motor burns out; a turbojet flies the whole way under its own power, which is where the order-of-magnitude difference in range comes from. Terminal guidance is imaging infrared, so it picks its aim point off the heat signature of the ship.

ASM-3 goes further, flying supersonically on a ramjet to shorten the time an escort has to intercept it. A longer-ranged ASM-3A has also been developed.

4. Air-to-ground

• Mk.82 (500 lb class) unguided bombs — 6 to 12
• JDAM / LJDAM — a guidance kit bolted to a conventional bomb. JDAM is GPS/INS-guided; LJDAM adds laser guidance
• Rocket pods

JDAM has no motor. Falling is where its range comes from, so how far it reaches is set by the altitude and speed at release. The profile is to come in high and fast, release, and leave.

5. External tanks

Tanks can be carried underwing and on the centreline. The 450 nm (≈830 km) combat radius figure assumes them.

Fuel comes at a price: more drag, more weight, and less g available. In service, the limit load with tanks and missiles aboard sits well below the 9 g of a clean aircraft.

The game holds its structural limit at +9 g / −3 g regardless of what is on the wings (see Stalls and turns §8). What tanks cost you is the g you can generate: the extra weight means less load factor at the same speed.

6. What the F-2 in this game carries

What the aircraft carries changes from stage to stage. There are six underwing stations, loaded with whatever that mission uses (practice rounds on the missions where you do not shoot). External tanks appear only on the stages that carry them — the Matsushima circuits and the formation missions. The carrier missions fly clean.

And what you carry goes into the flight model as weight.

The numbers say plainly which one matters: the tanks. Two of them are 2,420 kg — twenty-four missiles’ worth, and 16% of launch weight. Firing a single missile barely lightens the aircraft; dropping the tanks you feel (keyboard J, pad dpad ←).

A stage that does not specify a load launches at 12,702 kg — about 12.7 t, and that is the reference the flight model is tuned against. The 240 km/h stall, the 280 km/h approach and every other number in Stalls and Turns were measured at that weight. Hang the tanks and it becomes 15.1 t, with the stall up at 262 km/h.

The full breakdown, and how weight reaches the way the aircraft flies, is in The F-2 §4.

Sources

• Mitsubishi F-2 — Wikipedia
• Type 93 anti-ship missile (ASM-2) — Wikipedia (Japanese)
• AAM-5 — Wikipedia
• AAM-3 — Wikipedia
• ASM-3 — Wikipedia

This article is commentary based on publicly available information.