eli5 how can jet pilots hit targets at insanely high speeds

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Do they have lock on systems or what

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Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s worth mentioning that most of our media has been wrong about how aerial combat works since jets and guided missiles came into being – the vast majority of aerial engagements happen so far away from the enemy that the pilots only ever “see” each other on RADAR.

It’s also worth mentioning that speed is relative – when you are driving on the highway you’re moving at speeds several times what humans evolved to do, but you can still navigate traffic, because the traffic is *also* moving that fast. What matters to your ability to navigate traffic (or any high-speed situation) is partly how fast your surrounding actors are also moving. Fighter jets are firing at fast-moving targets, but in the vast majority of instances they are at least that fast as well, and they impart that starting velocity onto every weapon they fire.

But to get back to the main point: Yes, modern fighter jets use a variety of guided missiles to engage in combat. The unguided weapons they use are either imprecise (ex: a bomb doesn’t have to be particularly accurate to hit its intended target) or has a lot of ammo and/or computer assistance in aiming (ex: machine guns where still used can have an aiming assistant that calculates relative velocity, angle of attack, etc; of other airplanes and then “locks” on with an estimated lead to make the bullets arrive at the place the plane will be given their travel time, gravity, etc; in the era before computer assistance you’d have tracer ammo [bullets that glowed and showed the path of the shots] so you could see how far you were missing in what direction and update your aim accordingly).

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