Is it even possible to avoid SAM missiles in Falcon 3.0? Avoiding air-to-air ones is simple enough: increase speed, fly perpendicular to them, use countermeasures. However, once a SAM is in the air, nothing short of a mountain seems to stop it. They seem to be impervious to countermeasures, and have a ridiculous turn rate that makes it impossible to avoid them by flying maneuvers. A mad dive with afterburners seems to work sometimes, but needs much altitude.

Is there a reliable-ish way of avoiding SAMs?

For the life of me, I can't avoid them. They shoot me out of the sky all the time.

My apologies for responding to your post a year after the fact but better late than never right? :D

I sympathize over Falcon 3.0 and your frustrations with SAMS. They are indeed a pain. Now to answer your question. If we're talking about radar sams the trick to avoiding them (in my experience) is fly at right angles to the missle, so that they approach you either directly from the left and/or right, turn on your ECM and drop some chaff (del key) until the alert turns off. If you're in campaign mode and your mission takes you into the vicinity of these sites then by all means add an extra flight to your mission to fly CAS with anti-radiation missiles (AGM 88 and 45s).

Now, if we're talking about the IR SAMS that lock on to you when somewhat close to the ground, these missiles are indeed insidious! The truth is that these missiles are modeled poorly in the game and are completely OP.

The only real solution to avoid them, besides sheer luck, is to get yourselves F3MSL, it's a small app that patches the game so that those shoulder mounted missiles are more realistic. With the patch turned on you'll be able to outrun most of these missiles and even if they do hit they won't be as devastating as their vanilla counterparts.

The included text file with the patch explains in further detail.

You can get F3MSL here http://www.gamers.org/pub/archives/cactus/falcon3/programs/ just download the F3MSL.zip file, extract the exe to your falcon directory, run it (preferably in dosbox) and go through the steps of patching the game.


Hope this helps! Happy flying :)

So for years, I've hated the SAMs and they were bugged?! I have been playing Hornet the last few nights for fun and to see if I could ever really learn this game and in the Panama campaign the shoulder fired missles just knocked me and the rest of my wing right out of the sky!

I downloaded the Missile file but cannot run it on a windows 10 machine! Any advice?!

That's because it's an ancient dosfile and you need to be in emulated dos in dosbox to patch the game.
I haven't got the game installed at the moment so I can't give exact instructions, but I think the easiest is to edit the falcon3_single.conf with notepad and put a # before the falcon3.exe line and exit line, then start the shortcut and execute the patch. After you've done that remove the # and play the game.

I didn't even think about using dosbox! I used a seperate installed dosbox (cannot figure out where on earth they hide the config for GOG games) and it worked.

It's crazy that falcon 3.0 had so many patches and addons, and none of them took care of the OP SAM.