AS-20 Nord

Description

The AS-20 missile (scale is approximate)

The AS-20 Nord is a French manually-guided air-to-surface missile, it was introduced in Update 1.87 "Locked On". Holding a fairly light explosive payload, the air-launched nature of the missile allows players to fire the missile onto the roofs of unsuspecting enemy tanks. With its fast speed, high agility but low warhead TNT mass the missile demands more attention than its other contemporaries but also responds to your commands very well, ultimately leaving its potential up to the pilot's hands.

Vehicles equipped with this weapon

• Etendard IVM
• ◄F-104G
• G.91 R/1
• ◄G.91 R/3
• G.91 R/4
• ◄G.91 R/4
• S.O.4050 Vautour IIN
• Super Mystere B2
• G.91 Y

General info

Effective damage

The AS-20 Nord has the capability of penetrating 64 mm of armour from any distance and angle of attack. The warhead, however, only has roughly 16 kg of TNT filler, meaning unless you hit extremely close to a lightly armored vehicle or directly hit an enemy you won't do noticeable damage, if you damage them at all. On impact Nords generally do adequate damage, crippling or destroying an enemy hit directly.

Comparison with analogues

Compared to its closest contemporary, the Bullpup AGM, the AS-20 Nord flies faster and is a much lighter missile but also has less than a third of the Bullpup's explosive mass. The Nords excel more in agility as a result, while Bullpups are slightly heavier on the controls but offer a much wider margin of error. Overall, the two are roughly similar overall with the Bullpup generally being more applicable all around as the larger warhead is very noticeable and the agility differences aren't great enough to significantly affect missile guidance.

Usage in battles

AS-20s can be used in air battles and ground battles. The more applicable of the two would be ground battles, as the accuracy of the Nords when fully aimed can offer a precision strike capability that few nations have at these BRs. While you can fire off Nords without controlling them as they fly fairly straight, this is an ineffective way to use these missiles given that they cost noticeably more SP than regular rockets and have a fairly low TNT mass which limits its lethality when used this way. The more effective way to use Nords in Ground Battles would be to fire them from range (2-5 km or so, so long as you have visuals on your target) and guide them in, prioritizing SPAAs over regular vehicles as this will allow you to support your team for much longer. Gun-based SPAAs generally have a cut-off range of roughly 2.5-3 km where their effectiveness is greatly diminished, and as a result so long as you can land your missile just as they start firing at these distances you will have a greater chance of surviving, provided you dodge immediately afterwards. If there is already a friendly aircraft up taking fire, this is made even easier as you simply have to follow the tracer shells to find your unsuspecting victim. Slight misses are fine, but due to the small warhead it is important to attempt to land a direct hit whenever possible, regardless of your target, so practice is key to mastering Nords.

In Air Battles, Nords can serve as a good distraction and as a self-defense weapon. You can fire a Nord in a head-on engagement with someone you don't want to take the head-on with, and as the missile still shows the MSL diamond your enemy may think it is in fact an AA-20 (Air-to-Air Nord) instead (or simply panic regardless) and attempt to dodge, which you can then exploit to gain the upper hand position-wise. This can also work from the rear, making people falsely believe that you fired an AAM at them and closing the gap as they bleed speed trying to dodge the supposed AAM flying towards them. Nords can also be fired towards enemy AAMs headed your way as a distraction, as the hot motor of the Nord may sometimes fool the missile's seeker and cause it to veer off course. Do, however, also keep in mind that there are a few vehicles that either use MCLOS AAMs (such as certain G.91 variants, the Vautour IIN (Late) or the Swift F.7's Fireflashes (however elusive these may be) or SARH missiles (the aforementioned Vautour carries R511 SARH missiles if spaded!), so keeping that in mind it is crucial to know which planes can attempt these bluffs back at you and which aircraft are entirely incapable of such tactics in reverse.

Pros and cons

Pros:

• Decent penetration of 64 mm
• Nimble, easy to course-correct
• Fairly light (~140 kg compared to AGM-12Bs weighing ~260 kg each), relatively light impact on flight performance

Cons:

• Somewhat unintuitive guiding method; may take many games to get fully used to it
• Poor explosive mass of 15 kg; near misses will do very little damage, and heavily armored vehicles can occasionally shrug off a hit
• Hard to control at longer ranges due to its SACLOS nature

History

Examine the history of the creation and combat usage of the weapon in more detail than in the introduction. If the historical reference turns out to be too long, take it to a separate article, taking a link to the article about the weapon and adding a block "/History" (example: https://wiki.warthunder.com/(Weapon-name)/History) and add a link to it here using the main template. Be sure to reference text and sources by using <ref></ref>, as well as adding them at the end of the article with <references />.

Media

Excellent additions to the article would be video guides, screenshots from the game, and photos.

See also

• AGM-12B Bullpup - The American equivalent to the AS-20 Nord, with a warhead more than three times as lethal at the expense of almost double the weight
• Kh-23M - The Soviet equivalent to the Nord; Has a higher top speed, more penetration and even more explosive mass than the Bullpup (around 6 x the Nord's warhead), but handles somewhat worse, is limited to 2 per aircraft at higher BRs and mandatorily requires the Delta-NG targeting pod to be used, which degrades flight performance.

External links

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• topic on the official game forum;
• other literature.