Originally Posted by
Rhino power
The QF-4 does not need to survive a missile shot to have the telemetry data recovered, it's all transmitted live during the flight by the 'expensive gizmos', having the jet back on the ground provides no more info than if it was actually shot down, except for maybe the blast/frag pattern if it survives a live warhead shot...
-RP
Bandwidth and/or non-lossy data compression must have improved significantly to permit real time radio transfer of all fine detail recorded data, including hi-res video, since my day but I'm prepared to take your word for it.