Anti-Air missiles

[TheInferno]

Originally Posted by MrMorton

and as for the reaver, the scythe is actually the slowest aircraft from what I have seen, and according to e3 footage, the speed without ab went like this.


scythe 180
reaver 210
mosquito 240

Really? Interesting. Makes sense considering how maneuverable the Scythe is.

[MrMorton]

Originally Posted by DjEclipse

In E3 PS2 I did see an aircraft dodge a lock-on easily using chaff. But there will be a shit bucket of lock-ons when the game is open to all. So unless in a Reaver or Lib flying low is ill advisable until you buff that armor up.

But like MrMorton said (think about this when buffing in cert tree) it is best to buff the strength of what your vehicle already does best. Then try to make up for shortcomings.

Now that I think of it, each faction will have a unique way of dealing with missiles, countermeasures nonwithstanding.

the mossie will be able to extend away the moment they feel in danger, and should be able to escape only taking 1 missile hit.

the reaver should be able to tank multiple missiles, allowing it to escape even thought it has a lower speed.

The scythe is the only aircraft that will really rely on evading the missiles, but its different flight characteristics should make it easier to dodge missiles.

Originally Posted by TheInferno

Really? Interesting. Makes sense considering how maneuverable the Scythe is.

yea I was originally worried the reaver would get destroyed in dogfights, but it seems to be inbetween the two other aircraft as far as performance goes.

[fishirboy]

Originally Posted by Cuross

I been wondering, for those who played/playing Alpha or those who watched the videos, do the anti-air missiles have any kind of "weight" or "physics" on them? I'm wondering because watching the E3 streams, it seemed that even though the locked aircraft was trying to dodge a missile, it always seemed to not be enough. Granted, I only recall seeing this situation against those clunky and slow Reavers, but I was wondering if you would be able to juke a missile with some smooth flying.

To the rest of the community:
I'd like constructive arguments here please! Now I know what most of you are thinking, "That kind of stuff would make anti-air missiles useless". Well, I'm here just asking if they have weight because in order to dodge a missile, you have to time it precisely. My scenario is this: You're running close air support for your armor column and you are targeted by enemy aircraft. Your health is already low because of the few bouts of flak that you took and you've used your flares to keep the infantry's missiles off of you before you blew them up. You've got a few options, mainly A) look for a way/place to bail, B) take the missile in the exhaust, C) By luck you are able to double tap the shoulder button at exactly the precise moment to perform a barrel roll which to your amazement you see the missile go streaking by and you escape to fly another day (or you just happened to turn at the very precise moment where the missile couldn't adjust fast enough which I would assume could possible only happen maybe 1-5% of the time)

Will we have to wait for Beta to see? Is this in and we just don't know about it/don't know how to perform it? Will Fox be shot down because the lack of the "Z" or shoulder buttons? Will the Cacti become an Ace's best friend AND archenemy?

I imagine it would make escaping a dogfight a more harrowing experience. Or maybe it might just be the fact that I'm flying a Scythe and think it might be entirely possible for the superior mobility to work in my favor versus a locked missile, but that's just my hope and dream

What will happen is when people get into the game (me!) they will judge the distance it makes vs how long until they cant fly any more. So if you can out run it for that long will know what you have to do before you need to worry.

[Xyntech]

I think that the lock on missiles should be more maneuverable than an aircraft can hope to dodge. Speed and placing obstacles between your aircraft and the missile should be the best option available when you don't have countermeasures installed.

[Landtank]

Originally Posted by Xyntech

I think that the lock on missiles should be more maneuverable than an aircraft can hope to dodge. Speed and placing obstacles between your aircraft and the missile should be the best option available when you don't have countermeasures installed.

Hmm I disagree, because no aircraft can outrun a missile in a straight line, you should be able to out-turn a missile if you pull on the brakes and do a complete 180. That would leave you vulnerable enough to be balanced.

I think that it should be very difficult to out-maneuver a missile, but it should be possible fo sho.

[super pretendo]

Lockons should be clunky and dodgeable and require skill and leading to aim. Leading a missle should help, unless they they around

[Nasher]

If it's anything like PS1 then flak > missiles by a long way. With flak you don't have a lock on and you can often shoot stuff down before they realise what's going on. The TR burster MAX was probably the most powerful anti-air.

[Biohazard]

I think that the angle the missile is at should make a huge difference. If someone gets a lock perpendicular to me, then I should just be able to turn into them to lose the lock. However if they are directly behind or in front of me than it should be much more difficult or impossible.

Can we upgrade the guidance for our missiles? Something along the lines of:

Heat seeking (No lock on warning, easily countered with flares)
Radar seeking(No lock on warning, can be countered by turning off radar or chaff)
Radar guided (Lock on warning, more difficult to counter, shorter lock time)
Laser guided (Lock on warning, can be countered by breaking visual contact with the shooter.)
Self correcting heat seeking (No lock on warning, difficult to counter while in sight of the shooter)
Semi-intelligent Dual guidance heat/radar seeking (The ultimate guided missle, is a fast kinetic kill vehicle as the guidence system took up the payload space; No lock on, cannot be countered with flares or chaff, can only be avoided if the pilot breaks visual contact with the missle for longer than 4 seconds)

It's the future, we can come up with some really cool weapon systems

[mintyc]

the one thing that has me a bit annoyed is that in the E3 footage the pilots had to switch to ther missles as the active wepon to get a lock on, meaning that they coulldent fire ther guns as ther locked on.

i know ther is probably a good reason why they have done it this way but the flight-sim nerd in me still finds it a little annoying.

[LegioX]

Missiles are for pansies. Give me 8 guns on my wings anyway.

[Blackwolf]

PS1 had similar tricky maneuvers. Flying around trees and over hills sometimes got the missile caught on a tree or the hill and you were free. Flying out of lock range or breaking LOS with some AA platforms (Quasar and Striker) was all you needed in some cases.

You couldn't just shake the missile in mid flight though, and I think those kinds of physics in the game would take a lot of programming.

Originally Posted by mintyc

the one thing that has me a bit annoyed is that in the E3 footage the pilots had to switch to ther missles as the active wepon to get a lock on, meaning that they coulldent fire ther guns as ther locked on.

i know ther is probably a good reason why they have done it this way but the flight-sim nerd in me still finds it a little annoying.

I was really hoping they would remove the "secondary" weapons completely. Just use right mouse button to fire your secondary weapon, no need to switch between modes at all. That's what I wanted to see though, guess they are just doing that for MAX suits though.

[Xyntech]

Originally Posted by Landtank

Hmm I disagree, because no aircraft can outrun a missile in a straight line, you should be able to out-turn a missile if you pull on the brakes and do a complete 180. That would leave you vulnerable enough to be balanced.

I think that it should be very difficult to out-maneuver a missile, but it should be possible fo sho.

No. Anti-Air missiles need to be valuable. Flares also need to be valuable, or else the tradeoff isn't worth it.

If you don't have flares, afterburn behind some cover.

[LegioX]

Be nice if missiles have to be re-equiped. No use having unlimited missiles out there.

[Xyntech]

Originally Posted by LegioX

Be nice if missiles have to be re-equiped. No use having unlimited missiles out there.

Hopefully none of the vehicles have unlimited ammo in the final release. That shit is failtastic.

I suppose having a module that generated ammo for your vehicle out of nanites would be acceptable, so long as it came with heavy tradeoffs, such as generating the new ammo pretty slowly, taking up a valuable module slot, and having a smaller maximum ammo capacity so that you actually had to rely on the regeneration a lot quicker than normal. The explanation could be that the ammo generation module took up a lot of space, so it replaced most of the ammo magazine storage area in the vehicle.

To balance how long it took to regenerate the ammo, I would first figure out how long it took for a vehicle to expand all of it's ammo on average in normal battle conditions, and then make it take twice as long as that for the regenerating ammo to generate that many rounds. A regenerating ammo vehicle would still be viable at that point, but at reduced capacity. Seems fair to me. Everything is about tradeoffs.

[LegioX]

I'm going to be air-to-air, but i will never have missiles on my plane. Hopefully i can put about 8 machine/plasma guns on it. That would be deadly.