With SAL Brimstones being able to guide towards targets with the new map POI function, can Hellfires possibly get the same treatment too?
tl;dr: Brimstones currently can be launched using the map POI function to have it guide towards a general target direction, then the pilot can come out of cover to essentially do a LOAL/terminal guidance at the last second when the missile is near the target.
Currently, you can sorta do this with Hellfires by having a brief line of sight and firing on a point track location and immediately turning off lase, then popping up a few seconds later to reguide the hellfire missile at the last second, but this method has two pitfalls:
Requires you to have LOS with your target initially, which exposes your location
When you turn off the laser, your missile will simply turn off all control surfaces mid-course and become stupid (which may affect/exaggerate how off-course your missile becomes), and this is the main gripe people have with the piss-poor IOG ingame
If this is something helicopters can do, hopefully and maybe Hellfire equipped vehicles just got a little bit stronger
Just an update to this, it actually works alright!
Hellfire missiles will not hit pinpoint accurate to where you mark on the map POI, so make sure you give yourself just enough time (10-15 seconds) to terminally guide the hellfire missile on target.
Also ensure you have your helicopter to not immediately turn on laser when firing a missile, which can be turned off under Options→Air Battle Settings→Enable laser designator before launch (NO)
It works fairly well on SPAA sitting inside their spawn. Just make sure to have adequate LOS to target. This also works with all types of hellfire-like missiles such as mokopa, akd-9, akd-10s, L-umtas, etc.
What do you mean? Before when you had no POI function, you still had to expose yourself to get your missile to fly towards a general location AND if you had to fly above a certain altitude to see the enemy spawn to mark it, odds are you’re flying high enough for SPAA to spot you or worst case, they can possibly fire a sneaky missile with IR or contrast track.
Now you have the benefit of just not exposing yourself at all to SPAA and prefiring at your leisure.
Also, the inherent issues with the hellfire missiles losing maneuverability is because the way Gaijin models missiles where once the missile runs out of booster thrust, the missiles start to lose speed rapidly and “fishtail” when sudden course changes are applied because the rapid deceleration causes the missile to become sluggish. This is seen in ALL missiles ingame.
You can see this on SACLOS SPAA missiles after the boosters start running out, which is exacerbated on hellfires, l-umtas, and mokopa missiles because they have very short booster times, so unless Gaijin decides to remodel missile FMs, this will likely be here to stay.
A possible solution is if they fixed the top down trajectory so the missile isn’t as rapidly losing speed but I’m doubtful that this will help the FM characteristic of the missile because Gaijin just thinks missiles turn into wet noodles when the juice runs out
and yeah, these are just FM issues that have been plaguing the hellfires since day 1, most notably the lobbing trajectory which can’t be selected
And no, I never said that hellfires are good now, but they added one functionality that at least allows it some level of utility in certain situations
Creating the POI is not the problem prior you could just target anything behind and HF would behave like firing at max range. Problem is to time ascend of the heli and find target in time. Half decent SAM player will move out of spawn. So I don’t consider new POI feature much improvement for helicopters.
Problem is that HF spends energy in steep climb and then glides towards the target instead of following more ballistic trajectory which would allow to retain the speed/energy better.
POI does help when you know there’s SPAA pinging you from their spawn, or if you have drone assist from a squadmate, since quite a lot of players haven’t gotten the memo that moving away from spawn is pretty much a necessity to survive, so I’ve had some luck with nailing SPAA, especially after you loiter about 4-6 hellfires. Best case scenario, you can clear out 2-3 people from spawn if they’re being complacent. But like I said, it only works in certain situations.
I’ve also tested spam/loiter firing x16 hellfires in a general direction to some effect but it’s mostly affected by the trajectory and loss of energy inherent to hellfire missiles because the missiles don’t like it when you suddenly lase and tell it to hit something 100m away from the initial point it was gliding to
Yeah, there is no top down in hellfires unfortunately because it’s more or less horizontal when the missile is about to connect.
I’m like a 50/50 on whether a top down trajectory would actually fix its sluggishness though, just because of how missiles literally become limp as soon as it loses a lot of energy - something the hellfire is very prone to after ~5km. (but it may make the POI function more accurate, since the terminal glide for the hellfires cause it to miss about 50m from POIs) I’m hoping that there’s some sort of rework to them to make them more “snappy”, but something as big as missile FM takes forever for the devs to fix. Just look at how long the TOWs were broken…
i do agree that the hellfires are underpreforming, whole in any real life scenario they are verry dominating. i do believe this is intentional as the game devs want to keep this game monitized in russia, and if they make the russian counterparts underpreform they risk the game being removed from the country. hence why Russian and Chineese nations are the most powerfull in the game in all gamemodes
US ruled the skies before there were any counter parts until very recently with EF, and up to this point US is still one of the strongest nations. The reason for low WR is the fact that most people just spam AMRAAM and consequently die to the first missile launched at them, although they might get a kill or two, and couple that with the fact that from my experience, before EFs it was basically US v US every game, which lowers WR.
Which u should not shoot at? Why, ABRAMs will also block it with turret cheeks, why would u think it doesn’t, it’s 800mm KE and nothing does that except LOTAS lol.
That’s the case with any Chinese or soviet tank.
Quite the opposite, US tanks have blow out panels, just because u hit the auto loader doesn’t mean there is a round there.
Welp get help if u think that, they have clear weakspots where u can one shot kill easy.
US is better than China and by quite a margin, Germany or Sweden is better than Russia.
False, the dart spalls all over the autoloader, it used to hit the ammo straight now the autoloader blocks and eats every spall that occurs, so basically spall liners. Also Russian tanks are known to have less spalling somehow.
Same armor but worse reload
Russia is the second best nation in the game by having best helicopters, best SPAAs, ERA performance is rigged.
it can be a skill issue if it is from 1 or a few people but its thousands of people who say the same thing again and again.
its with a reason many people think the game shifts the baalance of the game to the russian/ chineese side in fear the game will no longer be monetized in those country’s.
im far from the best player.
this is because USA tech tree is the go to for most new people, they join the game, buy top tier premiums and go play, with makes the playerbase mosly in the usa camp, still that does nothing to the fact the american planes are underpreforming while russian planes for example overpreform.
that is just not true, the ammo in russian/ chineese tanks verry often gets destroyed and does not ignite as for usa/ britain ignites nearly 100% of times, from my experience atleast.
in my experience the side armor of the t80bvm for example eats so many apfsds rounds while leaving the tank with little to no damage while the american abrams sepv2’s sideplates do nearly nothing in terms of protection against apfsds rounds while made from the same materials
I just find the Hellfire’s flight path stupid. It’s trying to do both Top-Down and Direct at the same time. It lofts up but then goes back down. It’s like they want it to be gimped…
It’s a code issue, long known yet not fixed, kinda weird. The Chinese missiles work fine with top down although it is still a bit… I mean against Russian tanks they just end up running straight into UFP and do no damage half the time even when top down. Gaijin should really give the option of direct attack.
the british rooivalks rockets work fine also even tho they are a upgraded version of the hellfire so no idea why they cant fix them, maybe for balancing ?
Maybe, cause it’s sort of trades for balance. AKD10 slow but loads of pen, Hellfire has faster speed and similar pen to AKD10 so has to be nerfed by sth, and in the end they chose trajectory of all things.
The Mokopa outputs more thrust overall compared to the hellfire. So it doesn’t struggle in the 5-8km launches as much as the hellfire. What makes the hellfire really bad in longer ranges is the amount of speed it loses. Because of this, if a tank does any kind of movement, either the hellfire drops out of the sky (because it loses to much speed) or it overcompensates which leads to missing the target completely. Not saying that the Mokopa doesn’t struggle from this as all AGM (SALH) have poor engines but you won’t see it as much.
I think the only AGM (SALH) that doesn’t have this issue is the AKD-10 and the BA-7. It can maintain speed for much longer due to its long lasting sustainer engine. Because of this, it’s very accurate in longer ranges. It does come at the cost of poor short to medium range performance due to it’s weak engine.
Gaijin, just give US the AGM-114L, or at least implement the other Hellfires correctly.
The US currently have the worst heli AGM’s thanks to nerfing the Hellfire’s speed and max range (making it loft an absurd 66 degrees to a target which is 7km away lmao),
the KILO variant’s max range irl is 11.5km but in game it’s just 8km.
Also, hellfires don’t magically fuse themselves irl after flying 8km ;)
I’m not even going to mention that the Hellfire B autopilot is capable of leading to a target’s last known position after losing a lock, thanks to it’s IOG kit, while in game even the Hellfire K can’t do it.
Or you all just don’t believe in the hellfire’s capabilities, just like you don’t believe in Abrams’ armor increase?
