Hey there folks, being an active Pantsir player and involved in a similar thread involving the Pantsir I’d like to give my two cents on the situation.
Whilst it is true that the K-Band TRACKING radar leaves you with little warning about any incoming interceptors you must remember it’s operating a 83° F band search radar which can be detected by a massive array of fighters/strike aircraft.
There are some short comings that I encounter with using the Pantsir in both ground RB and custom.
- It’s tracking radar likes to freak out a lot when trying to intercept aircraft at heights of 6km or more at a angle of about 70° ish degrees which results in me removing the automated tracking of the missile and going back to manual SACLOS guidance which if you remember from the sky guardians nerf pretty much made accurately predicting and correcting your interception path “almost” impossible which usual results in either the missile shaking side to side to the point it outright misses or flies off screen.
Secondly when faced with aircraft doing what is essentially a “Tuck and roll” after launching a volley of unguided bombs using their bombing computer I usually abandon intercepting the aircraft and focus on intercepting the inbound enemy munitions while informing my squadron on their rough trajectory with at least a handful heading directly to my location. The same applies with dealing with those pesky heli bastards who launch fire and forget ATGMs then hide behind a hill for dear life which are usually much easier to intercept with my missiles but leaves me vulnerable to further fighter attacks later on if I’m not constantly restocking missiles on a CAP point.
Pantsir’s aren’t unkillable, but when faced against them you need to actually pay attention since the stakes are against you. My friend who has never played top tier has experienced using my own Pantsir before and even then he’s killed absolute idiots who fly in Straight lines.
Genuinely, stop it I know you cas players love bombing shit but do not complain if you died due to flying in a straight line if you detect a pantsir’s search radar pings which show up as S-1 it’s probably a good sign NOT to keep flying in a straight line because more than likely they see you and you most certainly have a interceptor screaming towards you without pinging your MAWs due to the tracking radar being K-Band as previously mentioned. This act of flying straight can be attributed to pre-sky guardians and pre-SACLOS nerf when I killed on average 6-8 enemy CAS using Roland 3s of all things due to your own actions of flying mindlessly straight. I’ll be honest with you and straight to the point. Fly about 45-90° away from a Pantsir to increase your chances on not being immediately shot down then sending a racial slur at myself and other Pantsir players for using what is in your mind “a broken vehicle” is it stronger than some of its other competitors in certain cases for example being the king of multi tasking due to its ability to assign 3 automatically guided missiles and a 4th manually guided one in relation to the TOR’s two it’s got pretty poor concealment and poor steering due to its massive size meaning any missile that I and others fail to intercept have a massive chance at killing the Pantsir.
In regards to other things, the Pantsir’s missiles might be lacking in turning capability being a 30g missile it benefits off the extended range and larger capacity of missiles being 12 in total
A. The TOR-M1 42g missiles
B. VT-1s 50g
C. Any other missile that can send out missiles with better turning than 30gs
To note, Pantsir can’t use its auto tracking feature built into it’s missiles if it’s using IRST so in order to actively hunt you cas players down it has to reveal its search radar in normal mode rather than the more stealthy IRST.
That is all, whilst cas is incredibly frustrating to deal with due to you lot having better overall control of the battle field and essentially being untouchable for a large duration of that, the Pantsir and other capable SAM’s are there to keep you all in check rather than giving you all a free pass to get 10x kills using no skill bombs so just remember that
