The 1 sided air defense problem is still here and worse than ever

Game Discussion General Discussion
1

Honestly it feels like the devs Added 1 competent AA to the game then pretended the others were somehow on par with it, cause i don’t know in what universe is the IRST SLM on the same battle rating as a system that fires 4 non slm irsts, The SPYDER, CLAWS, EldE 98 and Tan-SAM are pretty much all dead in the water past 10km so if you dont have the SLM or Pantsir on your team your pretty much playing with half the range air defense wise.

Ground Launched Active radar missiles particularly suck becuase they give off a radar warning the entire time while still having less range than missiles that dont in fact the CLAWS would be Significantly better if i could just take 6 Aim9X instead of any aim120s at all since their pretty much garbage past 10km anyways so there no reason to ever use them over the 9X.

But hey this is warthunder and if the dominance of the pantsir has told me anything we are gonna have to deal with this shit for like 2 more year before there’s any kind of balance.

6 Likes
2

SPYDER is as bad as it was on dev server?

while it might be too high in BR, it fills different role, or niche, to SLM.

3

yes

what role could that be considering its worse at everything other than maybe sub 3km shots

4

Nah dont worry well get a super buffed BUK next update and were back to russian dominance

7 Likes
5

rip israel lmao. really hoped gaijin wouldnt do them dirty like that after leaving them with chaparal as AA for how long? almost two years?

precisely that. SLM lacks thrust vectoring and pulls less Gs, coupled with the vertical launch config. From what ive tested, it has rather large deadzone around it, making it quite vulnerable to low flying aircraft and helicopters.

now i know, those arent exactly an issue at top tier right now as most pressing concern is the long range Kh-38MT spam.

BUT.

A) SLM, due to aforementioned deadzone, and lack of guns, coupled with large size and need to be set up first, will be hard to use on maps such as advance to rhine. dont get me wrong SLM will absolutely obliterate any fool trying to fly high, but i can already see me getting jumped by sneaky AH-1G and i will be just watching it as it goes to town on me.

not sure about low flying planes either, if the SLM missile wont get the initial DL info, will it be able to point its seeker towards the plane that just dissapeared behind some buildings? or will it be able to do it in time for IR to kick in?

B) if SLM proves to be as dominant as everyone says (which i mean, yeah, no doubt?), and if gaijin postpones additions of more modern A2G weaponry, i wouldnt be surprised if there will be shift in tactics of CAS planes, from launching long range missiles to low flying passes (similiarly how R-27ER basically forced multipathing when it was first added).

circling back to previous point. i plan to run few test battles against friends this weekend, so im curious if this will prove to be a correct assumption.

i can already see this happening with OSA and FlakRad. Those two REALLY struggle with low flying planes so i supplement them with Gepard A2. Which, due to stingers, is kinda lacking.

I can imagine the french and swedish (or rather finish) Ito 90 shares the same issue. but now sweden can supplement Ito90 with Elde.

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The slm only has less gs but it keeps the trust vectoring so it can still pull pretty aggressively, a heli would need to get like well withing 1.5km for you to not be able to shoot them down and thats not happening in most maps. and close range low flying jets are an issue for all the new AA since you cant manual lock the missiles (except the tan-SAM) and the radars take like 2 seconds to detect a target at close range and your gonna be dead at that point anyways.
the Rb 98 also has an orienting phase so its also not the most ideal for those situations either.
Again my problem here is there just seems to be another massive gap in SAM capabilities after we just went through years of the same issue.

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Even the IRIS-T falls short. My friends and I were testing out the new systems on Customs yesterday, and all of them are complete crap.

The SPYDER gets defeated by a slight turn (he was just doing wide circles and avoided the missile by doing that)
IRIS-T was being defeated by being slightly lower than Strike Aircraft spawn (and funny enough, slightly higher than Strike Aircraft spawn)
American Humvee was halfway decent, but again, was defeated by a slight turn (and wasn’t that good at defeating munitions, could just he skill issue though)
Chinese Pantsir was surprisingly good, just that it’s extremely slow for no good reason (missiles, not the vehicle)
EldE was as terrible as we all thought: literally just a Swedish Antelope.

So yeah, Pantsir is still the greatest SPAA, and even better now that you can use the radar to intercept Munitions instead of guiding by hand.

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im not entirely sure on that. does it really? model doesnt seem to suggest it (at least when compared to base IRIS-T), and right now in test drive, i would certainly expect hit at helicopter at 500m with TVC missile.

yeah not on most, but it is still an issue for those few that do.

IRIS-T has TVC for sure, which should make the orientation phase much easier.

oh definetively. i was just thinking about one concrete vehicle, not the new additions as a whole. SLM is miles above the other new SAMs.

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yep still has it you can check the files.

yeah its orienting phase is a lil shorter but not by much.

10

my bad then, i apologize.

that makes the current situation somehow even worse, lmao.

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welp all we can do is wait and hope the devs drop some buffs for the other sams

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Dont forget merkava armor is still non existent, its APS is still broken a year later but they gave russia a new one this patch that works, Chaparal still has the wrong seeker head on its missile upgrade… yeah, they put Israel even lower on the totem pole than the US

13

indeed, israel especially (which afaik would be the fastest buff, just slapping some derby-er onto it)

14

its a struggle bus, whats there to say.

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WIsh they would at least give us the Merkava Mk1 so we can have a lower BR one to play with. That thing actually stops stuff from time to time (especially since many havent dealt with them yet and fewer darts)

16

One sided is a false claim.
However, even if it was one sided, that still means all CAS in the match have to stay low and use less effective tactics due to all the other new powercreeping SPAA.

1 Like
17

stay low?? if you have both the SLM and Pantisr on your team you can just fly around freely since nothing else is much of a threat past 12km so your free to spam kh38s like usual

18

With SLM, SLAMRAAM, Spyder.* on your team you’re free to fly around high.
Pantsir is easily worse compared to them, even the new Chinese SPAA is slightly better.

1 Like
19

S400 straight. As a matter of jumping in spaa lvl we got moving from Tunguska to pantsir

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what??? the only 1 of those 3 better than the pantisr is the SLM. the claws and spyder mite be better at sub 10km but thats the only thing they have on the pantsir since it has almost twice the effective range.

1 Like