I am here to report as a player of War Thunder that currently any helicopter equipped with the hellfire missile that is unable to utilize Spikes or Vihkr missiles is unusable in the current meta and should be lowered in BR.
Being unable to FNF, and being unable to reach through smoke makes any engagement unreasonable.
Hellfires are often used with a visual tracker and if that loses track it will rapidly move off target and the hellfire will follow that movement so if its manually guided in it can still hit the target
No, if you lase into smoke the missile will get confused. if you turn off laser BEFORE the place you’re lasing is blocked by smoke, the IOG can get the missile there, but if you’re still lasing the IOG will continue whatever maneuver was last happening to some degree and it will veer off course. It’s not GNSS capable. Brimstones are, though.