I’ll admit, I don’t have a ton of experience with Stingers. Most of it’s on the Stormer AD recently, though I have a lot of experience with the Type 93’s missiles which are very similar in performance (albiet slightly more filler).
But when I used them, any target I hit would either die outright, be crit enough to die on it’s own, damaged enough to not be able to outpull a second one, or an Su-25. Other missiles (like the Mistral) tend towards the higher damage options (apart from against Su-25s), but only marginally.
It’s why I put a focus on the Gepard’s guns so much. A MANPAD can be outpulled no matter how the SPAA fired it. 35mm HE with decent aim is much harder to dodge.
Doesn’t help against standoff range munitions, but there’s fortunately relatively few of them at the tier.
Yeah, it’s map dependant. Just a best case scenario thing. The most important part, which I forgot to mention, relocate after they dip below the horizon. Because they’re going to be looking for you when they pop back up. Something that’s very easy for a Gepard, but much harder for the SIDAM/Shilka.
Personal experience against personal experience. Can’t say which is more common, I can only comment on my experience.
I had somewhat misremembered, they’re passive radar sensors. Effectively ground RWR. Taken from here.
As far as I know, it’s already been bug reported. Dunno why it hasn’t been implemented yet.
Even there, I can think of times I’d prefer to have the SANTAL over the SIDAM 25. It’s got a search RADAR, primarily. It’s also a lot faster, meaning you can position in sneaky areas where the casual player won’t be looking for smoke trails. You also get scouting, which combined with the previous point I find far more useful than the inconsistent tank hunting ability of the SIDAM’s guns.
The SIDAM probably still has the edge, but I think that’s more down to how overvalued these MANPAD only SAMs are. As already discussed, if you can see the missiles coming you get to completely trivialize them. I’d suggest lowering them, but that doesn’t really solve the problem.
Fair.