Why can ESFs kill my MBT with no way to retaliate?

I love how people complain that they have to give up their secondary in order "deter" aircraft, it's not so much a deterrent but a keep your *** alive gun. Just as having both AV primaries/ secondaries will keep your *** alive against other tanks. It's all about your load out or "keep your ***** alive outs", not very catchy i'm not good with names.

But what this guy is asking for it comical, he wants to be a jack of all trades but still a master of AV all the while in a ******* tank.

And to say ESFs are universally great at attacking all targets is laughable, we too have separate load outs that greatly dictate our roles in the sky. Sure your tank is vulnerable to hornets but said hornet pilot it dangerously vulnerable to coyotes and A2A lock-ons, "equip flares then" you might say. Then what get wrecked by flack during your attack run? It's all about the load outs, it's like asking for both flares and FS at the same time because you can't combat dedicated A2A fighters when you want to gank tanks.

How DARE they interrupt my farm with their farm!

I dont know why he complain.
you must choose your Weapon Wisely. There is no Overpowered alrounder who can do everything.
If u Choose the Walker/Ranger then you are a very vulnerable to tanks.

I always put Double Basilisk on my Sunderers. They wont kill an ESF (Except the Pilot is a Newbie) but a good Gunner can fear them.
Basilisk is also very good for Tanks. It is really a good alrounder for all Sitiuations. But it is not so good like a Specialised Weapon.

I am also an Pilot. Not the best but i already know how to dodge Antiair. (Yeah sometimes im too greedy )
Only A2A is my Weak point.

Kind Regards
Faustrecht.

Hold your horses! If you want to bring realism into the game to say "but aircraft should be OP as hell and wipe the floor with anything" then I want to go all out.
Top armor is thin? Ok, I want a missile-lock weapon that can fire 2000KM. Oh wait, continents are 4km wide? So you let me OHK any aircraft I get a lock on? Oh, this comes with a highly sophisticated radar suite ofcourse so firing is a matter of opening the map and clicking on the target I want destroyed.
You deploy a bunch of flares? Big deal, I'll fire a large swarm of wire-guided missiles (A TOW missile is wire-guided and already has a range of 4KM) and use a small alogarithm so missiles don't follow the same target, also I'll add a nice little alogarithm (this is the future after all) that takes into account the speed and direction of the aircraft and will avoid any flare that does not behave like the aircraft (or lacks any heat signature etc). At least one will hit the ESF and insta-kill it!

I'll use up-to-date sattelite imagery to detect any vehicle, ground or air, and fire an artillery shell at them powerful enough to destroy it (thin top armor right?), I can also fire off a bunch of shells predicted paths of the ESF and detonate cluster-flak shells to instakill it! Or just lock on with a missile and ignore the effect of flares altogether (by this time we would have that technology).

In fact, where are the aggressive nano-bots? Create a swarm that will deconstruct anything without the proper code similar to how white bloodcells recognize friendly cells from hostile. It's nothing like the movies where it deconstructs entire buildings in seconds, but lethal anyway. Anyone and anything that comes in touch with these bots will get 'sick' as if they got a flesh-eating bacteria (or in the case of tanks, metal-eating bacteria). It then becomes a question of volume: Can you create enough nano-bots to eat away the aggressive one's before they do too much harm while repairing any damage they do, or will they get enough into you to destroy/kill you? How much energy will you have to spend to keep off a low-grade nano-bot that self-replicates out in the open, and how much firepower and armor can you keep while at the same time needing to reproduce more friendly nano-bots?

Basically the only thing capable of moving if you take realism into this game and marrying it with technological advances are infiltrators.
Have fun with that game!

...

The top of hypocrisy anyone?

The funny thing is several pilots ask for that.
As for the OP, just get a harasser instead. It's far more throw away than an MBT so when air decide your fun is over you've only lost 150 nanites compared to 450.

well nobody's wallet is that big.

Fun Fact:

The Walker and Ranger AA options on the tank / sundy HAVE A BLIND SPOT DIRECTLY ABOVE THE VEHICLE. Yes thats right, an AA weapon that CANNOT look directly up.
Ive had ace pilots fly directly in this area to rain hornets down.

So even with AA equipped if the pilot is good enough you still cannot touch them, no amount of skill, brainpower, technique, or anything else can save your vehicle in this situation.

Get your *** in the air with Hornets and see for yourself how jack of all trades you are.

Another Fun Fact: ESFs cannot stand still in the air with their nose pointed directly down, so I call bull on your statement.

Where did i say stand still?
Please show me oh wise one.

What they can do however is get into this angle, then fly directly downwards staying in this area.

I was simply pointing out a flaw in the AA design, i see no reason to have such a flaw, it is afterall an AA weapon, that cannot look down, but also apparently cannot look directly up.....
Do you not see the problem with this?

.... Really? If they drop directly down from the ******* flight ceiling, which they need to do to even remotely fire enough rockets before crashing, then move your *** 20 m. Maybe drive on a damn rock and angle your tank.
That guy spent a minute to get into position, is clearly visible for anything looking your direction and you can counter it by driving a couple metres.
If THAT is supposed to be a problem I don't know what else you need.

Not that I'm opposed to AA firing upwards, its really necessary to get rid of ceiling Gals, but I seriously doubt what you describe is going to work against anything with more reaction than a vegetable.
ESPECIALLY against a Vanguard. You can basically press F and wait for him to crash into you.

Get a sundy
Deploy it, you know, what you have to do to deploy troops.
Then watch as an ace pilot does exactly what i describe, against 2 walkers might i add.
Ive seen it happen countless times, if it doesnt on your server then youve got some **** pilots to put it bluntly.

I deal with ESFs all day long, i dont have a 'problem' with air. To be quite honest, ill just go grab a lib if air is annoying me but thats another story.

Like i said, i was simply pointing out that AA cannot look directly upwards, its a design flaw and it needs addressing.

If you want to continue arguing for the sake of it (which is really what you wanted all along) **** off and annoy some1 else. Your fast approaching my ignore list, i simply cannot be bothered with ***** who just want to argue.

You deny that an ESF with Hornets can attack aircraft, infantry and tanks to great effect?
The only reason I can't do that G2A stuff is because I am unwilling to waste hours of unfun gameplay learning "features" that should have been filed under "bug" and completely eradicated long ago. AA has never been a problem for me, A2A wasn't a problem either until Reverse Maneuver and hover fighting became common usage. It's ridiculous that the developers don't even look at the least used features and buff them until they become as useful as the most used features, or buff them while slightly nerfing the most used features. Hover frame beats Dogfighting frame on every single viable combat strategy, Night vision scopes are almost never used because the nights don't get dark enough (and we have graphical options to make it light anyway), any flashlight or vehicle light is only useful as a "here I am" function, although the weapon-flashlight at least as a function finding infiltrators. HE and HEAT need a ton of diversification and changes to be as viable as AP, which is currently almost the only real option in tank combat. The list goes on.

Sure, people sacrifice some power when they equip Hornets instead of Coyote's/Afterburners/A2A missiles, but far from as much power as any tank does, despite being cheaper, 1-man and getting a ton of advantages over ground-vehicles that are simply not explainable.
And worst is that when you finally do equip that ground AA, you are still only a deterrent unless there's a few more similar AA weapons around or the pilot is a dummy. The only AA weapon where skill can actually do so something is the Walker, and even then it has a damage output similar to a Skyguard, IE any aircraft can escape it unless the pilot makes a mistake. You can't ambush them, you can't get them into a situation where they can't escape. The Pilot determines 99% of the engagement, whether he wins or loses is almost completely up to him. The only way you can change that is to have some friends pull AA as well, gimping your damage output against any ground unit while at the same time abusing a badly designed flaw in AA that scales too fast.

If you are unwilling to take a weapon to defend against something you are worried about...you can't stand here and complain you don't have the option.

And you still can take part in the ground game. You just won't be the guy up front. Follow another tank, stick with your sundies so they can help you. Just because you don't have an AV secondary doesn't mean you are destined to lose every fight. *eyeroll*

The guy keeps pointing out that his tank dies with in 12-15 seconds and that there's nothing he can do about it. He's clearly 2 hexes deep into enemy territory lone wolfing it and not about to work with team mates.

12-15 seconds is a long time considering all it takes is 1 flack max or a lock on to make me disengage, taking out tanks working with each other is actually really hard and very risky. Which is why we prowl the fringes looking for these *******' who over extend themselves.

so why don't ESFs are required to form wings then to cover each others tiny shortcomings? They are the biggest primadonnas in the game, who grew entitled to an unrestricted solo play on their own terms. Mention any buff to ****tastic skyguards and they start screaming bloody murder because god forbid they find themselves in a grave danger.

The game incentive structure is too out of whack for your point to stand. The game in practice is in 90% about individual FARM. It's in nobody's interest to permanently **** themselves to deter shrodinger's air that might be there or not so nobody does it. Also skyguards are garbage so the game literally goes out of its way to punish players for doing the right thing with the bottom of the barrel levels of xp gain. In the meantime airfarm prints certs.

That's hardly fair to call me a hypocrite. After I pointed out what I thought was pretty straight foreword that the air game is actually clearly split into two defined roles. The fact that we have the option of a rotary doesn't mean we're just as good at the air game as fully dedicated pilots, It's like rolling with Heat rounds and still engaging tanks YOU CAN DO IT just not as well really.

Rotaries or the default guns generally are there on A2G fighters to finish off smoking planes, making pot shots, or acting as a deterrent. As a way to tell that other pilot "Hey I'm not running banshee's/ Airhammer/ or PPAs I'm not a free kill" type of thing. (Thought you gotta watch out for those airhammers)

So in all fairness calling ESF a jack of all trades really isn't warranted, and calling them cheap at 350 nanites isn't fair either. That's 7 minutes worth of resources opposed to the MBTs 9minutes.

It's all rock/paper/scissors. You bring paper to a scissor fight, your going to... Too early in the morning for me to form coherent analogies.

Know what I call a ESF with out a wingman?

Dead

I run with a dedicated wingman all the time, it actually greatly improves the odds of survival and success. For instance we both run A2G load outs and constantly get these ESFs at the flight ceiling who would pounce on us with lock-ons and rotaries, you could do the reverse maneuver on them and pop your FS but for the most part you're at too much a disadvantage to win these engagement.

So when I'm solo I generally just run and hope I can make it to a populated place to thwart him before I die. But when I've got my wingwan he's able to pounce on the pouncer, I do my maneuver and we can burst him down before he kills one of us.

P.S. Do you fly on Connery? Because there are always roving bands of 6+ scythes stocked with A2A who fly all over the map clearing the skies, it's not all skyknights up there.

yeah and the main complaint of this thread is that tanks are in practice unable to wing it with what they have against air. Air is never SoL and can wing it even if it's not exactly pleasant. 10% chance for the tank is better than 0.1% (accounting for the pilot crashing). Currently it's pretty much have a proper loadout or ****.

It is warranted. For that price on the ground you'd get a pidgeonholed lightning that gets trampled by both mbts (understandable) and dirt cheap harassers (insulting).

so ESFs are what exactly in this rps? Scissors that are resistant to rocks and also the best against scissors out of the three?

I did read the whole post. You demonstrate that you don't understand asymmetrical gameplay.

I chose not to say anything about it because I knew it would result in a lot of hand waving and vitriol.

You're mad. That may be good, but wasting time trying to convince daft fury isn't my idea of a good time.