Can the Lightning get an Air radar? ESF already have an engagement radar that auto-spots aircraft within the area. Skyguards would benefit immensely from this and become a better hard counter to air. It would also allow a greater knowledge of aircraft whereabouts for friendlies such as AA MAXes or simply people trying to avoid Airstrikes.
No. Skyguards already crash or freeze my game when they fire at me, and they're a gauranteed kill on me. They need to become LESS powerful.
I love that idea and indead skyguards are very powerfull and annoying to deal with they can be very fast/mobile to add up to the "op" factors. I suggest that the skyguard has to deploy to activate the radar the radar would be a passive that can be unlocked for 200 certs the skyguard will have all aircraft spotted in the range of 500. To make it even better all aircraft will be able to get a passive that will spot deployed aa and aa turrets :0 actually... its a bad idea xD but still posting comment maybe someone likes it. libes would probably abuse it for easy skyguard kills or maybe not o.0 but then skyguard can see them as well so its kind of fair they kind of stay away from eachother and do their thing it would most definitely motivate air to fight air and ground to fight ground because no pilot wants to fly above a skyguard
I'd like to see this in the game. It's a good way of making AA a stronger counter to Aircraft without actually increasing lethality. Sneaking up on targets with aircraft would still work, just become slightly more difficult, because if you move fast enough the range won't give much of a warning, and the player may have slow reactions. As with the ESF, it'd be a helping hand to the less situationally aware but experienced Skyguard users may simply take Fire Suppression. It would close the gap in effectiveness though.
This is a problem for the developers to solve. The Skyguard doesn't need to become less powerful for a bug that YOU have. The bug needs to be solved for you, then it's fair again. A Skyguard is a dedicated AA unit that sacrifices all firepower against the ground to be able to fight Air. It's vulnerable to every single other tank and a lot of infantry. And with proper management an ESF that is capable of effectively attacking Air, Infantry and Tanks all at the same time can seriously hurt or even destroy a Skyguard. Alternatively you can tear one Skyguard apart with a Liberator. It takes far too many clips to destroy the Skyguard so the Lib just tankbusts him, if the Lib has a crew they can finish the job easily. And that's with the current system. Air units get the best stuff for no good reason that I can see. They have the best radar, best night vision, their AI equivalent is much more powerful than the Tank-mounted equivalent (Airhammer deals damage to vehicles, Canister doesn't), ESF are the only vehicles that allow one pilot to access 2 weapons simultaneously, Liberators have more armor than tanks and more firepower in each gun (nosecanon, bellygun, even tailgun is the air equivalent, and the air equivalent is more powerful). The air radar will shift things in the Skyguards favor, allowing him to better shield against air. Which is his whole purpose. Stealth frames would become more useful for fighter-bombers. Stealth frame counters the engagement radar already, so the ESF playing field would become more diverse in terms of utilities and defense slots equipped.
My PC runs at 50~60 FPS ( smoothing enabled ) and I never freeze / crash ( the only crashing that happens to me is when I hit a mountain / tree / tower due to being awful at flying ) when I get hit by a Skyguard, granted I don't fly all that much so it's not like I've got hours of experience with getting hit in the face by them but at the rare times that I do fly I've never had anything like what you described happen to me.
I had a similar idea, though I suggested directional radar that extended out from the front of the turret in a 90-degree cone with a massive range, and any aircraft caught in it it would be auto-spotted. Much as I like killing flyboys, auto spotting aircraft from any direction seems a bit overkill, and it would either have to have abysmal range to make up for it, or be long range but directional, such as my idea. Had an idea about this earlier too, though, some kind of radar truck would be cool, perhaps as a Sunderer certification that works a lot like prox rader but with a much larger radius and has to be deployed to work. Or instead it provides more detailed data about what kind of enemy forces are in an area for commanders to better co-ordinate tactics... I'm just rambling now.
