If you think the weapon you are using sucks.....

Remember, the spitfire exists.

Spitfire isn't a weapon. It's a tool that kindly alerts me to any nearby light assaults. It's also the best damned pocket pub a man can ask for.

I have found a good use for those little beeping toys...drop one on the top floor of a tower...just outside of the shield door...and have a friendly Stalker Infiltrator crouch a few feet away...since those things tend to *annoy* those LA's that run around up on top of the tower, they decide to kill it and...Mr. Stalker makes his day!

I use them only as warning mechanism and place them behind my back. Just so i get surprised less often.

The only problem that I really have with it is that it dies so fast. And to make it worse, you only get one before you need to resupply at a terminal. When it's not dying and I am able to focus on other things(repairing and shooting, mostly), I get assists and/or kills from it.

i spitfire is easily worth a BR 10 NC pub when it comes to helping you defend something

It's because the Spitfire isn't a weapon; it's a sentry with a weak rifle attached- a supplement to the Engineer, not another "man on the field".

What is the general consensus on the Spitfire? It doesn't seem very good, certainly not worth 1,000 certs but I've been killed by them or their Engineer daddy/mommy a few times.

Complete and utter waste of certs if you're not rolling in certs already.

First time I used the Spitfire, It managed to net me about 10 kills in one base defense. We were attacking another base and the enemy tried to thwart the attack by attacking our control points. I guarded one point and used the Spitfire and a pair of AI mines. I set it up so the SFT would beep right before the enemy encountered the mines instead of searching for them.

Mines got about 6 kills, the SFT got about 4. KDR in this situation was about 3 to 5. It served its purpose well.

I've found if you know you won't need a MANA AV turret, and are not going to be sitting in a spot with the AI turret, the Spitfire is a good choice to help guard an area you won't have a continued presence in. Combined with mines, its very effective, especially if you place it so that when the enemy is in LOS to it, they step on a mine.

Its not for everyone's playstyle, so if you believe the anti-hype, don't purchase it. But if you're prone to outside the box thinking, it will serve you well. Admittedly it is situational. But it can give you an extra set of eyes and act as a decoy in a pinch.

I particularly like using it against VS. They waste rounds on it and they don't have the magsize to keep fighting after destroying it. So once the turret blows, you can rush them and get a kill without any damage in return. TR is a bit harder to do this too.. and I'd imagine NC is hard to do as well because of their DPM.

Spitfires are great for finishing off troops who detonate mines but weren't killed.

Oh you're running flack armor and decided to run in here rambo style?

*BOOM* *Kaching* *kaching* *kaching* *dead*

Automated turret puts you in line

Spitfires are amazing when strategically placed.

Also, little known, but Infiltrators can hack enemy spitfires.

Whaaaaaat?!

Completely worth 2,000 certs. But it only costs 1,000 certs. So one of the few bargains in the game. : )

Yeah! It takes half a magazine at close ranges to kill! It's not as if that's a huge advantage if you stick around to kill anyone who destroys your turret...
And at range it gets worse. I often have to fire an entire magazine into it to destroy it, this means that not only has the turret alerted my position, I have given it away myself and I've just opened myself up for an ideal attack while I'm reloading.

A turret is a tool. The Motion sensor, motion darts, ammo packs, shield regenerators, health regenerator, triage, repair gun, rocketlauncher etc are all tools and all have the requirement that to make use of the tool, you have to be there. None of them can get kills unless you make use of it. If no one is around to use the motion sensor you don't get the advantage, if no one is around to get ammo you don't get the advantage etc.

Use the Turret as a tool as you should. It's an automatic 10 to 20% extra DPS to almost any weapon, it alerts you to hostile presence better than a motion sensor, especially when in combat or when enemies are stomping around on a level above/below you and you need to know when they get on your level. It tanks damage if the enemy decides to shoot the turret, at which point you get more time to kill your target as well as an ammo advantage: your enemy has less in his magazine and is more likely to run out before they kill you.
Frankly when I meet a turret I either avoid it or try to kill it. I don't run into rooms with them and my flank attacks are stopped, simply because it's suicide to run into a room with one Spitfire if there's even 1 extra enemy in there. It's not impossible but very tough to both kill the turret and one extra enemy. The turret has a TTK of 3 seconds on everything but a Heavy at about midrange if I remember correctly. This means that with firing a complete magazine on an enemy and reloading, the turret kills you before you at about the end of your reload, assuming you were never hit by the enemy you kill and not killed sooner.

And anyone not able to see the advantages in that... Then you don't even know what an advantage is. The turret's only flaw is that you only get one. You should be allowed to place more on a cooldown (about a minute cooldown?).

Yeah, I've been killing their own engineer with it... Boy were they suprised. I guess they were thinking it was bugged or something because they didn't do anything to avoid it.
I do have to note though, that often the hack doesn't start if you uncloak in front of it and start hacking. If you are unlucky the turret will constantly hit you even if you keep strafing around it. At that point: cloak, move to the other side and restart. If you are unlucky it will catch up again and you'll lose health, but you'll capture it eventually.

More fun is the following that I still have to try sometime: People place a bunch of Spitfires around one place, such as a jumppad, which is also near their Sunderer usually. Use an EMP or decoy to deactivate or distract them (might want to use an EMP implant for safety) and hack all of the turrets. Then watch as your enemy is blown to pieces by their own turrets.

My brother now has one kill on a spitfire btw even though he never bought one, courtesy of hacking a turret

Yeah it's an awesome tool for the 30 seconds it's alive. Then I'm gimped after that, when I could have just used an AI turret for a mobile cover instead, and my sensor darts to be even more aware of an enemy presence.

It's rarely just free dps. More often than not, I have to babysit the damn thing to keep it alive, which means I'm just taking myself out of the battle to repair a much weaker weapon than my carbine. My dps usually drops when using the spitfire. The exception is in small battles where 1-2 enemies are trickling into a flag room, but that isn't a scenario PS2 should be balanced around.

Thanks to this thread now I'm gonna spend the next hours as Infiltrator searching for Spitfires to hack

It could do with a touch more health but apart from that its ok.

Its a nice assist tool and is thus suited to certain areas more than others, but once you figure out which it can net a few kills...

It needs a bit more health/toughness or a bit more DPS (or maybe just to lock and fire a bit quicker), health/toughness being the more likely given that if you mass deploy them they can be pretty effective.

I think you probably should be able to carry 2 as well so you can redeploy once without resupplying.

Purely killing-wise I think you'd probably get the MAX punch directive more quickly.