[Suggestion] Upgraded Lightning AA Systems

my apologies, but your posts sounded like they were leading there and i get tired of people talking about how their aircraft should be better by divine right or some nonsense. add in some basic air physics that actually make flying in this game mean something and i would be all for increasing firepower on all of the aircraft. of course that would also probably remove 99% of the people in the skies currently.

BTW are you on connery? because i think i recognize both of your names.

No, I play on Waterson. I think that air physics should at least be battlefield's passable ones, and as the Valkyrie (helicopter) is coming it would be even more effective in reducing farming

too many people that copy names. depends on which battlefield you are talking about but i get your point. unfortunately any sort of real flight physics are unlikely to happen, partly because it would put too much strain on the processors in the servers, but primarily because it would remove all but a small handful of pilots from the skies.

Haha... ah, this thread has had a good run. Over a thousand views, 4 pages of posts, not bad for one little Lightning. But all good things must come to an end, and largely because of the changes being made to air units there's not a whole lotta reason to keep this up.

Except... that there's one last little Lightning that deserves its few seconds on stage. So I present... the Sky Buster!



Like the Shredder, not a whole lot to say about the Sky Buster, which is essentially a renamed Tank Buster placed on a swivel-mount for 360 degree coverage. It has a slightly longer range than the original Tank Buster, but pays for this by being relatively ineffective against tanks and infantry. It also has a slightly larger magazine belt as well for sustained fire.

The name comes from the Type 730 Close In Weapon System, which in turn gets its name from have seven 30mm barrels (which fits the Sky Buster perfectly assuming that that center one is a barrel).

A real quickie, but don't think I forgot about you!

now an artillery lightning could be interesting although i think the turret should be bigger.

Yush! Having a self propelled gun turret for a lightning would be perfect!

It's a mortar Lightning... loosely based off of something like this:



So not so much a SPG as it is just a mortar carrier. Though I agree... a Lightning SPG would be fun as balls too!

something else i just thought up that could be fun too would be a tank hunter variant of the lightning with a much larger angrier AP gun but no turret and only a very limited pivot for the main gun.

^^kinda like that.

Why don't we use solid bullets from a chain gun for AA? Battle fields AA kills farmers, can't attack at range, and is effective.

battlefield AA is effective? since which game? last effective AA i saw was in BF1942 (flak, desert combat stationary machine guns seemed ok too). i gave up on any games EA has touched since the awful mess that was BF3 (high prices, horrible products, shady business practices, and a general disdain for their customers).

Well in BF3 and BF4 they had the "anti-spawn camping" AA be very effective. Heck in BF4 it was an automated system that was also invulnerable.

The ground-based AA was (un)surprisingly good against infantry and light vehicles, and halfway decent against air as well. Definitely killed helicopters, and secondary missiles gave it a decent time against fast-flying jets.

Really, among FPS and RTS games, there are few games with as ineffective AA options as PS2.

The Lightning would actually make a great Tank Destroyer, largely due to its very low profile (and thus ease of ambush).

So if you took the "special" 150mm Vanguard cannon and put it in a fixed mount on the Lightning...

i have been doing fine so far with my AA options. i have never felt that i was just SOL when a swarm of aircraft popped over head. there are times when they have popped my skyguard too quickly and i have had to wait, but i have always had access to AA turrets, or my (mostly) vanilla single burster MAX suit (no the vanilla MAX won't kill anything, but they do take notice and sometimes run off). if a base is getting hit too hard by air i can almost always pull back to the next base in line and find some way to hit from there or somewhere on the way to the base being bombed.

in BF2 the jets were impossible to stop unless the player was either a pilot so horrible that they were likely to crash anyway or so full of themselves / dumb that they stood still and allowed you to kill them. when i got tired of being punkbuster kicked for not doing anything at all while watching the servers fill with blatant aim bots that would kill EVERYONE on the enemy side with medic panels using a single push of a button AT THE SAME TIME, at that point i don't remember seeing any jets so i don't remember any major AA. also if you have to make anything invulnerable (besides terrain/buildings, there are processing limitations there) then that is a sign that the game design is screwed up somewhere.

you are going to have a hard time convincing me EA can ever do anything right, because i have been burned to the point that i refuse to do anything that would willfully result in EA earning money.

Yes, oh and lets not forget the sunderers! Give them a large artillery weapon in the back in exchange for its carrying and spawning capabilities, its a good trade off. Though when I think about it more, I kinda ponder on how it would work. To counter it the use of light vehicles such as Harrasers, ESF's, and even Flashes should be able to take one of them out when deployed.. Maybe it can have an inverted angle. Say if you fire in front of you, the barrel would have to go at a 85 degree angle, and to get the longest range, it would go at a 25 degree angle or something like that. So that it wouldn't just be a short range copy of the HE turret.

Personally, using a Lightning for pure anti-infantry would make it less flexible with other forms of engagement. Awhile back I believe that the lightning can use a machine gun attachment that takes the active slots of the lightning, meaning opting Fire suppression or Smoke for a turret mounted machine gun, similar to the Kobalt or the engi turret but with ammo.

Now a sunderer can be made into a nice mobile support platform to carry anti-air artillery, or in-direct artillery support. As said to replace the ability to carry troops or spawn in/on them when deployed. We don't really have artillery in this game, but it would make a pretty good addition.

I really like the idea of the Coyote on a lightning, definitely should be implemented if anything.

IMO the cannon should be at the very back and have limited horizontal movement.

Oh I never said that EA did BF3 or BF4 right. In fact I wouldn't really recommend that you pay money to pay either, because they're rather bad. I only have 8 hours in BF4 and 60 in BF3... compared to the 1,061 hours I have in PS2. BF3 and 4 are still terrible... but for different reasons.

Although in BF2 the helicopters were always much more of a problem for me than the jets were... jets would usually leave me alone when I was an infantryman, but the helicopters would stay on station and absolutely wreck me.

Hmmm... like... so?


For that Russian 2S7 Pion look...



or...



For that US M109 appearance?

those actually look pretty good.

I'd think that a 2 small weapon setup would work for the Lightning.

Currently it's a single turret, with a Main Gun and a Secondary Gun with it.

What if you allow the main gun to be swapped with a AA capable, direct fire gun, meaning no Flak... But it has greater damaging and penetrative properties. The gun could be a low rate of fire, with a very long range, and it's only a single gun, not a dual gun.

When you change the secondary weapon, you can swap it with a AA missile weapon that specializes in locking on targets in the air.
Maybe allow players to choose from Warhead variant, or a EMP variant which disables the vehicle for 3 seconds, causing it to fall from the sky temporarily. The reload of said missile launcher would take far longer than 3 seconds, and it's a 2 round shot with limited ammunition. 10 second reload at minimum could be balanced for this.

The main gun would be where the cannon should be, but designed to have a higher angle of fire. The secondary gun is attached to the side of the turret.

Actually a even better idea is allowing players to change actual armor pieces of their vehicles, like the turret, into a different turret with new stats. For instance, you can swap it from a Lightning turret, into a Skyguard turret, and in effect the tank is renamed to a Skyguard class for that purpose.

You could apply this idea across different vehicles to give them new roles and new names.

You DO realize that BF3 is full of nothing but ESP hackers right?

Planetside 2 has it's share of hackers and cheaters too.
Any FPS game that runs client sided in a hybrid client-server and p2p structure will inevitably attract cheaters and hackers to it.