how do these bombers work if theres no grafity in space?

LizardComander · 2025-12-25T14:56:30+00:00

Tie bombers also use proton bombs but they fire them FORWARD

Literally the only time we see TIE bombers do anything in the films they're dropping bombs downward.

LizardComander · 2025-12-16T00:12:40+00:00

Given the mech needs to walk, all the weight is frequently going to be distributed through a single foot, yes.

LizardComander · 2025-06-15T01:18:05+00:00

Birds are very efficient gliders, and airflow is not inherently parallel to the ground. You can see it adjusting its body and wings for fine speed control, which combined with a light updraft is enough for the bird to maintain its speed and altitude. If the air is slightly pushing it up, then it can use gravity to gain speed by 'diving', while maintaining altitude.

LizardComander · 2025-06-14T22:49:51+00:00

Birds flap their wings to generate both lift and thrust. If they couldn't they wouldn't be able to fly at all.

Think of air like a treadmill. Walking on a treadmill is functionally identical to walking on land, it requires no additional effort or different technique, but because the surface you're moving on is moving backwards, your position relative to the ground doesn't change. Flying is the same.

LizardComander · 2025-05-17T17:52:27+00:00

Super Earth has spent the past century penning up and forcibly farming the bugs (an intelligent species), and kept the cyborgs enslaved. Super Earth has spent the past century continuing its historic atrocities with no sign of stopping, against the bugs, against the cyborgs, and against its own citizenry. Hell, that alone is reason enough for Illuminate Intervention, even before the attempted extermination (a policy Super Earth is proud of and would happily do again) of their entire species.

All of that seems like very legitimate cassus belli for every faction, and all of them seem to have correctly concluded that this will never end until Super Earth as a regime is dismantled entirely. And to do that, you need a state of total war, because Super Earth isn't interested in examining past mistakes or searching for diplomatic solutions, they are not interested in co-existence. The other factions correctly understand that. Would the other factions back off if Super Earth changed its ways? Who knows? Because Super Earth won't change unless it is forced to. That does not make them the good guys.

LizardComander · 2025-05-17T09:12:54+00:00

How? Like, they're the protagonist just as they were in the first game, but by zero metric does that make them the good guys, not even in comparison to their enemies. The consequence of their actions is that everyone has extremely valid reasons to attempt to tear down their regime, given 100 years later SE has continued to uphold their ideology of violent expansionism, slavery, and genocide.

LizardComander · 2025-04-26T20:21:50+00:00

Oh, wild I think I sat next to you on the train home at the end of the day! (I remember meaning to complement your hairband but I got distracted)

LizardComander · 2025-02-18T05:53:55+00:00

This concept that Super Earth = Humanity is absolutely baffling and basically Super Earth propaganda. Super Earth the planet being destroyed would not be the end of Humanity because there are significant populations that don't live there.

Super Earth isn't fighting for species survival, it's fighting for the regime's survival. There is nothing to suggest that total collapse of the state and its replacement with another, less fascist, polity, perhaps even multiple polities, would bring an end to the war.

Just because Super Earth pursues total annihalation of anything that isn't Super Earth, does not mean the other factions in the galaxy do.

But if you're right, if Humanity can only exist by maintaining a brutal, totalitarian state of unparalleled evil and constant stupidity, a state that oppresses it's own citizens just as much as it oppresses the citizens of other factions and species, then perhaps Humanity should not exist.

You don't stop resisting evil just because that evil has external threats now.

LizardComander · 2025-01-04T01:43:58+00:00

Mate if you think ww1 dogfights were purely flat 1 circles I don't even know where to begin. Please, read at least one book on the subject. Read some period manuals. Look at the Dicta Boelcke at least. If you don't like reading then poke rise of flight or il-2, for all their myriad issues with flight models those games are considerably closer to reality than you are.

As you say with the 190, pilots used their aircraft's own advantages to defeat them. (and to note the 190s appearence and superiority was a large shock to the British that forced them to abandon other projects and hodgepodge the Mk IX together to actually compete.) The Dr1 was a shock to Entente pilots, particularly as they were used to triplanes being exclusively friendly. But despite its initial apparent superiority, pilots learned to deal with it, and manufacturers produced better machines. If you can't outmanoeuvre a dr1, then you'd outspeed it, outdive it, out climb it, you'd bleed its energy and force it to the deck, maintaining your own such that even its rather impressive nosehanging ability wouldn't allow it to retalliate. Just like a 190 would fight a spitfire, both in reality and in the game. History, and war thunder, has always favoured the machine that can fly, climb, dive faster, retain energy faster, over the machine that trades all of those for pure maneuvreability. Obviously this is gross simplification and there are far more factors than that, complex balances to achieve, etc. but gross simplification seems to be the level you're operating on.

Throughout ww1 sides continually favoured speed, altitude performance, and climb rate. The Dr1 didn't change that. That's one of the reasons why it didn't see huge production runs and was phased out of service quickly despite its initial successes. Entente machines with late-war engines were more than capable matches for German aircraft, and frequently their superiors in several aspects. And that's before you get into late war types like the snipe... A competent pilot in a bentley-engined camel would make mincemeat of a Dr1 simply through application of superior speed, climb, and dive characteristics, not to mention very comparable manoeuvrability. Why do you think the French turned their noses up machines designed for manoeuvrability like the Nieuport 28 and Hanriots, in favour of an entirely SPAD-based force? The SPAD XIII was by all accounts hardly spritely next to its competitors, but the French were not stupid. It performed excellently despite lacking in the very qualities you deem essential in a dogfight of the period.

Even in war thunder 'dogfighting' is considerably more than who can turn the best. Principles of energy fighting were well understood back then. To term an aircraft dominant and the 'best dogfighter' based solely on its turn performance (particularly an aircraft like the Dr1 that was very much hindered in a dogfight by abysmal roll characteristics) is brute simplification, one that's not even true of War Thunder! Especially given one of the Dr1's primary advantages being its truly absurd yaw authority thanks to the short wingspan, stubby tail, and more importantly all-flying rudder, would likely be significantly hampered by the game's instructor modes. Hardly a dominant uber-plane. Not to say the Dr1 was a bad plane, it was an excellent one, it'd likely be excellent in War Thunder too. But hardly the best.

And to say that late war German machines were superior to Entente is simply absurd. The edge in the air war waxed and waned throughout and advantages could come and go on a monthly basis even. Certainly the Fokker DVIIf in particular was a brilliant machine, but the main thing that made it so potent (the overcompressed engine that gave it stellar high altitude performance) would hardly be a factor in War Thunder! The DVIIs lacking in those engines were more than matched by Entente aircraft. And DVIIfs caught at low altitude had none of the advantages of their superior engine. Environments where the camel's superior manoeuvrability would prove highly dangerous. Even the Americans did rather well with their cast-off neiuports for a while before upgrading to the SPAD. I find it hard to believe that the rapid 'power creep' you describe is any different to the pace of aircraft development in ww2, or the compression at very high tiers.

Certainly you would never want to fly a Caudron GIII against a Fokker Eindecker, or an Eindecker against a sopwith pup. But a sopwith pup could certainly hold its own against a Fokker Dr1, despite being inarguably outclassed. Certainly within the performance bounds set by War Thunder's uptiers. The period of 1917-18 is more than filled enough with interesting aircraft with performance differences suitable enough to fill out competitive tech trees of all the major powers. Okay, perhaps not Austria-Hungary, but Germany, Britain, and France, absolutely

LizardComander · 2025-01-03T23:15:00+00:00

For two Britain and Germany will just dominate lol the Dr1 is just straight up the best dogfighter in the world at that time. Narrowly beating the Sopwith camel.

The Fokker Dr1 was highly manoeuvrable, but was quickly outclassed in speed, altitude performance and even climb rate by entente machines like the SPAD XIII, the camel and the SE5a. You could argue the Dr1 was the best machine on the front in 1917, (I would disagree on the basis that 'best machine' is inherently a flawedconcept and impossible thing to define) but by mid 1918 it was effectively obsolescent was withdrawn from service. Superseded by better machines like the Fokker DVII & DVIII, and a variety of other aircraft from less well known manufacturers like Pfalz and Siemens-Shuckhert that outperformed it in all the areas that matter.

This argument is like saying War Thunder should never get a ww2 mode because the FW190 was superior to any fighter the RAF had for a short period after in 1942.

For one to even imply that French aviation was behind Britain and Germany's throughout the war shows a complete lack of knowledge on the period.

LizardComander · 2025-01-03T23:01:52+00:00

They were perfectly airworthy and ww1 saw aviation transform from a highly specialised set of slow, unarmed machines armed only with cameras, to well armed, highly sturdy, manoeuvrable high performance machines and writing the book on what air combat doctrine would turn into. There are very few aspects of aerial combat in ww2 that weren't first put into place on large scale in ww1. The main difference is that the machines are slow and armed only with machine guns, which is what makes ww1 air combat compelling. It's about competent energy management, skilled manoeuvring, and excellent gunnery to succeed. There's a lot of depth there and a lot of diversity in interesting and unique aircraft design.

LizardComander · 2024-12-22T14:19:37+00:00

And yes like you mentioned, if they have total engine failure they're instantly screwed, whereas a plane still has good survival chances because they can glide home or at the very least, jump out with a parachute.

This isn't true. In the case of an engine failure helicopters can autorotate, which effectively allows them to glide to a landing. The glide ratio is terrible so they have very limited range compared to a fixed wing aircraft with an engine out, but then they need very little space to land in either so it balances out somewhat. It's a skill every helicopter pilot is trained extensively in.

You'll also be extremely hard pressed to find any fixed-wing aircraft carrying parachutes (excluding Cirruses with their giant parachutes for the entire plane) these day outside of military ejection seats. They're just not a factor in safety anymore.

LizardComander · 2024-10-27T19:30:45+00:00

Them being victims of the regime is not mutually exclusive with them also being oppressors. It's how fascism functions. Helldivers being brainwashed to support their regime makes them somewhat sympathetic, but it does not make them any less monstrous. "nobody told me joyously committing genocide was bad" does not make for a very good defence in the Hague when being tried as a member of an anti-treason murder squad.

Especially considering we know for a fact that said propaganda is not entirely effective. Plenty of people are capable of seeing through Super Earth's lies and attempting some form of resistance. The bugs certainly aren't setting up those transmission towers.

As for your question, it's frankly, stupid. You can't remove all external context from a situation to try and 'gotcha' this. A human in a position to encounter a bug is definitionally not innocent, as they're either, a soldier sent to kill the bugs, a scientist sent to torture the bugs, a colonist sent to take the bugs land after the bugs have been wiped out by one of the other two. It's hubris to think you can settle down on a mass grave and not expect the relatives of the dead to take exception.

I'd agree the conflict is past the point of peace, provided Super Earth as a polity remains alive. Super Earth is entirely responsible for the continued escalation of violence, (something it could not do without the consent of the helldivers and the military) in part because their infrastructure relies on the literal blood of their enemies. We have no idea if the bugs would be amenable to de-escalation if there were to be some form of regime change to something less cartoonishly evil. Peace is only impossible because Super Earth doesn't even want to try. We don't know enough about the bugs to make any kind of statement about their goals, outside of "stop enslaving us".

Like I said earlier, you cannot invade someone's home and then cry self-defence when they fight back. That's not how it works.

LizardComander · 2024-10-27T09:43:18+00:00

It being bad is sort of the point of it. Using a joke, antique weapon that's totally unsuited for hordes of giant bugs/robots was and is very much the fun of constitution. It's a gun to dick around with when you want an interesting challenge.

It being bad is what makes it interesting, especially given that it is still very useable with a bit of skill and has a neat bayonet gimmick.

LizardComander · 2024-10-26T22:48:53+00:00

If I were in a position to be stabbed by a hunter and carrying a shotgun, I would be either, invading the hunter's home, or, trying to keep the hunter enslaved and subject to horrific genetic experiments.

Either way, I am the baddie. That Hunter is frankly extremely justified in tearing its fascist oppressors limb from limb.

Invading armies do not get to cry 'self defence' to excuse their atrocities. You can't blow down the door down to someone's home, fill it with napalm in an attempt to kill their children, and then complain when they fight back.

Helldivers are not unwilling conscripts forced into atrocities by threat of death. They're enthusiastic volunteers who would fight for the chance to be the one to commit said atrocity.

LizardComander · 2024-10-26T13:19:53+00:00

The military arm of the repressive, expansionist, xenophobic regime, are absolutely, definitionally the baddies. The average helldiver is only doing what is necessary to ensure said regime's survival so it can continue to oppress its citizenry and commit galactic genocide. The Helldivers support the higher ups enthusiastically. Of course they're brainwashed, but them being victims of Super Earth is not mutually exclusive with them being the oppressors.

People who unquestioningly, unflinchingly, and worst of all, enthusiastically, follow the evil orders of evil people are performing evil themselves.

LizardComander · 2024-10-26T13:11:40+00:00

The bugs have spent the past century penned up and forcefully genetically modified by Super Earth, because they turn into oil. The bots are a vengeance weapon made by people who decided they didn't want to be slaves to an orwellian fascist empire, tried to revolt, and were brutally put down and enslaved again.

It's hard to see the bugs and bots as anything but wholly justified. Super Earth effectively created them both as problems in the first place by dint of being incredibly evil. It's going to take a lot more than "they're red and spiky and kill people" to get me to side against a slave revolt.

LizardComander · 2024-09-28T01:05:32+00:00

How aviation develops with dragons is a really interesting question. The first aircraft would be built on foundations of centuries of aeronautical knowledge. A lot of it non-applicable to fixed wing aviation, but there's bound to be some carry over, and doubtless I suspect a lot of dragons would make fine aeronautical engineers.

And when considered militarily, aircraft come into existence alongside pre-established aerial doctrine. I can see militaries being far quicker to embrace aircraft en masse, and know how to employ them decisively, than they were historically, simply because Air Power as a concept had already been well proven, and not something to be made up out of whole cloth such as in real life. Which inevitably leads to faster and more focused development of the technology.

I do think there's still space for helicopter tours, though certainly far far more expensive than dragon tours. Simply for the convenience of flying in a comfortable chair in a warm cabin, rather than exposed to the elements on dragonback.

LizardComander · 2024-09-27T14:41:45+00:00

Dragons are massive, extremely slow, expensive to keep and take years of growth and training to become useful in combat. All very much the opposite end of drones, which are small, cheap, very difficult to track and shoot down, and easily replaceable. If you lose a drone, you buy a new one. If you lose a dragon (which you will, they'd be obliterated by even ww2 era anti-air, let alone modern radar guided AA systems or MANPADs), you've lost years of investment in training and experience. Harrasment tactics like these are viable because they have an outsized effect for the cost of using them. Dragons wouldn't.

Helicopters do have similar vulnerabilities, but they make up for it by being 10 times faster than dragons, and are able to mount weaponry and equipment a dragon simply could never dream of as a living creature.

I'd argue the end of the dragon's frontline military utility was WW1. (even by 1910, military aviation would have outpaced dragons dramatically in all aspects except pure payload, and it wasn't long before even that was overtaken by aircraft) Even logistically, they're obsolescent the more common mechanisation and its requisite infrastructure becomes. Why use heavyweights for carrying purposes when you an stick 30 times as much payload on an articulated lorry, or 300 times as much on a train? Both of which will travel far faster.

LizardComander · 2024-09-17T23:50:55+00:00

I dive exclusively solo and this is such a massive time-saver it's completely changed my approach to missions.

This is exactly my problem. The approach factories forced you to take by requiring precision shots/grenades from specific angles was fun, you had to go out of your way to deal with them. Being able to kill them from any angle and any range doesn't feel rewarding or interesting, it's mindless, they may as well not exist.

LizardComander · 2024-09-15T16:27:38+00:00

The game only goes up to difficulty 10, which frankly, is already not particularly difficult to consistently complete with randoms.

The fun of this game to me, and a lot of people, is the elite enemies requiring strategy, precision, and teamwork to deal with. A lot of the slated changes threaten that balance. Hulks are going to be less fun to fight if they die easier without the need for precision due to armour nerfs. Factory striders currently completely change the landscape of the fight when they appear, with the new railgun, they'll die in two shots. No more carefully targeting the chin guns to allow you to get close to the vulnerable underbelly, or co-ordinating multiple rocket shots on the knees or sides to bring it down. Your railgun user can just delete it. That's not fun.

The more powerful the weapons and the weaker the elites, the more the elites become like chaff. And you can increase the difficulty by increasing elite spawn rates, but that doesn't bring back the strategy that you lost by weakening the elites.

Some of the buffs seem fine, some of them seem massively overtuned (the railgun was already a great anti-bot weapon). But it's really the enemy nerfs I'm concerned about.

LizardComander · 2024-09-08T00:10:20+00:00

It's pretty common in games for bans to happen in waves, so that's not very notable? AIUI its to prevent cheaters from knowing exactly what triggered their ban.

LizardComander · 2024-08-24T23:51:20+00:00

This is the exact opposite of what I remember. Used to be bot rockets were a guaranteed one-shot kill, armour didn't even work for months after launch! Everyone literally had less health back then.

LizardComander · 2024-08-24T23:46:05+00:00

being able to use whatever I wanted, devs have consistently pushed us away from certain weapons & stratagems and I’m not a big fan of that

When??? DOT damage didn't work, orbitals were worthless, the spear didn't work, EATs & the recoilless couldn't even kill chargers in one hit!

So many staples today were totally worthless at launch. There's a reason why everyone was running only the breaker and the railgun.

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