WEAPONS

Every aircraft in JET3D carries the same three things: a pair of guns that never run dry, a rack of SPEAR rockets, and a rack of HOUND guided missiles, with flares to answer the HOUNDs. This page is the reference: the real figures the game uses, and what follows from them. The keys and the basics are in How to fly; how many of each weapon each jet carries is on The six aircraft.

Two rules shape everything below. Five rounds kill anything. One missile kills anything. There is no armour and no class that takes more punishment. What changes is how easy it is to land them.

The guns

At those rates a pair of rounds leaves every seven hundredths of a second. If everything lands, five hits take three trigger cycles — well under a fifth of a second. That is why a short burst at the right moment beats holding the trigger for the whole fight: the burst that kills is tiny, and the rest of the time you are only showing people where you are.

Drop and time of flight

Rounds slow down as they go and gravity pulls them down the whole way. Fired level at about 470 km/h:

The last column is the one that matters. A target crossing at right angles 500 m away moves about seventy-five metres — eight or nine lengths of a NEEDLE — while your rounds are on the way. Drop is small by comparison until you are past a kilometre.

The lead circle does this sum for you, but only for the enemy closest to your nose, inside 1,100 m and within thirty degrees of it. Past that it disappears, and that is a sensible place to stop shooting: at 1,500 m your rounds take two seconds to arrive, and anybody who changes their turn in those two seconds is not there any more.

Convergence

The guns sit either side of the fuselage and are angled in so their streams cross 250 m ahead. Closer than that, the two streams are either side of the crosshair; beyond it they spread apart again, and at 500 m they are as far apart as the gun ports. The ports are closest on the SABRE (2.8 m apart) and widest on the MAUL (5.2 m). In practice the difference is small, because a round counts within 2.2 m of the airframe — but it is one more reason the guns are at their best around two to three hundred metres.

What a round does when it lands

The kill is counted in hits: five rounds anywhere and the aircraft is down, and a round on a part that has already been shot off still counts. Underneath that count, each round strikes the first part of the airframe it reaches, and the parts have their own strength. Some of them break before the fifth hit, and when they do the aircraft flies worse.

The fuel tank, engine, tail boom and wings are all too strong to break before the fifth hit ends things anyway.

The cockpit is the exception that matters. Two rounds into it kill outright. From the front, the cockpit is the first thing a round meets, so a head-on pass with the guns can be over in two hits rather than five. From behind, rounds meet the tail first: the elevator and rudder. An aircraft that has survived a burst from astern is often one that no longer pulls or yaws properly, so press the attack.

You can damage yourself as well. Pull more than 1.3 times your aircraft's rated G for more than four tenths of a second and both inner wings take structural damage, costing lift. The ratings are on the aircraft page.

Smoke is how you read it from outside: one to three hits and the aircraft smokes, four and it trails heavy smoke, one from dead. Friendly fire is off — rounds and missiles pass through your own side. Any hit you land counts as an assist if somebody else finishes that aircraft within ten seconds.

SPEAR — the rocket

A SPEAR starts slower than a bullet and overtakes it at about two kilometres. Up close, that means it needs more lead than your guns, not less: a target crossing at 470 km/h 1 km out moves over two hundred metres before the rocket gets there, and the lead circle is drawn for the guns, not for rockets.

So the SPEAR is at its best when the target is not crossing at all. Dead astern or nose-on, there is almost no lead to judge, and the 25-odd metre kill radius forgives the rest. A SPEAR up the tail of somebody flying straight away is about the surest kill in the game, and they get no warning: it does not lock, so it does not set off anybody's missile alarm.

Walking a stream onto a target works, with a limit. No aircraft can have more than four of its own missiles in the air at once, and a SPEAR that misses keeps flying for its full six seconds unless it hits the ground or a building. A NEEDLE can get four away in under a second; the fifth has to wait for one of those to end. Fire in groups and watch them land.

HOUND — the seeker

Its speed is mostly yours. The motor only helps a slow missile up to 144 m/s; fired from a jet already doing 470 km/h, it starts at about 185 m/s (some 665 km/h) and slowly loses speed to drag from there. Launch fast — out of a dive if you can — and the missile arrives sooner and has more to spare when it gets there. Launch slow, and it is barely faster than its target.

It steers at where you are, not where you are going. It does not lead its target. Against somebody flying straight away that does not matter, but it does mean a HOUND fired from behind closes only at the difference between its speed and the target's. From 2 km behind a jet at full speed, that can take most of the missile's life. The best launches are from the side or ahead, where the two of you are closing.

It turns by what it can see. A HOUND tracks the exhaust. From dead astern it out-turns every aircraft in the game by a distance; the best a SABRE manages is 63°/s. From ahead, with the airframe hiding the plume, it turns worse than any of them. That is why turning to face one, the move covered in the guide, works at all.

The lock goes to whoever is nearest your nose inside the cone, not to whoever you meant. In a crowd, check what the box is on before you press Q. Once fired, the missile keeps chasing that aircraft even into cloud: cloud stops the next lock, not the one already in the air.

A solid lock is not a secret. The moment yours goes solid, the other pilot's screen reads LOCKED ON — BREAK, with a tone. Every second you hold the lock without firing is a second they spend diving for cloud or putting a tower between you. Once it is solid, fire.

Five ways a HOUND fails

• A flare. See below.
• Facing it. Held nose-on inside 900 m, within about thirty degrees, for three tenths of a second, the seeker loses the plume for good. You need to be decoupled to do it without flying into the missile, and a decouple lasts only 0.8 s before a sixteen-second wait for the next.
• Something solid. A HOUND has no idea a tower is there. Put a building or a ridge between you and it and it dies on it.
• Speed. A stern shot on a fast jet that keeps going straight may simply never catch up.
• Its own life. Forty-two seconds, then it is gone.

Flares

A flare leaves at a little over half your speed and falls, so it drops behind and below you. That has two consequences. It works best against a missile coming from behind or from the side, because that is where the flare ends up; against a HOUND coming straight at your nose, the flare is behind you and further from the missile than you are, so it does nothing. And it has to meet the missile before it burns out.

A worked example: a HOUND chasing you from behind at about 185 m/s while you fly at 470 km/h. The flare falls back from you at around 60 m/s and the missile closes on you at around 55 m/s, so the gap between them shrinks at well over 100 m/s. To get within 140 m of the missile in the flare's 3.5 seconds, the missile needs to be no more than roughly four hundred metres behind you. Pull at a kilometre and the flare has gone out before the missile arrives, and the next one is seven seconds away.

One flare can take more than one seeker if they arrive together. A pair of HOUNDs off a LANCE or ANVIL flies side by side, so a single well-timed flare usually takes both. The answer, as the shooter, is to space them: the second pull comes 3.5 or 4 seconds after the first, when the target's flare is spent and seven seconds from coming back. A BOLT, firing single HOUNDs every 2.8 seconds, can put three in the air inside one flare cooldown.

Reloads, and the four-missile cap

SPEAR and HOUND reload separately, so you can fire both on the same pass. Reload is per pull, whatever the salvo. The other limit is shared: no more than four of your own missiles in the air at once, and a salvo that would break the cap is shortened rather than refused. A HOUND that has been flared or blinded keeps flying until it hits something or its 42 seconds run out, and it holds one of your four slots all that time. The missile bars on the HUD include this wait, so a bar that is not full while the reload is done is the cap at work.

What a kill gives back

Every kill — guns or missile — refunds a quarter of each rack, rounded up and never less than one, and refills the boost tank. You can go past a full rack this way, up to one and a half racks.

The guns are left out because they are already unlimited. The point is that pressing an attack should not leave you empty.

What the bots do with all this

Bots carry the same loadouts as you and follow the same rules, with some habits worth knowing. They open fire with guns from about 1,100 m when you are within twenty degrees of their nose. They hold their rockets for six seconds after they spawn, do not fire rockets into your face at the merge, and will not launch a HOUND from inside 700 m. They pull flares when a seeker is about 2.2 seconds away. So against a bot, the spaced second HOUND is the one that lands. More on how they fly is in Tactics and How it works.

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