What it looks like
Buying it in the shop on F3, among the artillery and the strikes, opens a view from above over your head - the same as the ballistic strike’s. To take it you need the open sky above you. WASD moves the view, the left button over a point calls the strike; the money is taken at that moment.
Then the jet does the work. It comes in over the map, passes over the point and drops the bomb; the camera follows it first, then the bomb all the way down. The roar of the engines is heard by everybody at once - that is the other team’s warning.
A FAB-500 goes off wide: twice as wide as the ballistic strike. Players in the circle have next to no chance, buildings are hit very hard. What stands behind a wall from the blast is shielded by the wall - as from any blast in the game.
When to take it
The air strike is expensive - more than the ballistic one and more than any vehicle. It pays for itself when the enemy has something to lose in one piece: a Grad behind a HESCO, an air defence launcher beside it, a money box, a watchtower, turrets around. One bomb into the middle of such a base takes all of it.
Against one player or one turret it never pays - the mortar and the drones are for that. Nor against a base under a roof: the bomb falls from above and goes off where it meets the roof.
How to live through it
Hear the jet - you have a few seconds. Get under a roof or behind a wall, away from the most valuable thing in the base: that is what is being aimed at.
Ahead of time the jammer tower helps: under its dome the gunner sees neither players nor buildings and fires at a guess. The air defence can shoot the bomb down, but seldom. And the best defence is not keeping everything in one place: what is spread over the map is not taken by one bomb.
Advice
- Aim at the middle of a base, not at one building: the blast covers everything around, and what counts is the area.
- The jet is heard by the whole map - the enemy has time to run, the buildings do not. Hit those.
- If the sight shows bare ground where a base was - a jammer tower's dome is over it. The bomb still falls where you aim it.
