What kind of machine it is
A heavy kamikaze with a delta wing and a pusher propeller. In the shop it stands among the vehicles next to the drones and costs more than both of them: you pay for the blast. It is twice as wide as the small drone’s and leaves nobody near the point of impact - neither armour nor bought health saves them. It breaks buildings too, but its real target is people standing in a group and the crews at the vehicles.
The price of that is noise and clumsiness. The motor is heard across half the map, and the enemy looks up before you arrive. The Shahed does not get through a window like the FPV drone and does not wait round a corner: it flies all the time.
Launch and controls
The Shahed is put down like a building: pick a flat place under the open sky and put down the launcher - a trailer with a ramp, the machine standing on it. Press E at the launcher: the machine slides off the ramp, picks up speed and takes off, and your view goes into it.
The mouse or the A and D keys set the course. SPACE lifts the nose, CTRL drops it; W adds speed, S takes it off. In a dive it speeds up by itself. The right mouse button switches the camera: the view from behind, good for flying and for the approach, and the view from the nose, for the last seconds. The screen shows the fuel and the warnings; out of fuel, it falls.
It has no trigger: it goes off on impact - with the ground, a wall, a building, a player. Let go of the controls and it noses down and falls. The blast is yours either way.
How to defend against it
It is heard. Hear the motor - get under a roof and spread out: it wins by the width of its blast, and one player in a corridor is not worth it.
The air defence intercepts it in the air like the small drones - put it under the open sky next to what you would hate to lose. The net on its posts catches a drone that goes over it - it never reaches what is under the net. A jammer tower of the second level cuts the link of enemy drones under its dome: a Shahed that flies into it loses control within a couple of seconds and falls wherever it happens to be. A drone on a fibre does not mind jamming - that is a VIP privilege.
And lastly, the launcher. The Shahed starts from a ramp, the ramp stands under the open sky and does not hide: find it before anything has left it, and there will be nothing to shoot at.
Advice
- Climb right after the launch and come at the target from above: in a dive the Shahed gains speed, and the air defence and the bullets get less time.
- Hit groups and bases: one player is cheaper to reach with an FPV drone, the Shahed pays for itself with its wide blast.
- Do not let go of the controls in flight: without a pilot it falls and goes off where it lands.
