1. The FBL is generally considered completely useless, it's just...bad
2. The Tornado missile is also often ignore as far as missiles go. People say it's only good for spamming against capitals, and that it's completely outclassed by the Typhoon.
I say, put these two underdogs together, add a sprinkle of creativity, and suddenly you have a very powerful combination. The sacrifice is one single main battery point.
The trick is to stop thinking of dumbfire missiles as missiles, and start thinking of them as extremely powerful lasers that can only be fired from the boresight. Once we recognize this, we'll realize that dumbfire missiles only have two serious drawbacks:
- premature denoation when launched under fire
- piss poor accuracy caused by the lack of auto-aim
the first issue we can't do anything about, as it's a problem with all missiles in this game. The second issue, however, we can remedy.
Smarter players will have no doubt realized where I'm going with this. If you take a look at the stats of the FBL and Tornado, you'll notice that the FBL bullet travels at very similar speeds to the Tornado missile. This means the FBL's autoaim can be used as a subtitute for the Tornado missile.
To do this, equip a single FBL, and assign it to its own weapon group. Whenever you wanna fire Tornados, switch to the FBL and aim your boresight at approximately the auto-aim reticule, then fire away. Now the FBL is still slightly faster, but to compensate for that is not difficult at all. With very minimal pratice, I can consistently nail everything down and including M3s from up to 5km away. Any further than that and the auto-aim indictor won't show up (which is really too bad, but oh well).
This means you don't have to get close enough to smell your enemy's bad breath before launching missiles. Go in for a strafing run, fire off one Tornado at 5km, note you're outside medium weapon range, and thus safe from your own missiles. Yes, I kinda lied about not being able to do anything about issue #1, because you won't be under fire if your enemies' weapons can't reach you. Anything under M6 will be dead. M6s will likely have all of its shields stripped, then you continue the strafing run, close in with HEPTs for the kill.
400k damage that you can land from 5km away, usable by most M3s, take a second and let the implications sink in. Your Nova Raider can now take out pirate centaurs in just one pass. Don't even need to wait for laser energy to recharge, as you'll only need HEPTs to take out the hull. I know the next plex I'm building is going to be a tornado plex
tl;dr
Use your FBL's auto-aim to shoot your tornados FOR GREAT JUSTICE
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