Using it#
Fitting a weapon#
Every part is under Weapons in the editor, but for the EO director, the LITENING pod and the IRST, which are under Sensors. The big mounts stack on a 3 m node: the Pantsir, the Phalanx, the 5"/54, the YAL-1 turret and the MIRV bus. Everything else attaches to a surface: the missile rails, the B61 rack, the M197 under a nose, the EO director, the LITENING pod, the IRST and the dispensers. The Pantsir is its own command source, so a craft that is nothing but a Pantsir builds and launches.
The panel#
Open it from the KSArmory menu → Panel. The switcher lists every craft carrying something of this mod's, grouped by team, with a row per weapon; the picker beside FIRE chooses which weapon the trigger and the panel are pointed at. A weapon fitted twice, such as two rails, is one weapon with two stations, and the trigger steps between them.
A weapon belongs to the craft carrying it, not to the one you are flying, so you can take control of something else and watch a site defend itself.
Firing#
- FIRE shoots the selected weapon. There is nothing to arm first. A missile needs something locked; a gun fires where it is laid; a bomb rack lets its store go.
- Auto engage lets a weapon pick its own targets and fire. It starts off, so nothing opens fire on its own until you say so. The shield in the switcher is auto engage for every weapon on a craft.
- The line beside the trigger says why a weapon is not firing: no lock, out of reach, still slewing, out of rounds.
A contact becomes a threat when its closest point of approach falls inside Threat radius within Threat horizon seconds, and shootable once held for Lock time. A launcher commits Rounds per target before it looks again. A turret traverses and elevates onto its target and will not fire until it has settled.
Aiming#
- Shift-click anything, a craft or a place on the ground, to designate it. The turret follows it, the trigger shoots at it, and a falling guided store is steered onto it.
- Fire at the mouse turns an ordinary click into a shot at what is under the cursor; its own tick box arms it.
- Aim with the mouse points the turret at the cursor without firing; auto engage still decides when to shoot.
A gun over the ground is laid to land where you point, not along the line to it, and the line beside the trigger says when a place is beyond its reach.
Sights#
The EO director, the LITENING pod, the YAL-1 turret and the Pantsir's roof director are sights. Each has its own row: Main view looks through it with the view you fly from, Camera opens it in a window of its own, which can be dragged onto another monitor, and Zoom magnifies. Track slews it onto what the craft's sensors hold, Mouse points it at the cursor, Hand with sliders, and Spot finds a laser spot on its code. A sight finds nothing by itself: an IRST on the same craft is what hands it contacts.
Bombs and the ballistic bus#
The B61 rack draws a ring where the bomb will land if released now, flown rather than solved, and a
blue ring of where its fins can still move it once it falls. The MIRV bus is flown by its ballistic
computer, on the Ballistic tab: designate the targets, by clicking the world or KSA's ground-track
map, arm it and launch. docs/ICBM-GUIDANCE.md has how it flies.
Teams#
A craft with no team is fair game. The flag in the switcher puts a craft on a team, and the Teams window sets who each team is allied with, neutral to, and fires on. Every weapon on a team follows its team's rules.
KSArmory's own weapons#
Every weapon family can be switched off under KSArmory → Built-in weapons, at the next start. Its parts still load on a saved craft, as plain structure, and a weapon pack may then define a weapon of its own on them.
Tuning a guided round#
| Setting | Effect |
|---|---|
| Nav constant N | 3–5 is the realistic band. Higher leads harder and pulls more g; too high oscillates. |
| Max lateral g | The airframe limit. Drop it and fast crossing targets start escaping. |
| Seeker FOV | How far off its own nose the round can still see. Narrow means broken locks on hard crossers. |
| Fuse radius | Trigger distance. Larger is more forgiving; it does not increase lethality. |
| Explosive charge | What actually kills. Lethal and blast radius are both read off it by the cube root, so doubling it multiplies the reach by 1.26. Between the two the target survives. |
| Gravity compensation | 1.0 makes guidance ignore the fall. Drop it for lobbed, ballistic-looking shots. |
Countermeasures#
A guided round's seeker is one of three kinds, and that is what decides which decoy can take it:
| Round | Seeker | Flares | Chaff |
|---|---|---|---|
| AIM-9J | infrared, no counter-countermeasures | usually decoyed | ignored |
| AIM-120C | radar, pulse-Doppler | ignored | only while the target beams |
| AGM-88 | homes on emission | ignored | ignored |
| 57E6 | command link from the launcher | ignored | breaks the Pantsir's track while you beam it — see below |
A decoy is in the running once it outshines the target in the seeker's field: heat falls with the square of range and a radar return with the fourth power. A radar seeker holds its target in a range gate, so only chaff within 150 m of the target counts; a heat seeker sees every flare in its field. Each decoy is judged once, the first moment it does, and takes the seeker with an 80% chance less the round's resistance. A seeker that is taken follows the decoy until it is spent, and its fuse fires on it, so a missile seduced close to the craft can still hurt it. Then it looks for its target again, or flies on blind.
Notching the Pantsir. A 57E6 has nothing aboard to fool, but the set steering it can lose its
track. Turn square to the Pantsir so you are closing on it at under 30 m/s, and drop chaff: a bigger
return beside you with the same Doppler takes the set's gate, the track breaks, and any 57E6 already
in the air loses its uplink and flies on unguided. The set takes three seconds to find you again,
then holds you on its optical channel for as long as you stay in the notch — so it works once per
pass, and turning back towards it ends it. Flares do nothing to it. A sensor's ChaffNotchMps,
ChaffReacquireSeconds and OpticalBackup set this, on the Tuning tab under the sensor.
Every seeker setting is on the Tuning tab under Guidance, and a weapon pack sets them as
attributes on its <Munition>:
| Setting | Attribute | Default | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seeker | SeekerBand |
Radar |
Radar, Infrared, or None for a seeker no decoy fools. Read only for Guidance="Seeker" |
| Countermeasure resistance | CountermeasureResistance |
0 |
0 to 1: how much of a decoy's chance the seeker refuses |
| Looks again after a decoy | ReacquiresAfterDecoy |
true |
whether a seeker goes back to its target once the decoy is spent |
| Doppler gate | DopplerGateMps |
0 |
m/s; chaff is only seen within this of the target's closing speed. Zero is no gate |
Each dispenser's component row shows what it has left, and the first carries the craft's controls: Flares, Chaff or Both throw a salvo of two cartridges a quarter of a second apart from every dispenser holding that load, together, so a symmetric pair throws either side of the craft and each dispenser fitted makes a press heavier. Auto-dispense throws on its own when a missile whose seeker is on the craft closes inside 6 km: flares for a heat seeker, chaff for a radar one, both for anything it cannot place, at most once a second. A dispenser is never reloaded.