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itzjustrick

Lynx Skyranger: This is supposed to be an AA?

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So, after seeing tons of screenshots flowing around and taking it out in the test-range I made the impulsive and dumb decision to buy the Lynx Skyranger. So here a quick and dirty review of the Lynx for other perspective buyers or just people curious about the vehicle. (For the people interesting it took me 73 crates to get exactly 100 parts, with way too many rentals).

Survivability

The survivability of the Lynx is an interesting topic to talk about. This is because the vehicle has NERA and an unmanned turret. With the NERA your armor holds up for about all autocannons, except for an armor hole in the drivewheel once you turn your vehicle to about 75 degrees. However once your NERA is gone your vehicle is basically unarmored. In practice the NERA holds up pretty decently, but it is still recommended to try to get spotted as little as possible or only show your turret. See these screenshots for the armor against AC with NERA:

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And now the armor against AC without NERA:

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Against HEAT the armor holds up until the Lynx is getting shot at by shells with approximately 1300mm penetration. This means that it holds up for almost all atgms, only the Hellfire and AFT-10 has enough pen to reliably pen you. This however only holds when your NERA is intact. Just like with AC shots, once your NERA is gone basically all HEAT shells pen you. See the following screenshots for penetration with NERA intact:

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And the following without NERA:

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Against AP shells from mbts the armor does simply not work. After an enemy get around 680mm AP pen it will just go straight through. NERA has basically no impact on this, except for the ufp. See the following screenshots:

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One thing to take into account though is that your engine if mounted frontally so you will have a broken engine quite often. This also leads to quite a lot of engine fires. Your ammo rack is straight behind your gun, which does not have any armor whatsoever (since the whole turret does not have any armor to speak off). This means that your ammo rack will pop occasionally.  This is also one of the reasons why you should aim to keep your vehicle hidden.

Combined with the pretty decent armor for an AFV, it has 2500 hitpoints. This is the same as the M-48 GAU-8, which is very decent. The vehicle unfortunately has no APS, although the armor and unmanned turret sort of make up for it. Since the vehicle is so tall, you can hide behind all kind of rocks and only exposing your turret which other vehicles cannot do. This is also very nice.

Of course the vehicle also has smokes. It has 6 smokes in total inside a magazine with 2 smokes with 2.5s reload between them. The reload of the magazine is 25s. This feels very similar to most of the other t10 vehicles and is very workable. The only thing lacking is the limited capacity of only 6 smokes. I would like to see this possibly increased in the future since you can quite easily run out in this relatively light armored vehicle.

Gun

Your main gun is a 30mm Autocannon. This AC has the following rounds: 

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So we have an AP round with 80 alpha damage and 300mm penetration (which is low for t10 but very workable, especially compared to the special HE). This rounds seems to do less damage once you cannot pen a surface anymore (for example due to the angle), approximately 20 to 40 damage. We also have a very special HE round. This round is special in the fact that it has a 2m splash radius. This means that you can simply shoot over tanks and it will do lots of damage. Sometimes you also will have 2 hits if you fire at some mbts, one for the turret roof and one for the engine deck. This round has 90 alpha damage, with 72 partial-pen damage and 9 non-pen damage. On most turret-roofs you however only get the non-pen damage. 

The gun only has the ability to fire of it's burst at once like the t249 vigilatne. This means that you cannot just fire one shot, which makes killing infantry quite awkward. One such burst consists of 12 rounds and therefore you can do 960 damage on average with AP and 1080 damage max with HE. It takes about 1s to shoot such a burst (with gun breech) and then you have a cooldown of 2.5s. Shooting at most MBT roofs only gives about 120 damage, although on some more lightly armored vehicles you can regularly get 400-500 damage bursts.

The vehicle also has a second weapon: KEM ATGMS. The stats of these KEMs are as follows:

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So this KEM does about 500 damage per missiles and has a reload of 15s base. You have 2 missiles in the launcher simultaneously with 2s between these shots. There is no partial reload. With the 500 alpha per shot this is very similar to a HEAT ATGM, since this KEM ignores APS. So, while it's slightly worse the tradeoff is not as bad as it seems at first sight. The only disadvantage is that they are quite hard to shoot at moving targets.

According to the game, this vehicle has about 17.5k dpm (using a rammer). This is about 1.5k less than things like the Hunter or the Fatback, so this makes the vehicle slightly more difficult to play. However, we have special mission not affected by APS, which takes it slightly down. This is of course very competitive, but not best in tier like the T-15. You have 1500 AC rounds, which is plenty with 80 alpha damage. You will almost never run out of ammo.

You have 12 degrees of depression, which is very workable and makes working ridgelines a treat. The elevation is 70 degrees, which means  you can practically shoot straight up.

Also at this point you might be wondering why my title is "This is supposed to be an AA?". This is because the spread in the burst makes it really hard to hit all shots reliably on choppers. Especially since they have 1100 health it is impossible to shoot them down in one burst. This makes it extremely awkward to shoot down choppers and therefore play AA.

Mobility

We compare the mobility with some other fairly similar vehicles in t9/10. These vehicles are chosen because they are different AFVs or are TDs with an AC gun:

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As can be seen this mobility is slightly better than the AS21 Redback, but slightly worse than the Hunter AFV. This is a very passable mobility and nothing to complain about. Only the top speed of 70 km/h is occasionally awkward. But this is a trade-off worth taking since you get some armor in return. 

Spotting/Camo

We again compare the same tanks, now on the camo and spotting categories:

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As can be seen the spotting is very similar to the Hunter AFV. You get 5m more base view range with 505m which is basically best in class (and best in-game for t10). Furthermore you get 30% extra spotting through foliage to improve your spotting even more. 

You have 25% camo which is the same as the Hunter AFV which is very respectable, but less than vehicles like the Sphinx or the Vigilatne. While moving this is 20% camo, although these in-game stats do not show this. This is very workable, but while shooting your camo quickly drops down to around 6% or 1% while moving. This means that if you want to rely on camo to keep you hidden you need to use extra modules or a camo commander. Still I would not hold this against the vehicle since this is about par of the course for these kind of vehicles.

Of course we also need to talk about the elephant in the room here, the special ability of the Lynx; the High Energy Laser. This is a laser, which you can lock on to an enemy vehicle in around 2.5s which will decrease their vision by 60% for 10s, after which it has a reload of 15s. Apparently you also see this laser in-game while activating, but I have not actually seen this myself, so this might be bugged. However, in my opinion this is a bit of a gimmick, sort of useful in a 1v1, but it takes too long to activate to be useful in general. Especially since you cannot shoot while activating it. Furthermore since you can only limit the view range of 1 vehicle, this feature is not useful while fighting large group of enemies.

Final thoughts

To start of my final thoughts I just want to note that buying such a lootbox premium is just simply not worth it. (You can calculate yourself what it cost, but whales gonna whale, expect to pay around €175.) However, with that in mind I will still give this a normal score like it would be more easily obtainable.

To start of with, I want to state that the vehicle is simply quite buggy still. For example you cannot fire your missiles while your AC is on cooldown. There also is a reload of the main AC once you run out and replenish your ammo (although this did not occur 100% of the time.) As stated before I don't feel like the laser actually shows, but this might be me just ignoring it. However, I don't feel like this substracts too much from the overall experience of playing this vehicle.

All in all I would rate this vehicle with approximately a 8/10. The vehicle has decent armor, which will occasionally help you survive situations you should not be able to survive. You however should not rely on this armor, as it chips away quite quickly and the engine is placed quite awkwardly. The unmanned turret however means that you can just show this turret and will be relatively safe. However since there is no real mobility trade-off this is still really nice to have. The gun is not the best in t10 with the bursts, which limits your damage output, but really fun to use with the ability to kill MBTs through the roof. The AP AC is also very competitive, and you can delete enemies quite quickly, although you don't have the ability to delete stuff by just holding down your mouse button. Furthermore, the fact that you have 12 degrees of depression and the fact that the vehicle is really tall makes ridgelines very nice. Furthermore, this gives you the ability to hide the hull behind weird rocks, which gives you the ability to play all kind of positions other vehicles just simply cannot. The score is not higher since this is a prime vision control vehicle in which you should make sure to not get shot at if you can help it. This combined with this gun makes it hard to play. Which brings down the score. The vision control abilities are very good however and basically together with the Sphinx best in-tier/ in-game. The mobility is good enough, with only a slight disadvantage in the top speed.

Recommendations

Commander

For the commander you can basically go two ways. You can firstly use a vision control commander like Erin or Juan Carlos. This is definitely recommended for PvP. For PvE, you however can also chose to use a damage output commander. I would do this through increasing the damage per shot, so using Cortez or Kwon Han through the "fake Cortez" build. As stated by Sladjan, using Sabrina might also be a good choice in PvE since this commander increases your module damage and therefore allows you to track enemies easily. It is however up to you to also pick other commanders

Equipment

Honestly up to you, but the same with all AFVs. I would personally use:

-  Ballistic Computer - Better aim-speed to improve the accuracy in the burst so your shot do not go all over the place.

- Optics - Improve the vision control abilities of your vehicle.

- Pain - Improve the vision control abilities of your vehicle.

And the last slot is up to you, you will probably want to improve your DPM using a Gun Breech or improve  your view range while stationary.

Crew skills

Driver

- Off-road driving

- up to you

Gunner

 - Accuracy

- Aim time

Consumables

The use of consumable is honestly up to you, your engine gets knocked out quite easily and you will be occasionally set on fire, so I would definitely take a fire extinguisher and repair kit. You can choose your last consumable yourself, you are not really losing crew members, so oil could be a good choice although not required. Energy drink is not that useful since you do not have a human loader.

Bonus statistics

Well, the statistics of my play session with this vehicle are gone because of AW fucker, but it was quite doable to get around 40-50k in Special Operations and you occasionally get 70k hard-carries (which you lose). In PvP it was a mixed bag for me with some insane 10k games, but also a lot of games where I did not manage to do more than 500 damage. However enjoy this one great PvP result:

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Edited by itzjustrick (see edit history)
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