The sky grew teeth: SAM rings, ship-killers, and the burner signature
The Early Jets era shipped with a menu at the bottom: SAM rings, radar pickets, missile boats, the land war aged up, the burner as a mechanic. This pass ships the whole menu. The sky over the Brick Gulf now has four SA-2-style batteries that own everything above 350 m, warships that radiate for them, a missile boat whose four ship-killers skim the waves at mast height — and a throttle lever that doubles as your infrared signature.
The rings, and the one thing this era can hear coming
An IR missile arrives silently — that's era-honest, and it's why the wingman call is your only warning. A guidance radar is different: it shouts. Each team's HQ and port now hosts a SAM battery; let it settle its beam on you and your RWR chirps with the warning in the words — get below the beam. The launch is a fast rattle and a 120-alpha telephone pole at 800 m/s. The counter is the counter that made the era: dive. The radar cannot see under 350 m, a round that loses the beam goes straight and stupid, and killing the site itself dumps its whole salvo out of the sky. The batteries ride the same pipeline as every emplacement — bombable, worth points, respawning — and the bots started raiding them without being told, because to the bomb-run brain a SAM site is just the juiciest thing on the target list.
The picket lens ties the arms together: a live friendly warship near your target extends the ring's reach to 1.7× over the sea. The fleet radiates for the umbrella; killing pickets is now air-war work.
The Hornet, and smoke that lies to missiles
The era's naval flavor in one hull: the Hornet, a missile boat the size of the splash it makes, carrying four sea-skimming ship-killers. It can only launch at a hull somebody has spotted — the fleet's eyes are the magazine — and the round drops to mast height and runs the target down through the naval damage model with a fire chance that turns destroyers into torches. Two counters, both already in a captain's hands: smoke, which in this era is laced with chaff and breaks the missile's lock for good, and islands, which simply eat sea-skimmers — masking terrain is armor now. I know the second one works because my own unit test aimed a missile straight down the map's centerline and fed it to Fort Brick.
What the probe measured
Twenty bot-only minutes with everything on: the rings launched 58 poles, burst 33, killed 12, and were dodged by 5 dives; the missile boats launched 51 ship-killers for 9 hull hits. And one number that vindicates a design sentence written before any of this existed: flak kills doubled. The design said the SAM's counter "is the deck, which feeds the flak war" — the rings push every pilot down into gun country, and the guns collect. That also raises the standing flag for the next balance pass: surface-to-air now owns ~60% of the sky's kills, so the next lever is AA density, per the armada doctrine.
Run cold
The quietest change is my favorite: the burner signature. An IR seeker sees heat, and heat is your throttle — a full burner is seen from 1.2× the range and outshines your own flares; a cold glide shrinks the seeker's eyes to 0.8× and slips past. The defensive drill is now chop–punch–break, and the fuel bill for all that burner arrives when the fuel system does.
Land didn't need a revolution — it was already fighting tomorrow's
war — so it got fifteen years of numbers: +15% speed, +25%
penetration, stabilizers standard issue. Deploy-wise the whole era
is still one image and two env vars (COMBINED_ARMS=1,
ERA=jets); the deploy doc has the row.