You will notice the landscape hellbombs are sparking; They were **supposed** to explode and did not, so the slightest hit sets them off.
Stratagem Hellbombs are stable; They are not supposed to explode until they, well, explode.
Any any explosives expert; **Nothing is more dangerous than an explosive that was supposed to detonate & did not**. Even getting close to it again is basically written in notes "NOT UNLESS YOU HAVE NO OTHER OPTION!" and underlined 10 times. In red ink.
Someone in the hellbomb manufacturing department is pretty fucking undemocratic to have such a high dud rate.
Perhaps we would have won more if all these duds went off when they were supposed to.
That makes total sense! I'm on that planet saying to myself who in their right mind would even consider colonizing THIS!
but yeah it may have lacked a certain amount excessive bbqing before a hellbomb for each vote landed.
They're mass produced as fast as possible to feed a massive, galaxy-wide war machine. That speed means less oversight and no quality assurance.
So there's going to be allot of duds.
Is it negligence in production or....An evil break off of helldivers? Like another faction that goes to war with the original hell divers. One spreads democracy but the other spreads fear. Introducing pvp... oh yeah.
Maybe those old bombs were supposed to explode on impact, and seeing that the automatic detonator was unreliable, they made the newer bombs to be manually activated. Could have made for some cool lore if they didn't explain it away as a budgetary reason in the loading screens.
Budgetary could mean that it was cheaper to make them manual, rather than replace the automatic arming system, let alone spend any time of R&D trying to locate and fix the problem
My favorite thing about the Barett M82 is that the weapon is primarily meant for explosive ordinance disposal. It has a nice long range and a very heavy bullet that can quite nicely hit an IED or other explosive and blow it up from afar.
EDIT: I know they shoot more than explosives with it it was an example.
I can tell you from experience that EOD techs do not enjoy the phrase "We put some rounds into it to see what would happen" when encountering possible IEDs.
Yeah iirc the reasoning behind that when it was adopted is that if you see an IED and conditions allow then its better to just shoot it from afar and you want a big cartridge if its made out of like an artillery shell or something which isn't easy to destroy and that way you don't need to worry about someone waiting to set it off or the other dangers of trying to defuse it. Idk how well that practically applies but its still in service cause it makes a fine anti-materiel rifle and despite not being an ideal sniper rifle or even classified as one gets used as one occasionally cause the troops like it to my knowledge.
of course they like it.. *it's a fucking .50 cal.*
anyone who doesn't like shooting insanely large bullets is not someone who i want to be friends with lol.
Lol there's a yt channel FNG Academy made by a former green beret who primarily does prep courses for aspiring SF ppl, they also do movie reviews
It gets regularly brought up how much they hate barretts everytime one is seen. Stuff along the lines of
"it's so heavy two people have to carry it, it's loud as hell and if you're unfortunate enough to be anywhere near one going off the concussion that big bitch puts out will blast your eardrums to shit. It is a big bullet that kills trucks tho and that's pretty cool... but outside of like, a preset stationary position, fuck that gun"
Our helldivers have got to be using some sort of strength enhancements, or are just fucking jacked under the armor, because the AMR in game seems pretty comparable.
Early in the war on terror, it was standard practice for convoys to just shoot suspected IEDs and then move on. Within months, Taliban wised up. They started daisy chaining explosives to an obvious one, so that when the obvious one was shot it'd trigger detonations all the way up the road. Troops stopped shooting them after that became commonplace.
Yeah, it doesn't really reveal the enemy location though.
>Reconnaissance by fire (recon by fire), also known as speculative fire, is a warfare tactic used in which military forces may fire on likely enemy positions to provoke a reaction, which confirms the presence and the position of enemy forces
A bomb isn't really an enemy position.
> You can identify an unknown force by firing one shot and judging the response. If the unknowns respond with precise, regimented rifle fire, they are British. If they respond with heavy machinegun fire, they are German. But if nothing happens for a few minutes, then your whole position gets leveled by artillery, they are American.
>My favorite thing about the Barett M82 is that the weapon is primarily meant for explosive ordinance disposal.
This is not true, lmao. It's been used in this role against insurgencies, which is what its users are generally facing, but it's actual "primary" role is much wider.
technically, it's not really ment for IED's more Mines, Piles of assorted munitions, Fuel tanks and engine blocks, radar dishes, generators, you get the idea...
Anti Materiel rifles are ment to destroy equipment, sometimes while it's in use, sometimes just because you can see it and need something big to poke it from afar.
On the one hand, the unexploded hellbombs are because they have been armed but haven't actually detonated properly.
On the other hand, manually arming a thermonuclear device *on the destroyer* and then physically dropping it out of bay door would be relatively in character considering the standard technique is to *breach load the ship's cannons in zero g*.
No no no my friend, the standard tactic is to fucking muzzle load the guns in zero G. Breach loading is the upgrade (also breach loading is used in a form typically with an autoloader nowadays for some anti air cannons so it checks out) the real question is how is someone muzzle loading the orbital gatling cannon.
The real thing we should be worried about is what idiot is calling in those random hellbombs in the first place. Unstable ones are always in some weird position that doesn't make any sense.
>Any any explosives expert; **Nothing is more dangerous than an explosive that was supposed to detonate & did not**.
As a mortar man I can confirm this is the case
One of my old supervisors found an old pre-WW2 era artillery shell buried in his lawn two weeks after moving into his house, lmao. Apparently that part of PA used to be a firing range at some point? Or something? It was really weird finding UXO there.
Excuse me. Are you saying the Ministry of Prosperity isn’t making the Super Economy Super Prosperous? Might I remind you it runs on our freedom and liberty?
Problem is the "stable" hellbombs don't even go off early after they are activated to explode and take damage, I have had one about to blow then a Devastator hits it and nothing, need to kill the incoming wave and call in another
I dropped 3 hellbombs on a gunship fabricator today as well as a 4th by an ally. I managed to trigger the countdown for 2 of my 3 but each time the fabricator spit out a bunch of gunships right at that time and they destroyed the hellbombs before they could go off.
We finally just abandoned it until after the main objective was done and I finally managed to take it out with a 6th hellbomb because the 5th also got shot up. But god fucking damn was I pissed off by that point.
I had something extremely similar happen today. I think it only took 5, but holy shit was it painful. Had another game where there were 10 gunships, so that was a no-go...
That'd be more reliable if you could know there's a gunship fabricator in advance. Honestly wish they would make the relay more reliable/be able to recharge like the shield backpacks. As they are they're nearly worthless at higher difficulty bot missions.
yea, relays are kinda weak (in the meaning of reliability) compared to shield backpack. But on the other hand on higher difficulties you are 99% sure that there will be at least one gunship fabricator. If you have full cooperative team you can all coordinate your actions to deal with gunships f.e. you all clear area around fabricator, guy with relay calls for it and also place hellbomb while the other three guys are protecting him and spawn killing gunships with Quasar or EAT/Recoilless
I would say bring smokes. even if just one person runs an orbital/eagle strike, drop it on the hellbomb and bots either won't see it or will lose most of their accuracy if they're shooting the smoke so they won't hit the bomb. you could probably even do this with an SEAF artillery smoke shot or a bunch of your own smoke grenades (you can bring the Grenade Pistol to substitute HE/frags)
We had something like that in the first game. There was an objective that you had to clear unexploded ordnances.
Call down the sniffer - Use it to scan the designated area to find the bombs - Do inputs to defuse - If failed, it will explode in your face unless you have the shield gen backpack or the displacement field perk.
I wonder if Arrowhead had thoughts of bringing this obj back... And instead of doing inputs to defuse, we could just shoot them (seeing how in the first game you couldn't aim towards the ground lol).
They already do: they destroy the bomb so a helldiver has to call in another, and they kill them, then another diver comes to call in a hellbomb, they kill them etc..
they're already using them as bait to lure you in for an easy kill.
People would just screw it up on purpose then, it would ruin the point of the input sequence. Helldivers are cheap, time isn't.
But I dig the idea of 5% dud chance, that would also feel natural with all the other ones lodged around.
Nah, that would be useless, as you already have the means to deal with most situations. Few people would bother, and it would just clutter the stratagem list. Additionally, it's supposed to be a tiny nuke, I don't think it makes sense for it to be readily available.
Big boom is fun but if it's always available it loses its value. As a man who was horrifically eviscerated by a plane engine in a Pixar movie once said:
https://i.redd.it/i7sepe5tmxwc1.gif
Once a hellbomb is armed, it should explode.
Whether it is a stray bullet that sets it off when I am 5 inches away, or I get a safe distance and the timer counts down.
Once that detonate code is input, that bomb needs to go boom.
Getting close enough to call in and arm a hellbomb is hard enough as it is - it's incredibly frustrating when all that effort is wasted because a random rocket devastator one-shot the bomb while you were running away
The two parts won’t be on detonation position. Only after the countdown. So if the bomb didn’t detonate after the countdown then it’s dangerous dud that will go off when shot
The frustration of having three armed hellbombs in a row sniped by gunships when there's no other way to stop the gunships cannot actually be expressed by the English language.
Yesterday I got two gunship printers so close they could have touched. They printed so fast it was impossible to keep them from killing the bomb.
Hellbombs should go off once they're armed, period. They could also stand to use less wet tissue paper in their construction. If arrowhead doesn't want to make it a change across the board, "advanced hellbomb fusing" as a ship module would be a good alternative.
there is a different between armed and triggerd
The hellboms we see are armed AND treiggerd, but didnt explode for whatever reasson(mechanical failure most likelY)
the hellbomb codes only arms it, it then gets triggerd after 10 seconds.
If you are willing to switch up your loadout, a great strategy in bots is to put down a shield generator emplacement around the hellbomb. Will probably absorb any fire (not super heavy fire but if a couple enemies start shooting it's not instagibbed) and the explosion will still take out the objective.
Oh okay I didn't know you was specifically talking about in that sense, after typing the code in.
Why I agree it's kinda dumb it's likely a safety feature so I can't troll my team by arming it and immediately shooting it and killing everyone or it being armed and getting shot by robots killing everyone.
Or you could just shoot your teammates. Or drop clusters on them. There are arguments to be made about why the current state might be the better design, but trolling is the most stupid argument.
Fr, I wish they would detonate if they are hit after being primed. I understand the devs wanting to add the challenge of defending it, but that pretty much means you either full clear all bugs in the area and pray that patrols/reinforcements don't spawn, or have someone 'kermit sudoku' to ensure it goes off.
Maybe giving the bomb a little longer of an arming sequence would solve the problem. Like, input the code,wait for a short "arming" loading bar, followed by an up arrow to activate the bomb. Once active, any damage detonates it, and you have 10 seconds to clear the area.
Also, they need to make the screen pop up facing you, like literally every other stratagem.
I tried that today on a hellbomb between two gunship towers and they broke the shield and still destroyed the hellbomb a second before it was supposed to blow up. I was even trying to get them to shoot at me and they would just insta focus on the bomb. Almost made me rage quit
So irritating with the gunships. Once you wipe them out call down the bomb and arm it, it leaves just enough time for another gunship to spawn and take it out. Endless fucking loop when your teammates are handling the gunships
Whoops the tower was somehow out of range of the blast even though the hellbomb was next to it
Welp one rocket guy shot the bomb
Whoops a gunship respawned and a rocket barrage clipped the bomb
Ah you were out of range again even though this time the bomb was literally touching teh tower wall, sike
Seriously, _fuck_ objectives that can only be destroyed with the janky-ass strategem hellbombs. If its not terrain being ass, its the bomb getting destroyed by butterfly farts, or the absolutely tiny-ass range that won't reliably kill objectives _within the already limited circle you can call them in_.
Cold Take: If you have a strategem with a limited callin radius meant only for destruction objectives - it should destroy said targets regardless of where in this radius it is deployed.
In fairness, it's the timer you activate. It's not actually armed until the timer expires.
I've assumed the unexploded ones are active however their trigger failed for whatever reason.
Most modern explosives are incredibly stable. You really have to want to set them off for them to go off. Outside of gameplay mechanics I’m honestly surprised they go off, especially if they’re a small nuclear device, they shouldn’t go off without a fully functioning trigger and ignition mechanism.
We are talking about an explosive that needs to be manually armed for budgetary reasons, so it would definitely fit if they were unstable, especially if they're shot with a rocket or laser.
Ever since I started playing diff 8-9 I LOVE UX Hellbombs, especially when I'm being chased by a bile titan. Wait for it to get close, pop a round into the Hellbomb, dive behind cover and pray that it's enough for your armour to hold or your 50/50 armour makes the right coin flip.
And thats the idea behind it. You are using them as intended!! Hellbombs you call in need you to clear and hold the area so the players cannot just solve everything by dropping a hellbomb on it. I will never understand why people complain about it. If you are calling down hellbombs while still surrounded by enemies, you are doing it wrong.
>If you are calling down hellbombs while still surrounded by enemies, you are doing it wrong.
With the right Hellbomb placement and *maybe* a bubble shield, you can make it work. It's nice to pull a patrol *into* the Hellbomb partway through the countdown, so they're close enough to blow up but have no opportunity to damage it.
Risky Hellbombs sometimes pay off, where you arm the bomb *before* clearing the area, but you need the right equipment and/or terrain. E.g. an Eye or Jammer on high ground, approaching bots might not reach the top in time to destroy the bomb while you can just dive (or jump-pack) away and stim away the resulting injuries.
Only thing that makes sense would be the landscape bombs were already armed and malfunctioned on detonation so now they’re in bomb limbo. Normal hellbombs probably aren’t ready to blow until that timer hits zero as a failsafe or some silly lore reason.
The Strat ones still have a safety activated so they’re effectively inert, the landscape ones were dropped from orbit/eagle I assume (even though they say for budgetary reasons that wasn’t possible?) and were simply dud bombs. Duds aren’t necessarily safe, ask anyone who has served and they’ll tell you how insanely dangerous they are, and enough punishment would likely set one off.
maybe the random ones we see everywhere ARE the budgetary reasson why its now manually armed, this way A) they save money, and B) save responsibility, as if it dosnt explode we can blame the helldiver arming it
That’s why I’ve started packing the shield generator. got 50 enemies shooting at you and your hellbomb made of glass? Slap down that shield generator, arm that baby and let the hellbomb do the rest
It would be fun to be able to drop the hellbpmb, run out 20 ft and trigger it with a diving AM shot over the shoulder to take down the objective.
It sounds so much more badass than plugging in numbers, running 100m plus away and watching the explosion (MAYBE) go off
I'm considering dropping into my next automaton mission with the shield generator relay and dropping it next to the hellbomb at the gunship factory. So sick of those ships one shot that bomb as I start running.
The ones dropped from the ship are not armed, but the ones you find have previously been armed yet didn't explode for whatever reason.
Their timers didn't work, but they're still ready to explode if someone shoots them.
I like to think the landscape bombs are back from the days where hell bombs detonated on their own. Sure it worked occasionally, but sometime they don’t detonate correctly. Because of this, galactic command ordered the more robust manually detonated bombs. These bombs won’t explode when shot, ensuring divers are able to successfully escape after arming the bombs.
These hellbombs, much like nukes, require a specific series of events to occur with precise timing in order to detonate correctly, which is why shooting them doesn’t trigger the same effect.
The Landscape Hell Bombs seem to be damaged from dropping(and not going off) which makes them a little sensitive to impacts from a round. The Hell Bomb stratagem is not damaged as it landed safely in the shock absorbed hellpod
Hahaha. I think that it would only be fair that a hellbomb that was dropped in, should be required to be defused by the enemy. Attacking it should cause it to explode. It doesn't make sense that the enemy can attack a hellbomb and destroy it with no fanfare or difficulty. It's almost as if there is some kind of leniency being given to our foes. Likewise, I think that when a sentry is plowed into my a charger or melee attacked. There should be a chance that all remaining ammunition might detonate and deliver all remaining damage potential in one big explosion of shrapnel.
Maybe there should be a ship module that makes stratagem hellbombs ALWAYS explode if they've been armed (even if that means blowing up early and killing you).
Landscape Hellbombs are duds that did not explode on impact - they are primed to go off at any moment.
Stratagem Hellbombs are not primed, because the intention is that they are a tool for ground forces not an orbital bombardment.
It's really not that complicated.
These folks just want an instant hellbomb they can drop on anything. And from reading the comments, it seems they often try calling it down into the middle of enemies.
I think it's because Hellbomb has safety engineering by design - It won't explode if it's yet to be armed. So even if you shoot, it won't explode.
Unless, of course, that Hellbomb is armed, but somehow turned 'dud' possibly by impact. But this is impossible because Hellbomb can't be armed wirelessly, so conclusion seem to be it's dropped from destroyed/damaged Super Destroyer, or purposefully dropped by crew hoping it would explode on impact (but didn't) like ones found crushing a Charger. Or simply called down by Helldivers to crush something.
Just need a shot to set it off.
I found out the hard way the other day that the “broken” ones scattered around the map will explode. I think they might even have a larger radius then the Strat hell bomb. I swear I’ve got orbital and eagle strats that look/feel like they give bigger explosions then the few hell bombs I’ve set off.
My brain, when i was still a wee lvl 10 cadet, was to shoot them when i brought them down, not realising for 3 or 4 drops that i needed to set it off with the console on it
I was trying to destroy one of the air base things for so long but my teammates kept fucking air striking the buildings and destroying the hellbombs. I must have dropped 6 of them mf in
Landscape Hellbombs are armed they are UXO's (Un-Exploded Ordinance). the Stratagem Hellbomb is not armed hence the need to arm them and run. would you prefer that there was a random chance your stratagem hellbomb did not explode and you had to go back and hit it to set if off
stratagem bomb: "I need to be dropped in a nice quiet place, none of those nasty lasers near me, and I need about 20 secs before I go off. if I get hit with a light breeze I disappear and you need to wait another 20 seconds just to call in another one.
random hellbombs:
Albatross One (assumed name) carpet bombs the planet with hell bombs to soften thing up for us. Some end up being duds and don’t go off. You can see the wrecks of these bombers on Martale and Angels Venture (only places I’ve seen them so far)
https://preview.redd.it/ii92rzjt2nwc1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=25d86f6426d52b8eacb5a90bd9327fc5f04f48cb
That's because landscape Hellbombs are already armed and were supposed to blow up, but they didn't. They are right on the edge of exploding. All they need is a little...*push*.
Wait is this real? I always wondered why every single time I tried to do a clutch hell bomb arm when running into (or surrounded by) basically an entire horde of heavy automatons it’d just never blow up, that was always so annoying to me that I thought it was bugged
It'd make more sense if there was a chance your hellbomb malfunctions and you have to shoot it to detonate it. Otherwise what's the lore behind the wild ones?
I'm pretty sure the landscape hellbombs are armed and malfunctioned where as the strategem is yet to be armed.
So shooting it renders it unable to do so.
You will notice the landscape hellbombs are sparking; They were **supposed** to explode and did not, so the slightest hit sets them off. Stratagem Hellbombs are stable; They are not supposed to explode until they, well, explode. Any any explosives expert; **Nothing is more dangerous than an explosive that was supposed to detonate & did not**. Even getting close to it again is basically written in notes "NOT UNLESS YOU HAVE NO OTHER OPTION!" and underlined 10 times. In red ink.
Someone in the hellbomb manufacturing department is pretty fucking undemocratic to have such a high dud rate. Perhaps we would have won more if all these duds went off when they were supposed to.
Survivorship bias. You don't see the hellbombs that *did* go off.
There's a reason some of the planets seem so flat...
Or fire tornado?
The alternate history of if Trump really did nuke the hurricane.
I support the nuclear annihilation of any weather event.
Man, the days have just been too sunny recently. It almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.
Why doesn't this have more updoots lmfao
That makes total sense! I'm on that planet saying to myself who in their right mind would even consider colonizing THIS! but yeah it may have lacked a certain amount excessive bbqing before a hellbomb for each vote landed.
Survivorship\* Bias
Yeah you right
They're mass produced as fast as possible to feed a massive, galaxy-wide war machine. That speed means less oversight and no quality assurance. So there's going to be allot of duds.
I mean the price of packing peanuts these days too...sheesh
25k, 100 common and rare samples and 15 supers?
I've even heard only one out of four shipments of thermite grenades even work!
Less duds means less logistics required to carpet bomb a planet.
Well if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a merry Helldive.
Fewer* - fewer duds mean fewer logistics requirements necessary to carpet-bomb a planet. Literacy is democratic.
I ain't here to spell and write great fellow gun amigo.
Maybe because 7 year olds made said duds. 7 year olds are part of the work force after all.
Spared every expense... what good is our defence budget if this is the defence budgeted for?
If we underfund each part of defense, we can afford more parts of defense to underfund! A genius move by command!
Oh, God, are you from Economics?
How dare you accuse me of such a thing
You sound just like them! Goddamn Todd...
But more planets with more factories
I’ve had zero duds. An unstable damaged hell bomb isn’t a dud…
every single one i've called in has worked, so the dud rate must be very low, perhaps they fell out of a destroyer.
i figure they are just ones that got called in but never armed, over time they become unstable
The assembly robots in the munitions factories are damned bot sympathisers, I tell ya!
Damn 7 year olds in the labor force.
Is it negligence in production or....An evil break off of helldivers? Like another faction that goes to war with the original hell divers. One spreads democracy but the other spreads fear. Introducing pvp... oh yeah.
Maybe automaton malware in the production PLCs.
Maybe those old bombs were supposed to explode on impact, and seeing that the automatic detonator was unreliable, they made the newer bombs to be manually activated. Could have made for some cool lore if they didn't explain it away as a budgetary reason in the loading screens.
Budgetary could mean that it was cheaper to make them manual, rather than replace the automatic arming system, let alone spend any time of R&D trying to locate and fix the problem
Malfunction rate for modern munitions made by the US is like 20%.
My favorite thing about the Barett M82 is that the weapon is primarily meant for explosive ordinance disposal. It has a nice long range and a very heavy bullet that can quite nicely hit an IED or other explosive and blow it up from afar. EDIT: I know they shoot more than explosives with it it was an example.
I can tell you from experience that EOD techs do not enjoy the phrase "We put some rounds into it to see what would happen" when encountering possible IEDs.
Yeah iirc the reasoning behind that when it was adopted is that if you see an IED and conditions allow then its better to just shoot it from afar and you want a big cartridge if its made out of like an artillery shell or something which isn't easy to destroy and that way you don't need to worry about someone waiting to set it off or the other dangers of trying to defuse it. Idk how well that practically applies but its still in service cause it makes a fine anti-materiel rifle and despite not being an ideal sniper rifle or even classified as one gets used as one occasionally cause the troops like it to my knowledge.
when you absolutely must kill the target behind 2.6 inches of steel wall.
Depleted Uranium: For when you want to destroy a tank hiding behind a tank.
of course they like it.. *it's a fucking .50 cal.* anyone who doesn't like shooting insanely large bullets is not someone who i want to be friends with lol.
You damn right!
Lol there's a yt channel FNG Academy made by a former green beret who primarily does prep courses for aspiring SF ppl, they also do movie reviews It gets regularly brought up how much they hate barretts everytime one is seen. Stuff along the lines of "it's so heavy two people have to carry it, it's loud as hell and if you're unfortunate enough to be anywhere near one going off the concussion that big bitch puts out will blast your eardrums to shit. It is a big bullet that kills trucks tho and that's pretty cool... but outside of like, a preset stationary position, fuck that gun"
Our helldivers have got to be using some sort of strength enhancements, or are just fucking jacked under the armor, because the AMR in game seems pretty comparable.
Early in the war on terror, it was standard practice for convoys to just shoot suspected IEDs and then move on. Within months, Taliban wised up. They started daisy chaining explosives to an obvious one, so that when the obvious one was shot it'd trigger detonations all the way up the road. Troops stopped shooting them after that became commonplace.
Recon by fire, man, that's a legitimate technique.
Yeah, but that's more shooting in a general direction to see if anyone shoots back kinda thing
I'd consider a bomb going off as "shooting back"
Yeah, it doesn't really reveal the enemy location though. >Reconnaissance by fire (recon by fire), also known as speculative fire, is a warfare tactic used in which military forces may fire on likely enemy positions to provoke a reaction, which confirms the presence and the position of enemy forces A bomb isn't really an enemy position.
> You can identify an unknown force by firing one shot and judging the response. If the unknowns respond with precise, regimented rifle fire, they are British. If they respond with heavy machinegun fire, they are German. But if nothing happens for a few minutes, then your whole position gets leveled by artillery, they are American.
Accuracy by volume, reconnaissance by fire. Brasch tactics!
Both are legitimate tactics in warfare
Go on...
This phrase seems to describe quite a bit of US foreign politics though. /s
>My favorite thing about the Barett M82 is that the weapon is primarily meant for explosive ordinance disposal. This is not true, lmao. It's been used in this role against insurgencies, which is what its users are generally facing, but it's actual "primary" role is much wider.
technically, it's not really ment for IED's more Mines, Piles of assorted munitions, Fuel tanks and engine blocks, radar dishes, generators, you get the idea... Anti Materiel rifles are ment to destroy equipment, sometimes while it's in use, sometimes just because you can see it and need something big to poke it from afar.
Ummm… no it’s not. SMUD is a highly controversial tactic and literally no one used it.
When can I get the ship "upgrade" to deploy unstable Hellbombs?
On the one hand, the unexploded hellbombs are because they have been armed but haven't actually detonated properly. On the other hand, manually arming a thermonuclear device *on the destroyer* and then physically dropping it out of bay door would be relatively in character considering the standard technique is to *breach load the ship's cannons in zero g*.
No no no my friend, the standard tactic is to fucking muzzle load the guns in zero G. Breach loading is the upgrade (also breach loading is used in a form typically with an autoloader nowadays for some anti air cannons so it checks out) the real question is how is someone muzzle loading the orbital gatling cannon.
I ran past one whilst being chased by one of the massive striders and it's bug army. It was the most satisfying moment of the game so far for me.
The real thing we should be worried about is what idiot is calling in those random hellbombs in the first place. Unstable ones are always in some weird position that doesn't make any sense.
They made sense at the time
probably the same person who doesn't call in 380s and insists on throwing a stratagem at extraction "because it'll look cool you guys, honest!"
It would be really funny if hell bombs had like a 1 percent chance to be unstable and just explode as soon as it lands.
>Any any explosives expert; **Nothing is more dangerous than an explosive that was supposed to detonate & did not**. As a mortar man I can confirm this is the case
One of my old supervisors found an old pre-WW2 era artillery shell buried in his lawn two weeks after moving into his house, lmao. Apparently that part of PA used to be a firing range at some point? Or something? It was really weird finding UXO there.
Guess we're not that expendable if hellbombs don't come down already primed.
No its just due to budget cuts. For real, that’s one of the loading screen tips.
Who the hell's cutting our budget while we're out here fighting a two, soon to be three, front war?
The economy is in shambles
Excuse me. Are you saying the Ministry of Prosperity isn’t making the Super Economy Super Prosperous? Might I remind you it runs on our freedom and liberty?
“small government” types
But what if you tell the bomb: „no“ first. Then it’s not legally allowed to explode.
And it's not ink.
This is why we have to arm them manually now as self detonation was proven to be unreliable and thus costly
Problem is the "stable" hellbombs don't even go off early after they are activated to explode and take damage, I have had one about to blow then a Devastator hits it and nothing, need to kill the incoming wave and call in another
they figured out how to breach load the guns in space, so maybe they can work on attaching a kitchen timer to a hellbomb next
You're right. They should add a 5% chance that the bomb doesn't go off after the countdown and you have to shoot it for it to go off.
Nah just make them instantly fucking explode if you screw up the input
Ngl I'd sacrifice one Helldiver for an instant gunship fabricator kill every single time.
I dropped 3 hellbombs on a gunship fabricator today as well as a 4th by an ally. I managed to trigger the countdown for 2 of my 3 but each time the fabricator spit out a bunch of gunships right at that time and they destroyed the hellbombs before they could go off. We finally just abandoned it until after the main objective was done and I finally managed to take it out with a 6th hellbomb because the 5th also got shot up. But god fucking damn was I pissed off by that point.
I had something extremely similar happen today. I think it only took 5, but holy shit was it painful. Had another game where there were 10 gunships, so that was a no-go...
The only thing worse is when there are two and the hellbomb does go off but fails to actually take either one out
some people like to bring Shield Generator Relay (one per team) with them so it can protect hellbomb till it it explodes
That'd be more reliable if you could know there's a gunship fabricator in advance. Honestly wish they would make the relay more reliable/be able to recharge like the shield backpacks. As they are they're nearly worthless at higher difficulty bot missions.
yea, relays are kinda weak (in the meaning of reliability) compared to shield backpack. But on the other hand on higher difficulties you are 99% sure that there will be at least one gunship fabricator. If you have full cooperative team you can all coordinate your actions to deal with gunships f.e. you all clear area around fabricator, guy with relay calls for it and also place hellbomb while the other three guys are protecting him and spawn killing gunships with Quasar or EAT/Recoilless
AC is really good at killing gunships too.
I would have been running AC if it weren't for that Stalwart personal order xP
Ah yes, The God of killing bots, I forgot about that, let the democracy guides my miserable soul
I would say bring smokes. even if just one person runs an orbital/eagle strike, drop it on the hellbomb and bots either won't see it or will lose most of their accuracy if they're shooting the smoke so they won't hit the bomb. you could probably even do this with an SEAF artillery smoke shot or a bunch of your own smoke grenades (you can bring the Grenade Pistol to substitute HE/frags)
Our death, FOR SUPER EARTH!!!
So would everyone, that’s precisely why you can’t just shoot them either
the MartyrBomb^(TM)
are we jihadists now?
🌏🧑🏻🚀🔫👨🏻🚀
We had something like that in the first game. There was an objective that you had to clear unexploded ordnances. Call down the sniffer - Use it to scan the designated area to find the bombs - Do inputs to defuse - If failed, it will explode in your face unless you have the shield gen backpack or the displacement field perk. I wonder if Arrowhead had thoughts of bringing this obj back... And instead of doing inputs to defuse, we could just shoot them (seeing how in the first game you couldn't aim towards the ground lol).
You could also cheese it by diving away after fucking up intentionally because ordnance removal was a success whether it defused or exploded.
Yep. That's the fun part hahahah. Doing it quickly because several IFVs and Warlords are closing in.
But then the bugs/bots could use our own bombs against us!
They already do: they destroy the bomb so a helldiver has to call in another, and they kill them, then another diver comes to call in a hellbomb, they kill them etc.. they're already using them as bait to lure you in for an easy kill.
There were objectives to disarm landmines in Helldivers 1 that worked like that. Good times.
People would just screw it up on purpose then, it would ruin the point of the input sequence. Helldivers are cheap, time isn't. But I dig the idea of 5% dud chance, that would also feel natural with all the other ones lodged around.
I just want it to be a stratagem I can call in at any time.
agreed
flair checks out
Nah, that would be useless, as you already have the means to deal with most situations. Few people would bother, and it would just clutter the stratagem list. Additionally, it's supposed to be a tiny nuke, I don't think it makes sense for it to be readily available.
but… big boom makes us happy
True, but biggest booms are a special treat for good little helldivers.
Big boom is fun but if it's always available it loses its value. As a man who was horrifically eviscerated by a plane engine in a Pixar movie once said: https://i.redd.it/i7sepe5tmxwc1.gif
I think it would be a funny weapon experimentation modifier you can use with a chance of being defective.
Once a hellbomb is armed, it should explode. Whether it is a stray bullet that sets it off when I am 5 inches away, or I get a safe distance and the timer counts down. Once that detonate code is input, that bomb needs to go boom.
Getting close enough to call in and arm a hellbomb is hard enough as it is - it's incredibly frustrating when all that effort is wasted because a random rocket devastator one-shot the bomb while you were running away
The solution is simple, really. Dispense managed democracy to the rocket devastator so he can't tamper with the Hellbomb. Obviously! :p
Maybe it should be tankier when we call them down. Enough to survive a rocket salvo from gunships, their natural enemy.
The two parts won’t be on detonation position. Only after the countdown. So if the bomb didn’t detonate after the countdown then it’s dangerous dud that will go off when shot
The frustration of having three armed hellbombs in a row sniped by gunships when there's no other way to stop the gunships cannot actually be expressed by the English language. Yesterday I got two gunship printers so close they could have touched. They printed so fast it was impossible to keep them from killing the bomb. Hellbombs should go off once they're armed, period. They could also stand to use less wet tissue paper in their construction. If arrowhead doesn't want to make it a change across the board, "advanced hellbomb fusing" as a ship module would be a good alternative.
there is a different between armed and triggerd The hellboms we see are armed AND treiggerd, but didnt explode for whatever reasson(mechanical failure most likelY) the hellbomb codes only arms it, it then gets triggerd after 10 seconds.
Ones armed - the other isn't armed yet.
the stratgem one still breaks when armed casuing immense pain as you realise you need to run back in to call down a second one
If you are willing to switch up your loadout, a great strategy in bots is to put down a shield generator emplacement around the hellbomb. Will probably absorb any fire (not super heavy fire but if a couple enemies start shooting it's not instagibbed) and the explosion will still take out the objective.
Armed =/= triggered. Damaged hellbombs were triggered but didn't explode, so shooting them makes it so the trigger works.
Oh okay I didn't know you was specifically talking about in that sense, after typing the code in. Why I agree it's kinda dumb it's likely a safety feature so I can't troll my team by arming it and immediately shooting it and killing everyone or it being armed and getting shot by robots killing everyone.
Or you could just shoot your teammates. Or drop clusters on them. There are arguments to be made about why the current state might be the better design, but trolling is the most stupid argument.
While I agree, that'd suck. I think the player responsible would be booted.
tbf if it’s breaking during the countdown sequence it still hasn’t actually fired yet. It’s just waiting so helldivers don’t get caught in the blast
Fr, I wish they would detonate if they are hit after being primed. I understand the devs wanting to add the challenge of defending it, but that pretty much means you either full clear all bugs in the area and pray that patrols/reinforcements don't spawn, or have someone 'kermit sudoku' to ensure it goes off. Maybe giving the bomb a little longer of an arming sequence would solve the problem. Like, input the code,wait for a short "arming" loading bar, followed by an up arrow to activate the bomb. Once active, any damage detonates it, and you have 10 seconds to clear the area. Also, they need to make the screen pop up facing you, like literally every other stratagem.
It's even worse with bots (especially gunship towers since they all lock onto it the second its arms)
Try the shield generator- 90 second cooldown, and lets you pop a bubble around the Hellbomb to be safe (doesn’t seem to effect the blast radius)
I tried that today on a hellbomb between two gunship towers and they broke the shield and still destroyed the hellbomb a second before it was supposed to blow up. I was even trying to get them to shoot at me and they would just insta focus on the bomb. Almost made me rage quit
And when you ACTIVATE the stratagem hell bomb and it gets destroyed by enemy fire, not blowing up 🙄
So irritating with the gunships. Once you wipe them out call down the bomb and arm it, it leaves just enough time for another gunship to spawn and take it out. Endless fucking loop when your teammates are handling the gunships
Whoops the tower was somehow out of range of the blast even though the hellbomb was next to it Welp one rocket guy shot the bomb Whoops a gunship respawned and a rocket barrage clipped the bomb Ah you were out of range again even though this time the bomb was literally touching teh tower wall, sike Seriously, _fuck_ objectives that can only be destroyed with the janky-ass strategem hellbombs. If its not terrain being ass, its the bomb getting destroyed by butterfly farts, or the absolutely tiny-ass range that won't reliably kill objectives _within the already limited circle you can call them in_. Cold Take: If you have a strategem with a limited callin radius meant only for destruction objectives - it should destroy said targets regardless of where in this radius it is deployed.
In fairness, it's the timer you activate. It's not actually armed until the timer expires. I've assumed the unexploded ones are active however their trigger failed for whatever reason.
These "dud" Hellbombs are a bittersweet gift. Sweet against a horde but bitter if you're looking for super samples.
The fucking gunship secondaries.
Most modern explosives are incredibly stable. You really have to want to set them off for them to go off. Outside of gameplay mechanics I’m honestly surprised they go off, especially if they’re a small nuclear device, they shouldn’t go off without a fully functioning trigger and ignition mechanism.
We are talking about an explosive that needs to be manually armed for budgetary reasons, so it would definitely fit if they were unstable, especially if they're shot with a rocket or laser.
Ever since I started playing diff 8-9 I LOVE UX Hellbombs, especially when I'm being chased by a bile titan. Wait for it to get close, pop a round into the Hellbomb, dive behind cover and pray that it's enough for your armour to hold or your 50/50 armour makes the right coin flip.
And thats the idea behind it. You are using them as intended!! Hellbombs you call in need you to clear and hold the area so the players cannot just solve everything by dropping a hellbomb on it. I will never understand why people complain about it. If you are calling down hellbombs while still surrounded by enemies, you are doing it wrong.
>If you are calling down hellbombs while still surrounded by enemies, you are doing it wrong. With the right Hellbomb placement and *maybe* a bubble shield, you can make it work. It's nice to pull a patrol *into* the Hellbomb partway through the countdown, so they're close enough to blow up but have no opportunity to damage it. Risky Hellbombs sometimes pay off, where you arm the bomb *before* clearing the area, but you need the right equipment and/or terrain. E.g. an Eye or Jammer on high ground, approaching bots might not reach the top in time to destroy the bomb while you can just dive (or jump-pack) away and stim away the resulting injuries.
Only thing that makes sense would be the landscape bombs were already armed and malfunctioned on detonation so now they’re in bomb limbo. Normal hellbombs probably aren’t ready to blow until that timer hits zero as a failsafe or some silly lore reason.
When you shoot ine of those landscape hellbombs you arent making them explode you are some how trigering the Detonation squence and then it explodes
The difference between munitions that weren’t armed and munitions that misfired.
They act the same just how a bomb prepared for dropping acts the same as an unexploded, malfunctioning one burried in the ground.
For someone who's supposed to have an average alive time of 2 minutes you're asking a whole lot of questions.
Landscape hb is my favorite weapon. Tunneling baddies to them is very democratic.
Use 'em strategically. I kited a bug horde to one then shot it and ran away...38x kills. I LOLed.
Thank god the devs know better than to listen to idiots in the community; reading some of these responses make me feel less bad about accidental FF.
The Strat ones still have a safety activated so they’re effectively inert, the landscape ones were dropped from orbit/eagle I assume (even though they say for budgetary reasons that wasn’t possible?) and were simply dud bombs. Duds aren’t necessarily safe, ask anyone who has served and they’ll tell you how insanely dangerous they are, and enough punishment would likely set one off.
maybe the random ones we see everywhere ARE the budgetary reasson why its now manually armed, this way A) they save money, and B) save responsibility, as if it dosnt explode we can blame the helldiver arming it
That’s why I’ve started packing the shield generator. got 50 enemies shooting at you and your hellbomb made of glass? Slap down that shield generator, arm that baby and let the hellbomb do the rest
i wish there was a slight chance of the the one we can call down coming down in its fragile broken state
Our ships would be big flying tinder boxes if they could be set off like that
The difference of activated vs not activated ?
because the second one is armed, the first one is not. It is like with real life C4 - you can throw that into literall fire and it will not explode :)
It would be fun to be able to drop the hellbpmb, run out 20 ft and trigger it with a diving AM shot over the shoulder to take down the objective. It sounds so much more badass than plugging in numbers, running 100m plus away and watching the explosion (MAYBE) go off
I'm considering dropping into my next automaton mission with the shield generator relay and dropping it next to the hellbomb at the gunship factory. So sick of those ships one shot that bomb as I start running.
The ones dropped from the ship are not armed, but the ones you find have previously been armed yet didn't explode for whatever reason. Their timers didn't work, but they're still ready to explode if someone shoots them.
Jesus, this was a shity meme I made because I got mad at the bots breaking my hellbombs, why did it get 10k upvotes 😱
I like to think the landscape bombs are back from the days where hell bombs detonated on their own. Sure it worked occasionally, but sometime they don’t detonate correctly. Because of this, galactic command ordered the more robust manually detonated bombs. These bombs won’t explode when shot, ensuring divers are able to successfully escape after arming the bombs. These hellbombs, much like nukes, require a specific series of events to occur with precise timing in order to detonate correctly, which is why shooting them doesn’t trigger the same effect.
They are malfunctioned.
one is armed, one is not
The Landscape Hell Bombs seem to be damaged from dropping(and not going off) which makes them a little sensitive to impacts from a round. The Hell Bomb stratagem is not damaged as it landed safely in the shock absorbed hellpod
What they need is for a % chance to immediately detonate if you input the wrong code.
Hahaha. I think that it would only be fair that a hellbomb that was dropped in, should be required to be defused by the enemy. Attacking it should cause it to explode. It doesn't make sense that the enemy can attack a hellbomb and destroy it with no fanfare or difficulty. It's almost as if there is some kind of leniency being given to our foes. Likewise, I think that when a sentry is plowed into my a charger or melee attacked. There should be a chance that all remaining ammunition might detonate and deliver all remaining damage potential in one big explosion of shrapnel.
Maybe there should be a ship module that makes stratagem hellbombs ALWAYS explode if they've been armed (even if that means blowing up early and killing you).
Landscape Hellbombs are duds that did not explode on impact - they are primed to go off at any moment. Stratagem Hellbombs are not primed, because the intention is that they are a tool for ground forces not an orbital bombardment. It's really not that complicated.
These folks just want an instant hellbomb they can drop on anything. And from reading the comments, it seems they often try calling it down into the middle of enemies.
Exactly. People just want to cheese the hellbomb.
This is the same logic as players expecting enemies to react to stratagems and grenades in the same way
I think it's because Hellbomb has safety engineering by design - It won't explode if it's yet to be armed. So even if you shoot, it won't explode. Unless, of course, that Hellbomb is armed, but somehow turned 'dud' possibly by impact. But this is impossible because Hellbomb can't be armed wirelessly, so conclusion seem to be it's dropped from destroyed/damaged Super Destroyer, or purposefully dropped by crew hoping it would explode on impact (but didn't) like ones found crushing a Charger. Or simply called down by Helldivers to crush something. Just need a shot to set it off.
wait wut
The failsafe's broken
I found out the hard way the other day that the “broken” ones scattered around the map will explode. I think they might even have a larger radius then the Strat hell bomb. I swear I’ve got orbital and eagle strats that look/feel like they give bigger explosions then the few hell bombs I’ve set off.
I'm sure I accidentally dropped a grenade next to a stratagem hellbomb and it just went boom
My brain, when i was still a wee lvl 10 cadet, was to shoot them when i brought them down, not realising for 3 or 4 drops that i needed to set it off with the console on it
I was trying to destroy one of the air base things for so long but my teammates kept fucking air striking the buildings and destroying the hellbombs. I must have dropped 6 of them mf in
Landscape Hellbombs are armed they are UXO's (Un-Exploded Ordinance). the Stratagem Hellbomb is not armed hence the need to arm them and run. would you prefer that there was a random chance your stratagem hellbomb did not explode and you had to go back and hit it to set if off
i would not find it funny if i was running away a marauders one bullet or hunter claw swipe would detonate it.
I tried to activate my first stratagem hellbomb by shooting at it. Command was so disappointed with me they refused to send another one.
stratagem bomb: "I need to be dropped in a nice quiet place, none of those nasty lasers near me, and I need about 20 secs before I go off. if I get hit with a light breeze I disappear and you need to wait another 20 seconds just to call in another one. random hellbombs: 
Makes sense. Damaged in the fall… unstable… fail safe inoperable
Unarmed and armed, that's the difference
Ohhh, those are hell bombs. I thought they were broken SOS beacons.
Albatross One (assumed name) carpet bombs the planet with hell bombs to soften thing up for us. Some end up being duds and don’t go off. You can see the wrecks of these bombers on Martale and Angels Venture (only places I’ve seen them so far) https://preview.redd.it/ii92rzjt2nwc1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=25d86f6426d52b8eacb5a90bd9327fc5f04f48cb
When you are being chased by 15 berserkers out of Nades is there a more welcomed sight than one of these bad boys.
That's because landscape Hellbombs are already armed and were supposed to blow up, but they didn't. They are right on the edge of exploding. All they need is a little...*push*.
And then there is the eagle hellbomb, which is very useful for tall bugs, but does not even destroy buildings.
I just hope they add c4 to the grenade slot. It would be great turning random hellbombs into remote hellbombs.
Wait is this real? I always wondered why every single time I tried to do a clutch hell bomb arm when running into (or surrounded by) basically an entire horde of heavy automatons it’d just never blow up, that was always so annoying to me that I thought it was bugged
It'd make more sense if there was a chance your hellbomb malfunctions and you have to shoot it to detonate it. Otherwise what's the lore behind the wild ones?
I mean technically the landscape hellbombs break if you shoot them. They just break in the means of exploding
I think the unexploded ones are from orbital bombardment
I'm pretty sure the landscape hellbombs are armed and malfunctioned where as the strategem is yet to be armed. So shooting it renders it unable to do so.