The ground strike of Lightning Sortie as a stand-alone page: fly a procedural F-35A up the night valley into a defended depot complex and knock out its radar, fuel tanks and vehicle park with the gun and rockets — free, in a desktop browser.
You start airborne at the valley ingress, 1 500 ft · 380 kt, six kilometres short of a lit depot complex. Automated emplacements defend it: gun turrets track you and put up tracer streams, flak batteries burst at your altitude, searchlights sweep the valley and hover drones patrol the roads.
Knock out all three target groups with the gun and the rockets: the radar site first blinds every turret it controls, the fuel depot chains tank to tank, the vehicle park hides behind its searchlights. Seven units of armour; tracers, flak and two seconds in a beam each cost one, with two seconds of grace after every hit and slow recovery once nothing is on you. The command bunker at the far end is shielded for now.
Knock out the first group (or hang around for 90 s) and the depot scrambles: two adversary jets roll down the lit strip beside the vehicle park, climb out and turn onto you — another pair when the fuel depot goes, never more than three in the air. They fire like the dogfight's jets (at most two at once, dodgeable bursts, a BREAK cue on the HUD) and the ground fire eases off while they are up. Lock and shoot them like any target, or catch them with a rocket burst: 350 points, 500 while one is still climbing out. Radar ring and minimap show them in red. Difficulty (Easy · Normal · Hard) in the Lightning Sortie settings.
Three firing styles are available. GUN: R2 / Space / mouse gun only. GUN + ROCKETS: the same gun trigger, plus one rocket on L1 / X. BARRAGE: one fresh R2 / Space / mouse press starts the gun and a six-rocket ripple about 0.12 s apart; holding keeps the gun running but cannot repeat the salvo, and L1 / X is disabled. Release and press again after the 5 s rearm.
In either rocket mode, move the ballistic gun-cross centre inside the current target box's visible lead circle. It becomes LOCKED on that first frame. A single launch or all six barrage rounds capture that exact target independently; R1 / Tab only cycles the box. Without LOCKED, launches stay ballistic. Bursts keep the existing 70 m reach and damage.
gun 600 rounds · 4 s reload · 1.8 km reach — combined: one rocket per L1 / X, 3.5 s Normal rearm — barrage: 6 rockets, 0.12 s ripple, 5.0 s rearm · ~2 km reach · 70 m burst