The Spider

"Concealment and swiftness are the two principle elements of closing."
-Colonel V. Dubrov, Soviet Airforce

"It is always the one you don't see that gets you."
-Major Thomas B."Tommy" Mcguire, USAAF
Second leading U.S. Ace WWII 38 victories.

The Spider is of average speed, average handling and weakly armed. Its one great advantage is that of cloaking. The cloak device, when turned on, makes the Spider invisible to the naked eye, giving it a huge advantage in terms of intelligence.

The Spider’s best form of attack is to zoom in from the side of the targets vector, deliver a volley of rounds, then egress to the rear of the enemy and disappear again. The rearward egress forces an additional delay on the enemy that he has to reverse his vector to follow you costing him precious moments that allow you to change direction again and give him the slip. Once at a safe distance, the Spider can turn off the stealth, recharge his batteries and repeat the process until a kill is achieved.

The Spider requires great self restraint however as you must always hold in reserve enough energy to remain in stealth until you are a safe distance away. A disciplined Spider pilot will wait until he sees the enemy visually then pound him with 5 rounds before disappearing away again into the black.

One particularly sneaky tactic a Spider pilot can use is to hover around a powerup while cloaked (without actually picking it up) and when an enemy approaches the powerup, the spider pilot can fire a volley of bullets at the unsuspecting pilot, potentially killing the player before he even realizes he is being shot at.

A Spider with Stealth and the Cloaking device, which makes the ship invisible to the eye and on radar, is one of the most potent weapons in the game.

The nemesis of the stealth is the X-RADAR which reveals all stealthed and cloaked ships on radar. However X-RADAR costs energy to maintain and you should not assume that even if a ship has already demonstrated XRADAR that it is always on.

To fight and win with the Spider takes cunning and skill but there is great satisfaction destroying an enemy without him ever knowing of your existence until its too late.