Skipjack fires a slow missile with two small guns on its sides that spin as it flies, spraying bullets in a rotating pattern. It fills a corridor with damage rather than hitting one point.
| Tier | 4 |
| Unlock level | 45 |
| Upgrades from | Sledge |
| Barrels | 1 launcher |
| Reload (0 points) | 2.14 s per missile (0.47 missiles/s) |
| Missile | 22.4 damage, penetration 4, radius 12, constant 331 px/s |
| Missile flight | 2.5 s, about 820 px |
| Side guns | 2 guns 180° apart, spinning at 320°/s, firing a pair about 7.5 times a second |
| Side bullets | 7.8 damage (35% of the missile), 240 px/s, 0.9 s (about 216 px), penetration 1, radius 5 |
| Recoil | a Recruit's kick per missile |
| Health / movement | ×1 / ×1 |
Every number here is at 0 stat points, before the per-level health bonus and the per-level speed penalty that every tank gets. The automatic balancer can nudge a class's damage and health over time, so treat these as the roster's base values.
Skipjack's missile flies straight at a constant 331 px/s for 2.5 seconds, about 820 px. On each side of it sits a small gun, and the two guns face opposite ways and spin together at 320° a second. About seven and a half times a second they each fire a bullet: 7.8 damage, 240 px/s, and each lives 0.9 seconds, so it reaches about 216 px from where it was fired. The result is a missile that sprays a rotating spiral of bullets along its whole path.
Over one flight that's around 19 pairs, nearly 40 side bullets, each doing over a third of the missile's damage. Most of them won't hit anything, but anyone standing within a couple of hundred pixels of the missile's path eats a few. That makes Skipjack a zoning class. You fire missiles down lanes and through groups, and the spray punishes whoever is near the line, even if the missile itself misses.
Unlike Sledge, Skipjack has almost no recoil: a single Recruit's kick per missile. You lose the Sledge recoil jump entirely, so you move with your own speed.
Skipjack is excellent against groups and against anything that sits still. Clusters of bots, tanks farming a shape field, and team-mode fights where players bunch up all take heavy spray damage. Drone swarms flying through the spiral lose drones, since bullets do double damage to drones. It outranges every short-range class by a long way.
The missile is slow and only has 4 penetration, so any enemy bullet doing 4 or more damage that meets it knocks it out of the air. A spread gun like Fanblade or a stream like Cascade can erase your missiles in flight. Single fast targets such as Afterburner dodge a 331 px/s missile easily. Horizon outranges you, and at 2.14 seconds between missiles you have long gaps if one is wasted.
A 33-point build: Bullet Damage 7, Reload 7, Bullet Speed 5, Bullet Penetration 5, Movement Speed 5, Max Health 4.
Sledge leads to Amalgam, Cataclysm, Skipjack, Bombardier, Sailfin and Starburst. Four of those are missile classes, and they're different enough to be worth comparing directly.
Skipjack's missile is the slowest of the flying missiles and has the most side fire: two guns spraying outward in a spiral. Bombardier and Sailfin accelerate to much higher speeds and fly further, with their guns pointing backwards. Starburst bursts into a ring of bullets when it dies or when you right-click. Take Skipjack if you want to deny areas and hit groups. Take Bombardier or Sailfin if you want to hit single targets at long range, and Starburst if you want to choose where the damage lands.