Pelican meets Warthog, with spectacular results!

Posted August 8th 2019, updated later

• Introduction
• Setting up
• Catapulting basics
• Tagging for fun
• Gunner fun
• Gunner kick-launching and sniping
• Scuff ejection
• Self launching
• Further aspects

When an evac Pelican departs from the cliffside survivor area, it passes quite low across the front of the bordering hilltop. Low enough that if you've got a Warthog up there and you boost it up with a plasma and frag at just the right time, it gets hit by the Pelican with potentially spectacular results, e.g. getting sent a huge distance or very high. It's something I realised while working on valley banshee spawning.

For extra entertainment you can have the hog manned with a couple of Marines, potentially resulting in bodies flying through the air. But if the gunner is suitably resilient he can actually survive the grenade boost and go for an airborne ride on the hog, which makes for even better fun - seen extensively in BCM372.

But wait, that's not all! You can potentially also get the gunner ejected into the air by the boost, and then hit by the Warthog after it bounces off the Pelican, causing him to go flying. You can get some amazing trajectories like this, and have some tremendous sniping fun - as seen in BCM373.

You can set things up very easily with a handy checkpoint, enabling you to do catapults repeatedly. The work is demonstrated at the start of BCM371 (using Easy) but I'll give more detail here. Any difficulty level can be used, but if you want to have fun with an airborne gunner as seen in BCM372 you should use Heroic or Legendary and make sure the gunner is armoured and in good health. You'll need to have a seated guy too. Have a pistol and sniper rifle for the later fun, as they're the best weapons for viewing and for shooting.

Before visiting the cliffside area, I recommend clearing one of the other two survivor areas first, to trigger and eliminate the valley Banshees. Otherwise they'll get triggered during the core work and they may spot you and cause trouble. Dealing with the hillside survivor area is quickest and easiest, and you can also be sure to get Stacker on the chain-gun if you want him. He's always there (though it's random whether he's armoured) and he has great voicing.

In the cliffside area, link up with the survivors and get the evac call, then finish any remaining covies, causing the Pelican to finally arrive. Pay attention to your grenade supply along the way. For the catapulting you'll need at least one plasma and frag. In connection with the possibility of tagging, I suggest having four plasmas and only one frag.

Promptly drive up to the hilltop and park your hog in the path of the Pelican. You might like to do an advance test to familiarize yourself with the path; or just see my movies.

When the Pelican touches down to pick up survivors, a checkpoint gets triggered (normally it would come about four seconds after touchdown). Keep it delayed by jumping, until sometime after the Pelican starts to rise. The Pelican rotates leftwards and I suggest that you stop delaying when it's getting sideways on. With that timing you should end up with a few seconds spare before needing to throw grenades, which will enable you to shift position beforehand, from play to play. If you prefer to have more time for shifting, get the checkpoint earlier.

At the right time, throw a plasma and a frag to boost the hog so it hopefully gets catapulted by the Pelican. Typically you'll be needing to throw the plasma around the time the Pelican begins to accelerate; namely when the engine pitch rises. You can potentially judge it either by sound or - if the Pelican is in view - by vision. If you're standing unusually far away from the hog though, you'd need to throw slightly sooner to allow for the travel time of the grenades.

Experiment with the timing and grenade placement to get different outcomes. You have considerable control in that regard, although significant variation in outcome can result from even very small differences in placements and/or timing.

The range of outcomes you can obtain will depend to some degree on where you parked and at what orientation. If the hog is pretty well centred on the Pelican's path, you should be able to get the hog catapulted to both the left and the right, such as seen in my movie. If it's significantly to one side though, you might find it hard or impossible to get the hog catapulted to the other side.

With your pistol and sniper rifle you can potentially have fun shooting the catapulted hog or Marines (dead or alive), or just zoom in and watch.

Bonus blasts

Typically your frag will be going off slightly after the plasma, and therefore may detonate one or more dropped grenades from any passengers killed by the plasma. Such 'bonus blasts' are liable to upset the catapulting outcome you were trying for, if any, but sometimes you may get an interesting result. In particular, the hog might pick up a bit of speed and go further than usual.

Grenade dropping and detonation is pretty random. In the case of two passengers dying from the boost (which would typically be the case on Easy), you'll probably find that bonus blasts happen quite a bit.

After throwing your two boosting grenades, you can potentially tag the hog for fun. It's pretty easy to tag it just as it's colliding with the Pelican, as seen in my movies. You can soon get the hang of aiming your throw in the right place. Another possibility is to tag the hog when it's sailing through the air after it's been catapulted, but that's harder (not least because of how fast it's going). Indeed, it's a real challenge.

Tagging the gunner

There's also the possibility of tagging the gunner, if he's still aboard. He makes a tricky target, but you can get a decent success rate if you do the 2-grenade boost in a consistent manner and then hone the aim and timing needed for the tag throw.

If tagged, he'll bail. Sometimes when he does that, he gets quite far away from the hog before the bang. There's also something very rare that can happen. When he bails, it's possible that he immediately gets killed by contact with the hog. In that case he might drop some frags, and the plasma bang might detonate them. There's an example of this near the end of BCM372.

Set-up tip on grenade supply

If you're planning to do tagging, I suggest having only have one frag in your set-up. That way, after you've thrown it as part of the boosting duo, you'll automatically be switched to plasmas. It saves you having to switch manually (not that it's any trouble, but it's simpler). Also, have four plasmas. One for boosting, one for a first tag throw, and two for possible extra throws.

Under the right circumstances, the chain-gunner can actually survive the 2-grenade boost and, if he's not ejected, go for a ride on the catapulted hog. This is a source of great amusement, as seen in BCM372. You can watch him flying and see if he survives to the ground, and there are other things you can do too, such as trying to tag him so he bails in mid-air, or trying to snipe him (which is rather hard).

If you want to have such 'gunner fun', it's best to use Heroic or Legendary. The gunner must be sufficiently resilient though, to survive the boost. Based on my testing, he needs to be armoured and also have at least 6 health bars. Also there needs to be a seated guy or it doesn't work (the gunner generally won't survive the boost).

Stacker recommended

The hillside survivor area is a good place to get an armoured guy in full health, but I especially recommend getting Stacker because of his voicing. Stacker isn't always armoured though; it's random. If you want an armoured Stacker, save a checkpoint prior to entering the area (e.g. save the checkpoint you get at the lifeboat, where you can pick up a sniper rifle). Then if you find that Stacker isn't armoured, just eject the disc and reload to try again.

Using Easy or Normal

Easy isn't very suitable for gunner fun, because normally both passengers die from the boost. However, this can be avoided if you tag the hog with your plasma, rather than having it settle on the ground. Thanks to the presence of the seated guy who seems to act as a damage sponge, the gunner will survive the plasma blast with no health loss. If the subsequent frag blast occurs sufficiently far from him, he can thus survive the boost (the 'tag-boost' as I'll call it) and go for a ride. In specific regard to the tag, try tagging a back wheel low down. That can give an appropriate shunt for the boost, though it's pretty random and often fails.

That randomness is also part of the reason why Easy isn't very suitable. You're limited to tag-boosting, which doesn't give you much control, often fails, and only has the potential for a smallish range of outcomes.

How about using Normal? Standard boosting can result in gunner survival (like for Heroic and Legendary), but it seems rather fickle. I did some testing, and with one fully healthy armoured guy he was surviving ok, but with another guy he wasn't (the plasma blast killed him every time). It depends on resilience. Bear in mind, there's variation in resilience even between two guys who are both armoured and with 8 health bars.

As already covered, you can get a chain-gunner going for a ride on the catapulted hog. However, sometimes the boost instead ejects him. This in itself can be taken advantage of, seeing where he flies and possibly shooting him as he goes. He can get ejected quite far. But the real fun is if he gets hit by the hog after it bounces off the Pelican. Such a 'kick' can send him flying off with great speed, in a variety of directions. You can get tremendous height and distance, and the gunner makes a great target for sniping (quite a challenging target sometimes), as highlighted in BCM373 which ends with a sniping extravaganza.

Now here's the key thing. Instead of just taking advantage of such kick-launches as they fortuitously happen, you can potentially try to make them happen. In other words, you can make kick-launching your focus, with the actual Warthog catapulting just becoming a tool. Kick-launching is really a significant topic in its own right, with great entertainment value (maybe I'll make a separate page for it sometime, but for now I'll just cover it here as part of the Warthog catapulting article).

Not only can you try to make kick-launches happen, you can try to achieve a particular type of trajectory, by using the appropriate timing and grenade throwing. That's something you'll need to experiment with, but it's certainly viable. In making BCM373 I learnt various ways of getting particular results (with that particular set-up), although some trajectories were relatively hard to get, taking many tries. It's possible that there were better ways of course. I haven't really done much investigation yet to try and improve reliability, but that might be worthwhile.

Big trajectories

Trajectories can be huge. In particular, the gunner can end up flying into the hillside survivor area or the adjacent waterfall area. When you get a big trajectory, it can be fun going off to try and find him. The hog will likely have landed in the valley, and you can board up for transport. Adding spice to such a Marine hunt, there might even be the possibility of finding him alive, if he got some lucky cushioning. it would be a fine thing to find him alive in one of those two areas I mentioned - though I haven't experienced that yet.

If the catapulted hog scuffs the ground, the gunner (or any passenger still aboard) can get ejected if the hog isn't upright. As with boost ejection, this can be amusing and sometimes he might survive the resulting flight. For example, it's not uncommon for him to bounce off a cliff and do some sliding before settling in the valley. You can see some entertaining examples in BCM374, devoted to the topic.

It can also be quite spectacular. Indeed, if he gets a relatively strong knock from the hog before getting clear of it (bear in mind, the hog may be spinning), there's a possibility that he could end up alive on a distant hilltop.

You can potentially try to cause scuffing on purpose, but it's not very controllable. You need to time things so the hog stands a decent chance of getting catapulted approximately horizontally, so it'll quickly make contact with the ground (the hilltop, that is). Getting an interesting scuff ejection typically takes many tries, so it tends to be a bit arduous and doesn't make such good recreation as kick-launching. It can still be fun though.

In previous sections I've covered how you can get a chain-gunner launched. Namely in which he's either catapulted aboard the hog, or ejected by the boost and kicked by the hog ('kick-launched'). But actually, by quickly manning the gun after throwing grenades for a 2-grenade boost, you can get yourself launched in similar fashion! This is great, and you can get some excellent results, as seen in my opening movie on the topic, BCM375.

There's a key difference though. To avoid being killed by the boost, it seems like you need to tag the hog with your plasma, rather than having it settle on the ground. That's the only way I've been able to get myself launched (in either of the two senses just mentioned). Unfortunately that makes things pretty random, because the blast from the tag is to some extent randomized in terms of strength and direction. In turn this means that you have only quite sketchy control, and it can take a good many tries before success. Indeed, the boost will often kill you, quite apart from other issues. It's worth the effort though!

Set-up basics

If you already have a Warthog catapulting set-up in which the gun is manned, you can potentially use that for self launching by quickly killing the gunner each time (pistol headshot), to free up the gun. But that quickly gets tedious, and also he might drop frags which would mess things up. So really it's best to have a devoted set-up in which the gun is already free.

Use Legendary or Heroic to have good resilience against the boost, and be sure to have full health of course. Legendary gives you the most resilience. When you survive a boost you'll usually have five health bars left, whereas on Heroic it's usually three or four. The interest in health is partly from the point of view of surviving a nasty landing, but also in connection with play you might be doing subsequently, in certain special places. You might need decent health for surviving a fall for example.

It's a good idea to try and get your checkpoint quite close to the time when the Pelican accelerates, so that you'll be able to make launch attempts relatively fast. If you have to spend several seconds waiting for the Pelican to rise and turn, that'll quickly get tedious, bearing in mind that it can take a lot of tries to get a good launch (especially if trying to be launched in a particular direction). If there's about 2 or 3 seconds before the Pelican accelerates, that's pretty ideal. You have minimal waiting, but still enough time to alter position and aim.

It's optional to have a seated passenger (I don't think it makes any difference to your boost survival chances), but I recommend having an armoured Marine in full health, to potentially give you company on the catapulted hog and at any special place you land and play about at. That said, he'll often get killed by the boost; it seems a bit random, but will also depend on your grenading pattern of course.

NB: When you get your checkpoint, it's good to be fully loaded with grenades and well stocked with ammo (for pistol and sniper rifle), for possible later fun.

Boosting

Because of the randomized effect of tagging the hog, you don't have much control over the boost, but some grenading patterns will still be better than others, for getting yourself sent in a particular direction or whatever. I won't try to go into any detail on this at the moment, but will just say, experiment and persevere. Whether we're talking hog riding or kick-launching, I've been able to get similar trajectories to what I've previously seen occur to a gunner. I haven't managed a monster kick-launch yet (such as suffered by Stacker a few times in BCM373), but I suspect it's possible.

Checkpointing after landing

In connection with post-landing play, it's nice if you can checkpoint, to save the situation and be able to repeatedly try dangerous descents or other stunts for fun. This is possible to arrange by having triggered the succession of four rockslide dropships before gettng your launch set-up checkpoint. Each of the last three ships brings a checkpoint; so you'll potentially have three checkpoints available after landing (and it can indeed be useful to have more than one available). These checkpoints are fully delayable, incidentally.

The creation of such a set-up is demonstrated in BCM376. There are various options in how to go about things, and you can read the written commentary for some talk about that. But I'd suggest using the strategy shown, in whch the rockslide is visited only after having killed most of the surface covies (potentially even so many that the survivors spawn and start to head up), so that when you return, you'll be able to trigger the Pelican fairly quickly. Quickly enough that when you get your set-up checkpoint, there'll still be quite a while (possibly close to two minutes) before the second rockslide dropship is due.

You can see that set-up being used in BCM377 for exploration of the nearby coastal plateau, and in BCM381 for exploration of the 'valley heights'.

Getting a second bounce

If the hog gets catapulted sufficiently high and at the right angle, it can end up coming back down and bouncing off the Pelican a second time. Sometimes it might be just a glancing blow, which isn't very interesting, but other times it can be a good meaty bounce, such as seen at the end of BCM371 (see pic). It makes a nice challenge to specifically achieve this. It's pretty difficult though. You can expect to need a lot of tries before getting lucky. Actually there's even a possibility of a third bounce, if the second bounce sends the hog on a nice arc ahead of the Pelican. I wasn't far off getting that in the aforementioned case.

Protest calls

If you're playing on Easy or Normal and thus expecting any passengers to usually be killed by your 2-grenade boost, you can expect to be getting frequently reprimanded by guys aboard the Pelican. In this connection, it's probably best if plenty of guys made it aboard, so you potentially get a good range of calls.

But depending on your set-up, or your location after doing a boost, you might find that you hear from some guys more than others. In a worst case scenario that could get monotonous. If you're going to have Warthog company but want to eliminate protest calls in advance, make sure none of the survivors fly out. I think the best way to do that is to first get all but one of them killed underground during combat. Then when the Pelican arrives, kill the last guy. The Pelican will still touch down.

Blue beam possibilities

Not long after I discovered this catapulting, a thought came to mind. Perhaps the hog could be catapulted into the blue beam? That would be quite a trick! In order for this to happen, obviously the beam needs to be firing at an appropriate time relative to the catapulting. When I created the set-up seen in BCM371, by chance the beam was due to fire at around about the right time. Normally I couldn't get the hog catapulted close enough, but on one occasion the hog got extra speed from some dropped frags going off, and hit the tower quite high up. So it looks like a blue beam zap is possible, with the aid of bonus blasts. You'll need freakish good luck though!

One other possibility is that a hog passenger could get zapped, dead or alive. I haven't actually had that happen yet either, but I've seen some close calls with a dead Marine, courtesy of bonus blasts. And as highlighted in BCM373, kick-launching definitely has the potential for getting a live Marine zapped.

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