Above is a picture of me bombing the heck out of a ground-based missile silo. The silo appears below my plane as a circular object. The fire in the middle of the silo is the fire from the bottom of a missile-- the silo has detected me and is trying to fire. If fired, the missile will heat-seek after me until I blow it away or it runs out of fuel. In this case, I managed to destroy the silo before it could fire the missile; the trail of fire to the upper left of the silo is a stream of my bombs exploding.
Above is a picture of me attacking a ground cannon (which happens to be sitting in the middle of the water). The cannon has fired several explosive shells at me; one of them explodes behind me as another approaches from the front.
Above is a full-window dump (showing all the controls and other info). In the main display, I am doing a close flyby of one of the more dangerous objects in the game-- the rapid-fire ground gun. This particular one is rather stupid, and shoots at where I am, rather than where I will be when the bullets get to me. The truly dangerous guns (not shown here) predict the plane's course, and fire unerringly at where it is headed. In this particular case, I have just flown through a stream of bullets, and I have taken a single bullet of damage, shown on the damage display. Note the radar at the top right; I am the white dot, the rapid-fire gun is yellow; the missile silo is purple, and the cannon is green.
This picture shows me taking out one of those stupid but pesky enemy airplanes. The enemy has fired several bullets, but I'm going too fast for him to track, so they're all missing. However, I am using the Concentric Rings of Death (tm) weapon, which leaves him no chance of survival. He has just met the front of my second ring, and is properly in flames. Note the red dot to the left in the radar display; this indicates that even if I survive my encounter with the enemy plane (who can still easily destroy me by colliding with me), I will have to deal with a guided missile. If I missed the red dot on the radar, I would still know this because of my blaring red Lock Detected light, which indicates that something has locked onto me.