Cik

you can beat red fighters without much trouble because their missiles are so smoky. turn abeam, look in general direction of bandit once he fires, snap off HOB 9X or two turn out and run receive kill ~70% of the time laugh generally though it's better never to be in an inferior position, like running from an enemy or being on the deck, or both. assuming you are even numbers with the enemy and have AMRAAMs you should really never get into the position where you have lost in BVR and are now forced to merge or retreat. retreat is especially dangerous as the -18's top speed is very trash and they will eventually catch you and bag you.

you have no real chance of killing SA-10/PT(?) with HARM anyway, assuming it has a decent stock of missiles and you are not a 12-ship 4-harm setup. basically, anything you can kill with the HARM you can hit from it's first shot position. just wait until it shoots at you or reckon from a certain point from briefing-based intel and shoot.

tbh insurgents should just be cloneable. 2 is too few for some of the more modern conflict, where everybody and their grandmother has cat's paws involved. look at syria: probably at least 5 different factions of insurgents/militants/fighters/what-have-you all shooting at each other.

you guys are warming up your engines right? it says in one small line in the manual that if you don't get your oil/rad temps to a certain value (dunno what number exactly.. i just look at the needles) any sort of throttle action past 20%~ it will kill your engine. it says this once and then never mentions it again. never have i heard this advice while complaining about engines dying. since i've started doing the warmup procedure though my engine outs while in flight have stopped entirely. the problem is that the oil pressure spike kills your engine on a timer, so you may think that it is just due to overheat but in reality your engine died 20 minutes ago while sitting on the ramp and the timer's only hitting you now. tbh what would be really nice would be a report when your engine seizes that tell you why (oil temp exceeded safe limits at server time 0730) or whatever as otherwise it's a huge guess as to why it's broken and you have to parachute home.

identify it before the mission, then avoid it, or fly above it's maximum launch range (25,000 should probably be enough)

PB/EOM is going to noticeably improve the situation i expect. the current self-defense RUK analog is a no-range activate-off-the-rail shot IIRC, which won't loft very well and has no ranging information associated with it. once you can fire S/O EOM with a more top-down profile and a narrower seeker cone you will get much more accuracy, at the cost of only being able to shoot at things whose precise position is known.

a/g radar is not a necessary component in bombing things.

HARMs actually don't seem that good. at the moment they are greatly hindered by the 5ft miss, no damage meme. also, S-300 mops them up with no trouble. SA-15s also get them odds-on. assuming it's a fairly capable site, you will need more than 4 hornets' worth of HARMs to kill a single flap lid. granted, that will probably exhaust it's missile stock entirely as the PK is only ~40% or so per missile launched to intercept. (plus it will launch a bunch of totally hopeless missiles at you before you crank) long term though i think we will probably need SAMs that behave a little more intelligently with radar emissions. if the CEP/damage radius on these things ever improve it will be like clubbing baby seals.

IIRC it will go active off the rail (without PB/EOM) so don't expect perfect always-on-target behavior. but i don't know if it should follow sukhois lmao, that might be a bug.

shoot at range where you can theoretically hit the enemy crank wait a little while reverse crank fire while nose on again if target still not dead, start throwing sidewinders out like candy flare aggressively going into merge dogfight ^salt to taste with bursts of chaff and flares if target is killed at any point, stop and pat yourself on back. really, BVR strategy is very simple. much simpler generally than dogfighting i think.

it flies fine, if your expectation is that it is going to fly like a P-51 and not an F-16.

there are large gaps in the OOB such that the current in-game units are poorly suited against what is ~60% of the ingame modules now (third gen and below) new units should be added such as the S-60, SA-7, FIM-43 REDEYE, and other 50-60s AAA and tank units so that there are realistic targets and defenses for what is basically the majority of the game now (that is to say, less capable helos and 3rd gen and below A/C) currently, the game leans far too heavily imo into the very sophisticated find/fix/target/track capabilities of A-10C/KA-50/F/A-18 TGP/GPS/INS capabilities which the majority of the game no longer has. it would be nice to have: SA-4/5/7 FIM-43 REDEYE patton/T-34/centurion/ etc older bolt / semi-auto based infantry (garand, SVT-40, etc) older ATGM teams (konkurs, malyutka, etc) older fixed machine guns (tripod m2, dshk, etc) non-80 BTRs (why no 50-60-70?) in particular fixed man-portable defenses are something the game really lacks IMO as really in a COIN environment those boys rule the battlefield in many cases and are ubiquitous in many places around the world going back decades. i edited it to be more polite, thanks.

going to be hard to enforce with a defacto RUK mode. actually saying for sure that the enemy SAM that's about to waste you is not on an airbase is hard when you have very little ability to measure range against it and no TGP to check. really if you are likely to be using HARM you are going to be probably BVR the vast majority of the time (60~nm) with current SAM AI though, it should probably be banned as otherwise it will be 80nm turkey shoot as SAMs don't turn off intelligently. every single hornet will be 4 guaranteed SAM kills from far beyond the range of any SAM/fighter in the game. btw, it's going to get even more ridiculous when JASSM/GBU-39/SLAM-ER get here. "i vaporize your entire base with my 4ship from across the whole map, gg no re" hornet will likely end up with 40% of it's repertoire banned if i'm being honest.

go troll elsewhere

16's better

the capability should be in the game, it's historical. whether it's historical for every single unit or engagement or mission or scenario is up to the player to figure out, but it's unhistorical to not have it in some scenarios and thus it should be added.

the P-51 is, literally speaking, double inferior. there is no complaint here, fren- the thread is "how do i beat the 109?" and the answer is: you are double inferior, so here is what you do: enter the fight with an advantage, and as soon as your advantage leaves, you should follow it immediately. the mig-21 is double inferior to the F-15, but that does not mean you will always lose. really, the -51 is a perfectly capable plane because as long as you draw lead and shoot, he falls down. it's advantages are strategic rather than tactical, and so in a tactical situation, you simply play your game as best you can and leave when it is a good idea. but no kidding, it is double inferior. go nose up with a 109, you lose. turn fight with a 109, you also lose. describing the situation is not complaining about it. if you offered me 72" as long as it's historical i would take it, but realistically that would probably still not actually make you single inferior. it would just give you an extra vertical turn before you dive and run.

amazing can you quantify 1. why this is inaccurate and 2. how this is actually effective in combat being able to pull 11G at max energy doesn't matter if after one turn 109 will be at such a high energy advantage that regardless of your turning capability you will never be able to go nose up with him again.

why is that even useful though?

do 109 pilots actually complain about being unable to kill P-51? you guys can climb to the moon in a straight shot without blowing your engine, why not just yoyo and shoot? you are in a double superior plane, if you position yourself well there is near 0% chance of losing 1v1s.

guns only is it's own thing. i am specifically talking all-aspect, that is to say as soon as he passes in front of you, you win the fight odds-on. that means that even getting below corner is probably not going to happen. hornet will come into the fight, ID his target and then one-circle to victory. the most extravagant move you should need is a nose high turn to drop speed, then do a pull into WEZ and shoot. this is mostly an academic conversation simply because hornet rate is so good that you will simply obliterate most opponents with the simplest of level turns assuming you enter the fight at a reasonable speed for close combat and do not start the fight with him on your tail (granted i've won those too because lmaohornetalpha) i would say, generally speaking don't screw around with the rudder unless you are doing a maneuver that specifically requires pilot-command input or you are for some reason do not have your lift vector aligned with the target's momentum and are trying to execute a snapshot. otherwise, just roll. in WWII combat you end up using your rudder in combat alot more because your roll authority (especially at certain speeds) is quite bad. but in hornet it's virtually unlimited so why not roll instead? like i said, opinions though. hornet wrecks everything else in close combat currently ingame without much effort.

eh, i just don't see low-speed rudder turns as particularly decisive. useful for hammerhead and pirouettes, but with 9x you should basically enter WEZ at will. for legacy missiles, yoyo and nose-high out of planes are better to set up a shot than simply trying to nose-level rudder turn at people, IMO. big ol' rudders give you some really bizarre edge of the envelope advantages, but in my strategy i never end up employing those anyway as they leave you too vulnerable (just imo) better to play a "fair & honest" ACM than to rely on tricks that will get you scooped by bandit #2 a lot of the time. ~opinions~

rudders are used to coordinate turns, but the FLCS does that automatically. in general, there probably isn't much use to rudder in a turn fight. generally speaking your roll authority is near unlimited so there is no real obstacle to rolling and then simply applying aft stick. i would expect that inputting hard rudder turns would be less energy efficient than simply putting in roll and pulling. i would suspect that the best way is to just exit your turn, roll, enter a new turn. you can probably hold aft stick and roll at the same time, though i would expect that this is both 1. stressful to the aircraft and 2. not as energy efficient as just quickly rolling and pulling the stick. really though, the times you should actually reverse your turn like this in close combat.. i struggle to conjure a use case. in scissors, dumping throttle is often useful as it is chiefly a contest of whoever reaches low speed first. generally though you won't want to dump it forever- you get down to near your corner and then enter full AB for energy maintenance. likewise, in horizontal scissors i usually actually extend brakes until i am down to 300-400 kn, otherwise my turning circle will be the radius of a small country and i am sure to lose. optimum gs? uh, for what purpose? i mean, if your objective is to turn the quickest circle possible you can just yank the stick as hard as possible. "optimum" gs just depends on what you are actually trying to achieve- granted loops don't really achieve much(?) so perhaps you are thinking aerobatics and not combat.

pony is double inferior, but most of the time it doesn't really matter. 6000' advantage means you are single superior and you can win fights all day. simply a gunnery problem. real issue is: axis outnumber allies most times- fights tend to be deck where superior horizontal energy maintenance matters a lot- difficult as hell to make VID from beyond point blank range so swooping attacks are less effective than they probably oughta be. personally in mustang i never worry about guns not killing things. usually, quarter second tracking shot if well aimed turns axis into slowly drifting confetti. ammo is deep enough that you can make a half-ace in one sortie or so with some reliability if you can find a semi-cooperative target and aim well. it makes me grouchy that it's a K-4, which is probably a little more advanced than the real axis front line at the time. but eh whatever. there are much worse matchups in this game, in a gunfight all that matters is your ability to apply your guns and that is usually not superlatively difficult currently.

are you in an area where the enemy have IR missiles are you below the engagement range of these missiles dispense it's why you have flares senpai. there isn't unlimited space in these birds; the extra weight, maintenance profile, cost, and potentially limited effectiveness of the device means it was left out. you have a brain, you have flares, you have eyeballs and a wingman, you should rarely have trouble with being struck by missiles. if you are having such trouble you are: 1. flying your missions incorrectly 2. flying impossible missions 3. making mistakes why isn't every plane bulletproof with a 30mm gun? because it would result in unacceptable compromises in other parts of the design deemed more important. having a bunch of extraneous sensors hanging out of your aircraft causes more drag than they were willing to accept. MWS is not standard equipment and using it as a crutch is foolish.