Jets and their weaponry

I’m an avid jet fan, and going into 2042 I had a plan to grind them out as much as I can. But right now they leave much to be desired.

there are still key features missing or bugs preventing things from working which I’d like to outline for any devs that may come across this post:

• Activating the rear view cam blocks the ability to roll or pitch
• freelook sensitivity is incredibly low, and doesn’t seem to have any kind of slider that increases the sens
• no joystick support
• There is currently not roll camera toggle option, a big thing for me since I sometimes get nauseous without this toggled

Now something else I’d like to bring up for discussion are the weapons. As someone who learnt to fly on bf1, the difference in flight model and weaponry is astounding. I constantly hear on social media about the hatred towards jets who can take out tanks without any way to deal with them, and I agree that that is the case, but it’s mostly down to the weaponry.

In bf1 I mostly ran either trench fighter or tank hunter, the key reason being they have bombs. The thing about bombs is that they need to be aimed first. They are affected by gravity and that needs to be counted for based on your height, angle and speed. This in turn means less experience pilots will land less bombs than experienced ones, when experienced pilots will be able to come up with more creative uses of those bombs after learning how to use them properly.

the problem with AGMs is that they basically have a 90-100% success rate. Whereas in bf1 a tank hunter may only land 20 or so % of their bombs due to not knowing their trajectory, and each one only dealing a minimal amount of damage if their miss slightly. With an AGM, you simply need to aim in the general direction of an enemy, lock on and then click and boom, you hit them. Sometimes it’s possible to kill a target in one strafe because the turn rate of the agm is so fast it can still hit the target after you’ve flown right over it.

The cannons themselves (30mm) are far too in effective to be a decent replacement. For some reason they have an incredible amount of spread, that punishes those who are able to stay constantly on target by forcing them to miss anyway. So now a decent pilot like silk will hardly be able to land any more shots than a noob would that alongside almost non existent splash damage makes them even worse. Again in bf1, the cannons actually got more accurate the more your fired, so someone with decent aim is actually able to beam infantry, and they should be allowed to if they have the skill to do so. In bf4, the 30mm is precise, quick and damaging. Only the best of pilots could achieve significant damage in one run, and could finish them off with a jdam, which is another unguided bomb that can be deployed quickly if the pilot is experienced enough. Attack jets could target boats, tanks, jeeps and jets but ONLY if the user could effectively track their movements and land shots.

The overreliance on making strong weapons easy to use and always available is a pretty drastic problem in this game IMO, from atvs with 30mm to the rockets on the nightbird. The AGMs are no exception.

I feel that if the spread was to be reduced on the cannons, and the agms were to be replaced by some sort of bomb like the age old JDAM or even a dumb fire rocket, you’d see far less instances of jets being blamed for being too strong since the person in the jet needs to be good enough to actually land the shots, as well as creating a skill gap that differentiates new from experienced players. Those with experience and knowledge should be far more effective than a new player, and right now the weaponry allows anyone to kill most things without much effort.

As someone who enjoys games the most when there’s something to constantly improve at, jets at the moment just bore me because they just feel so simple when you can take out a tank in 3 clicks without needing decent aim and is far less rewarding. I’d rather continue playing bf1 and continue learning the bomb physics for different heights and speeds to improve my shot accuracy.