Originally posted by Cobra412
I'm not necessarily talking about the basic maneuvers that all are aware of. I'm talking using some of the tactics and merges. I've seen only a few that use some of these tactics. Single side offsets, hooks and such aren't very common. You find very few folks who will try it.
Such tactics are common, at least among the more experienced players. Find a good pilot in the combat theatre and almost every merge will begin with an attempted offset or hook type maneuver, often by both pilots. In the main arena, it is less frequent because of the higher proportion of inexperienced players who don’t know how to create or use turning room, and prefer to rely on high aspect gunnery, which can of course be quite appropriate in many cases.
What I was trying to get at earlier is the tactics employed in the MA aren't like the ones in this book. These are texted book engagements and rarely ever work with the folks we fly against.
I disagree, and although Shaw doesn’t make it clear, none of the material in that book is meant to be used in a scripted fashion, engagements should not be carried out in a move – counter move manner, like a game of chess. Maneuvers during air combat should be employed in a fluid and dynamic manner, so that a maneuver might only be partially complete when another more appropriate one is begun. The successful pilot is the one who can actually recognise the need to change, and pilots who become locked into a maneuver with a “I’ve started it so I’ll finish it” mind set are going to be continuously outside of the OODA loop. That kind of dynamics can make individual maneuvers hard to spot for beginners, so it’s easy for them to think they aren’t there at all.
Reason being is not all of them react in a text book way. Majority close the angle to nearly 0 and force a head on initial merge.
Firstly, there is no such thing as a “text book way”, because fighter pilots who are properly trained, don’t think about air combat as though it was a sequence of set piece maneuvers. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you have a well practiced set of maneuvers and all you need to do is use the right one for any given situation. If you ask ten pilots who think like that, to solve a problem, you will probably get one answer, but if you present ten pilots who understand the dynamics of air combat, with the same problem, you may get at least ten different answers, maybe more
The bottom line is, if you expect to see maneuvers in any engagement, real or virtual, that look as they are laid out in Shaw’s book, you will sometimes be disappointed. But they still happen, and in almost every engagement! One of the things I used to do when I taught this, was to examine films (Called ACMI for Air Combat Maneuvering Instrumentation in the real world, but in Aces High we use the films from the arenas) of engagements and then talk guys through them, identifying each maneuver and explaining why it was or wasn’t appropriate. More often than not a fight was lost because one of the guys did a maneuver as though it was a set-piece, a stock response, when in fact it was the wrong thing to do. They knew the name of the maneuver, and what it looked like on the page, and how to do it in the air, but didn’t properly understand the why or when to do it, or spot when it wasn’t working quickly enough to do something more appropriate. They were also largely unable to recognise their opponent’s maneuvers, or why they were being done, and generally responded with some home-spun set-piece response. Almost every film I’ve ever been shown by a new pilot contains examples of that kind of flying. If you have a film where it looks as though an engagement didn’t include any real world tactics, you probably just need to have it pointed out and explained.
It's rare you see the element of surprise used in the MA. The CT on the other hand due to distance tracking it can be done. One thing that is nice is the new sun model in AH 2. With it alone I can see alot of folks using it like it should be used.
Agreed.
Badboy
