Originally posted by Sloehand
Having had one encounter with Gunzo in the DA, I can say I would take anything he says with a grain of salt. He wanted to nothing but BnZ, travelling out 2-2.5K to zoom back in on my Hurri. That's a viable situation in the MA, its just not the point of the DA for me.
Yep, but what you forgot to mention was that I was flying an F4U1, against your Hurri, and I wouldn't normally choose to fight a Hurri or a Zeke in an F4U in the DA because of the style of fight, but you checked my six first, and not wanting to refuse any fights, I accepted. Now, getting into a continuous turning fight in an F4U against a Hurri isn't very smart. Yes, the F4U1 will turn with the Hurri, but only at high speed, and at low speed only for a short time.
Of course fighting Hurri's and Zekes in an F4U1 is perfectly viable, and an almost certain kill for the F4U1 if it is flown correctly. That means flying it the way it was flown for real in the Pacific, attacking, extending far enough away to reverse for a follow up attack, and repeating until the bandit is dead. In real life though, Head On shots were common, but since the HO is frowned on in the DA, I was using a modified version of that tactic, involving turning with you as long as possible, getting on your six every time, but not quite getting the shot. Then then just extended far enough to repeat, and on and on until someone made a mistake.
That's much different from BnZ, which would have meant a similar, but perhaps even greater extension, a reversal and guns attack, with no real attempt to turn any longer than necessary for guns tracking. It would have probably been even smarter to extend far enough to ensure a good E advantage to rope you or use pure BnZ. That may have been even smarter, but it wasn't what I was doing.
The problem was, you had no idea how to counter. Chasing an extending bandit that you can't possibly catch is dumb. You had two far better options.
First, if you want an extending bandit to reverse, you should let them extend, while grabbing E in another direction, to tease them back in, that has the advantage that you don't have to wait forever while they try to get enough separation for a reversal, and you can gain far more energy that way than you can in a tail chase, so you would would have even more maneuvering potential when they came back. Secondly, because you were always going to have less E, you could have used that to counter the attack with a scissors, for a snapshot at the initial stage of the extension.
If you had attempted to do either of those things it would have signalled to me that you had a clue about ACM, and would have made a much better and shorter fight. But no... you didn't even counter the lead turns properly, which is why I was always on your tail... You always picked the worst option available. It was only the pure turn rate of the Hurri that saved you.
I complained a bit of course, and his response was (to paraphrase) "if you fight with me, you fight to the end", and some other equally forgetable comments. No name calling, just defining his generally poor, unfriendly attitude.
To me it just looked like you were flying the Hurri so you could duel guys in planes that wouldn't turn with you, hoping for easy kills. It looked like you were expecting an easy kill from an F4U and instead you got a fight you couldn't win, and when you saw that, you tried to end the fight for no apparent good reason. If you had put up a good fight and asked to break off I would have agreed, but it just looked like after some dweeby flying, you were just trying to chicken out and save yourself by landing.
Gunzo doesn't seem to have that sense of the experience that I and many others do.
But I personally, would not take anything he says here at face value. I've been in the DA when he was there on a couple of other occasions and haven't noticed him TnB-ing.
Then watch those films, look at names on the pelts, then say I don't TnB like a true TopGunzo
Gunzo
