Warning – the following may be seen as idiotic.
If there’s one thing I adore about the Corsairs, it’s that flying them gives you many options. You can boom and zoom, energy fight, or turn around on a dime. You can fight just about any enemy you meet, on his terms, and give him a run for his money.
The Corsair truly puts the “stall” in stall fighting. Here is a bird that, properly trimmed and with flaps deployed, can enter a vertical climb at speeds approaching 100 mph, zoom up to darn near 0mph, and then tailslide with its superb rudder to swing its long, heavy nose right down where it needs to be to acquire an angle on the bad guy. You can also put her in a gentle spin and catch her when she is where you need her to be.
In other words, this plane’s limits can be exceeded and exploited for gain.
When merging, you have many options. You can take a more relaxed merge and energy fight your opponent, or you can do a number of things to bleed your speed before and during the merge to get an angle on them pronto. You can bleed a bit of speed on the approach with rudder and/or you can immediately drop your gear and/or cut your throttle through the first merge.
You will want to be careful when merging with cannon armed planes, as very often after the first merge you will again wind up nose to nose. However, assuming you are not destroyed here (takes some practice to position yourself correctly so you aren’t), you can often high yoyo back toward your opponent, who is likely starting to flounder after his own hard merge. Remember, properly handled your Hog can get into the vertical from very low speeds.
It is important to note that the Corsair has great flaps. If you are committed to a knife fight, be sure to use them. If I know that my enemy is going to try and stall fight me I start dropping them as soon as I can after that first merge, and keep on going as I go through the second. The plane does great on full flaps. It turns on a dime and can seemingly float around effortlessly. The only downside is that it makes aiming a pain. Against some MA opponents who aren’t doing much, I’ll often raise a few notches to ease my aim.
As others have mentioned, the Corsairs can also deploy their gear at incredibly high speeds without any fear of snapping it off. I once asked BluKitty when I should be deploying that gear, and got the best answer I’ve ever heard: “when you need to slow down.” A few choice times for this are when your bandit is diving away from you, doing the “FW Jingle” in an attempt to get you to overshoot, or when you are trying to get someone to overshoot. A really nice thing about the hogs is that although most models don’t have the greatest level acceleration, they all can build speed very well in a dive, and then can bleed speed nearly at will with a hard break turn with gear deployed as Llama stated. This works after a shallow dive while you’re on the deck with a hard flat or slightly nose-low break turn, or when you are in a power dive with a hard climbing break turn. Both can be converted into a rolling scissors, where you will usually have a great advantage over your enemy.
This ability to rapidly accelerate (in a dive), and then equally rapidly decelerate (with gear), all the while maintaining great control throughout the entire speed range from very fast to incredibly slow, is something that most planes in the game simply do not have.
In regards to the F4U4, it is indeed the king of the plane set. It can do everything described above, with even more power. You can actually take that plane and have a fight ascend – all while at incredibly low speeds (yet in complete control). It’s a real monster.
