Loops

[Belial]

Basically its all about fooling your opponent into underestimating the amount of energy your have, make gentle turns and they wont think you have the angle, and all of a sudden you pull hard on the nose and BAM 20mm in yo face.

[TexMurphy]

Winning a vertical fight is all about one thing (if planes and pilots are relativly equal).... merges..

Honestly the fight is won or lost in the merge.

The pilot who wins the battle for vertical separation is gonna get the gun solution.

To understand vertical separation do the following.

Take two rings and lay them over each other. These two rings represent the "loops" of the two pilots. If they are above each other you see that they will mirror each others flight path. This means that you merge HO and you will meet at the top HO.

Now move one ring "down" and you will see that the one ring that starts his/her loop lower is gonna "intercept" the other pilots flight path. First merge you are under your target which means he cant HO you. Just before second merge at top of the "loop" you are gonna have him in your sights.

In practice it aint this easy because a good pilot is gonna fight you for the vertical separation so you are gonna get just a little bit of separation but its still valueable.

Key thing is that you should not be making loops but rather chained immelmans. At the top of the "loop" you roll over and treat the situation as a new merge. If you won vertical separation in merge 1 you have a big advantage in merge 2. For each merge you are gonna get more vertical separation until finally you get your gun solution.

Ofcourse you will not be able to make that many immelmans in a row before your out of E.

If you win vertical separation and your opponent knows the value of it he will fight you for it in merge 2 (top of first "loop"). If he fights for vertical separation there he will bleed alot of E as he will have to force his plane.

So by winning your first merge your either gonna get gun solution or your enemy will have to bleed E. If he bleeds E chances are quite high that he will end up hanging in his vertical manouvers. If he runs out of E you will get a very easy gun solution on him.

[DamnedRen]

Winning a vertical fight is all about one thing (if planes and pilots are relativly equal).... merges..

Honestly the fight is won or lost in the merge.

The pilot who wins the battle for vertical separation is gonna get the gun solution.

SO........................

What yer saying is when I let the guy get 600 yds off my 6 then reverse on him I'm gonna lose in the vertical because I merged with him even though he began on my 6? What did I just say anyway? I personally don't care where the guy is... if he comes for me I attack every time. Boelcke said turn to face yer opponent...or sumtin like dat... he never said what distance....

To put it another way...and I hope this answers lots of other questions from someof our newer folks....If you don't turn to fight and flop around like a fish out of water then you have a pretty good chance of ending up in the tower. If you turn and fight you just decreased those odds by 50%. If you learn from it then you've just decreased those odds by another 25%. Which would you rather do... flop around and die alot of attack the dude and live 75% or more of the time?

The hardest thing to do is understand that just cause the guy is on yer 6 only means it might take another 40 seconds to kill him....

Most new folks ask the question "I'm always going defensive when a guy gets on my 6, how do I get him off it". The answer is quite simple, quit flopping and attack him. The execution might take a lil training Drop by the TA...that's why the trainers are there.

Hope this helps

Ren
Aces High Training Corps

[Yossarian]

Disagree with that comment on the basis not all aircraft do well when they become slow enough to actually do a modified hammerhead. Some even lose more alt trying to recover than if they had just used their radial G to nose over at the top.

I'm not suggesting that endless looping is a viable tactic, I'd rather see someone do a lag displaced roll to reacquire the angles and range instead of overshooting or 'looping'.

Could someone please me/explain what a 'lag displaced roll' is?

[SRD]

Could someone please me/explain what a 'lag displaced roll' is?

There are a couple of good films posted demonstrating displacement rolls here http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,260965.0.html