Tips?
Learning to HO is basically the opposite of learning pretty much anything else in the game.
All you need to do is point your guns at the other guy and shoot, regardless of which direction he's flying, and with no regard to the success of your manuever. If you care about living through it, you'll never be truly successful at the HO...
That's what makes it the opposite of pretty much every other facet of the game. Almost every other facet includes living through it to consider it successful. Imagine how easy it would be to learn to land if you considered exploding on or near the runway as equally "successful" as rolling to a controlled stop where you intended to. With learning to HO, your long-term average "success" won't be over 50-50. So, essentially, dying while attempting it is just as much a success as not dying, and in many ways perfecting the HO could be seen as a "failure".
Don't get me wrong though- I see the HO as a legitimate tactic, and I'm glad we have it, and I believe it's directly responsible for the overall "quality" of the "good" fights that we do see.
That's because it's the most basic, simplist, most "instinctive", and obvious way to fight. It's so predictable it's ridiculous. And that predictability makes it easy to defeat for anyone who deserves to consider themselves a "fighter" pilot. Getting hit by an HO is a very fair "penalty" for shabby tactics. Without that penalty as a possibility we could be much more successful with less-refined tactics. Anything other than the HO requires more advanced thought, use of space, speed, angles, plane type, control surfaces, throttle, gunnery, SA etc... Sure, getting hit by an HO while you're getting swarmed by multiples can be impossible to avoid, but in 1 v 1's it can almost always avoided with very little effort.
It's almost like flying/fighting good, is more difficult than flying /fighting poorly. Hmmm, maybe that's the way it should be?
So, you're asking for tips on how to fly/fight less skillfully? Let me see if this is an accurate analogy- A ten year old is mad that he can't compete with the high school track and field stars, and that he keeps getting bumped off balance by the two year olds crawling around on the playground. So now he's gonna pout, drop to his knees, and start crawling again? And he wants some pointers on how he can do better at something the little kids were able to figure out on their own? He thinks he'll be more successful as a "crawler" than he would be if he applied his efforts to becoming a track star?
