Interesting stuff. I like how the chart illustrates how narrow a window that "negative E advantage" is. But, I'm not sure I fully grasp how it is being achieved.
What is curious to me, is that you answered this in terms of speed. What I most often hear duelers saying is they want is to be lower ("fighting from the bottom") after the initial merge, but not that they are also slower. Assuming one plane turns more in the vertical while the other turns flatter, isn't the one who turned vertically (and is higher) also the one that is going slower coming into the second merge. Wouldn't the higher/slower plane thus have the "negative E (slower speed) advantage" you describe? This is kind of where the wheels come off for me.
At what point exactly are you intending to be slower? Diving into the merge doesn't imply getting slower, nor does turning flatter (below) your opponent.
Perhaps you can elaborate more on how this "negative E advantage" is obtained.
Much of this seems counter-intuitive to me and is the exact opposite of what I learned in Warbirds, hence my difficulty in conceptualizing it.
<S>
Ryno
So this next question is the much trickier one to learn and/or explain. It is quite like a chess match when both pilots fight each other with the same tactics. If you've played chess much you'll know that even being one pawn down is a death sentence fighting an evenly matched or better opponent. But, unlike chess, if both pilots climb for E and are not hoing each other then in theory the fight could last forever. The same with any style or tactic.
So if both pilot's are going for a -energy adv what you get is a nerve racking stalemate of cold merges until someone slips up or tries something new. There are of course ways to defeat that situation, and then counter measures for those counter measures, and on and on. The intricacies of how to gain that small window of negative advantage are so complex that to explain it is futile. We have to actually chase it and gain it to understand how our bodies must react in controlling the aircraft no matter how many diagrams the mind ingests.
Judging your opponent's energy is another huge hurdle. Most of us have trained ourselves to recognise when an enemy aircraft is too slow to kill us and when one is too fast for us to get them. Not so many have worked with that bit in between. As with everything else in this game, we can't learn how to judge e states in any specific fighting style unless we fly that style experimentally ourselves first.
For a tour fly to battle at no more than 6k in a fighter. You will learn about -energy adv if you stick it out for the whole month. Devote yourself to a flying style for long enough to add it to your belt and then call back on your old styles with a new addition to the trick book.
By that I assume you mean missing your shot(s) opportunities.
Actually the first and worst way of doing it would be the failure to reach a -energy adv and putting yourself intentionally into a -energy disadv. But yeah, missing easy shots is a terrible confidence sinker at a crucial moment.
