Just want to reiterate something so that newer players understand...
A scissors is a dance that needs two partners. It is also not a very stable "dance" so to speak.
"Well hey Murdr I've had scissor fights that went on for nearly 10 minutes."Yes, so have I, but let me present this progressive flow of the scissors.
I want to stress what I said earlier...we are not looking for a scissors per se. We are looking to induce a flight path overshoot.
"But Murdr, Humble says the scissors fight is the pinnacle of acm."Yes, yes, but bare with me here. A scissors only developes if both opponents are doing the correct maneuvers in response to each other.
Here's how thing progress
1. A flight path overshoot happens.
2. The "defender" recognizes this and cuts his flight path toward the defender.
That could be the end of the story right there. The defender might be in position to swing his wingline back across the "attacker" and convert that flight path overshoot into a wingline or "3-9 line" overshoot. That conversion is really our true objective in the first place. If that is the case than it's not accurate to say they had a scissors fight.
3. The "attacker" also recognizes the flight path overshoot and
a. Tries to extend out of gun range before the former "defender" can place a shot.
b. Cuts their flight path back toward the opponent to cut them off from gaining a trail position.
4. If 3b. happens, and the "attacker" denies his opponent a shot outright, or at least a critical shot, we have another flight path convergence (see #1)
If you made it all the way to #4 twice, we have a scissors fight.
So what I'm trying to make clear is that just barrel rolling back into the opponent after a flight path overshoot isn't a rolling scissors. If it results with you in trail, you managed to cause an overshoot. Just alternating left and right hand turns with a bandit on your six isn't a flat scissors. Unless you're getting the bandit far enough out of trail for converging flight paths, you're just "jinking". Hence it's a dance that needs two partners.
As far as inducing a flight path overshoot, which could lead to a scissors fight, we suggest the barrel roll defense.
You can see a movie demonstration by Badboy
(
http://www.badz.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Animations/Animation6.avi),
and there is also a package of film demostration by me
(
http://trainers.hitechcreations.com/files/murdr/evarevall.zip).
Briefly, the barrel roll defense is a 3 step process.
1. A "leading turn". Generally this is going to be a break turn, but it does not have to be. In this step we are going to try to present the attacker with a high aspect target, so that the attacker will try to pull a lead for guns. If you can acquire the bandit nose on in your up view, that means there is a greater that 45 degree difference in your flight paths. We need this difference to create a severe enough flight path overshoot to work with.
2. Just as the bandit is about to employ guns, we want to start a barrel roll by rolling 90 degrees out of our turn.
On a side note: BFMs are named by the BFM problem we are trying to solve. At this point we are solving guns defense, so we can consider this portion a high G roll (typically the "over the top" persuasion).3. If everything went well with 1 and 2, while still performing our high G roll we need to watch our 6 for the flight path overshoot, and then orient our roll to our best guess of where the bandits flight path will end up.
At this point, our BFM problem is an insanely high aspect, and as pointed out earlier, we can consider the rest of our barrel roll as a lag roll.Obvious question, what's the counter? For step 1 use lag pursuit to minimize flight path differences. I mentioned other options earlier in the post.
This is a basic straightforward way to induce a flight path overshoot and then convert it to a wingline overshoot with "a bandit coming in on my six". As I also mentioned earlier sometimes flight path overshoots "just happen" and you can just start with step 2 or 3 at that point. There are also ways to "make" flight path overshoots happen during the course of a fight. But this is a good way to get familiar with both guns defense and recognizing flight path overshoots.
Finally, if you want to view an animiation breaking down the components of a rolling scissors, see
this thread. And by the way all of the links in this post have been accessable from the
Trainers Site in the Trainer's files section.
