What am I mistaken about in duels and jousts?
A duel was most often set up to solve a dispute of "honor". In my mind I was thinking of pistols so take 10 paces "turn and fire! one with the luckiest aim wins" (luckiest because the black powder guns most often used were notoriously in accurate.)
And Jousts where two "knights" on horseback running full speed head on, trying to unhorse his opponent.
Neither is a matter of luck. Jousting took a tremendous amount of skill; a skilled jouster would beat an unskilled one every time. Nothing random about it at all.
Black powder is not
that inaccurate at short ranges. At ten paces any half-decent and half-clean gun will have a group well smaller than a human torso. What made people miss was either (a) they meant to or (b) nerves (or possibly improper loading, but IIRC the seconds usually did the loading). Andrew Jackson killed a man in a duel (AFAIK the only President ever to have done so) after the other guy had already shot him in the chest and broken two of his ribs. That ain't luck. Incidentally, duels were as likely to be "shoot one after another, challenged first" as "both shoot as fast as you can when the signal is given."
What makes HOing more random than dueling or jousting is (a) starting from a range where few people if any can hit reliably and (b) automatic weapons with which you can spray until you hit something. It's more like a duel running at each other with Glocks starting at 200 yards.
But you missed the whole point of my post. HOing is only like jousting if what you're doing is like jousting to begin with - two guys lining up looking straight at each other from out of effective range and then galloping/flying toward each other at the same time. In that situation, what everyone says about HOing is correct, it's stupid and obnoxious and indicates a lack of skill or class.
But there's nothing joust-like or duel-like about it if you barely manage to get guns on and kill a guy who was vulching you on your takeoff but stupid enough to come in low in your front quarter, or a guy who jumps you from 10k up when you're limping home with your engine oil nearly gone, or one of five enemies ganging you or capping your field, or a jabo 5 seconds from dropping on your CV. And I find myself in situations like those, or others that are not remotely duel-like, a lot more often than 1v1 co-alt merges.
Now, as to having honor, perhaps if you don't like people making unflattering assumptions about you without knowing what they're talking about, you should avoid making unflattering assumptions about others without having any idea what you're talking about. You might even find people are more receptive to your ideas if you don't claim that anyone who disagrees with you is skilless, clueless, and classless.
(You should also quit with the "Kids today!" crap. It just makes you sound like a cranky old curmudgeon, and you have no idea how old the people you're talking about are anyway and are wrong in many of your assumptions on that point.)
