Jinx, I said I'd PM you but then thought others might be helped too and of course more people interested better for me, more people to play with!
You asked how a Ki-84 can out-turn an FM2. I understood you were mostly a GV player, so to reiterate and expand on my brief explanation in the MPA:-
The merge: this is quite an important part of the 1-on-1. Here you get to see what your opponent is flying, the relative energy states and possibly his gameplan once you become adept at reading situations and the all-important person in the virtual plane. While you can't as such win the fight in the merge you can disadvantage yourself so much that you really can lose the fight there. You will rarely see a HO-type merge because duellists are generally looking for some horizontal separation - this is passing side by side like cars on the road. If you're a sly bird (take Blade for example) then you're also looking for some vertical separation, this is passing under or over your opponent (you can of course have both vertical and horizontal).
At a given moment the first turn will happen. I won't belabour which particular opening move you want to do, you can experiment with that as they stem from BFM, however in our fight you chose to Immelmann and turn before we passed - a so-called lead-turn. The timing was too early. If you do the fighter pilots hands thing, both hands flat and coming together and your right hand turns upwards before they pass, you'll see that the left hand is below the right, and has to make a less hard turn to pull into the right. Most significantly the left hand automatically falls behind the right. You are just letting a bastage like me on your six this way. This isn't an ACM issue or a BFM issue so much as a timing issue. Experience will teach you this. A lead turn can give you angles for free but the timing and positioning is important.
Although the MPA air spawns are random in spacing, they certainly allow you to get some speed before the merge, enough to put you above corner speed. This is that point on those EM diagrams where your fastest rate AND tightest radius are available. The upper limit is the amount of G the virtual pilot is pulling in game. In AH it looks to be something like 6.3G. Therefore around
their specific corner speeds everything turns approximately the same (a lot of detail skipped here). For our aircraft it's instantaneous corner speed because we have way less than 1 to 1 thrust ratio, turning makes huge amounts of lift-induced drag and we can't replace that loss to our kinetic airspeed. So it doesn't last long unless you supply airspeed by descending (burning up potential energy).
There's obviously
a lot more to this, the essential point being that in our fight, the combination of lead turn and being above corner speed meant I could out-turn your FM2. Having got in that position I was essentially having to do less work to stay there. I was doing a lot of lag-pursuit, riding my boards, exploiting a better power-loading, a Sony car stereo and better cup holders. The FM2 has advantages too. If you can force the fight into your assets being applied against your opponent's weaknesses then you will be able to give me the yips just like Blade does in his Spit9
I'd be happy to spend some time with you going over merges and ACM. Spend time with others too because I have faults and preferences and the more variety you're exposed to the better. Read plenty. Just confining your reading to this forum will already take you a long way!
Hopefully run into you again and have helped a little introduce you into the marvellous world of the 1-on-1. Have fun, explore and remember it's just a game!
P.S. There was another fella who asked how I stalled out less often than him in the same plane but he was annoying so I shan't answer
