I kind of wish aircraft actually acted like aircraft.

I've always been perturbed by the way aircraft in ps2 fly. While it's great they're agile, the stuff they pull off is simply crazy aerodynamicly. I don't think esfs should hover as well as they do, even with the hover frame. Libs aand gals should practically fall out of the sky if they try to fly upside down. They all should only be able to hover for a little bit before losing drastic altitude.
They also however should be given more latitude for going out of bounds, sometimes they just have too much momentum to get back in. At the very least a hud display showing the oob area approaching.
Unguided bombs should be more prevalent, and should be potent. Area denial weapons such as a napalm or some sort of tank area denual should be available.

The problem is the air game is very punishing for new pilots to try and get into it. AA is extremely prevalent, the control scheme isn't optimized for KBM, there are squads of veteran pilots who have nothing to do but farm newbies.

The problem isn't the realism of flight; this is the distant future and everything is made of nanites. Don't complain about how Galaxies and Liberators fly when everything is VTOL capable, even dependent on it.

Heck, there is cloaking tech, hovertanks, and rebirthing. Don't think too hard about the fineries of flight when the real problem is learning how so you can be competitive in the air game.

They are VTOL capable, but the troops inside and the ammo inside seriously have to be an issue when some of these maneuvers are pulled off. Not to mention the wonky physics make it really hard to judge how yo aim at them. Maybe a implant to show direction of travel or an aim circle for max and vehicles?

You can jump out of a moving aircraft at 1km above the ground and have a soft landing. You can step into a teleporter or onto a glowing pad that flings you hundreds of meters in a second. Don't worry about the g-forces on the ammo stores in an aircraft.

I've made this remark recently on here. But I don't think any of the planes short of the galaxy perhaps should be able to hover at all. If aircraft in the game operated a bit more closely to aircraft in real life then a lot of the balance issues would be mitigated immediately.

We have had, for decades, aircraft that can hover and fly 300kph, and shoot all manner of weaponry. They're called helicopters. The flight mechanics in this game are similar to flying helicopters in other games. Just imagine invisible whirling blades above the scythe and mosquitoes and you'll be right as rain.

I think that it is more a problem that a single set of maneuvers dominates the A2A game, the fact that ESF can do a vast amount of roles often simultaneously and that other aircraft require massive amounts of skill and luck to do A2A vs an ESF make it a very lobsided airgame.

The solution:
Make more air maneuvers viable
Give each aircraft a unique way to fulfill a role. Valkyrie could be a light gunship and/or attack heli, ESF more of a fighter-bomber etc.
Give all aircraft enough ways to do an A2A engagement. At the very least a way to escape an A2A engagement. (because someone is going to think it, the escape isnt automatic but takes skill to pull off and skill for the ESF to keep on the tail)

ESF are definitely twitchy and hard to hit. I'd settle for more inertia and less agility if it meant the complete removal of all the noob weapons introduced to help players who don't want to aim in a fps.

But this traditional view of aircraft flying by to drop a bomb just wouldn't mesh with PS2. If air couldn't loiter and gradually put out dps like currently, it would have to dump a crap ton of rage-telling death in the very short window in which it flew overhead.

And I do love Warthunder, at least I did maybe 5 years ago when it came out. But this game just can't support the necessary render ranges to pull off that type of air combat. The 1,100m render range is already incredibly frustrating.

Air has its issues for sure, but the real problem with air has always been incredibly poorly implemented and misguided AA.

Pretty much. As a fellow war thunder player, I can confirm that there just isn't enough room to maneuver within the sky box of planetside, nor the render range to support proper flying.

The maps in this game measures just under 10km with its maximum distance. For traditional Ariel flying and combat to be viable, you would need close to 60 km to work with. And that just is not possible under this games engine. Heck, no modern engine that I know of can be expected to handle the necessary render ranges, map sizes, and simultaneous player counts to achieve that feet.

And like you said, bombing just would break the balance of this game. In war thunder, its one thing, since everything has the potential to insta-kill, so its just par for the course. But that does not happen here, so unless players are willing to allow for that, bombing can't be implemented.

Sure. Yet these aren't helicopters and the flight mechanics of aircraft in planetside2 are nothing like flying helicopters in other games I know. If you turn upside down, you should crash. If you fly in a sideways manner, you should crash. And ones movements should not be like a space UFO where they can stop instantly and speed back up instantly moving in any direction.

No helicopter does that. Top speed is only attained in certain conditions and over a rather long run up. There should a significant delay between stop and start as well as direction changes. That is, if we want to take your view of planes in PS2 behaving as helicopters.

That or hover should go away. If one wants to loiter then they need to run circles or the like. Without the ability to hover, it would make both dogfighting and flying more interesting while also making pilots consider their strategy more than darting and plucking enemies, suddenly stopping over enemy tanks and blasting them then shooting off, or doing sudden 180 degree moves to counter other planes. That is arcade like. Now one would need to learn actual dogfighting techniques like lag displacement rolls and defensive splits.

I'm afraid your image does not make me feel right as rain.

Then go find some one shot kill simulator.

This thread is about wanting this game to change. If you don't like the discussion, I suggest you find another.

Why not? This is in the distant future. And the Scythe is literally UFO technology.

Except the TR and the NC don't have 'alien' technology. So there would be no balance on the flight side.

There could be asymmetrical balance, but Planetside fails miserably at that. So in the meantime everyone gets the Scythe's future alien technology to make things fair.

There isn't much of a logical argument for these future aircraft to be limited to conventional flight models. It is the future after all. I will agree that this game's physics are entirely jacked up, and fixing those would drastically help air combat. But hating on PS2 aircraft for being VTOL is silly, especially considering the limitations of this game's engine. And like I keep pointing out, and infantry doesn't seem t understand, is that if aircraft can't loiter and they're to remain viable, then their weaponry would have to be exponentially more devastating over a much smaller time duration. Ground guys who just don't understand the air meta have no idea what they're asking for and what the implications of those changes would be.

I kind of wish infantry acted like infantry and not be able to shrug off being near a tank shell when it goes off.
I kind of wish tanks acted like tanks and tore down walls to bases and didn't go nuclear when some atv with a rocket launcher shows up shooting it's ***.
I kind of wish spitfires acted more like sentry guns and had a faster response time and had a rotating gun instead of a clunky as **** rotating body.
I kind of wish grenades weren't made of rubber and weren't tossed like a rabid weasel was ripping your arm off.
I kind of wish damage would actually stick if it was done by a heavy anti armor rocket instead of being repaired off in the next second.
I kind of wish balancing wasn't done based on the best a vehicle could do but instead present counters to said playstyle (lets be honest here, there were only like 3 people who really used the galaxy for the bulldog farming and devs nerfed in response to them).
I ******* wish vanguard HE wasn't strictly worse than lightning HE in terms of AI.
I kind of wish magscatter wasn't better than semi-shotguns.
I kind of wish I had more asp points.
I kind of wish railjack didn't have a delay and trap had a better...something. Maybe recoil control or damage model. Or maybe a model that changed based on mode, that would be cool.
I kind of wish C4 was used to create tactical temporary doorways instead of being used as a better grenade. And less C4 on classes.
I kind of wish maxes were more versatile.
I kind of wish we had true mini-guns to the heavies (like TR gets a spin up tru MG, NC gets a more suppressive MG with an underbarrel, VS gets a laser or plasma MG that has small splash damage but can hit a larget area to disrupt shield recharge).

I kind of wish the funding for this game that this game earned did not go to other games.

This is the one that really gets me worked up.

You're assuming 'the future' means 'hollywood UFO type vessels' but that isn't a given.

2 out of 3 factions in 'the future' still shoot weapons with metal bullet projectiles and all 3 drive lightning tanks running on tracks and support vehicles with rubber tires. Is that not also the future? Therefore 'the future' is hard to describe without actually being there.

The issue isn't keeping aircraft at the same lethality as they are currently, but honing them to their respective roles - ESF to A2A, Lib to A2G, Valk to assault hauling of infantry, Galaxy to flying taxi. They don't need further 'devastating' firepower if they can no longer hover and stop/turn on a dime. They simply need to have a more defined role and play that role. Just like infantry.. and ground based vehicles.

I'm not 'hating on PS2 aircraft for being VTOL.' If you somehow incorrectly discerned that from my post then either I haven't been descriptive enough or you haven't read closely enough. I'm thinking the latter....

The issue you seem to be missing is the air model in this game is very arcade like in terms of how they maneuver (upside down, sideways, stop and turn 180 instantly, etc) and there is a large blurring of aircraft type roles. Its unfun to me and apparently the OP would like to see a change of some sort too. No, I'm not expecting a change, just voicing an otherwise quiet opinion. It seems whenever someone suggests something out of the status quo the PS2 clique comes to strong arm it out of existence with strawman fallacies and belittling/minimizing instead of just agreeing to disagree.

Not really. Aircraft can't rely on armor, so they need to rely on evasiveness. That might change if shields replace armor, but even then you have to assume they'll have a weaker power source and shield than armor. It stands to reason that light air will always choose performance and agility over tankiness.

The problem is that people who don't understand the current air game can't understand what needs to change or what's even possible to change.

Aircraft (as in normal, real world aircraft) are rather evasive. And airframes designed for A2G are designed to withstand significant damage. Others (A2A) shouldn't be anywhere near the ground to have pot shots taken on them - part of their evasiveness is based on altitude.

No, the problem is that people don't want their pet part of the game reworked because they're afraid of losing their (unfair) advantage. So there is a lot of jockeying on the forum to negate and rebut any discussion that is outside of their own of unspoken 'I should dominate' mantra.