Can something be done with Air to Ground combat!

Oh no, not like this.

First the damage ESF receive from small arms is tiny. It takes litteral squads to be any threat at all unless you hover around.

Aircraft are also designed around flying to the target, but since hovering around is often easier due to the lack of proper incentives to pull AA in the game people often use that.

Attacking large fights is fully possible to do. The thing is thst you shouldnt expect to win just by charging straight at it, doing a full strafing run without ever breaking off of a target and then expecting to come out alive. You are an aircraft, you can use cover to approach and hit a target before anyone is the wiser. You can also fly high at the skyceiling and drop down without being engaged till its too late.

I'm OK with dropping bombs, but an automated system that says "yep here is a free kill on this target" is just an even bigger middlefinger than the accurate high DPS stuff that aircraft already get. You can heavily damage and kill tanks with the AI rocketpods for crying out loud if you do more than just hover around but read a battle and assault the enemy tanks, preferably tanks already under fire as it increases chance on a kill or that your allies finish a surprised target that just lost 30 to 80% of his health depending on where you hit.

Giving aircraft bombs to drop would be wonderful, but they should drop them themselves. No free kills simply because you learned to fly over a target. Just imagine what I could do by simply targeting someone while I fly low. They cant move fast enough to escape or maneuver out of my way, their AA will likely not even notice me (often I get noticed because they heard/felt my shots or when I'm on my exit path) and they can do nothing more than take the hits from my bombs.

Drop them yourself, aircraft have enough power as it is simply because all dedicated AA is a deterrent and almost every aircraft weapon is a superior version of the ground variant.

It wouldn't really be a free kill, especially since everything would be moving. I'm not suggesting that you could target a tank and it would stay on it even when it moved. In order to get a direct hit with CCIP on what you targeted, you'd have to fly at a set speed and altitude. Lets say around 150 kph and 250 meters for example, and you'd have to be flying perfectly to try to keep the line in the target. So you'd be very exposed to AA and other aircraft shooting you down. But you'd need a way to yaw the aircraft, or move it side to side to really be able to keep the line in the target. So the automatic dropping method wouldn't really work, but you still could have a way to drop bombs just from having an indicator on where it might land in your HUD like this:



(The air to ground reticle would be where the bomb would land)

I just want ESFs to be more like strike bombers than helicopters in the game. I grew up playing arcade flight simulator games, so when I saw planetside 2 back when it came out I was excited. I've spent a lot of time flying in PS2 and I do agree that they leave more to be desired in large battles. I know liberators are meant for them, but they require another person and only survive battles due to their enormous tank than flying ability. But I think the main reason ESFs are bad in big battles is because the gun and missiles need to be aimed with the nose of the aircraft.

Another good way of providing good survivability in big battles is if we had TV guided missiles. This is where you'd have a screen in the bottom corner that you could control with the arrow keys and fire with the enter key. In other arcade flight sims I've played, the dumb fired missiles did more damage than the TV guided ones. As in the dumb fired ones that you'd have to aim with the nose of your aircraft could take down a building, but the TV guided ones were good for small targets like tanks and radars. The only problem with TV guided missiles is you'd want an autopilot that could maintain a speed and altitude so you could take time to aim.

But just to reiterate I grew up playing arcade flight sims and do really wish they'd add more features to ESFs specifically. This game is like a dream come true to me, obviously there are other games with air to ground against real players. But planetside 2 I think is the most fun one I've ever played. That's why I would really like to see stuff like this implemented that would help ESFs engage targets at higher altitudes/speeds so they'd be more impervious to ground based AA.

Here is an example of TV guided missiles in F/A 18 Hornet 3.0:

What stats do you people propose for air dropped bombs?

Turns out it doesn't really need nerfing at all:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/cp70tr/08102019_prime_time_vehicle_kills_lightnings/

Spitfires got just over half the amount of kills as Liberators on emerald.
And you lot say air op op lol.

Wow that's an interesting report. See guys? I was right about the Lightening, who's laughing now!

About the air I said it's bad for the game, not op.

You need to divide the Lightning number by 3 since all three factions can pull the Vehicle and that number lumps it all together. It should be fine if we assume even distribution in this case. About 245, on par with the Magrider, on Emerald. About 235, between the Sunderer and the Reaver, on Miller.

I'll take "number of uniques" for 500 Alex.

Now how about we add something important called "the amount of Lightnings pulled vs amount of aircraft pulled".

Because I dare bet that there are more Lightnings pulled than all the air combined on Miller and Cobalt, so it makes sense they would have more kills too. And what about Vehicle kills eh? This is the kind of misdirection that aircraft have to stoop to to make themselves look oh so terrible /s. Worse is that many probably even believe this and have no real idea that these numbers are missing most of the important data that is needed to make sense of it.