[Suggestion] Limit the ability of skyknights to dominate air.

No wouldn't fix ganking. If the vet gets a drop on someone they should get the reward.

The idea is to give those guys that do run away a chance to actually get away. At the start of the "run!", both vet and noob will be even. Both will afterburner, the vet being on the tail will begin firing. If he takes him down, so be it (can't solve everything). But if the vet doesn't drop him in the first clip, the noob is going to have more burner. The next clip the vet fires will be at an increased range.

I think it will help.

What I'm after with this: Something subtle. Something that helps noobs but does not actually hurt vets.

Where I think it would help most: Noobs can usually hold their own better in a traditional nose-tail dogfight. Skills from other games transfer over. They usually suck at hoverfights. Many engagements start with a fast pass at each other (where noobs are ok) and then quickly settle into a hover fight (where vets dominate). Right now there is no way to avoid the hoverfight. If you try to run, you just get chipped to death before you can get away. If you stay and fight, you die in the hover fight. Noobs need a way to run away.

Running doesn't help gunnery, that's for certain. Not getting in the plane to begin with helps even less though.

The single non-nonsensical thing in your post.

(I hope you re not part of our TR collective,with that antisocialist blabber going on)

Not a fan of the whole "safe space" idea tbh. Once you actually get into an ESF, the map becomes surprisingly small due to your speed, and making a third of the map a "no-go zone" would shrink it so drastically you'd just experience crowding over certain hexes due to vast swathes of the map being inaccessible.

Fast-movers need the ability to roam, if even just for evading threats such as flak. That enters the discussion too by the way, because flak-anything will still have their 1000M range to snipe aircraft from the border of the no-go zone, only this time the lib/ESF cant sneak up for an ambush to shut it down.

I'm not one of those pilots who feels that more air is necessarily a good thing - people will spend nanites on whatever vehicles are powerful and most profitable for them to use. Back in the day you even had low to average-skilled pilots tearing ground apart due to how OP the rocket pods were, and a similar thing was true with the scythe PPA and banshee. The old banshee could quite literally decimate an entire platoon sitting on a vehicle terminal at a freshly capped hex (with thermal sights!!1), so everyone and his cousin pulled pods or A2G noseguns just for a chance to do just that or one clip a tank with a single pod salvo.

But of course, all the ESF weapons were tuned up and brought into more acceptable places, thermal sights were removed and infantry were capable of hiding once again. Some of those weapons were still "good", objectively speaking... but they possessed a fraction of the power they once wielded. Conversely, a pilot could still be effective while using said weapons, but the amount of technical skill and situational awareness required to excel with the same tools went up proportionally to how hard they were nerfed. Anyone who complains about A2G infantry farm for instance, surely was not around in the days of thermal sights and unnerffed banshee, with infantrymen being lit up like neon signs begging to be farmed...but I digress.

My theory is that this falloff of the weapon effectiveness of ESFs (pods, hornets, A2G noseguns, thermal removal), in addition to the more modest playerbase numbers, are squarely to blame for the decreased number of ESFs in the sky relative to release:

• There are not more aces proportional to noobie pilots than there used to be. Keep in mind, a lot of aces quit as well back when all the flight changes were hitting and never looked back. It's not that there are relatively more of them, it's that the ones who remain simply have 0 competition and are allowed to run amuck uncontested.
• The aces of today are not more skilled than those of yesteryear, in fact some might argue they are a bit weaker due to being in a less competitive environment (which is frankly only logical due to being less total aces in the talent pool).

What you are experiencing is a game where there are half as many players online as there used to be, with nerfed A2G ESF effectiveness (that's an important point), so the air is naturally more empty, but of course some aces will still always play for the unique experience... so if there are less players in general, and low-average pilots dont feel ESFs are profitable enough to farm with? Then those pilots stop pulling, there isn't enough food to go around, and the wolves will trip over each other trying to hunt the same prey.

I believe it highlights a stark contrast between the way ESFs were thought of and balanced during the early era, and the reworking of ESFs in the modern era of PS2:

• In the old days, ESFs (along with everything else in the air), were balanced around the "average" pilot. They wanted to build the aircraft around the capabilities of a single, reasonably skilled individual in the air and give him ways to influence the battle in his faction's favor. Hence the pods, the A2G guns, the hornets, the thermals, the OG rotary, the whole shebang... but the pilots got better. They got more and more skilled, more comfortable with advanced maneuvers, more comfortable with each weapon platform, they started getting more kills, more enjoyment, more ragetells, influencing the outcome of battles with greater effectiveness.

Maybe noone realized it then, developer or otherwise, but this is the inherent problem with a gameplay system that features a very high skill ceiling, such as ESF flying: The more time goes on, it becomes apparent that certain "strong" weapons start to seem overpowered when in the right hands, even if those hands belong to a very small segment of the playerbase. And so, the whine posts, complaints and salt mounds accumulated until...

• In the modern era of PS2, ESFs are balanced around the Ace pilot.This brought the highest tier of flyers down to earth a bit, cut their earnings down per session a good 15-20% ish on average, and gradually diminished their ability to influence small battles, culminating in the wholesale removal of vehicle thermal sights, without so much as a cert refund (granted this affected all vehicles).

So what the devs essentially did in those days was decide that limiting the power of a few individuals, to prevent them from being perceived as OP, was more important and desirable than promoting the potential of many new pilots, who would have far more incentive to fly if their tools were more appealing and profitable. In the old days, sure they might have gotten ganked by an ace, but in the 10 minutes leading up to that time they would have gotten some nice kills on some armor and infantry in their hex, and more importantly, had a greater influence on the outcome of the battle as well. This is how the air game worked pre ESF nerf, and still does, just to a much lesser degree. And hey, if any of those A2G pilots felt like finally doing something about the ganks? Well, since there are more people flying in general, there's more people to practice A2A duels with, the talent pool is bigger and the average skill level goes up as a natural result.

So the devs chose one way, and that way resulted in the diminishing of the air game to the state that you see it in today - not aces, not mechanics mind you, not the reverse maneuver (this dead horse was mercilessly beaten) - it was the Devs.

They are the ones who decided to drop the nerf hammer on ESFs, they are the ones to thank for making the ESF a less attractive pull for new flyers, and therefore, for less aircraft in the air.

Either that. Or it's just that after a certain amount of time players quit the game and that has NOTHING to do with ESF changes. We got fewer players so we got fewer pilots. I don't think that much changed about the percentage...at least not since we got the resource limitation.
ESFs are far from too weak. They are just not completely op anymore(which, together with spawnroom shelling likely drove more players off the game than anything else). Certain pilots just want to ignore that their fun killed the fun for everyone else...and still dream of the old days when nobody could touch them.

This is a great idea. It also needs to be tied somehow to Tomcats. Maybe when the lock is taking place.

That's debatable. I think ESF are about where they should be, but with flak as OP as it is the ESF are actually too weak.