I'm going to laugh too, because I'm going to be the one farming all those incompetent assholes the moment I get in the air.

I want to know how the collision model will work.

If they make it so that it ignores damage to the aircraft like Battlefield, we're going to have a LOT of snipers tears as they get clipped off of mountains and towers by after-burning Fighters.

We are just looking at concept drawing and having fun. Relax... There is a good chance the new dropship is the "jet fighter".

But you never know. The other post also had concept drawing of all the suits, I did not see pilot suit, unless it is a scout variant.

Anyway,

A proper Fighter should have no business being low enough to the ground to be taken out by Swarms or Forges (if you wanna hug the ground go for it, but that type of maneuver should be extremely difficult and risky). Save for the most ridiculously lucky of shots Swarms and Forges should never take out Fighters, not due to HP, but due to speed, altitude, and maneuverability. Collision damage shouldn't be a concern, because you shouldn't be hitting anything. What happens if you bump into a radio tower with an F-16? The "collision damage" will probably be pretty intense.

Fighters should be the fastest thing on the battlefield. They shouldn't be easy to fly without dedicating yourself to the role to avoid Fighter spamming (and i'm talking about practice and experience, not so much SP allocation). Fighters should be WORTHLESS against ground troops, again, save for the most luckiest of shots. Fighters should be exclusively for attacking other Fighters and any sort of Attack Bombers that would be needed to justify the existence of Fighters, and taking out a Dropship should be tricky proposition due to speed differences. And of course there is no reason Fighter pricing should be any different than current vehicles in general.

New aircraft are not a good idea at the moment, which is why they are a distant idea at this point, not so much a plan. Honestly my dream version of the Fighter would have a gun only, no lock on missiles. Make it NOT pinpoint accurate, as shooting at a vehicle requires less precision accuracy, and this would help to keep the Fighter from turning into an infantry killer.

I've said most of this before in Mobius' post from a few days ago-

https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=110827&find=unread

Athena, this is probably as close as you are going to get to a DEV commenting on this topic. Iron Wolf Saber makes a comment or 2 in the thread, but none of it is solid information of any kind.

EDIT: Please take note of the shoulds and shouldn'ts in my post. They are not wills and won'ts because I am not claiming to have any knowledge of any of this, just posting what I think would work best.

I agree with another poster that fighters probably wont happen until sometime in the spring of 2014 at the earliest. My guess is they will be introduced when/if DUST ports over to the PS4. I carry a 4mil SP buffer for when they finally do come out. We shall see.