Skybladev2 wrote:Assembling aircrafts together
When all types of aircrafts will be deployed, air combat will look like this:
- Fighters fight with individual infantry and dropships. They can damage heavy aircrafts as well, but must stay away of their anti-swarms.
- Dropships deliver infantry over long or high distances and perform fire support over small areas. It can attack heavy aircrafts from above or drop infantry to its roof.
- Heavy aircrafts working much like tanks in the sky, clearing large areas or ground vehicles/installations.
Future thoughts. Part 1: How Eve and Dust economies can merge Personally, I think we need a solid distinction between two types of Light Aircraft.
Fighters and Gunships.
As you can see from the following concept art, the original vision in 2009 was for the Fighters to full both the Gunships and Fighter role by having a secondary player operate a gun turret that deployed when the aircraft hovered:
2006 Gallente Fighter Concept ArtHowever, this would lead to that second player being unable to do anything in the aircraft, and effectively completely useless until such point as the "hover" mode was activated, as you can see.
Conversely, if you look at the concept art shown during the 2013 FanFest CCP Presents! presentation, you will notice that the Caldari Fighter they showed looks like it was not designed with that same role in mind.
Caldari Fighter LandedCaldari Fighter AirborneThis aircraft has more of the appearance of a dedicated fixed-wing "jet" aircraft, and what I had always envisioned Fighters to be. This also sets it up as a single-seater, meaning you don't have to pay off one of your Corpmates to get them to handle your turret on the rare occasion you switch to "hover mode".
With the idea of a hybrid aircraft off the table, which is really for the best, this still leaves open the space for a dedicated VTOL gunship. The Assault Dropship was a good step toward providing a more attack-oriented role for pilots, but it's still the equivalent of a
Black Hawk with
guns on the side, rather than something like an
Apache Longbow.
This aircraft would be a two-seater, possibly feature some kind of unguided rocket launcher or other lower-damage weapon for the pilot to use that would require pointing the aircraft at the target, and then have a turret mounted underneath with a full 360 degrees of rotation that is managed by a gunner.
A good example of what I'm talking about can be seen in Battlefield 2142. The VTOL gunships have a somewhat weak rocket launcher that can be fired by the pilot, while the gunner has access to a rotary cannon mounted under the nose, and optically guided missiles.
This allowed those aircraft to be dangerous to both vehicles and infantry, while their lesser armor plating made them easier to shoot down if they didn't stay mobile.
Thus, a Gunship would pack far more firepower than an Assault Dropship, but have to rely more on staying mobile to avoid being shot down, which would be assisted by it being a Light Aircraft as opposed to a Medium one.
Bear in mind, this hinges on Dropships in general getting an HP buff at some point.