When all types of aircrafts will be deployed, air combat will look like this:

1. Fighters fight with individual infantry and dropships. They can damage heavy aircrafts as well, but must stay away of their anti-swarms.
2. 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.
3. 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

Yes.

Knowing what happened to Dropships, light and heavy aircraft are going to be paper airplanes and lead baloons respectively.

I hope so.

I'm anxious to get my shield skills up so my Dropships can be fit for tank decently.

Good read, thanks OP.

My thoughts on LAA are very similar to yours.

LAA need to be speed tanked, not HP. They should barely be able to survive a forge or round of swarms.
There should be no moveable turrets on them (trying to aim a turret at speed = lol)
There will be two weapons that the pilot can switch between (front weapon and ordinance)
The weapons will be classified as 'medium' as far as damage goes.

Movement techniques
- L2 - Air Break
- R2 - Thrust
- L1 - Weapon Cycle
- L2 - Weapon Fire (lock on then fire for some weapons)
- Left Stick - General movement
- Right Stick - Yaw for tight banked turns (only L/R functionality)
- VTOL is auto initiated when airspeed = 0 (good idea OP!)

This would make mapping to a joystick/pedal setup easy
Joystick - Left stick plus buttons for fire/switch etc
Pedals - Right stick
Throttle - L2/R2

Weapon Systems
- Nose - This would be standard assortment we see today
- Blaster - Anti aircraft or strafing for anti-infantry
- Missles - Mostly anti-infantry
- Railgun - Anti installation and anti-vehicle

- Ordinance - This would be a new set of weapons but could be modeled off of what we have now and what is coming
- Missiles - This could be patterned after Swarms. They have time to lock on and then fire. This works because the aircraft must have LOS for a set period of time to lock on which means they are flying in a set path and could be vulnerable to fire. They will do a little more damage than proto swarms (remember, the jet is always moving so they cant camp a target like an infantry with swarms can) and skilling them up only increases damage a bit but increases the number fired (and extra skill would be reducing lock on time). One way to make this fair would be to have specialized missiles that have a decent skew towards shield or armor.

- Bombs - These would be dumbfire weapons with AOE damage. It will need a good bit of physics because the trajectory will be based off of speed angle and yaw. They should be somewhat powerful as they are dumbfire and aiming them should require skill. They could easily fly off course so it would require the aircraft to be moving slowly or low which makes it a much easier target to hit. Possible variations on bombs would be an ECM (disrupts HUD, turrets and installations for a set period of time) and a Flux bomb (larger blast radius and takes out shields and deployed equipment but no damage to armor)

Having missiles and bombs be specific means that the aircraft would not be solo monsters and still require a team effort. They could kill on their own but it promotes strategy, communication and tactics to truly shine.

Thoughts?

The cockpit view could use a lot of work as well.

The Gallente fighter design is still there. Hey, they don't have to have the exact same function; that would be lame.....

If use such kind of distinction, I think Fighters need to be light aircrafts, Gunships - medium (as it very close to existing Assault dropships) and Dropships became heavy aircrafts (with more EHP, of course).
This will save existing HUD icons.


Yes, I want them too if there will be no other interesting changes, but I think bombs can be 2-in-1.
When you drop it, it falls like a solid piece. Detonation is condensed at minimal volume. This is good option for maximizing damage to turrets and tanks.
If you feel, that you a missing a target, you can press drop button again and bomb will became cassette bomb in the air, thus covering wider area, but lowering damage per m2.