* This will be the main page acting as a main hub to all other guides, charts and information*
Introduction:
There has never been a comprehensive introductory guide to Air RB. To make matters worse stat cards are misleading at best and there is clear lack of understanding of what is actually happening at a foundational level in Air RB. That being said, this guide will hopefully bring a better sense of understanding to Air RB to both new and experienced pilots alike. Understanding something is the first step to improving and having fun. This guide is meant to help facilitate that. I will be adding more modules here in the near future, with the next one being flight stick controls. This is not a proper flight test database, nor is it intended to be, as it’s not the proper format. that being said:
*I highly recommend reading the Air RB - Game Mechanics / Fundamentals modules before attempting to use this guide since it is foundational.
*Use the Air RB Map Temperature Guide if you decide to use the MEC settings in the guide
*I also recommend reading the detailed performance guide following the chart for each nation. The detailed performance guide has a lot of very good information including Infi-WEP settings. The chart is at the top of the modules for quick access if needed rather than scrolling down but the chart is more supplemental / quick reference to what is actually deeper in the guide.
I’ve discovered that the min airspeed where contrails appear on wingtips is universally between about 40-50kph higher than what is says in the chart. The planes do not handle any differently its just where the the contrails appear.
This should be kept in mind, that if rope a doping and using this number the enemy or your self still has a significant amount of ability to handle or get the nose up compared to before the contrails were changed.
First off, I want to above all thank those of you in the community for constructive criticism, suggestions and ideas that made this guide what it eventually became. with that out of the way, I wanted to give an update to what the future looks like for this guide. Unfortunately, I will not be updating it moving forward, for several reason which I will go into in more detail here.
The changing of flight models by the developers with no notice or announcement to the players is incredibly disruptive and irresponsible. It will silently get players killed in game never knowing that their plane has been changed. in addition, instead of updating the chart as needed, I would literally have to recheck every single plane periodically just to make sure Gaijin didnt change something without telling anyone. This is exactly what they did with almost every single Japanese fighter at the beginning of the year,
In addition to helping players understand their aircraft better, the guide was also meant to highlight some issues found with aircraft performance so they might be adjusted by Gaijin. Examples of this are planes marked with an (H) in the aircraft notes overheat and have auto radiator settings that need to be adjusted. The yak fighter line is good example of this, where the radiators are incorrectly set to 111 Celsius when they should be set to 109 Celsius where the plane actually overheats. This issue is still present in game even after I tried to contact gaijin with this information with a technical moderator and they never responded.
After months of the previous version of this guide being in the Realistic battles section of the forums, a forum moderator decided to move all the charts into machinery of war. This was the same area where historical flight data was and created alot of confusion. It also scattered the guide in several different areas making it less organized. I tried to contact the moderators to put it back under RB at which point they refused. I wont get into more details about it, but in the end had to redo the whole guide in a very specific way because of this delaying the completion of the guide
I’ve tried to help make Air RB a better experience by providing knowledge and tools to better help players get into flying which the learning curve is pretty steep. I’ve also shown where there are things that could be easily fixed and made suggestions in that regard. Unfortunately, the lack of transparency of the developers making flight model changes, the lack of addressing the issues I found in testing, and the negative experience with the forum moderators I don’t see the purpose in providing a guide for a game that wants to willfully stay broken or less than what it could be.