Another look at the late F-104 situation

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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The later F-104s are in kind of a weird spot in the current meta. While the A and C variants dominate their area of the battle rating when played properly, every single one after these seems to get hard countered by some common adversary aircraft.

The 10.3 F-104J gets trolled by the 3.5km rear aspect AIM-9L of the A-10A (Early), the Chinese F-104G has the same issue except the L is more likely at 10.7, and the German/Italian/Belgian F-104Gs constantly get sucked up into the land of the MiG-23ML which not only carries a missile/radar combo invisible to their RWR, but also has a higher top speed and maintains energy better in turns. A MiG-23 on your six is essentially a guaranteed 10k SL debt waiting to be redeemed.

(Both the S and the S.ASA are lost causes lmao, giving up your gun for 2 radar missiles on somewhat weak radars while facing F-18s and F-15s respectively)

Is there any outspoken reason they’re kept in their current state?

Or better yet, is there a better way to use them rather than just tent-plugging whenever you see the 384th lvl 4 premium player of the day?

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They have a high efficiency metric because they are good at base bombing, so gaijin doesn’t see an issue with their BR.

I’d just move all 10.7 and above F-104s down by 0.3, and the ASA to 11.3.

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F-104A/C when played properly are ground strikers, because they can’t frag dogfight aircraft.
F-104S is one of the best 11.3s in the game.
ASA should be looked at. I consider it 11.7 at this time currently.

If you want advice on F-104J: Just keep distance from A-10s.

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feel surprised there still someone remember ASA.
it’s a pity that this plane has some beautiful skins, but it’s still at a unplayable br.

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(all aspect)

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The F-104A doesn’t even have bombs or rockets…

Both are BnZ aircraft, not ground strikers…

No. F-4E, JA37C, J-7E are all magnitudes superior.

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F-4E is the F-15C to the F-15E that is F-104S.
They’re different.

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No. The F-4E is just strictly better than the F-104S save for things that do not matter either due to irrelevancy or being so minorly better at it that it doesn’t matter, see: speed.

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Idk man, If I just roll and then turn I can ignore an F-104 all match.

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You also will never kill him, but its very easy for you to slip up eventually and die.

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It’s very easy to avoid them in most fighters that face it. In a 1v1 the one that farms ground faster wins

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Guess what the F-104 is also better at doing than most jets that cant catch it

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Plenty of jets that have an easy time gunning down ground targets with better agility to do it faster than the F-104. Some even with ballistic computers

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Most don’t carry an m61 with a horde of ammo

most maps have the ground objectives lined up in line warfare… you can strafe 20 in one pass

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Plenty of jets with 20 or 30mm guns with lots of ammo. Some with even more than the F-104. The ADENs for example are great for that and you just need 1 tap per target and a very short burst for pillboxes. The hunters have 600 rounds of 30mm

There are only like 8 or 10 targets in each convoy and you would be lucky if you got more than 5 in a pass. Also you would waste a lot of ammo spamming the gun like that.

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Lmao, that’s a good joke.

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? I am talking about the static ground emplacements on every single map that ppl actually go after. I haven’t seen someone actually target a convoy in years.

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F-104 is not the best thing to farm those in a pass (you mean crossing the front line horizontally?) You will have more trouble killing 4 targets in each group in a pass because it lacks rudder authority and the F-104 starts pushing AoA at slower speeds which makes it harder to ground pound and you need to pull up sooner.

Also, non-rotary cannons work better to conserve ammo.

Point being, the F-104 is still decent for ground pounding, but it doesn’t mean some other jet can’t beat it at bleeding tickets

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You ignore the spaa and kill the howitzers and pillboxes. This takes very little change of direction each time and can easily be done.

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Depends on what you think of the ‘dominate’ term.

If it means ‘fragging enemies asap and decreasing the number of subsonic junks by dogfighting’
-You might be right, F-104 isn’t built for dogfighting, unlike the F-100D.

But if it means ‘using speed and thrust of 10.0+BR equivalent to make the whole enemy subsonics annoying all along the match’
-You are wrong.

Also, as long as this topic is for late variants of F-104, STOP DERAILING THE TOPIC with F-104A/C.

Please?

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