Recently I’ve spaded entire US V tier of early jets /air RB, and I could make few remarks or minor inconsistencies but F-84F sticks out like a sore thumb.
8.3 is BR when big bois come to play. It pushes you in 9.3 - early mach 2 bracket, Mig-21, F-104 Starfighter, British Lightning, you also meet really good Korea era dogfighters like Mig’s 17/19, modern stuff like Swedish Saab-105 and Italian G91, lot of AA missiles etc
Poor F-84F has no business there. It’s a bad plane that is marginally better than 7.0 F-84G variants, it loses speed rapidly, it accelerates slowly, it has 50 cals, it’s a piss poor dogfighter, all it can is drop bombs and pray nobody sees it or targets it because there’s literally nothing you can do. Really not fair or fun. If it drops in BR it would not suddenly become good or meta, just less frustrating to spade.
I’m spading entire US techtree. Primary measurement of air vehicle is Air RB/AB not ground.
There are lot of armed strike aircraft, like TRAMs and A-10/SU-25 who maul early jets with advanced missiles.
It doesn’t have to be good at dogfight but if it was, it would offset to some degree his poor attacker performance. “Hey, it’s not a great attacker but at least it can fight” - this is bad in either.
I haven’t tried it in RB, but in AB it used to be a great RP earner. Great for crew developement too. I have several F-84F with a talisman by now. But yes, if bombing avoid interception.
As far as speed goes, the F-84F is missing JATO which would easily help it act as an attacker by giving it the necessary speed boost to outpace fighters at the same BR. On top of this, the American F-84F could be given the J65-15 engine which would provide it with a considerable amount of thrust over the current engine it has (9,000 lbf @ SL).
