I bought av 8a, because it was the highest american plane on sale and whenever i meet mig21s i can’t do anything. When one decides to kill me he just does. He has so much aoa and roll rate that i can pull in any direction, roll or whatever, he will just pull more and aim without any difficulties, because he still has some spare turn and kill me.
That’s mainly for low altitude fights when i can’t do a split s, but that’s the majority of all fights on this br. When your target is so low and you are subsonic you can’t catch anyone without losing all of your energy and altitude. And catching anything at your altitude or higher in a harrier is a fantasy.
Pretty much all harriers are flying bricks so you have to learn how to use thrust vectoring to get any dogfight performance out of them. This will bleed absolutley all of your speed and energy but if done correctly you can get ppl to overshoot you if they arent careful
I presume you bought your way to that br so it’s natural you are struggling. If not, all you have to do is use full elevator to dodge the 1circle, you have the best acceleration performance and the mig21 will shit all it’s speed after 1 turn. Go flat scissors instead of rolling when applicable. You can learn how to use VIFFing to thrust vector on top.
So unless the mig21 goes for a BnZ attack instead of a sustained fight you should be fine in the harrier
The amount of times I have seen an AV8 trying to flat scissor a mig21, that’s just not going to work. You want the mig21 to overshoot you, he’s not going to overshoot if you going to flat scissor the guy, and he will easily pull inside of you unless he has no brain whatsoever… luckily there’s no shortage of ARB players with just that attribute
Get the mig21 to speed, you want him faster than you, give him a bad angle to shoot you when he catches you where he has to pull enough AoA to slow down just above your speed range, roll around his guns when he passes you, then try and get on his 6. You may need to use (SOME, not 100%) trust vectoring to keep up if he pulls hard… But better yet, is to third party them or pick them off with you 9Gs instead of trying to 1v1 a mig21, that’s really where the AV8 is at least decent
Fact remains, if you are an AV8 and a competent pilot in a mig21 wants you gone and you can’t get a missile solution (or its one of the later ones with flares), you are going to be gone. These planes aren’t comparable in their flight performance
I have test flown the MiG-21S and while harrier obviously accelerates better at low speed, it’s always the first thing off the runway, mig 21 at higher speeds accelerates much better with an afterburner.
Also mig 21 starts to drop manouverability only when he goes faster than 0.9 mach, for the harrier it’s max speed and it will take a while to get up to this speed. Since the harrier pulls any Gs only when it goes fast i think i have to keep my speed at all times, even though i’m subsonic.
For maximizing rp gain focus on trying to get to positions where you can shoot 9Gs at the MiG-21S players. if you can get 2 9Gs off on 21S or 21SPS-K without flares you get to collect your RP no matter what happens in the match afterwards.
you may be food for them in the dogfight, but they are food for your missiles.
did is just a premi noob, buys the highest plane he can afford right off the bat has no combat experience, and is trying to compare a hairier to a MiG, Everything you guys are trying to explain to him, I promise he has absolutely no clue how to pull off the maneuvers, and will only get frustrated
I’m not a premium noob, I have played props before and learned quite a bit. I bought AV-8A only because I thought that it was the only thing on sale I will get… then there was an F-4S on sale, which was what I actually wanted to buy.
You’re definitely late to the party and now I know that Harriers are just just shit planes with good missiles like A-10 or Su-25. I also have MiG-21S and it’s a good plane, R-3Rs are surprisingly good, the only thing is that the gun is absolutely horrible and it has no flares. Still MiG-21S is a much better plane, it’s an actual fighter unlike Harriers.