Yes, a F104 can boom and zoom easily - wich at those BRs is a valid strategy and essentially uncounterable.
What you fail to understand is that long range (sometimes referred to as BVR) missles make this playstyle obsolete.
The 29s top speed on the deck is Mach 1.3 (wich you most of the time wont reach due to fuel consumption)
lets say a R27ER is fired at you while you´re running.
That thing goes Mach 5, and 120km (effectively more like 80) - you wont outrun that with your pesky mach 1.3
Even sparrows easily reach mach 3-4 on the deck, this is not a feaseble strategy against BVR platforms.
What you could do is use your speed to increase your missiles ranges. This is the reason why the F15E is 14.0 and the F15C isnt.
You dont boom and zoom in the F15E - this playstyle isnt present in Warthunder top tier unless its a pure dogfight.
So you could use your speed to increase your BVR effectiveness (this is what makes the F15E more deadly than the F15C) but wait
In our little scenario of the 29A getting the R73 and loosing the ER the 29 doesnt benefit from speed at all!
you cant apply the logics of 9.0 BRs to 12.7-13.0
or in short:
Our hypothetical mig-29 doesnt benefit from being able to go mach 1.3, for a non BVR platform speed barely matters in a BVR enviroment.
i stopped playing the mig -29 cause i got the yak 141 + i just needed the mig-29 to get the gripen (eurofighter didnt exist yet). and i stopped playing the french f-16a because it got boring. chinese f-16 is not relevant, it gets a good radar. also i havent touched any of those planes other than the chinese f-16 in months
the azimuth is not useable, the maximum scan size is 50° while the F16s is 120°
TWS barely matters for this scenario since in this case the 29 wouldnt have ERs and wouldnt benefit from ERs
(neither does the F16a bl10 tho, so I dont really get why youd need TWS to begin with)
the american F4U’s at 3.0 have better engines than the Japanese F4U-1A and that is a fact
so why are they at the same BR even tho they have better engines than the japanese one?
That economic data is also affected by player skill, since better players earn more. This is why the Amx-13 FL11 is 4.3 despite being worse than the 3.7 M24.
That’s a very simplified way of looking at it, and I don’t think that’s entirely true. Speed is important, but it’s not entirely tied to survivabilty. Also, the Mig-29 isn’t super fast, especially since it can only go fast for 4-5 minutes before it runs out of fuel.
As it stands the Mig-29G suffers hard from Br compression at rank 8, but it should not move down (many other planes should move up instead). I already said how easy that is to do and gave an example, but Gaijin would never listen.
The other Mig-29s with just R-73s and R-27Rs are not good enough to be 13.0, and will be fine at 12.7 right now.
TWS matters even without any radar missiles… I had so many kills with the F-16A MLU by catching stray jets off guard with orbital 9L launches back when they could actually have decent range.
TWS will help you with awareness and positioning. R-27R will still benefit from it.
You’re overestimating the value of speed at top tier. In lower BRs like 9.0, fast planes like the F-104 can boom and zoom effectively because there are fewer ways to counter them. But at high tiers, where BVR missiles dominate, that playstyle simply doesn’t work. A MiG-29A going Mach 1.3 isn’t outrunning an R-27ER or a Sparrow going Mach 4–5 with 80+ km range. Speed alone won’t save you. The only real use for speed at this level is to extend missile range — that’s why the F-15E is so dangerous. But if you remove the MiG-29A’s R-27ER and give it only R-73s, it loses that BVR capability entirely. In that case, its speed becomes almost meaningless in the current meta, and certainly doesn’t justify a BR increase. You can’t apply 9.0 logic to 12.7+.
@Merf_HD
Air spawns are common place now, and you have 8 minutes of fuel in the Mig-29 when drop tank is equipped and you go into the battlefield using doctrinal tactics: Off AB.
You have even more fuel if you climb.
Complaining about that fuel time.
@ron_23 Please tell us how the PW R-2800-8W is better than the PW R-2800-8W is better than the PW R-2800-8W is better than the PW R-2800-8W is better than the PW R-2800-8W…
All F4U-1 aircraft use the PW R-2800-8W, none of them use a different engine at this time.
@PercussionCap
And all of them have almost identical climb rates because all of them use the same engine and the marginal weight differences aren’t as noticeable.
@Ion_492
That’s why Gaijin doesn’t use economic data in a vacuum for balancing.
