- Yes
- No
Hello everybody, I would like propose a simple change to make comparisons between aircraft easier. I’ve noticed that although ground vehicles have their mass in the statcard and ships have their displacement aircraft have nothing relating to mass on theirs. This is unfortunate as mass can have a huge effect on aircraft performance and sometimes be the only difference between two aircraft. For example the J11 and Su-27 are nearly identical except one is slightly heavier. It is impossible to know this from ingame information though.
Many modifications or loadouts effect the mass of the aircraft but it is difficult to understand how much they change the performance of the vehicle they are without knowing the full mass of the aircraft. It is already possible for modifications to effect the statcard as shown with the Ka-Chi pontoons changing the mass depending on if they are installed or not. Also, on certain aircraft modifications can change the main guns which also shows up on the statcard. Loadouts such as bombs or missiles also change parameters on the statcard and would be similar for the mass.
The most difficult aspect to show would be fuel mass. Showing the dry mass without fuel as a baseline would be the best option in my opinion. Then fuel mass could be a part of the added weight in red text along with the weight of the loadout. This would be similar to the way max speed and climb rate are shown as a baseline with red text afterwards displaying how they are affected by the current loadout.
There are currently two ways of discovering the mass of an aircraft and neither work well for a quick check. You can either look through datamines for the exact mass or on the wiki. This wiki unfortunately only goes to the nearest metric ton which is an issue especially for lower tiers where many fighters are under 10 tons. To be truly helpful the mass of an aircraft would need to be shown to at least the nearest 10 kg.
Overall, I think this would be a relatively simple but helpful change. It would make it much easier for players to quickly compare aircraft and remove the need for third-party tools to do the same job.