You should have kept it and waited lol, only yourself to blame
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It would never have sold much better. If it ever does well fine, but I’d be very surprised.
Also, I sense you took my comment WAY too seriously with your “lol only your self to blame.” I shouldn’t have to put a big “this comment was not completely serious” disclaimer for you to astutely discern when someone is intentionally making more of something than they actually feel just for fun.
I wouldn’t say the plane itself was overhyped, the only thing that was oversold was the capabilities of the AIM-4 missiles but I would blame that on gaijin when they put mach 3 + 27G of pull in the stat card and mislead a lot of people that ignore the historical background, especially youtubers, when they very well know that something like mach 1,5 + 14 Gs of pull would be a lot more accurate to the typical warthunder experience (expected parameters for max speed launch in sea level - ingame can’t even do that).
But I think the low price has more to do with just how popular this plane turned out to be, a LOT more people got it compared to some past events (since the iranian F-14 at least, and that was sold on it’s OP practically fantasy missiles), driving down the prices, but to be fair it’s been a while since a brand new airplane model is introduced in an event.
And leaving aside the half baked implementation, the 3d model for the exterior and the cockpit is very well done.
This is probably a joke, but if it’s not, learn what supply and demand is.
??? Now, I’m sure you were joking before since I’ve read the rest of this comment, but how do you know realize what supply and demand is, and therefore, that the price rises as the vehicle gets further from its event?
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People said this about Leo 2AV too.
meh 50.
I’m surprised nobody had said anything about the obviously wrong drag chute deployment speed.
And here’s gameplay footage from someone who can use this plane ingame much better than me www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbPRCpv5mjM&list=RDQbPRCpv5mjM
Complete with the tradition of using infrared aim-4s for ground attack like f-102s in vietnam.
timestamp for the ground kill?
It’s not actually a ground kill (i.e. killing a ground unit), it’s killing planes on the ground (like at 0:40 or 7:20 on the video). Just a tongue in cheek joke.
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I see. I was very curious because I was sure the game doesn’t let IR missile seekers register ground object heat as a legitimate source. I really wanted to see that lol… that would have opened up a can of worms…
It’s honestly kinda disappointing that we can’t, especially considering A2G missiles (e.g the maverick) can lock both ground and air, so clearly the functionality is in the game.
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Good point.
Most people that like planes have heard of the navy’s Top Gun, but I didn’t know that ADC (air defence comand) had setup an air combat maneuvering (ACM) training schedule for F104’s in 1964 in the wake of the cuban missile crisis, and had evolved it into a full blown training program (they called it “college prom”) with dissimilar aircraft combat training (DACT) between F106, f102 and f104 squadrons in 1966, 2 years before top gun was started. It’s all laid out in a free article by Michael E Weaver, and it’s an especially great read if you are trying to learn the plane in warthunder:
College Prom utilized seven pilots to investigate and develop the best tactics for the “Six.” In terms of F-106 flying experience they ranged from 1490 hours to just seventy-one, with most possessing around 500 hours. Interestingly, the -106s used did not have G-suit attachments, so the pilots were going to have to be careful past five Gs. There was no need for high-G maneuvers against Soviet
bombers, so the absence of that feature was not peculiar. During the College Prom training sorties, however, F-106s frequently exceeded six G’s during the exercise (the jet’s limit was seven). Even without G-suits these pilots “did not exhibit a reduced capability to maneuver because of’G’ loads except when five or more sustained ‘G’s’ were experienced for 360 degrees of turn or comparable periods .”
In order to grapple with their fighter adversaries, F-106s during College Prom first received GCI vectors toward the adversary aircraft, which received warning on some missions of the F-106s’ presence from a GCI weapons director. The adversary aircraft were not passive targets, either. They maneuvered in ways to defeat the attacking F-106s both during the intercept run-in and after the attackers closed, and they tried to position themselves behind the -106s for their own simulated IR missile or gun kills. These practice combats demonstrated the difficulties a wingmen had in staying ia position relative to his leader. For instance, when a wingman saw his leader light his afterburner, he was already a few seconds late in doing the same and was thus falling behind.
“Staying and fighting” was not always the best decision, either, and the -106s learned to accelerate away from a fight at maximum power, then to get a vector back from GCI when ten miles away. They found that if an F-104 got within firing range dead astern, an F-106 did not have time to escape if the pilot saw it at the last second. “When starting on equal footing, the F-104 proved to be a formidable adversary only if visual contact could not be maintained.” The F-106 accelerated faster from a low initial speed than from a higher speed. The participants also found that it’s best to keep the -106’s airspeed up in turning fights in order to maintain a greater turn rate. Sometimes pilots entered “post-stall gyrations” as a result of violent maneuvers while trying to get into a simulated guns-kill position (they practiced that in anticipation of possibly adding a gun to the jet at a later date), but found that recovery of normal flight was pretty routine by releasing backpressure on the control stick.
With practice, the pilots found that they could maintain position behind an adversary in a maneuvering fight and complete the switch actions necessary to
fire their weapons.
Among other findings were that the best search altitude was 5,000 feet below the target’s suspected altitude because the -106’s radar would point to the sky and not receive any ground returns, and because from that aspect the target’s radar crosssection was larger. Somewhat surprisingly the gloss grey finish of the ADC aircraft was harder to see “against a dark ground background” than the darkcamouflaged F-102s. Lighting the -106’s afterburner inside thirty miles from the target, however, resulted in a “white cloud of fuel vapor [that] gave away the F-106 position.” F-106’s flying stern intercept profiles were seen at five or six miles away, before they had completed their turn to the target’s tail, prompting the targeted aircraft to maneuver offensively. Intercepting pilots preferred to track the adversary on radar by eight miles, and as an aid they looked for tell tail signs like “contrails or smoke trails at ranges greater than ten miles.” If they did not see those clues they started looking for the target jet itself.
The requirement to have the element leader fly past the suspected targets to visually confirm that they were hostile undercut the effectiveness of the F-106. The target aircraft would see the identifying Six as it flew past them, so they would know they were under attack — violating a basic rule of air combat: the best way to shoot down another aircraft is to make sure its pilot is unaware of your presence, or at least of your attack. This ID/shooter tactic could ensure positive identification of the target as hostile, but it also ensured that the target would be maneuvering defensively by the time the trailing interceptor shot its missiles, thus complicating firing sequence or even defeating the AIM-4F in fiight by out-turning it. The targeted aircraft might even be able to target the shooter before it fired its missiles, or go after the identifying -106.
Altogether this rule of engagement (ROE) forced the F-106 to avoid using its weapons to its best advantage.^* Another lesson was that if the IDing -106 stayed and fought after accomplishing an ID, the shooter could not risk firing his missiles because he might hit his element leader. It was better for the lead aircraft to blow through straight ahead so the shooter would have only hostile aircraft in front of it (the leader would he out of the trailer’s missiles’ range), or climb up to a spot out of the way of the trailing shooter, then re-attack. Stem shooter/ID profiles were problematic, because "an attempt to climb to a position of advantage [by the lead F-106] resulted in the targets achieving a missile launch position on the ID element before it could use its speed to separate to a safe range the since initial closure and separation rate was low.
Although designed to shoot down bombers and not fighters. Operation College Prom, in 1966, discovered that the F-106 possessed a number of characteristics favorable for fighter vs. fighter combat. For instance, “The F-106 is extremely responsive to the rudder for directional control,” and “The rudder roll over the top very nearly duplicated the hose high reversals necessary to gain an advantage over an opponent during a scissors.” The Six proved to be very stable at high pitch angles, and even when flying as slow as 95 KIAS when pulling over the top of a loop, and it did not go out of control when stalled.
Indeed, “All F-106 pilots expressed enthusiasm for the confidence maneuvers and basic ACM because of superb aircraft response throughout the flight envelope.” This project’s findings were pretty positive: “The F-106 exhibited excellent performance response to all aerial combat maneuvers with no undesirable flight characteristics,” and “The F-106 can perform all of the classic offensive and defensive maneuvers in a close-in fight.” The WSEM’s [weapons system evaluation missile] and the MA-1 flre control system performed pretty well considering that they were designed for finding, tracking, and shooting non-maneuvering bombers. Of fifty missile attacks during the project, thirty-four succeeded, nine failed due to a malfunctioning radar, and seven because of “pilot error.” The MA-1 was able to compute firing solutions against hard maneuvering targets, something for which it was not originally designed. College Prom confirmed the need for electronic identification of enemy aircraft, because nearly every time an F-106 closed for visual identification, the adversary saw him first and took evasive action.
The interceptor pilots were learning a lot while these decisions were being made, finding as a result of fighting F-104s that the similarly-sized MiG-21 would be hard to see, and that F-106 radars would not detect them at great distances.
Pilots of the 94th FIS found that four F-106s “linea-breast” was best for visual lookout, but that the finger-four formation neither lent the protection for the lead element it was supposed to provide, nor did it place the formation “in a position to offensively command.” Furthermore, the fighting invariably broke down into combat by two-jet elements, not four-jet fighting wings. It was best to keep the F-106 fast because of its superior maneuverability at high speed, and if one searched just below Mach 1, F-106s could go supersonic “almost instantaneously through afterburner use.” Finally, the infrared “boresight mode of the Fire Control System [was] highly effective in acquiring the target for a kill in the maneuvering ‘dog-fight.’” This was all good to know, because these pilots were flying patrols out of South Korea a month later in June 1969 to ensure that another EC-121 was not shot down by North Korean MiGs.’
ADC’s “Air Superiority Indoctrination Course” a.k.a. “Mini Dart,” consisted of three DACT, four strike intercept, and two escort missions, seventy-two sorties in all, over a period of five days. Each side—F-106s and F-4s received its own GCI controller for the DACT sorties, for example, and for the strike intercept missions, four F-4s escorted three F-lOlBs. Four F-106s tried to shoot down the F-IOIB strike force.^" At the same time, an officer evaluated the F-106 against the F-4E with slatted wings (which improved maneuverability) at Neflis, and a pair of IWS instructors examined the classroom side of the Navy’s Top Gun school.
Before and during the outbreak of the invasion of South Vietnam by mechanized forces of the North Vietnamese Army in the spring of 1972, Navy and Marine F-4 units came to Tyndall on a regular basis in 1972 for DACT against F-106s. In January, for example, F-4s of VF-154 and VMFA-251 went up against F-106s fi-om the 318th FIS. All three squadrons praised the quality of GCI the IWS controllers provided, “one of the outstanding learning outcomes derived from this course.” The Marines sent their own controllers to the IWS in March to learn GCI methods from the IWS controllers.^^ In February, the 87th FIS flew against Marine F-4s at El Toro MCAS in “Project ‘Have Partnership,’ joint AF/USMC aerial combat training.”^^ The IWS held another “ACM instructor pilots’ simposium” on May 25-27, with officers from the “USAF, USN, and USMC fighter weapons schools as well as from several tactical units of all services” in attendance.
Before the year was out, ADC analysts concluded after “maneuvers with the Navy at Point Mugu NAS, [F-106] superiority over the F-4 and F-8 was well documented (3:1).” That is a difficult assertion to accept, because an F-106 pilot could not fire his missiles if pulling more than three Gs because that would over-stress the weapons bay doors. It also took too long to open them and extend the missile launching racks: three seconds. College Dart was producing successes for combat pilots. According to a letter to the DCS of Plans and Operations, Navy Lt. Randy Cunningham “during his debriefings” credited the sorties he flew in College Dart as “one of the primary reasons for his success in downing five MiGs.”
Interceptor pilots relished the College Dart deployments. For three weeks starting November 16, 1972, the 5th FIS practiced against TAC, Navy, and Marine aircrews: “The pilots were very impressed and enthusiastic toward this type of training and returned to Minot with a new knowledge of tactics for dissimilar aircraft and passed this information on to the rest of the squadron.”^^ In January 1973, eight pilots of the 87th FIS flew out to Miramar to train against F-4s, F-8s, and A-4 Skyhawks, completing forty-six DACT sorties over the course of six days. The members of the “Red Bulls” considered the TDY “an outstanding success” as did their Navy comrades.
You can see why the specifications for project six shooter came about…Too bad ADC couldn’t afford the Radar warning receiver and countermeasures they also requested after the Have Drill/Have 1969 tactical evaluation.
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So statshark has compiled the first statistics for the performance of the F-106 through august 2025 - Remarcably, in that month it turned out to be the second most played USA event vehicle after the F-14 IRIAF, although it does show most of those players were newbies considering it also has one of the worst winrates
.
But perhaps more surprising is that after all those people complaining about the in cockpit visibility being terrible, it turns out that the F-106a has THE best winrate for USA event vehicles in air simulator battles, and is in 7th place for all USA aircraft.
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Probably because they put the F-106 at a lower br than the F-100A in sim
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that’s criminal lmao
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