Yeah, sure.
First of all you aren’t getting all the pros of an F-104 without any of the cons. The F-104 is faster and has a better acceleration than the F-106. Yeah, it’s true that the F-106 has far better nose authority than the F-104 and you can pull an elevate AoA… for exactly one turn, because it has the worst speed bleed of any plane in game, and contrary to what you wrote, you can’t “accelerate back to your speed faster than your peers”, the acceleration isn’t that good as you seem to think.
Basically if you want to dogfight people you are bound to lose all of your speed very fast, and you are going to have a very difficult time getting that back, making you a sitting duck prone to getting killed extremely easily. Starting to dogfight people left and right will get you killed really quickly, the best way to play it it’s by using it to boom and zoom your enemies, pretty much the same play style you need to use with the F-104, but without the AIM-9B, which if you know how to use them can be surprisingly useful, not having them it’s a pretty negative. AIM-4 are extremely situational, they are only good for killing stalling enemies instead.
Moreover, you are right, at 9.3 planes aren’t that reliant on missiles, but thanks to compression, at 9.7 they quite are, whiteout functional missiles you would be really disadvantaged, not to mention you’ll see even more powerful missiles, more planes equiped with AIM-9L, Magics, R-60m and PL-5B. Tell me, what is an F-106 supposed to do against a J7D which does everything you do but better and has some powerful IR missiles?
By bringing this up to 9.7 you wouldn’t resolve anything, 8.7 subsonic planes are as helpless as the 8.3 subsonics to this plane, you are just making this plane more unplayable that it already is.
Subsonics have to treat this plane as every other supersonic, start turn fight with it and get it slow and kill it, if the pilot of the supersonic plane doesn’t take the bait they are helpless, which is unfair, it isn’t a problem with just the F-106, it’s a problem they have with F-104, Mig-19, Mig-21, lighting… The 9.0-10.0 is probably the most compressed and unfair br, but save a massive decompression bringing every supersonic up (and subsequently everything else above up too) nothing will change.
Also I noticed now that this discussion is tagged as Sim, I was writing with RB battles in mind. In sim, as I already wrote in other threads, it should go up to 9.7 as the other supersonics like the F-104. Basically imo the F-106 should be whatever br the F-104C is.
