The Ki83 is a mediocre aircraft. Yes it climbs good, but it climbs literally like anything else at 6.0 and the airspawn doesn’t really matter when you have to dive down and choose to either go up again forever and stay at 5 plus km of altitude for the rest of the match without having any battle presence, or send it, get down, kill three people and get so slow that even if you climb very good other people are going to be much faster than you that they can just put all their kinetic energy onto altitude with no need for prop thrust. Yes, the ki83 was busted in 2018 when every ally played bombers and japanese 30mm’s worked well. But it’s no longer 2018, it’s 2025 and even if it was worse for years until now it’s still very bad.
Why I believe the Ki83 deserves 5.7:
-It is VERY slow
-It overheats terribly, you trade thrust for engine endurance, and the ki83 needs over 90 percent power at pitch 90 and radiators at 60 percent to preserve the engines for over 10 minutes at constant thrust. If you have to dogfight you need 100 percent thrust and closed radiators which gives you about a minute before the engines start to die.
-It compresses terribly and doesn’t accelerate well in dives
-The guns suck, period.
-extremely fragile, a single 50 cal solid tracer feels like getting struck by a high caliber mineshell.
A good buff instead of getting moved to 5.7? Well, make it overheat less and last far longer in thermodynamics department, and have more leverage in a dogfight when having to use full engine power with radiators closed, because it is good at it but not good in quick ones, but rather in prolonged dogfights.
Yes I’m aware. After the war the US tested the prototype and it made so much of an impression that they almost mas produced it but decided against is since they just came out with a new twin inersepter / heavy fighter
Edit: just a little history lesson, but don’t quote me on it.
The Ki83 is one of the easiest planes to defeat. It literally just climbs and drops all the speed it gained in seconds, it has zero linear retention, it flies worse than many twin engine bombers and to add more insult to injury, the guns deal no damage. I say 5.7 when i actually think it should be 4.7. But say 5.7 instead to avoid getting booed for saying sensible stuff. I know this community well enough.
