The Ki83 is so bad it just hurts playing. The only strength this aircraft has is the airspawn and yet, it doesn’t even help it (soon explained)
“But it climbs good, skill issue!” So what? it’s slow and whether it can clock 50m/s of climb rate or not is not really something to be hyped about; anything else can catch up because every other aircraft have superior kinetic to potential energy transformation. Even if it climbs good it will be too high above (anything that is not a p51h or a yak3u) which can pretty much outpace you. Ok, you don’t climb that hard; what is it? You are barely clocking 450kmh IAS and around 600 at 5000m of altitude. The guy does a 180 and still manages to catch you up because they’re about 40-70kmh faster than you; you climb, you go up but don’t really increase the distance. You start spiraling and you die because your oponent almost climbs as good as you and has better retention. You’re a massive target that gets shredded by a single 12.7mm. You need to spend 50 ho-5 combined with 10 ho155 30mm shells to kill a Ta152H (fragile aircraft relatively speaking) now imagine tougher bombers.
Let’s say you actually survive and can energy trap someone. You pitch down and get guns on target. You mount the cheeky stealth belts with ALL HE filler. You get a hit (as it is usual with these L tier guns lately) and then peel off. The guy as usual ends up catching you up because it has a superior airframe
“then just hunt bombers silly, skill issue!”
well did I say that the guns do no damage? there you go, airspawn or no airspawn is futile, if not more when it has to deal with bomber gunfire. A single 50 cal can cut your wing off or cause a fire you can’t put out… funny because the tanks are self sealing. Meanwhile the zeroes with no self sealing tanks at 5.0 catch fire N times and all these times they put them out with still enough fuel to return to rearm.
Most 20mm prop guns are now amazing. But somehow Ho-5 deals objectively less damage than 7.7mm, and ho-155 sparks more than Hispanos ever did.
The only function I see on ki83 now is just to bait enemies into trying to kill your juicy grinding piñata when you have teammates around for them to kill them if they manage to save you early. That’s literally the only benefit I can obtain from this thing’s “insane” climbrate that any 5.7-6.7 can easily match.
I don’t know much about the Ki-83, but if it’s true it sucks its down to meta being completely avoidant of heavy fighters in general more than the Ki-83 being bad at being a heavy fighter
Oxymoron, cannot force teammates to work with you. Flying near them only offers a small increase in efficiency in this regard. “train” all you want to fix your “skill issue”, it won’t change.
The ki-83 is fine if you want to complain do it about the F7F that things Actual garbage
The guns are fine they reliably oneshot pretty much anything they hit especially with the HEF-I shells on the 30mm the only issue is the poor muzzle velocity ever since they got nerfed from 940 m/s and got a drag increase but they were literal railguns back then
Run tracers never use the HE belts on the jap army 20mm the AP is just more consistent if you’ve played enough jap air you should know this by now
Similar to the situation in your post on the N1K2 where you said the Type 99s were useless, the Ho-155s are not working mostly because you are loading the wrong belt. The “cheeky stealth belts with all HE filler” on the Ho-155 are quite possibly the worst performing shell/belt in the game right now. The reason why can be found in the stat card for the belt, “0.8mm Fuse Sensitivity”. You will find if you test it out in the Protection Analysis that these HEF shells will not fuse on airplane skin. They only detonate if they directly hit a module such as an engine, fuel tank, or wing spar. I’ve also found that even if they do hit a module and detonate they don’t seem to do much damage to the airframe itself, only to the module.
These rounds mostly tend to just pass harmlessly through the airframe without detonating or dealing any kinetic damage. Japanese Army Ho-155s are in really terrible shape right now, as the only good shell in the belt for shooting down planes is the HEF-I shell, of which there is never more than one in a belt, while all belts containing HEF-I, except Ground Targets, also have some pollution of the HEF round. I would recommend loading either Default belts and just know that the first of every 3 shots is a paintball, OR load Ground Targets which also has 1 HEF-I round, and hope that the AP-T rounds will kill the enemy kinetically(which I have had some success with).
The Ki-83 should be better. Its climb rate does give it an advantage, but it doesn’t give it enough of an advantage over common enemies at its BR.
My main complaint is that it feels like a boat, with 0 speed. Any fighter can easily catch you, and you don’t have the manoeuvrability to escape them easily.
Just saying it is a bloody great aircraft.
Just many other twin engines - you dont want to be in a dogfight, especially alone.
Examples are - mosquito, hornet, me410, ta-154, f7f, p61 . . . . . .
Are they now shit because they cant beat a yak in a 1v1? - no.
What always bothered me about the Ki-83 back when I spaded it was not the climb rate, nor the engines’ tendency to overheat even at 100% (nevermind WEP).
It was the handling to actually get the supposedly great armament actually on target that was my main complaint. It handles like a wobbly boat at low speeds, turns okay with flaps for 1-2 turns tops at moderate speed, and compresses very badly when attempting to convert that superior climb rate into speed to catch someone diving away from you.
Sure, you can bait people into stalling out underneath you and then looping down on top of them, but the moment someone doesn’t fall for that, there really isn’t much you can do with it barring third-partying someone distracted by a teammate.
And at that point, I would rather take it into 6.0+ Combined Ground decks to hunt CAS. At least without the idiotic red enemy markers it can surprise people and blow them to smithereens before the other bad characteristics become a problem. Much as I like to do with the Hornet and F7Fs.
Now if you want to experience a plane even more godawful, try the J7W1. I dare you. At least the Ki-83 can climb…
The thing is, it does perform like a twin engine aircraft, albeit a slow one. However, it is outclassed by the planes it faces, so I think it should go down.
Strawman fallacy. They are 2 completely different types of aircraft made for different things, so they are not relevant to this conversation.
The Ki-83 is not a bomber, or attacker, it is an interceptor/heavy fighter. However, it is regularly outclassed by regular fighters at its current BR.
Would dropping it even help it? My problem with the thing was never the straight-line speed but the complete and total lack of maneuverability at nearly any speed paired with a rather low limit where it hopelessly stiffens into a worthless brick. Lowering it would likely place it against slower and more maneuverable opponents, thereby worsening that problem in exchange for solving the one of it being slow in a straight line.
