Even despite years of hearing how vulnerable the F8s are to wing rip issues, I was just not expecting how prevalent the issue really is now that I’ve finally unlocked the F8U2. If you attempt a full mouse/keyboard input turn at high speeds, your wing will fall off after about 1 second. This is intensely annoying when you’re playing them, but also rather annoying to fight against. I’ve had multiple F8s that I’ve gotten the drop on inadvertantly (Or maybe not) ripping their wings and killing themselves seconds before I got the kill, leaving them with a crew lock and me with nothing.
I thought my experience with the Lansens back when they had a similar issue would have prepared me, but the gameplay style of the F8s, being high altitiude jets that are often diving on people, and highly maueverable planes that benefit from turning with just about anything you see, just sets it up for constant wing rip issues.
For those who aren’t aware, the wing rip issues stem from an oddity of the flight model, if you snap into a max elevator pull at high speeds, you’ll initially pull about 10G, which is completely fine. However, after about a second, the Gs will suddenly spike to 14-15G depending on speed, which will instantly rip your wings off.
Now, I’m not qualified to know if this oddity is a realistic implementation of the F8’s actual flight model, or some error that has somehow gone unnoticed by Gaijin up until now. What seems obvious to me though, is that the instructor should be altered to prevent the plane from spiking it’s G loadings during these high speed turns. That’s the whole point of the instructor after all, to prevent players from making dangerous mauevers, like those that would put them into a flat spin, to help ease the issues of translating mouse movement in a 2D plane to the 3 axis movement of a plane.
It’s also an issue they’ve seemingly already resolved for the Lansens, as recently replaying them, even with all the structural boosting modifications uninstalled, I could not get it to rip it’s wings like it used to. Even a max G turn at low altitude at or near the red line speed wouldn’t manage it. Now, I have no idea when or how they changed the Lansen to fix this issue, but it’s clear they saw this as an issue and fixed it.
So, the question is, why do they not resolve the F8’s wing rip issues by doing whatever they did with the Lansen?