Yak 38 fits fine in battle rating of 9.0

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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4x R-60 at 9.0 is quite a sensitive topic, so i’ve been talking to people 1 to 1 a lot prior to making this post - please dont immediatelly rage in the comments and think it throughtly.

yak 38 is a very poor preforming aircraft, its turn time is 40 seconds, this means it turns slower than a B-17G, this alone though, does not prevent yak 38 from being a good plane - it is capable of dodging 10G aam’s with proper handling (though, only at high speeds and with great loss of speed - slow yak 38 is unable to dodge aam’s)

problems start to occur with yak 38’s max speed - it is unable to outrun most other 9.3 aircraft it faces, though, its climbing speed is quite decent, this falls short when taking into account that aircraft is unable to mount flares at all, and thus has to leak speed if enemy has any kind of aam.

if this wasnt bad enough already, yak 38 also leaks speed horribly in those shallow turns its capable of, thus its limited to flying in pretty much one direction until it gets out of combat.

while one might argue that aircraft from lower tiers stand no chance against 30G missiles yak 38 packs, i have to disagree, since yak 38 turns so poorly, getting a 10G missile in it feels like getting a 30G missile in a nimble aircraft, and due to yak 38’s poor turn rate, the 30g missiles it fires are already likely to approach target at a higher angle, thus being easier to dodge (but they can be dodged even if shot at 0° angle, so doesnt particulary matter anyway).

i shall also mention that those missiles are rear-aspect only, so if one is afraid of them so much, he can avoid them, by prioritizing yak-38’s and going to them, head-on.

last thing to debate is aircraft’s preformance, on 9.0 it is going to be a very fast aircraft with awesome climbing speed and horrific turn rate… does this remind you of anything? F-104, right, so if you think yak 38 would overpreform aircraft at lower br, then you better start uptiering F-104’s first.

before i create the topic im also going to say that it would be sensical for yak-38 to be limited to 2x R-60 aam’s since most lower tier aircraft at full speed could probably dodge two, but lose too much speed for the third one, leaving the yak 38 to finish the target with gun.

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I don’t disagree, but IMO the biggest issue the Yak-38 faces is that every plane it usually faces ends up having flares, and so the R-60s are useless. When it was initially dropped to its current BR, I don’t think as many planes had flares at those BRs yet, and so it actually was pretty effective. If it goes up against non-supersonics with no flares though I don’t know if it’s a great idea.

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i included my toughts in the topic

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Also, it CANT turn. ITs like F-104 with VTOL feature. So its even worse that F-104 because it heavier and thats something to say…

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the yak 38 is a poor plane yes but lowering it’s BR just makes everything worse.

the solution as always is to raise BRs and give it and flareless planes breathing space to be enjoyable again. supersonic jets need to start at like 10.3. I don’t think anything similar to a sabre F2 or hunter f1 should be fighting 30G missiles and mach 2 capable planes

I have only flown the 38 at 9.3 and I have 167/35 K/D. it stomps 8.3/8.7s or gets stomped by 9.3s and up. WT in a nutshell now. you wreck most planes below you in terms of BR and get wrecked if you try to fight anything above.

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Yak 38 is a plane of one tactic. Climb high, choose targets below, fire missiles, collect kills and fly back to base. Do that and you will get decent amount of kills. The turn time or speed dont matter, you wont need them. With this tactic in downtier you are pretty much untouchable since the only plane that can climb is f104 and cant turn as well. In uptier you are very much killable but a lot of people doesnt climb so you can get decent matches as well.

By moving the plane to 9.0 the area where you can dictate who is dying today by launching r60s from orbit will significantly increase so no,this is very bad idea, yak is fine where it is

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It’s a BR compression issue. Moving it to 9 would mean saying its equal to the Hunter F1 with no CMs or AAMs. These jets should never, ever meet, but they do.

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staying in 9.3 would mean its equal fo F-104. F-104 turns faster than yak 38 and therefore has every advantage over it

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F-104 turns better than yak 38

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You might be forgetting something…

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Yes. And yak 38 has 4 R60s. Your point?

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aam’s? you know that only way yak could launch it to F-104 is by F-104 strafing it and missing all of its bullets + yak having enough energy to turn up towards f 104 afterwards, this is near impossible to do as yak doesnt have airbrakes and lack of maneurability makes it a super easy target for F-104

even if it somehow survived it would be hard to touch F-104 because yak’s VTOL is incredibly unstable and by the time it turns towards it F-104 might be already out of aam’s range.

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Okay, so we move the Yak-38 to 9.0 because its worse than the F-104.

Then we need to move the Hunter F1 to 8.7 because its worse than the Yak-38

THen we need to move the Yak-30D to 8.3 because its worse the Hunter F1.

and so on and so on…

It just creates a big mess to balance like that.

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true, but game is a big mess already. We might just as well re-do all br’s from scratch

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That is EXACTLY what we need to do, its called a BR decompression. Take everything that is currently between 9 → 12 and spread it out between 9 —> 14-16(ish) and instantly so many problems go away.

You can take your original post and subsitute dozens of jets into it. Jaguar Gr1 has No CMs, Only 2x9Gs, is barely transonic and overal, not really built for the enviroment that is ARB, and its at 10.0

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You seem to not understand. BR is not set based on fictional 1v1 scenario. Air RB is not a set of duels. Yak 38 will lose to some 8.7 planes in 1v1 and that doesnt make it 8.7. The thing is yak might lose many 1v1 but as a great support (or killsteal) plane it can also kill 4 people in the matter of seconds. The key is to know how to position yourself and use your team as bait and cover

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right, and if queue times become a problem RP requirements to reach high tiers may be reduced, i have a friend trying to unlock his first aircraft with aam and its pain to watch him struggle as i did prior to reaching supersonic jets

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i also looked at the game this way, but as time passed i began to realise this actually isnt a good argument, many german twin engine fighters have enough ammo to eradicate entire enemy team if they got into their gunsight, but this doesnt instantly make them good for higher br’s than that of their own preformance.

do-217 N-1 for example carries 4x 20 mm cannon (800 bullets) + 4x 7mm mgs (1000 ammo) + has a radar, this is more armament than 5.0 twin engine fighters carry, yet its positioned in 2.7 and for a good reason.

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Then you have to learn to fly the Yak-38 at 9.3. If you are looking solely at its performance to fight F-104s, then yeah, you might struggle, but EVERYTHING sub-sonic struggles against F-104s because they are really fast. The same way all sub-sonics struggle past about 9.7.

should the F-104 go up, possibly, but we’ve just seen the Lightning come down in BR, because it was struggling against things like the A-5C.

Try taking a hunter into ARB. It sucks.

Where you can’t fight F-104s, I re-call barely being able to fend off a Yak-38 in the Hunter FGA9. Based upon that experience, Yak-38 should go up. Its faster and better armed than the Hunter FGA9

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looking at your hunter, its really not a 9.0 aircraft

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