The jets bite again
The word from the flight line was blunt: “turns are too wide — the jets need to be more maneuverable,” and “bank and pull toward lift and it just keeps rolling instead of pulling through the turn.” Both were right. This pass gives the jets their teeth back — and hangs a smoke rope off every missile so you can see one coming.
Your turn was leaving money on the table
Pull the Balalaika into a maximum-effort turn — stick to the rim, full back-pressure — and it should ride hard against its limit and knife around. It wasn't. A recent fix that smoothed a wallowing pull-up had gotten a little too eager and was quietly bleeding away a chunk of your sustained turn, so a fighter that should have been carving felt like it was mushing wide.
Now the smoothing only touches the twitch it was meant to catch and leaves your honest hard turn alone. The wallow stays gone; the bite comes back. A jet held on the edge of its envelope now pulls the tight circle it always looked like it should — the Balalaika still out-knives the Starfang, the Starfang still keeps its energy, and every airframe turns like a jet with something to prove.
Bank-and-pull carves instead of rolling forever
Here's the one that felt broken. Roll the jet up on its side and pull toward lift — the classic diagonal carve, a turn tilted off the horizon — and instead of biting into the turn, the fighter would just keep rolling, right on past vertical and over onto its back. A deliberate carving turn read as a barrel-roll command and tumbled you.
The game now tells the two apart. Slam the stick flat sideways and you still get the fast roll all the way through inverted — that's a roll, and it stays crisp. But bank up and pull, and the plane commits to the turn: it holds the bank you set and hauls around at full rate. The move that every jet pilot reaches for finally does the thing it's supposed to do.
Roll that stops short of a coin flip
The flip side of the report: “roll seems to snap too easily.” At speed the jets would whip around their roll axis so fast it felt like a hair-trigger — twitch the stick and you were inverted before you meant to be, fighting to stop on a heading. The roll is still emphatically a jet's roll, quick and authoritative, but it's settled down to something you can meter and stop where you want it, not a coin flip between wings level and upside down.
The Balalaika also wasn't using all of its wing — the safe edge of its turn envelope sat short of what the airframe could actually deliver. The whole jet roster now reaches its full pull inside the margin the auto-limiter keeps for you, so max effort means max effort. The WW2 propeller fleet is untouched — this is a jets-only tune.
And the missiles write in the sky
The smallest change here is the one you'll notice first. Heat-seekers used to fly as a dim dart with a stubby glow — at any range they were nearly invisible, which robbed the era of its best drama and its fairest warning. Now every missile in flight lays a fat white smoke rope across the sky. It billows as it ages and drifts on the wind, so a launch is legible from clear across the valley.
That trail is the counterplay. You rarely spot the missile itself — you spot the white finger pointing at whoever it's chasing, and that's your cue to break hard and punch flares while there's still time. The land theater's wire-guided missiles draw the same rope, so an ATGM sailing across the steppe announces itself the same way.
Go carve a turn, roll onto a bandit's six, and watch the sky fill with smoke ropes. The jets fight the way they look now.