I've installed the package today to take a break from weather-making, and what can I say... it's quite addictive
, and the satisfaction to circle around the crash site of the other plane is quite something.
Hunting A-10 with the F-16 is rather challenging - basically they are too slow to shoot them down comfortably, and I had to learn how to kill speed and avoid overshooting without losing the target. I was surprised the planes don't show on the F-16 radar though - should they not? I know that the tanker for air-air refueling does. Hitting with the gun as such isn't so terribly difficult - but maybe I have a lot of practice - I'm an old Falcon 4.0 veteran
With the A-10 it's much easier - both to intercept and to shoot down.
Otherwise they are very hard to see, unless contrails are on, then it's sort of possible, but still tricky. But there seem to be lots of enemy planes, so I guess the idea seems to be that there's always one nearby.
The A-10 also take a lot of punishment - maybe with the F-16 M61 vulcan gun that's sort of ok., but I've flown this with the A-10 later, and the GAU/8A is a different story - that's an anti tank gun which can penetrate 3.8 cm armour from 1000 m range - that should essentially shread an aircraft in a single burst.
When weapons hit, I get message windows (occasionally also when I just fly) - but they seem to be only loosely correlated with what I see. For example, I saw that I caused 0% damage, and the next thing I see is the enemy plane going down in flames. So as far as I am concerned, the message windows could be absent - I can always look back and see if I hit someting...
I haven't tried the WW I fighters yet - but that's probably fun as well...