The kill that took twenty minutes
The report came in the usual shape: “air-to-air kills are too hard.” And it was right. Your bursts were landing, your damage was real, and the bandit flew off anyway. An average pilot was scoring about one kill every twenty minutes — in a sky where planes were going down all around them. Here's what changed, and how your guns feel now.
Landing hits, starving for kills
The trouble wasn't finding a shot — enemies crossed your nose plenty — and it wasn't your aim, exactly. You'd get on a plane, walk tracer into it, watch pieces fly, and it would still limp away. To actually down a Sparrowhawk you had to land something like twenty-five rounds on the same airframe, and at real gun range that's a needle-thin cone of aim. Most pilots were spreading their hits across every plane that flashed past instead of piling them onto one. Twenty-five on a single target? Twenty minutes.
Now your bursts bite
When you’re on a bot now, your guns are more forgiving and they hurt more — a shorter bill for a plane that's squarely in your sights. Get the pipper on a bandit and hold it, and it goes down on a burst, not a marathon. The change touches only your fire against the bots; pilot-versus-pilot dogfights are untouched and stay exactly fair. You’ll never read this and feel handled — your bursts just bite the way they always looked like they should.
The kill you earned is the kill you get
There was a second injustice hiding underneath. Break a plane clean — engine dead, pilot gliding a dying aircraft toward the dirt — and if it took a little too long to actually crash, the kill went to nobody. You did the work and the ledger shrugged.
Now a crash pays the pilot who broke the plane: whoever put the most damage into it on the way down, as long as they did real damage and not a passing graze. Shoot a plane into the ground and it's yours. A clean pilot-error crash with nobody shooting still belongs to nobody — as it should. The kills you were quietly owed now land on your tally.