You can land your plane anywhere on the ground, even way out of bounds. There’s intricate mechanics to use your landing gear, change the position of your flaps and there’s even physics for how fast and at what angle you land.
So what do you land for?
Can you repair your plane, perhaps? Untag it?
No. As soon as you exit the plane, it blows into bits and you are reset to the infantry combat area. You’re also still tagged, so whoever last damaged you is now given credit for destroying your plane - the plane that you just so carefully landed WITHOUT DESTROYING IT.
Landing is currently identical to crashing into a rock or ejecting mid-air.
And yet the integrity of your plane is really crucial for steering and aiming.
Landing seems like a golden opportunity to introduce a repair function for planes.
On some pacific maps, certain planes can already land on aircraft carriers to get exactly that - a repair.
All planes should be able to receive repairs when landed - here’s how:
When you land and your plane drops below a certain velocity, a timer starts. This timer allows enemy planes to finish your plane so you can’t just land in a dogfight to reset your integrity
When this timer’s over, your plane will quickly remove damage states and restore integrity. You can then take off again.
Given how difficult landing already is, and how fast the TTK for planes is, this function will likely not become overly powerful. But it allows planes to actually become more controllable after taking damage when they’ve earned it through a successful fight and a successful landing.
Let the plane take off from the airport
Not only can it limit aircraft spam, but it can also introduce a maintenance mechanism
Kill two birds with one stone
Exept you are not finding a spare engine in a random bush or inside of a random farmers barn…
And im sure that planes dont come with a spare engine so repairing outside of a carrier or an airfield doesnt make sense.
This suggestion is mainly made with gameplay in mind, not realism. Realism is why repair kits are considered so weak at this moment and I don’t suggest you keep to it when it comes to repairs.
This would nearly be a good idea, it’s identical to how aircraft carriers work.
However, I usually end my pacific matches with 6+ plane kills.
That’s because you know exactly where the enemy plane is coming from - their carrier - and you also know that planes have an extremely weak climb rate when they’ve just spawned. Diving onto them from above guarantees that they’re defenseless against me.
Until this mechanic - which closely resembles spawnkilling - is adressed, I’m not convinced planes should start on airfields.
You can add a rule that allows your plane to land and respawn as another squad. If your plane crashes in a healthy state (Minor damage will not trigger this mechanism), you will receive a penalty for abandoning the plane, including score penalty, team manpower penalty, and squad cooldown penalty.
The reward of free repair is not attractive enough, as many people prefer to have their planes launch suicide attacks to achieve higher combat efficiency.
I’m, of mixed opinion about adding airstrips
On one hand single pistol bullet to your radiator wont kill you
On the other hand, there definitely will be people who try to spawn camp
There will be people who take 1 damage and waste 5 minutes to go repair, blocking your team from using limited vehicle slots
Also, the maps are just too small for that currently
You get 100 points and are able to bring it back in 1 squad sooner.
The ONLY changes I would make are either
Buff the reward of points according to how much damage was done by enemies to the aircraft
OR
Penalize players heavily that just crash into the ground having not sustained any damage from enemies.
This way, the players that just kamikaze aren’t able to continuously get their planes back.