Your speed is the result of the opposition between your aircraft’s thrust and drag. Throttle and afterburner inputs work by changing your thrust. The first important detail is that it will only change at fixed rates. This means that if you are throttling up from 0%, engaging the afterburners just wastes fuel since your thrust is already increasing. The second important consideration is the impact of turning. Thrust increases are slowed and decreases are sped up while in a turn. So, it’s quicker and more fuel efficient to build up to afterburning thrust levels while flying in a straight line.

One technique that takes advantage of this is afterburner tapping. Once you reach full afterburning thrust, you can use quick, intermittent taps of the afterburner to maintain that thrust level while spending a fraction of the fuel. This is particularly effective since the rate of thrust increase is based on your acceleration stat, while the rate of thrust decrease is just 5.8 in those units for all aircraft. So you can balancing things out while spending more time with the afterburners off than on, more than doubling your fuel efficiency.

An illustration of thrust over time for afterburner taps. The areas shaded red indicate the time spent afterburning. Notice how a faster pace at the same ratio between on and off results in a higher average thrust.

The Fitter’s wing sweep mechanic works by instantly switching between an extra 50 knots worth of thrust and 5 extra turning power. There are a couple ways to take advantage of these mechanics when going between a high thrust (afterburner + swept wings) and low thrust state (no afterburner + unswept wings). When going from high to low, you can unsweep the wings immediately to gain access to the improved turning while the rate of thrust drain remains the same.

An illustration of thrust over time for deceleration. The line shaded blue indicates when the wings are unswept. The area shaded red indicates time spent afterburning. The red and blue dotted lines indicate the decreased thrust target from releasing the afterburners and unsweeping the wings respectively.

When going from low to high, you have two options: fuel efficiency or turning. Sweeping the wings first and waiting to gain that thrust before engaging the afterburners saves a bit of fuel each time, while afterburning first and waiting to sweep the wings retains that improved turning for longer. While a wing sweep technique similar to afterburner taps is technically possible, it is an incredible amount of effort for very little gain given the inefficiency of thrust changes in a turn.

An illustration of thrust over time, showing the fuel efficient option on the left and the stronger turning option on the right. The line shaded blue indicates when the wings are unswept. The area shaded red indicates time spent afterburning, and the area shaded blue indicates the thrust increase from sweeping the wings.

Your angle of attack in a turn puts your thrust out of alignment with your direction of travel. The sideways component is responsible for the turning of your flight path, but the reduced forward component means you are generally getting only 60% to 70% effective thrust in a sustained turn. This is what causes your loss of speed in a turn in Sky Knights.

That speed loss is a problem because your turning power stat gets modified based on your speed. Each aircraft has an ideal speed, generally around their stock cruising speed, where you get the full 100% of your turning power. That percentage will decrease as you get further from that speed, but overshooting that number is not as punishing as undershooting it. So, given the lower effective thrust, afterburners or plentiful speed buffs are necessary if you want to maximize your turn rate.

As long as you are above your min speed, engaging the speedbrake will apply a force negating some of your thrust. This does not affect the normal thrust drain of throttling down and instead just offers a head-start on reducing your speed. As such, its effects are less noticeable for longer periods of deceleration, but it means your remaining thrust is higher than usual for a given speed, making for quicker recoveries when used in combat.

Since the speedbrake opposes thrust rather than adding to drag, it produces some unusual results when used in a turn. The sideways component of your thrust drops sharply the moment you engage it, but your speed takes longer to respond. This causes your flight path to straighten out, while your mostly unaffected turn rate results in a growing angle of attack. By sharply accelerating, you can reverse this process, consuming that larger angle of attack for a tighter turn radius. Although it needs to be executed preemptively, that concentrated turn radius can prove useful in combat.

Maneuvers work using the same basic mechanics as a turn, just in a different direction. The two can even be combined for a more extreme diagonal turn. However, maneuvers have a couple limitations. You must be within the map border and below a certain altitude to start a maneuver, and dropping below roughly 120 knots or running out of stamina will force you out of one.

When you end a maneuver, your aircraft will right itself before attempting to return to its original altitude. Some extra forces are applied in this state, generally translating to a 10% reduction in speed. Although, at low enough thrust values, it will speed you up instead. As such, descent is a particularly vulnerable state since the altitude locks you out of maneuvering, and the speed loss alongside the less horizontal flight path makes running away more difficult.

If you want to add more complexity to your maneuvering, two useful techniques are the dive and reversal. For a dive, simply extend your pure maneuver or maneuver turn until you end angled diagonally down. This trades a higher stamina cost for reducing the time until you can maneuver again and potentially puts you low enough to avoid your opponent’s guns. Just be sure to practice this enough to not crash in the process. To execute a reversal, after starting a maneuver turn, switch to inputting the opposite turn direction. The later parts of this technique are especially potent, with hard-to-track motion perpendicular to potential pursuers and extra altitude enabling steeper dives with more options for your heading coming out of it. However, it is very slow to start, leaving you vulnerable unless your opponent is busy with their own turns or maneuvers.

The stamina cost for a turn is a fixed rate, but the cost for maneuvering scales with your speed. Your total stamina drain is capped at about twice that of a turn. Turning and maneuvering at the same time will always hit that cap, and a pure maneuver will reach it anyway at speeds above 260 knots. Curiously, stamina drain takes a moment to ramp up/down, which hides that your stamina regeneration is actually always active. This means that stamina regeneration buffs will effectively reduce the cost of turns and maneuvers too.

While you have a missile selected, a lock-on timer ticks down. When it reaches zero, if there is a valid target, a lock is acquired. If not, then the timer gets reset to a random value with a minimum and maximum based on the type of missile. Countermeasures or switching targets will also cause this reset. Notably, the timer progresses even while there are no valid targets around. This means it’s possible to acquire extremely quick locks by sheer coincidence. The most predictable lock-on timing is the first lock after switching weapons, so a well-timed switch to the desired missile a little under a second before the target enters your sights can lower your average lock-on times.


Since heat-seekers don’t require the launching aircraft to maintain a lock, they have a more complicated relationship with countermeasures. A heat-seeker will inherit the aircraft’s lock as a target, but it also has its own target-finding behavior. Its priorities are to target flares within its vision, pursue its current target, and find a new target in that order. This is separate from the lock-on system and means it can instantly reacquire a target after flying past a flare or being fired without a lock. However, this behavior only starts after a brief arming time, so lock-less heat-seekers need some space to work. Notably though, this means a locked-on one will ignore flares for a short window, making them surprisingly effective at very short range.

Both bombs and rockets work by dealing damage in a splash radius, with the latter just having a smaller one. This means that grounded aircraft or even just low-flying ones can get hit by them in rare circumstances. More practically, the splash radius is relevant for damaging FOBs as well. The hurtbox for the FOBs is shrunk to account for the large radius bomb, so essentially only bombs that fall on the model will damage it. Rockets, given their smaller radius, have to be towards the center to count.

Rockets simply travel in a straight line at an angle to your aircraft, making the in-game sight very reliable. Bombs, in contrast, fall after inheriting your speed, so you can extend their range slightly by afterburning. However, its in-game sight only accounts for horizontal speed. If you are descending, then your bombs will fall short, so you have to aim past your target. Of course, the reverse is true if you are ascending.