The Starfang: a jet you have to earn
There's a new card in the hangar, and it starts out grey. The Starfang is an early jet in the Starfighter mold — needle nose, razor wings, tip tanks, T-tail, a missile with a man in it — carrying a six-barrel 20 mm Vulcan and pods of unguided rockets where everyone else carries bombs. It's the game's first career-locked aircraft: down 25 enemy planes over your lifetime and it's yours, forever. Until then the card counts your kills at you.
A jet among warbirds
Dropping a Mach-happy interceptor into a prop furball sounds like heresy, which is why the flight model leans into the airplane's real vices instead of sanding them off. The Starfang's wing is tiny — the real F-104's was famous for it — so the FDM gives it a low lift ceiling, an early stall alpha, and brutal induced drag the moment you haul on the stick. It will out-run every prop in the sky by a wide margin and out-climb them on sheer thrust, but bleed it below 250 km/h in a turning fight with a Sparrowhawk and you're a very expensive glider. Boom-and-zoom isn't a suggestion; it's the only doctrine the airframe supports. The same speed cuts both ways for the defense: flak fire-control leads it just fine, and a jet that flies predictable straight lines eats an 88 like anything else.
The gun matches the era jump. The Vulcan fires thirty rounds a second — two and a half times the .50s, four times the Hispano — at lower per-round damage and a hot 620 m/s muzzle velocity. In practice it's a hose: the tracer stream reads almost solid, snapshots that would be prayers with cannon become clips, and the damage-per-second lands deliberately in family with the prop guns so the jet's edge is energy, not raw firepower.
Rockets: a third ordnance class
Bombs fall, torpedoes swim, and now rockets fly. A rocket leaves the rail at the plane's velocity plus 150 m/s, and the server integrates it under less than a third of gravity — the burning motor holding the arc nearly flat — until it hits terrain, a vehicle, an emplacement, a freighter, or a plane silly enough to cross the lane. Impact bursts use the same blast-falloff radius the bombs do, so a pair into an armored column damages the whole neighborhood. You get fourteen per sortie, rippling off alternating rails at four and a half a second while you hold B, and the carrier deck re-arms them like everything else. On the wire they ride the existing ordnance section with one new flag bit; the client draws a hot orange motor plume behind each round so a ripple reads like a ladder of fire walking to the target.
An unlock that can't be asked for nicely
The gate rides the career ledger that already powers medals and daily missions: 25 lifetime kills on your pilot record. The client greys the card and refuses the click, but the client is only being polite — the server checks the same threshold at every door. Join with the jet requested and you spawn the trainer. Switch to it with the number keys and the request is dropped. However a locked request arrives, the spawn path clamps it. When the 25th kill lands, an unlock event fires in the same breath as the medal events, the card opens live mid-session with a toast, and the feed tells the server who just earned their jet — a little public ceremony for a milestone that takes most pilots weeks.
Two deliberate exceptions. Bots never fly it — the lobby matchup stays the tuned five-prop ecosystem, and the jet stays what it is: proof a human earned something. And flight school hands you one free — the new Jet & Rockets drill drops you above an armored column with a full pod, because the best advertisement for a 25-kill grind is ninety seconds in the cockpit you're grinding toward.
Progression in a pick-up dogfighter has to be a trophy, not a treadmill: one aircraft, one number, earned in public. Everything else in the hangar is still free on day one.