HOW TO FLY

JET3D is a browser dogfighting game. Twelve aircraft, a shrinking ring, guns and two kinds of missile. It is quick to start and takes a while to be any good at, and most of the difference between a new pilot and a dangerous one is in this page rather than in reflexes.

A jet does not steer

This is the single thing that separates people who can fly from people who cannot, and it is worth more than every other paragraph here.

The rudder — A and D — does almost nothing useful. It swings the nose sideways without moving the aeroplane, so you end up pointing one way and travelling another, which is slow, wastes speed and puts your guns nowhere near where you are looking. New pilots reach for it constantly because it feels like steering.

A jet turns with its wings. Roll until the wings are banked toward where you want to go, then pull — arrow up. The wing makes lift at right angles to itself, so once you are on your side that lift points sideways and drags the whole aircraft round. Bank, then pull. The harder you bank before pulling, the tighter the turn.

Everything else about turning follows from that. You cannot turn hard while wings-level, because the lift is holding you up instead. You cannot turn hard while pointing straight up, for the same reason — pull at ninety degrees of bank and you are not climbing, you are turning. Watch the horizon rather than the nose.

Speed is the thing you spend

Every turn costs speed. A hard one costs a lot. Think of speed as a budget: you arrive at a fight with a certain amount, you spend it turning, and when it is gone you are a slow target in a sky full of people who still have theirs.

Gravity does most of the accounting for you. Climbing bleeds speed and diving builds it, in proportion to how steeply you are pointed — a shallow climb costs a little, straight up costs everything. The oldest trick in air combat works here: when you are slow, trade height for speed by putting the nose down. When you are fast and safe, trade speed back for height. Height is speed you have not spent yet.

W is the boost. It roughly doubles your speed for about three seconds and refills on its own, and it refills instantly when you get a kill. Use it to close a gap you would otherwise lose or to leave one you cannot win. Do not use it to go faster in a straight line for no reason; it is not there to make the map smaller.

Shift is the hard turn — roughly three times the normal turn rate. It is the most expensive thing in the aeroplane. Hold it through a whole fight and you will end up at walking pace with somebody comfortably behind you. Use it in bursts, to get a shot or to break one.

Guns

Space fires. The guns are unlimited, so the only thing stopping you shooting is whether you are pointing at anything.

Rounds drop. At close range you can ignore it; past about nine hundred metres gravity has pulled them noticeably below the crosshair, and at two kilometres it is tens of metres. Rounds also take time to arrive, which matters more: shoot where the target is going to be, not where it is. Against someone turning, that means pulling your nose ahead of them and firing into the space they are about to fly through.

The lead circle does that sum for you. Point at an enemy and a ring appears ahead of it, sized to the aircraft, with the drop and the time of flight already in it: put the crosshair inside and fire, and the ring lights up when you are there. It assumes the target keeps doing what it is doing now — so a pilot who keeps changing their turn is still hard to hit, which is the whole art of not being shot. You can turn it off in Settings and judge the lead yourself.

Five hits kill. That sounds like a lot until you try to land them on something that is trying not to be hit — and it means a gunfight is a pursuit you can see going your way: the other aircraft starts to smoke, then trails heavy smoke one hit from dead.

An orange cross flashes on the crosshair for every round of yours that lands, and the screen flares on a kill. Enemies off the edge of the view get a red arrow on a ring around the crosshair, with their distance; a missile chasing you gets an orange one marked MSL; and when you are hit, a red bar on that ring shows the direction it came from.

The two missiles

They are different weapons for different moments, and carrying both is the point.

SPEAR — E

An unguided rocket. It goes exactly where the nose is pointing and kills whatever it touches. No lock, no warning to the target, nothing to dodge except the rocket itself. It reloads in well under a second, so you can walk a stream of them onto somebody — that is the technique, not a single hopeful shot. Hold the key; the reload sets the rate.

HOUND — Q

A guided missile, and a committed shot. It needs a lock: hold the target in front of you for about a second until the tone goes solid. No lock, no launch — the key simply does nothing. Once away it steers itself and will follow somebody through a turn they cannot out-fly.

Two things deny a lock. Cloud, symmetrically: you cannot lock into it, out of it, or across it, so the cloud deck near the ceiling is the one place to hide from guided missiles — at the cost of your own. And flares.

The two run on separate reloads, so firing one never costs you the other. You can put a HOUND and a SPEAR into the same person on the same pass.

Flares, and the seven seconds

S drops flares. A flare pulled at the right moment takes a HOUND off you permanently — not briefly, for good. The seeker commits to the flare and does not come back.

The timing is the whole skill. Too early and the flare burns out before the missile arrives, which is worse than nothing because you have spent them. Too late and the missile is already on you. When the inbound warning sounds, wait, then pull.

You get one set every seven seconds. That cooldown is why guided missiles are still worth firing, and why a second HOUND straight after the first is often the shot that lands.

Turning into a HOUND

A HOUND is a heat-seeker. It steers at your exhaust, and your exhaust is at the back — so from behind you it has the brightest thing in the sky to aim at, and from in front it has your airframe in the way. That is a thing you can use.

Hold F and bring the nose round onto an inbound missile. Keep it there for about half a second, inside roughly nine hundred metres, and the seeker loses the plume and goes dumb — permanently, the same way a flare takes it. The warning tone going quiet is how you know it worked, exactly as with a flare.

Three things make this a skill rather than a free answer:

• You have to be decoupled to do it. Turning onto the missile with the engine still coupled means flying at it, and closing with the thing trying to kill you does not end well. Measured: it fails every time.
• It costs you everything. You come out of it pointed the wrong way with no speed, which is the worst possible state to be in if anyone else is nearby.
• Close shots still kill. Inside about four hundred metres from directly behind, there is not enough time to hold the aspect before it arrives. That is the shot worth setting up, and there is no answer to it but flares.

And the obvious trap: breaking the seeker stops the missile steering. It does not move it. A blinded HOUND on a collision course will still kill you if you fly into it.

The other side of the same coin: running away from a HOUND while decoupled is the worst thing you can do. You are slow, you are not manoeuvring, and your exhaust is pointed straight at it. If you are going to use F against a missile, turn and face it.

The light, and the weather

Every match is flown at one time of day, the same for everyone in it: noon, golden hour, dusk with the city lit up, or now and then a storm with rain and lightning. None of them changes the fight — the fog is no closer in a storm than on a clear day — but they change what is easy to see. At dusk the towers carry red lights on their tops, which is worth knowing, because the spires are solid.

Watch the other aircraft's engines. An orange glow is a jet cruising; blue-white is a jet burning boost, which means it is spending energy it will not have later. At range it is the quickest read there is of who is running and who is about to be slow.

The ring and the ceiling

The ring shrinks through the match. Outside it you take damage continuously, so it is a clock rather than a wall — you can cross it briefly to escape something worse, and you cannot live out there.

The ceiling is the cloud deck, and it is the top of the world. Above it you take damage until you come back down. It is also where locks stop working, which makes the band just under it genuinely useful: a place to break a guided shot, at the price of not being able to take one yourself.

The ground is solid everywhere, including the trees and the buildings in the city. Contact is instant. More people die to the ground in a hard low turn than to anyone's guns. When the line you are flying meets the ground or a building within about two and a half seconds, PULL UP flashes above the crosshair with a warning tone: believe it.

Decoupled flight — hold F

Every other control in this game moves the aeroplane by pointing it. F breaks that link. Hold it and the engine drops to idle and the flight path stops following the nose — you keep travelling in the direction you were already going, and the nose goes wherever you put it. Sideways. Inverted. All the way round until you are flying backwards, still moving the same way, looking at whatever is behind you.

The controls are three times as sharp while it is held: under a second to come all the way round, about half that to go broadside. It lasts at most a second and a half — then it re-couples on its own, and you have to let go of F before it will work again. After each one there is an eight-second cooldown; the thin bar above boost shows the window draining and the cooldown refilling, and flashes red if you press F too early. You start every life with it ready. The camera does not tumble with you — it holds the view it had, so you can see what the aircraft is doing rather than watching the horizon spin.

What it is for, in order of how often you will want it:

• Making a chaser overshoot. Hold F and your speed falls off a cliff. Somebody matching your speed from behind does not have that option, and goes past.
• Shooting at something that is not in front of you. Your guns point where the nose points, not where you are flying. Come round and fire backwards.
• Breaking a gun solution. Presenting a different aspect every second makes you a much harder thing to lead.

What it costs: all of your energy. You are not accelerating while you hold it, drag is far higher than normal, and you come out slow — and slow is how people die here. There is no minimum speed, but there is the cooldown — so spend it when it matters, not every time somebody looks at you.

If you used the old Cobra on this key, this replaces it. That was a single canned manoeuvre on a timer that took the controls away for its duration. This gives you the controls instead — and, unlike the Cobra, when it is not ready the HUD says so.

The six aircraft

The first three fly within about twenty per cent of each other on purpose, and the real difference is what they carry. The second three are specialists: each leans hard into one corner — the turn, the speed, or the weight of fire — and pays for it everywhere else.

The NEEDLE is the aim-it-yourself aircraft: fourteen unguided rockets and almost nothing that steers for you. Its ceiling is your gunnery.

The LANCE fires a pair at once off a single pass, which is the best salvo in the match and the reason to pick it — two rockets, or two seekers on one lock, at the same target.

The ANVIL is the patient one: four guided missiles and nine flares. Hard to kill with a HOUND, reliable at killing with one, and slower about everything.

The SABRE turns tighter than anything else in the sky — 63 degrees a second against the field's low fifties — and carries the least. It is built to get behind you and finish it with the guns.

The BOLT is the fastest aircraft there is, by a long way, and the worst at turning. Pick your fight, take it at speed, and leave. A BOLT that tries to turn with a SABRE is a BOLT that is about to die.

The MAUL is the heavy: three rockets off every pass, twelve flares, and a turn like a bus. It is very hard to kill with missiles and very good at saturating a target — and its salvo empties both seekers in a single pull, so make that one count.

A kill refunds part of every magazine, so the pilot who keeps killing keeps shooting.

Controls in full

A controller works too — any Xbox, PlayStation or similar pad, plugged in or paired, with nothing to set up. The sticks are analogue, so half a stick is half a turn, which is easier to aim with than keys. Left stick pitches and rolls (pull back for nose up), the right stick or the bumpers work the rudder, right trigger fires the guns and left trigger is the hard turn. A boosts, B drops flares, X fires a SPEAR, Y a HOUND, and clicking either stick decouples.

Mouse aim is in Settings. Turn it on, click the view, and the mouse points where you want to go: the camera follows the mouse, and the aircraft rolls and pulls itself onto it, finishing with the wings level. A small ring shows where the nose actually is while it catches up. Left button fires the guns, right button a SPEAR, and Esc gives the mouse back. Every key still works alongside it.

On a phone or tablet the controls are two floating sticks that appear wherever your thumbs land, with buttons for guns, missiles and decoupling (hold it, like the key). Turn the device sideways — the game is built for it.

Flying against bots

Empty seats are filled with bots so a quiet server is still a game. They are not target practice: they carry the same aircraft and the same magazines you do, they fire guided missiles, and they pull flares when one is coming at them. Get behind one and it will not just sit there: it corkscrews, and the better the pilot the further out it sees you coming and the longer it keeps rolling — a ROOKIE is catchable in a few seconds, an ACE can keep you working for twenty. Short bursts as it rolls through your sight line beat holding the trigger.

The host picks how good they are. MATCHED SQUADRON is worth knowing about — it starts in the middle and moves: beat them and better pilots turn up, lose and they ease off. It only changes which pilot is in the seat when one respawns, so nobody ever gets better in the middle of a fight you are already having.

Three habits that will save you

• Look behind you. Most deaths arrive from an angle nobody checked. The markers show every aircraft; use them.
• Do not turn with someone who out-turns you. If you are losing a turning fight, stop turning. Dive away, build speed, come back with height.
• Leave before you are empty. A fight you win at walking pace is a fight you lose to the next person who arrives.

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