A Plane So Bad It's Addictive: Tornado F.3 (War Thunder)

Thanks for all the support. It means more than you know :)

[shadowssxdv]

Ah yes the dopamine rush that you get from doing good on a bad plane

[AverageWTPilot]

There is one thing I like about this plane, how awesome it looks with the wings fully swept along with the fuel tanks and 9ls/7temps

[MrRandyDandyAndy]

Part of what i like about the tornado is that it actually feels like a real plane and not some magical 14g pulling spaceship like a lot of top tier aircraft

[AWACSHOUND]

The Tornado really represents me besides the British part, fat, slow, and if I go too fast I tumble over (wing tear). I am also super anti-social so if someone gets too close I slow down due to social anxiety (compression). I’m also outdone by literally everyone else.

[mrj]

Love how he’s talking about dogfighting with a bomber/interceptor XD

[Panuch]

Spit, I've never been able to put my finger on what gives me this feeling until now. Thank you. The feeling when flying a plane that no where meets the meta yet still finishing amongst the meta vehicles at your BR is quite the dopamine rush.

[MarkDrisch]

I love how this plane is only .3 higher BR than the IDS now. It has like 4x the countermeasures, 2x the 9L's and pretty good radar missiles... there seems to be little to no rhyme or reason behind a lot of BR's.

[captaincracks]

For me the biggest weakness of the F.3 is the radar, it really struggles to lock simple targets even in the most opportune conditions and I've even had it be defeated by flares before. Whilst the Tornado is an absolute bus, they've also kinda messed up the lift characteristics of the plane as it does have a lot of fuselage lift which Gaijin has completely ignored, making it even more wallowy and slow than it should be.

[imperialinquisition]

The communities reaction to the tornado is really funny but confusing to me. I was and remain a big fan of the tornado in game, mostly because I like the top tier bomber play style and because the thing is just so fucking cool and also pretty successful in real life. However with other people it seems funny to me. People used to talk about it a lot, always asking when the Tornado would come, 4th gen swing wings when? etc… but like, it was always a bomber/interceptor and was never really likely to be super successful in war thunders current meta, except in a fast jet bomber/throw missiles at long range support fighter. Yet people seemed shocked when this was the case, but I feel like this should’ve been obvious from the start, if you knew anything about the plane. That’s not to say it’s not Gajins fault, they deliberately nerfed the plane, especially the British ones for some reason, and it would really excel in an Enduring confrontation only air RB game mode which of course doesn’t exist. So a lot of the reasons it doesn’t do so well are due to the game, but knowing about what the plane was good at irl should’ve prepared people for what the plane would be like in War thunders meta. So it’s funny to me that people were talking about it and excited, but then just uninterested when the obvious factors came into play.

[costmceleoy]

Well the tornado is meant to be a fast strike fighters not meant to dogfight so call me at bed as a dog fighter is actually accurate

[arushatwot]

Tornado F.3: 8 AAM, influding 4 radar-11.3
Tornado IDS: 2 AIM-9L-11.00
Both 100% at 12.00
Perfectly ballanced

[TheFlyingPancakeReal]

9:19 yeah, the plane was designed over the IDS, whose role was that of “fly extremely low at Mach .9 on autopilot, release bombs, go back home”. So, it wasn’t meant to have good high alt performance

[AlmightyDude]

It is the same feeling I got from spading every single french ww2 prop. There's just a certain charm of flying a cr.714 or an ms.410. And getting kills with those is the best feeling ever

[benniboi]

i love the F3 in sim battles as im able to make full use of the radar, people cant hide from me. and ive been able to win many dogfights in it

[RyzawaCh]

Apparently it's underperforming, shouldn't be a great dogfighter but I heard it was able to keep up with a tomcat in a dogfight until it eventually ran out of energy. Wouldn't be surprised if it was gimped because it does feel a bit too exaggerated in all the wrong ways.

[TheGarandGuy]

I love the F3, such a good looking aircraft. The recent buffs are a welcome addition. The only thing I don't like is your AIM9s fire off both left wing first, so when you're left with only 2 missiles (such as 13:25), if creates a real unbalance in the wings due to the right wing having the weight/drag of 2 missiles, with nothing on the left. It should fire off alternating wings.

[JSDFEnthusiast]

This is literally my thinking with the Tornado IDS. It got moved up and it's atrocious how 50/50 playing it is. You're either going to do poorly, or you're going to bite and scratch to even get one or two kills. And I love it, it gives me a run for my money. The tornado is so beautiful in looks and I'll always come back to it.

[tazzie]

On the Pyrnesse game, however you spell that map, you played the tornado how they would fly irl. U, the tornado have the radar and radar missiles and have a manoeuvrable team mate beside you. Britain would use Tornado, Hawk combos at Red Flag which made them absolutely dominate.

[TheBuccaneerIsHot]

They really fucked up the fox Hunter radar, and they shoulda given it its AMRAAMs or atleast aim7ms or something with actual BVR capabilities

[leogibney]

*Gaijin NEEDS to fix the Tornado F.3.*
Warning: Rant incoming.

Currently, the F.3 is unplayable. At 11.3, it sees everything at top tier almost every single game and it simply cannot even begin to compete in its current state.
The F.3 still has severe bugs that hinder the already hindered performance of this supposedly top tier aircraft.

As of writing this comment, the devs are yet to implement the Tornado F.3's proper radar variant. What we have in WT currently is a dumbed down subvariant of the early Foxhunter radar, when we should have the much newer, much more capable Foxhunter radar that would actually make it one of the absolute best in the game currently.

But even with the current radar, it's performance is hindered by ridiculously stupid bugs.

Bugs I have noticed as of writing:

1) When locking a target from TWS into an STT (to fire a Fox 1) the game will tell you, when you try to fire a Skyflash (DF or sT) that *you need a radar lock*, despite the fact that you definetly already have a single target track lock.
This makes it impossible to fire your skyflashes, because the game simply thinks you don't have a radar lock, when you definetly do.

2) The ACM mode of the F.3 only goes out to 9km, which is pathetic in itself (the Phantoms go to 19km making individual target locking much easier) but the issue mainly lies when trying to lock a target with the radar, and missing.
Sometimes when trying to lock a target, the radar tries to find it in a specific area. And if the target is not in that specific area, the radar (instead of turning back to scan) continues to try and lock something in that general direction. The issue is that you cannot cancel this action. The radar for some reason will continue to try and lock something that isn't there, and you cannot switch back to a wide search mode, and cannot change into TWS or PD/SRC.

There are still MORE radar bugs that prevent a player from firing missiles, but they come and go as Gaijin pleases.

As for the wings, I think that yes, the Tornado had brittle wings, but for the sake of the game, the unpredictable wing ripping at an unspecified and varying G level is utterly ridiculous, and puts top tier British players at a significant disadvantage.

And this all would have been a bit more excusable if Britain were to get an actual 4th gen aircraft below it. The problem is, THIS IS ALL BRITAIN WILL GET UNTIL THE EUROFIGHTER.

Top tier Britain will be utterly crippled until Gaijin gets its head out of its ass, and implements fixes to the Tornado F.3 that actually make it at least somewhat competitive against top tier planes like the F-16, F-15, F-14, MiG-29, Su-27 and whatever other planes Gaijin will add in the following years.

Rant over.