VRChat Dogfight Central F-100 Tournament!

Something that has always been a staple of VRChat Aviation are its dogfighting tournaments, and for the longest time the only popular on the Western hemisphere ones were the ones hosted by the VRC Black Aces.

There have been other communities that have hosted tournaments but they never really had the same ambiance or punch that the Black Aces had at the time. But now another one of the big players in the VRC Aviation community has started hosting their own tournaments: Dogfight Central.

We have already talked about DFC here in the past, and they are good friends of everyone here at Skyward, so we were excited to not only see them host their own tournament but also to be hosting it with their own in-house aircraft, the F-100 Super Sabre. Additionally, they went all-in with the prizes for the winners:
1st Place: $200, Dogfight Central Coin, Trophy 2nd Place:$150, Dogfight Central Coin 3rd Place: $50, Dogfight Central Coin
THE TOURNEY Matches during the tournament were a mix of very strategic flying and the good-ol’ rate fights that are extremely technical to fly, but a bit boring to watch if you are not technically minded. Since there were three blocks comprised of 56 total participants, only 15 made it to the finals, 5 from each block.
The plane these participants had to fly was the F-100 Super Sabre by Mia. Modeled and tuned in-house, it stands as one of the only aircraft ever featured on a tournament to have been made entirely by the organization responsible for the event. Planes like these take months and months to make, so seeing one featured in such an interesting event is something we are super happy about. We have also done the same thing before with our Colibri, so we are glad to see others put in the effort and make their own models.

This plane flew less like a standard SaccFlight aircraft, and more like the Colibri in terms of how you had to approach its flying. They both are low thrust to weight aircraft that lose energy pretty fast, forcing the pilots to adopt a different flying style than they would have otherwise. It also lacks a HUD and relies on steam gauges and a basic gunsight, always a plus when it comes down to making it more interesting for the pilots.
It made for some interesting matches; but, since it did have an afterburner, it resulted in a lot of prolongued rate fights that are extremely common on dogfights with equally skilled pilots flying the same planes under pseudo-laboratory conditions (known parameters, known terrain, known fuel amount and known merge point). NRG took first place, while Nighthawk and x_womanslayer_x got second and third place respectively. There were some interesting matches, moments of relative boredom for the audience which were usually broken by amazing maneuvers being pulled by the competitors.

I cannot wait to see which tournaments DFC will do in the future! About the Author Santiago "Cubeboy" Cuberos Longtime aviation fanatic with particular preference towards military aviation and its history. Said interests date back to the early 2000s, leading into his livelong dive into civil and combat flight simulators. He has been involved in a few communities, but only started being active around the mid 2010s. Joined as a Spanish to English translator in 2017, he has been active as a writer and the co-founder of Skyward ever since. Twitter  | Discord : Cubeboy