I - Introduction Hello, i'm following the project since mid 2017 in SC 2.6 and I've seen many evolutions, transformations. During this time I learned how to handle a ship and became familiar with the concept of 6 degrees of freedom in zero G environment. I do not pretend to know exactly where CIG wishes to go in regard to the ship combat. This is only my point of view regarding the combat experience between ships from light fighter to heavy fighter. I will not talk about the balance between ships or component but about dogfight only. I do not pretend to master every ships but I tried every of them from light to heavy fighter in 3.8 and 3.9. I'm running Arena Commander at 85 fps average and I think that active players can confirm I spent a huge amount of time training in Battle Royale. II - The good things The current flight model is offering differents sensations from a ship to another. Actually , the player need to know how the ship handles to get the most out of it which is an excellent thing. With this flight model, i've seen and made many fight where the players were merging and 'dancing' together, when both of them are trying to predict each other's vector to overtake him while choosing the good vector + rotation to have a decisive positional advantage. These fights were as challenging as spectacular offering a really great game experience in duel but also in squadron battle. Unfortunately these type of combats becomes more and more rare as the limitations and weaknesses due to le current state of progress become more noticeable. III - The bad things The great majority of dogfight PvP players noticed that they had a longer life expectancy in Gladius because their dodges were better, easier to perform. The reality is that the light fighters and especially our beloved Gladius benefit from such a powerful acceleration in all areas that most of the failed maneuvers still offer a positive results. Knowing that the servers are unable to correctly calculate the position of a light fighter due to its acceleration was the last piece of the puzzle to explain the imprecision of the PIPs which go so far as to follow a Z while the ship is on a curved and constant inertial trajectory.The 3.9 nerf will help a bit but will not solve the real problem. I had the experience, being less than 100m above another gladius. I saw my 3 ballistic shots converge right on the back of the gladius and inflict no damage either to the shields or to the hull, zero point scored by crossing it right through. I was confused, and tried to understand why my opponent’s PIP was moving around in every directions, despite the fact that his ship was following a predictable trajectory. I had to fight against my own ESP wanting to bring the nose of the vessel back on the PIP and giving impulses to erroneous places. Aiming became senseless. The automatic aiming assist system can't help (which basically is a good if we consider that the auto gimbal system work better if the aim of the user is on point). The darkest point being that the result calling for satisfaction, it becomes more and more common to see players settle for back strafe in order to always have the enemy in sight while stirring the strafes in all senses in order to "evade" with a PIP moving faster than the convergence calibration capacities. Players seeking maneuver and positioning by pushing towards the opponent are disappearing while the number of light fighters "fighting" by backing up while stirring their strafes as quickly as possible increase. By spreading again, the fight in star citizen will only be constant face to face where the aim has become a dice game. IV - How to improve I have heard about combat position and maneuvering enough in the CIG weekly shows and have been bored of the damage race in face to face. I clearly doubt that this is CIG's vision for Star Citizen dogfight and i don't think that the majority of players are enjoying this. These are for me the main problems to solve for a better dogfight experience: 1 - The constant ability to strafe backward As long as every ship will have the ability to strafe back that fast, we'll only see people shooting themselves in face to face with one guy following another one in back strafe. I don't know what kind of feature will give the " Speed Combat " in 4.0 but a limitation of the backstrafe use should be a great thing for combat. Of course we need power on back strafe to be able to break correctly, but being able to go faster than your opponent and still gaining speed while shooting make boring fights that always end in the environnement. It's basically dangerous to go back in full speed while you don't look that way. Reducing the back strafe capacities or having a ship security to stop the acceleration backward lower than the front Speed combat limitation will encourage positional combat. 2 - The lack of G effects Having more G effect as we had in the past should give more immersion and make more difficult dogfights while the player will not be able to do the same thing forever as circle strafing or backstrafing. More G effect will force the player to make manoeuvres as rolls to balance the blood during a circle strafe or to push more forward. This can also be a good feature to allow the pilot who is in bad situation to turn the fight at his own advantage if the other one did a too fast backstab attack for exemple. 3 - Fixed vs. Auto-Gimballed guns I will be brief. The aiming system with a fixed weapon is unusable and the difference in term of damage between the sizes of weapons is too small to justify their use. For me it's more a problem of ESP than a damage ballance one. Fixed weapons could have some sort of micro zone of auto aim inside the PIP. It would be far much smaller than the one we currently have with auto gimbals. This could make fixed weapons more viable while waiting for ESP and netcode to be improved. 4 - The wrong PIPs and ship positions This is the main problem. At the beginning i thought that it was only a client to server informations transeft issue but after seeing some streams or videos. I realized that the jittery PIP was totally intentional by the player, and it was the result of constantly changing strafes while keeping momentum. This inputs are not made to create a barrel roll or a J-hook, they are here to shake the ship and it create miscalculation while shooting face to face. A pipe moving 3x more than the ship do is just senseless. Skill base game became a dice one. Let's trust in CIG for the optimisation while the ESP system will be improved too. It will resolve many problems we have. But with the acceleration we have on our ships actually, we have the ability to push instantly in the direction we want. It allow brutal and micro movements making wrong pipes. I see 2 possible solutions: - A warm up time. The propulsion is raising to reach the maximum G like we can have on a plane. Good exemple with a jetfighter, when you engage the post combustion it needs time to come at the maximum power. A raising acceleration should force the player to take a decision before to do it without the possibility to adapt it constantly. Making more smooth changes should also help the pipe to be more correct without teleportations and shaking your stick will just let you where you are. It looks like the new 3.9 feature on acceleration to fix the jerk problem. But we actually still feel the jitter far too much. - (Okay, this one is weird) A limitation from the ship like: If you decide to strafe left, a right strafe will have no effect until time period. Again to force de player to take a trajectory decision instead of shaking in face to fake. Thank you for your attention.