Teaching the bots to shoot
The complaint was exact: a bot slides onto your six, sits there saddled and steady on a perfect tail chase — and never fires. Turns out the bots were aiming fine. They were missing because nobody had ever taught them that bullets fall. That's fixed. The sky shoots back now.
Bots that never took the shot
A bot with a clean shot lined up used to hold its fire almost every time, and the few shots it did throw sailed harmlessly past from way out. The reason was simple once you saw it: its guns leave the muzzle fast but the rounds only live about a second, and over a long shot gravity pulls them clean under the target. The bot was aiming dead at where you'd be and putting every round just below you. Six seconds of perfect tracking down your tail, not a scratch. It had been that way forever — the busier skies and the new wrecks just made the empty tail chases impossible to miss.
Now it holds over and picks its moment
The fix reads like a gunnery manual. The bot now holds over: it aims a touch high, exactly enough for the drop the rounds pick up on the way to you — the same thing a human does by reflex after the first tracer sails low. And it knows when to shoot. Up close, when it's got a real killing solution, it opens up to put you down. Farther out it hoses pressuring tracers to make you flinch — but only as far as the rounds can actually reach, so it stops wasting ammo on shots that die in the air before they get to you. Line up on a bot's tail now and it will turn, lead, and try to kill you. Give one your six and it takes the gift.
Fights with a memory, flights with a plan
Bots used to have goldfish memory — they'd swap to whatever enemy was nearest every couple of seconds, spreading damage all over the furball so nobody ever actually went down. A bot now stays on its target while he's alive and in reach, and finishes what it started. Wingmen fly like a flight: a wingman fights his leader's fight, piling onto the leader's target so a whole element brings one enemy down together, and holding tight formation until there's a reason to break. You can finally watch a flight cruise out, turn in, and attack as one — and feel it when they pick you.
The top cover finally flies high
The high patrol — the flight meant to loiter up in the thin air and pounce on climbers — never actually went up there. It dove into the brawl at the deck and stayed. Now it does its real job: it ignores the scrum below, holds the high perch, comes down hard on anything that climbs into its band, and defends itself against whoever tags it. Take the fight upstairs and there's someone waiting for you now.
Add it up and the sky is a real fight instead of a parade: bots that shoot when they should, land their shots, gang up to finish a kill, and guard the high ground. Come get some.