The Starfang: a jet you have to earn

July 3, 2026 · feature

There's a new card in the hangar, and it starts out grey. The Starfang is an early jet in the Starfighter mold — needle nose, razor wings, tip tanks, T-tail, a missile with a man in it — carrying a six-barrel 20 mm Vulcan and pods of unguided rockets where everyone else carries bombs. It's the game's first career-locked aircraft: down 25 enemy planes over your lifetime and it's yours, forever. Until then the card counts your kills at you.

The crimson Starfang early jet climbing hard against the morning sky, afterburner lit, tip tanks and T-tail catching the light, a prop fighter far astern — Climbing away on the burner. The Sparrowhawk astern is at full throttle. It doesn't matter.

A jet among warbirds

Dropping a jet interceptor into a prop furball sounds like heresy, and the Starfang flies like it means to keep its real vices. That wing is tiny — the real F-104 was famous for it — so it stalls early and bleeds speed hard the moment you haul on the stick. It out-runs every prop in the sky by a wide margin and out-climbs them on sheer thrust, but drop it below 250 km/h in a turning fight with a Sparrowhawk and you're a very expensive glider. Boom-and-zoom isn't a suggestion here; it's the only game the airframe will let you play. And that speed cuts both ways: fly predictable straight lines and the flak leads you just fine — a jet eats an 88 like anything else.

The gun matches the era jump. The six-barrel Vulcan fires thirty rounds a second — two and a half times the .50s, four times the Hispano — in a hot, flat tracer stream that reads almost solid. Snapshots that would be prayers with cannon become bursts you can walk onto the target. It hits about as hard per second as the prop guns do, so the jet's edge is energy, not raw firepower: use the speed, not the trigger.

Rockets: a third way to bring the pain

Bombs fall, torpedoes swim, and now rockets fly. Each one leaves the rail fast and nearly flat, its motor holding the arc until it hits — terrain, a tank, an emplacement, a freighter, or a plane unlucky enough to cross the lane. The burst carries like a bomb, so a pair into an armored column shreds the whole neighborhood. You carry fourteen per sortie, rippling off alternating rails while you hold B, and the carrier deck re-arms them like everything else. Each round trails a hot orange motor plume, so a full ripple reads like a ladder of fire walking onto the target.

A rocket pass on an armored column: the Starfang boring in low over its own rockets, orange motor plumes down the lane, the lead tank already a column of black smoke — Fourteen to a pod, nearly flat off the rails. The lead tank found out first.

An unlock you have to earn

The gate is your career record: 25 lifetime kills on your pilot history. Until then the card sits grey in the hangar and counts your kills back at you. When the 25th finally lands, the card opens live, mid-session, with a toast — and the feed announces to the whole lobby who just earned their jet. A little public ceremony for a milestone that takes most pilots weeks.

Two deliberate exceptions. Bots never fly it — the lobby stays the tuned five-prop mix, and the jet stays what it is: proof a human earned something. And flight school hands you one free — the new Jet & Rockets drill drops you above an armored column with a full pod, because the best advertisement for a 25-kill grind is ninety seconds in the cockpit you're grinding toward.

Progression in a pick-up dogfighter has to be a trophy, not a treadmill: one aircraft, one number, earned in public. Everything else in the hangar is still free on day one.