The air combat of the Transhuman War (or Pacific War, or WW3, if you prefer) was, at least at first, not particularly different from previous air combat so much as it was just more. More missiles, more jamming, more stealth, more altitude, more speed, more radars, more everything. While the war would end with overwhelming air dominance in favor of the PDT, it didn’t start off that way; the PDT’s road was a long and rocky one.

It should be assumed that all listed aircraft are designed for radar stealth unless otherwise noted, as it is generally an integral component of modern air combat.

Early War (Early 1760 - Summer 1763)

Early-war air combat followed a fairly predictable pattern:

• Acquire targets: Find enemy aircraft via orbital imagery, AWACS, and/or ELINT systems, then burn through their jamming and stealth. “Burn through” is a bit of a misnomer; it's not solely a matter of emitter power and range, but also involves a complex dance of ECM and ECCM algorithms. Very stealthy aircraft, extremely heavy jamming, and/or very long ranges can prevent burn-through entirely.
• Long-range engagement: Once a halfway decent track and ID on a target is acquired, launch long-range missiles in sufficient volume to overwhelm the targets’ defensive jamming, stealth, countermissile and directed-energy interception capabilities. In most cases, this only secures kills if one side is significantly more capable or numerous than the other. At this point in the war, ODI was generally more capable of winning long-range engagements, since they could field more fighters than the PDT due to their larger industrial base.
• Short-range engagement: Close the distance and engage with short-range missiles, guns, and directed-energy weapon (DEWs). In most cases, short-range engagements didn’t occur unless the side with a speed advantage pursued them.

In practice, early-war air combat was fought by radar, electronic warfare, datalinks, and anti-missile defenses, particularly the PDT’s pencil-beam weaponized radars and ODI’s miniaturized interceptor pods. While early air victories during the “speedbump invasions” of 1760 gave the PDT plenty of optimism, ODI was quick to modify their doctrine, banning dogfights in all but the most exigent scenarios in order to prevent any repeats. PDT pilots could easily survive missile hits, but their aircraft could not— and ODI could produce a lot more aircraft than the PDT. Within a few months, PDT air victories were restricted to areas where they had some sort of home-field advantage, be it ground, sea, or orbital. For ground attack roles, both sides used terrain-hugging flight, with standoff missile and glide bomb attacks performed by strategic bombers.

PDT

Practically all PDT fixed-wing combat airframes were designed either by the Northern Union exclusively, or by international cooperatives mainly based in the Union. This was mostly due to a combination of the rather extreme cost of designing and prototyping a new aircraft, and the robust “hobbyist” flight industry in the Union. After the start of the war, this continued for a different reason: deeper Union territory was largely safe from ODI air and artillery strikes.

The main advantage the PDT held in the air was that of transhumanism. Practically all PDT pilots were draconics by birth, and had innate understandings of flight based on decades of dragon-form flight, games, and sparring. Further improvements came from HP-F forms, which massively improved their users’ G tolerances. ODI doctrine relied on standoff tactics to nullify these advantages, and actively avoided close-range engagements.

FI-23-U2 Beowulf

A twin-seat, twin-engine interceptor with forward-swept wings and vectored thrust nozzles, the FI-23 entered service in 1723 and was the primary fighter for the Northern Union until the MN-44 entered production in 1744. While they were revolutionary for their time (introducing the concept of thrust vectoring and forward wing sweep), they were very much showing their age when the war broke out in 1760, particularly in their avionics. The -U2 version rolled out in 1761 improved avionics performance significantly and added a dorsal laser link, but they were still not long for this world. The remaining Beowulfs were scrapped in early 1765 to recover the silver alloys used in their construction, which were desperately needed for the Blacklight program.

MN-44-U1 Talon

A single-engine, twin-tail, diamond-wing multirole naval fighter that entered production in 1744, and the PDT’s only carrier-capable platform for the entire war. Talons were widely exported and produced in PDT nations, and were the first aircraft to employ weaponized radar emitters. They were generally considered a good jack-of-all trades at a reasonable price, though their limited top speed (Mach 2.3 on full burner, Mach 1.7 supercruise) became very apparent when compared to newer ODI fighters.

MA-47 Valkyrie

A two-seater, twin-engine, twin-tail, modified delta-wing multirole attack aircraft used by the Union, Australia, and Japan. While slightly faster than Talons (Mach 2.5 max, Mach 1.9 supercruise), their main features were a much longer range, improved payload capacity, and the addition of a WSO, though this came at the cost of being carrier-capable. Valkyries were the PDT’s primary land-based strike fighter throughout the entire war.

FI-52 Lancer

A modified delta-wing/lifting body, twin-engine tailless heavy interceptor. Lancers were the fastest aircraft in the sky when they entered service in 1752, with a sustained top speed of Mach 3.5. However, they were expensive to build and operate, which limited their deployment numbers despite their effectiveness, and they were quickly matched by ODI Gammas in the air.

BN-13-U4 Hurricane

A swing-wing supersonic stealth bomber that was nearly 50 years old at the start of the war, the Hurricane was generally used as a standoff munitions truck, since it wasn't fast enough to evade modern fighters.

BN-54 Aurora

A medium-sized hypersonic twin-engine delta-wing/lifting body bomber, primarily designed for nuclear delivery but relegated to being a standoff munition truck. Auroras were capable of sustained Mach 6 flight and were equipped with a powerful laser interception suite.

ODI

Following the severe fighter losses they took during the initial weeks of invasions (particularly in the South China Sea), ODI entirely ceased attempting to dogfight PDT aircraft, and instead opted for less deadly but safer stand-off tactics, which was largely successful. While ODI didn’t have total air superiority, this effectively ended any PDT attempts at offensive strikes or counter-invasions in the Pacific.

Pre-war Indian-made aircraft were officially given Greek letters for names; the PDT simply referred to them as such. Chinese aircraft were not given official names, and were referred to by reporting names instead.

HAL Epsilon

A follow-on to the failed HAL Delta project, the Epsilon was a modern single-engined, single-tail, trapezoidal-wing fighter that entered service in 1752, intended to overmatch the Talons in wide use by the PDT. While they were slightly more performant than -U1 Talons, their real advantage was that ODI could build two for every Talon that the PDT produced. Widely exported to all ODI member nations, Epsilons were the most numerous fixed-wing aircraft of the war.

BH241 Gamma

A high-supersonic delta-wing, twin-tailed, twin-engine strike fighter that was roughly equivalent to the PDT’s Lancer. Gammas were ODI’s main high-performance fighter of the early war, and were used to counter PDT Lancers and Auroras in addition to suppressing the more numerous Talons. While they couldn’t keep up with an Aurora, interception was still possible with sufficient early warning.

DRD-N1A7 “LOZENGE”

A joint project between ODI air forces, the Lozenge was an oblique flying wing AWACS platform, capable of efficient flight in both subsonic and supersonic regimes. The design itself was extremely controversial because of its extreme asymmetry, and it remains a mystery as to how it got through the various committees to enter production. Nevertheless, the design is efficient, and still has its adherents even in the post-war world. The initial version used a high-power LIDAR/designator system to improve IR missile seeking for its allies; later versions would upgrade this to a full laser intercept system.

J-85N “DENTIST”

An aging fighter, J-85s made up for their lack of stealth or high speed by being extremely cheap to operate. While most would be lost in the first few years of the war, they provided an important stopgap to allow the production of more modern airframes to ramp up. Their airframes may have been 55 years old, but their weapons and avionics were brand-new, allowing them to at least pose a threat to modern fighters.

J-101K “FLORIST”

A slightly more modern multirole fighter that still entirely lacks stealth, J-101Ks were comparable to the Talon in flight performance, but were cheaper to produce and had nearly double the payload capacity. In practice, a lot of this capacity had to be dedicated to countermissiles or jamming pods to make up for their lack of radar stealth. Early engagements with PDT fighters went poorly, but this was quickly corrected with changes to doctrine and tactics. J-101s were widely exported throughout the war due to their combination of low production cost and all-around effectiveness.

H-99 “WAITER”

A small dart-shaped, single-engine subsonic stealth bomber that used the old angular style of stealth geometry, the H-99 was the first true stealth aircraft ever produced. While it was quite out of date when the war began, it was brought into service as a strike fighter, launching anti-air missiles in pop-up attacks and performing small-scale ground strikes. Surprisingly, its low thermal signature kept it serviceable in the modern battlefield, even if its radar stealth wasn’t really up to par. H-99 production was not restarted during the war, and they were gradually phased out as they took losses.

H-101 “BAKER”

A large, twin-engine subsonic flying wing that served as ODI’s primary strategic bomber, H-101s were extraordinarily stealthy in all but the visual bands and included a powerful laser interception system. While this didn’t prevent orbital detection, it did make them quite difficult to engage with long-range missiles (which were generally IR/radar multimode seekers).

Mid-War (Summer 1763 - Spring 1765)

Mid-war air combat was dominated by the presence of Indian-made H-1000 Garuda hypersonic interceptors and PDT orbital payload sleds. The systems and strategy of combat didn’t change much, but Garudas’ near-invulnerability to fighter interception and the PDT’s ability to deploy hundreds of tons of munitions within minutes made airspace increasingly dangerous for both sides. While PDT air forces were already mostly suppressed, ODI’s air superiority approached true air dominance by the time the first Blacklight flights and squadrons entered service in mid-1765.

Towards 1765, sustained orbital bombardment of ODI defense industry put increasing limits on the availability of high-performance aerospace components and many computer components (and thus, the missiles and jets that needed them). ODI demand for complex ordnance actually decreased through the mid-war period, as most conflicts of the time were primarily infantry-based, which prevented the effects of this from being felt until later in 1766.

PDT

CN-2000 Lighthouse

A flying wing AWACS, the Lighthouse replaced the aging CN-1000 Heimdal, which was based on a militarized passenger jet. CN-2000s are unique for being the only aircraft of the war to mount a thaumic electrolaser (TEL), which allowed them to intercept munitions that lasers or radars could not. While they were very vulnerable to the guns of ODI Garudas, they were the only airborne platform of the war that was capable of intercepting hypersonic targets with a directed-energy weapon instead of much more costly missiles.

BI-54 Shimmer

A refit of the BN-54 Aurora for air combat rather than nuclear delivery. Because Auroras were the only hypersonic craft the PDT had, when ODI Garudas entered the scene in late 1763, they were the only available option for an airborne counter. Shimmers were equipped with massive naval radars, and filled their bomb bay with hypersonic missiles and counter-missiles instead of air-to-ground munitions. While they were completely ineffective in hypersonic knife-fights due to their poor maneuverability, they could fill the air with a terrific amount of ordnance.

Strategic Payload Sled (“DINER BLUE”)

The DINER BLUE program was the weaponization of the North American Launch Rail (NALR), the Union’s 1200km-long ground-to-orbit launch rail. While intended for use in space exploration (really, NALR construction was a jobs program during an economic slump), it was feasible to use it for deployment of orbital weaponry. Most DINER BLUE launches were dummy payloads, intended to waste ODI’s anti-orbital weapons, since it was far cheaper to launch something into orbit than it was for them to shoot it down with rocket-based weapons.

Live DINER BLUE payloads consisted of a mix of artillery, ECM/surveillance hypersonic glide vehicles, and pods of long-range air-to-air missiles. Live payloads were always deorbited along with several dummy payloads to complicate interception. Typically, a combatant with sufficient authority would request a certain available component (such as JUKEBOX jamming HGVs or HARDBOIL missile canisters), and the remaining payload would be distributed to any unit that could respond in time to the notification of availability.

In practice, DINER BLUE was a military success that only narrowly avoided political disaster. Weaponization of space was deeply unpopular in the African Federation, whose material and economic support for the PDT was crucial to the war effort, and they almost pulled their support over the program. However, it was tremendously effective at ensuring Southeast Asian countries (particularly Indonesia and Japan) held the line, tying up millions of ODI troops for years.

ODI

J-1X “WASHER”

A fully-automated, single-engine tailless flying wing designed to serve as both missile truck, dogfighter, and sensor platform, J-1Xs were intended to expand ODI’s numerical advantage in the air, carrying additional missiles and helping offset pilot losses from attrition. In practice, the drones were dubiously useful— they were not so cheap as to be disposable like intended, and they couldn’t reliably maintain control links in jamming-heavy environments. This led to them being used to deliver an initial missile volley and then retreat, instead of closing for close-range combat where they were intended to win against transhuman pilots. They saw the heaviest use on the Russian front, where Russia’s lack of trained combat pilots by 1763 made them an attractive option.

H-1000 Garuda

A twin-tailed, twin-engined, angular delta wing hypersonic fighter, Garudas were tremendously effective in achieving air superiority after their initial deployment in late 1763. With a large payload, extremely powerful radars, and a massive speed advantage (top speed of Mach 6.2), they were capable of taking on many times their number in lesser aircraft, and could evade all but the highest-performance air defenses. They were also fantastically expensive to build and operate, but the PDT had no real answer to them beyond a crude refit of their own hypersonic bomber. Garudas made notable use of a pair of superimposed hypervelocity ETC cannons to allow them to use guns at hypersonic speeds; these guns used grids of electronically-fired barrels with rounds stacked inside each barrel.

Late-war (Spring 1765 - Summer 1768)

Late-war air combat was dominated by the PDT’s IS-64 Blacklight strategic interceptors, used in conjunction with an expanded DINER BLUE program. Blacklights were so effective in the air that they quickly became the tip of the spear in all PDT aerial operations, opening the skies for their allies.

Of further consequence was the African Federation's entry into the war following the bombing of Davao in 1766, bringing their sizeable military and industrial base to the war and turning the tide of production back in favor of the PDT. Federal air presence was fairly muted despite the size of their naval air forces; the additional airpower had relatively little effect beyond making ODI’s air defeat even more severe.

Even without the near-total air superiority the PDT achieved in the last years of the war, ODI’s war industry was still facing systemic supply chain issues by 1767. They struggled to produce sufficient numbers of guided munitions for their ground troops, much less the advanced munitions and electronic components needed to maintain their air presence.

PDT

IS-64 Blacklight

A very large twin-engine, twin-tail, delta-wing/lifting body strategic interceptor, Blacklights were designed almost entirely around countering Garudas. They were faster (top speed of Mach 9.5), significantly more maneuverable (60G peak acceleration), carried a larger payload, and mounted a guided railgun with a much longer range than Garudas’ ETCs. While this was itself enough to make Blacklights capable of winning against Garudas, the primary advantage was that the aircraft were designed to make use of a “full-immersion” sensory system, allowing a pilot with a specific engineered form (the blob-like HP-FS) to perceive themselves as if they were the entire plane instead of a person piloting it. This form could endure extreme sustained G-forces, allowing Blacklights to kinematically defeat most enemy missiles by out-turning or out-running them.

Because most pilots could not wear the HP-FS without severe psychological symptoms, specific pilots with extreme tolerance for (and interest in) nonhuman forms were recruited via the MYSTIC GREEN program. These individuals effectively fused with the planes’ sensory apparatus to become an airframe-pilot complex instead of just a person flying a plane. This system proved so effective that Blacklights routinely engaged three times their number in Garudas without damage. ODI designers would not manage to develop a practical offensive counter for them for the remainder of the war, though sufficiently powerful directed-energy or strategic air defense was effective at preventing overflights of mainland India and China.

Blacklights were capable of exoatmospheric flight (but not orbit) with an external oxidizer tank, a capability used to save on fuel for long-distance flights, since maintaining speed outside of the atmosphere was free. In practice, this capability was rarely used, and the second half of the production run omitted the mount points and piping for the external tank entirely.

African Federation

Federal air doctrine was primarily oriented towards police actions, not a sustained conflict with a peer. This is not to say that they lacked high-performance fighters— the Federal Air Force had no trouble equipping their massive supercarriers with full complements of supersonic jets —but structurally, they were not set up for a sustained high-intensity campaign. Fortunately, this didn’t particularly matter for their aerial presence, since Blacklights could easily take the pressure off of their fighters, and overall the FAF spent most of their time in the war conducting ground support.

A-57 Cheetah

A single-engine, single-tail, short trapezoidal wing, carrier-capable multirole fighter, the Cheetah was very similar in purpose and performance to the Union's MN-44, trading a little bit of speed for a little more maneuverability. They were far cheaper to make and operate than the bleeding-edge A-70s, so they stayed in service. They were widely exported before the war, with some even being sold to Vietnam in 1744, though they never ended up getting a mirror matchup in combat.

A-70 Thunder

A single-engine, twin-tail, delta-wing/lifting-body fighter, the Thunder was the first production fighter to be capable of hypersonic speeds, and also the first (and so far, only) carrier-capable hypersonic aircraft. Despite their size (barely larger than the Cheetah), they were far more expensive to produce and operate, so Federal air doctrine used a mix of A-70s and A-57s. Unlike their larger competitors (the Blacklight and Garuda), Thunders were not initially designed around particularly powerful radar or DEW suites, and required difficult refits to be competitive in the modern battlespace.

B-4 Cyclone

A strategic bomber variant of the Federation’s venerable S-4 SSTO spaceplane that replaces the passenger cabin and parts of the fuel tank with bomb bays. While not the first hypersonic aircraft to enter mainline production (the S-4 was the first), it was the first hypersonic military aircraft. Unlike future designs, Cyclones had no stealth features whatsoever. Instead, they used a massive array of countermissiles, extremely powerful ECM systems, and a naval-grade laser engagement system to survive in hostile airspace. Unlike the Blacklight, the Cyclone was capable of full suborbital maneuvers on internal tanks alone, and its spacecraft-grade ablative reentry shielding made it very resistant to lasers at high altitude.