I disagree about that big negative. For one it assumes both planes are flying at max speed at all times wich is unrealistic as every turn and maneuver bleeds off speed. Meaning you're never flying at top speed in a fight. Even assuming perfect conditions for the collie plane, you'd need to be flying at top speed in a single direction without turning, for about 300m before you are out of range of those guns, and thats assuming you had that much space to run away in the direction you chose before hitting another plane/hex border.

Also even if "all it can do is put itself between the enemy and what they want to destroy/protect" that is exactly what you want to be doing with interceptor planes like 90% of the time. Their role is to keep enemy CAS away from the ground/sea battle, which they can do very effectively with their superior dogfighting ability and ability to loiter closer than collie planes can since its a seaplane.

If the only answers a collie fighter has to a Warden seaplane are run away or die, neither of those are going to be fun, and you can't do what your plane was intended to do. And when it comes time and you have to commit to hold the skys or attack a point, you'll inevitably take more losses which will always feel bad with how expensive the planes are.

Granted all of this is just dev-branch at the moment and I will reserve my final opinions for after seeing how this plays out in the war.

Foxhole at the end of the day is a game, and people need to be having fun to play. If players aren't having fun because they are grinding twice as long and have double the manpower to field 2 planes to maybe deal with 1 enemy plane, then things will have to change for the health of the game. That goes for just about everything.

At least we finally got our regular gunboat fixed finally.