I was messing around with bf2 editor and i looked at the lock angles for air to air missiles. Normally you can only lock onto a target from the rear, meaning that one must maneuver behind them, wait for tone, and fire. The lock on angle was normally set to 45 degrees, so I changed it to 360. Now, missiles will track you no matter where you're facing, which isn't to say they're 100% accurate. Far from it. You can still evade missiles, but you need to use a maneuver called "beaming" which means putting the missile perpendicular to your flight path and turning away. I tried this on the computer controlled gulf of Oman and it took some getting used to. Instead of just breaking hard in any direction, you need to have a general understanding of where the threat is, which brings me to my next point. It is possible to create a threat warning receiver? Not that annoying buzzer, but an actual picture of where the threat is. Remember the little bird in vbf2? It automatically spotted enemies. Would it be possible to make the jets and helicopters have a similar device that tracks air threats only? It would be cool.
On the other hand missiles are MUCH more effective. Remember when you watched in disbelief as your missile missed an enemy jet that was less that 50 feet away, and hit a friendly blackhawk full of defenseless medics crashing into the carrier, causing its reactor to have a melt down, vaporizing every man, woman, and spawn point on the map? Well you can all come out of your bomb shelters because that stupidity doesn't happen because the missiles don't miss targets that are within its turn radius. I turned the turn speed down on the missiles, which makes all aspect dogfighting a matter of getting a good missile firing position rather than getting behind someone. ie. ww2 vs now. Oh and helicopters can get hit by missiles now! No more slowing down to stall speed and trying to land 200 rounds or whatever it takes to kill one anymore.
To balance out the missiles, flares should be able to be released two at a time rather than 5 and should be ready on demand (but should have a limited payload, like guns). This is because threats can hit you twice as much (and from any direction).
Anyways the real nice part about this is that missiles will hit you unless you do something about it, unlike vbf2 and some cases of PR. Running away for example is a good suggestion. Its sort of frustrating firing SA-7 after SA-7 and watching the hovering cobra just fly away without dropping flares.
To help you understand the concept, I have prepared this visual aid.
(see attached)
