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Recommended Skill Level: Medium
Availability: Rarely sold in premium shop
Similar tech tree plane: P-51H (somewhat loose), XP-72 (loose)
Equipment Slots: Cockpit, airframe, engine, engine, ordnance
Consumable Slots: Cockpit, airframe, engine, ammo, ordnance
Pros:
Extremely high cruise speed (620KPH clean, 600KPH fully loaded)
Very high cruise acceleration
Decent dive acceleration
Good climb rate
Very good controllability
Tied for best maneuverability of any HF in the game (12.3s)
Great at low speed maneuvers, doesn't suffer much controllability loss below minimum optimal speed
Extremely accurate guns with great autoaim
Extremely long burst length (as in, better than most .50 cal-equipped planes in the game)
All guns are center-mounted
Center-mounted rockets
Decent ordnance load
Twin-fuselage, hard to hit in head-ons
Cons:
Very low boost speed (740KPH clean, 715KPH fully loaded)
Below-average boost acceleration
Below-average altitude (2000m)
Somewhat fragile
Below-average gun range (600m)
Awkward ordnance load (unable to reach a lot of damage breakpoints for optimal multirole-ing
Opinion: A decent plane with the ability to become a strong one. Sound familiar? That's because it is, this plane takes a lot of cues from its USAAF counterpart, the P-82B. However despite this it's unique in its own right thanks to the tweaked stats and armament. I feel like there's a certain meme about copying homework that would be relevant here. The cruise acceleration and cruise speed is fantastic making the F-82E surprisingly fast despite the horrific boost speed. It suffers from the same altitude issues of the P-82B but the F-82E has a superior climb rate to further alleviate such issues. Curiously the F-82E is better at cruise-climbing while the P-82B is better at boost-climbing due to their differences in respective accelerations (at least it feels like this is the case, I have yet to do extremely thorough tests.)
The agility of the F-82E is truly fantastic for an HF allowing you to easily dominate any HF in a dogfight and even start picking fights against LF's and MRF's; P-82B flight model with even better turn time and controllability. This makes it the most maneuverable HF in the entire game to my understanding, however it doesn't have the tightest turning circle, 434KPH minimum optimal speed is a touch higher than P-82B minimum optimal speed which presents a bit of a problem for low-speed dogfighting.
In terms of firepower, the F-82E is great. 576 DPS and 660m range might seem lacking for an HF but in tandem with high accuracy and autoaim, the F-82E is EXTREMELY lethal as it's always able to use all of that DPS. The P-82B has a lead wall, the F-82E has a homing beam, very different gun setups that require you to play differently. Where P-82B just simply chainsaws through enemies in a flash after adjusting your fire a bit, F-82E uses its superior agility to ensure that its homing beam melts targets. The ordnance of the F-82E isn't bad but is very... awkward, to say the least, only 5 rockets while using XP-44 bombs leads to many missed damage breakpoints and in general greatly hampers the ability of the F-82E to flip heavier sectors.
Like the P-82B, the F-82E has a drastic improvement when specialized and fully kitted out. Honestly you should just read my P-82B review since most of this section is just copy-paste with a couple of changed numbers however the configurability is more limited here due to the awkward ordnance. Something to note is that full turn build on the F-82E is quite hilarious seeing as how you can bring the turn time down to 10.7s when you have Aerodynamics Expert. This makes you more maneuverable than the P-51H however bear in mind your roll rate isn't all that hot compared to it so don't go too crazy trying to turnfight people. With some effort the P-82B could dogfight Vampires, with turn build F-82E you can dogfight specialized Vampires (sort of, the inability to chainsaw them makes you more prone to getting stuck into a low-speed fight.) Overall equipment isn't a total day/night change, probably closer to a cloudy day/moonlit night change.
Overall this is an easier to use but ultimately weaker P-82B. The extremely easy to use guns and fantastic agility allow you to pick fights with many aircraft while the excellent cruise characteristics allow you to move at very consistent speeds and outlast would-be pursuers. However it's ultimately slower with less ability to kill air and ground targets than its USAAF counterpart. I haven't fully fallen for this plane, but I greatly enjoy it. After all, it's more of a good thing with just enough changed to make it a new experience.
I really should look into more precise language, me thinks, I've actually had to format the opinion here because there's just so much I want to talk about in regards to this thing.
Fun bit of trivia: this review initially used the F-82E image from the World of Warplanes website which is identical to the P-82B, but after tinkering with some files I managed to extract the icon from the game.