Airframes

Six aircraft. The airframe sets your hit points, contributes three signature cards, and decides how many hardpoints you can carry.

AF-01 is never sold. Selling something every pilot is given free reads as a swindle.

The starter is the weakest, on purpose

The Interceptor wins about 30 per cent of its fights against the rest of the roster. That is not an oversight and it is not going to be patched: it is the reason a second airframe is worth having. If the free aircraft matched the ones you buy or grind for, nothing you did to get another one would be felt.

What it is not allowed to be is unplayable. The PvE ladder is tuned around the starter, so a new pilot still wins the opening battles of an encounter comfortably; what the starter cannot do is beat the aircraft flown by people who have gone further. Those two things are locked by separate tests, so neither can drift into the other.

Balance is a gate, not a hope

An automated round-robin fails the build if any airframe lands outside a 40 to 60 per cent win rate. The starter is held to its own band, 25 to 35, for the reason above. Every other airframe, the ones you can actually acquire, is held to 40 to 60 exactly as before, because the things you pay or grind for must not beat each other.

It is why the flagship is expensive rather than strong: it wins through an exclusive bench of AF-05 modules, not through a bigger number, and the hardest opponent in the game was never nerfed to make room for it.

Getting one

The crate drop. Airframes are minted on chain as NFTs and come out of sealed crates. See The crate drop.

Be clear about what a crate is today: an on-chain collectible, not a key to the hangar. Owning the token does not yet put that aircraft in your hangar or let you fly it, and nothing in the game reads your wallet's tokens. Redeeming one in game is not built. The airframes you fly come from your own progression, and while the Showroom is closed that means the one you started with.

The Showroom is closed for as long as that is true, because a shelf price and a crate selling the same aircraft undercut each other. When the drop is done it reopens as a market for aircraft other pilots are selling.

What the server believes

The match server never takes the client's word for which aircraft you fly. It reads the airframe from your own player object, server to server, and discards whatever the wire claimed. The af and pl values that used to ride in the URL were only ever a display hint, and they are gone now.

That is what stops anyone flying an airframe they do not own.