also to a certain point each duel survived by the ace is a learning experience further stacking the odds in the ace's favor as time goes on
Yeah, in WWII a lot of the Aces flew missions against pure rookies. That really makes em rake up the kills.
Let's take germany's top scoring ace; Erich Hartmann, 345 confirmed soviet planes shot down.
How many of these russians were well trained, well experienced pilots? Possibly none of them.
And during the battle of brittain, the union jacks barely had any time to train their pilots, it sure becomes an easy task to gun down masses of untrained pilots when you've already mastered your own flying skills.
And then you've got to wonder, how many potential super talented ace pilots died young in their carreer? If they just had a slightly more smooth learning curve in their part of the war, or a slightly better plane to fly with. Would the war have gone drastically different if you scratch the luftwaffe's top 5 aces? How many potentially super aces did these aces kill before they could get to their potential?
It's always fun to speculate.
Wonder how insanely good you'd have to be to get through all of FS2 in one go on insane. Even the greatest FS veterans would probably still die/fail an objective once or twice while going through the whole campaign.
Then again, if enough people played it and put enough time in it maybe someone would emerge who'd be able to pull it off, just like A1 is something that had to happen when you have tens of thousands of pilots.
You'd also need to take away all the knowledge and foresight of these FS veterans. I think a lot of FS2 vets can almost dream how every mission goes.
And pretty much every mission in freespace is stacked against you in one way or another. You are pretty much always outnumbered.