Let's see how far this derails the thread with bitter hatred for me:
You know what these aircraft really need? Iron sites.
Alright, now on to my actual idea (which people may still hate me for
)
Here we see an image from inside an F18. If you were to center the camera a little, it would be pretty close to what the pilot would be able to see, and would take up maybe half as much of the screen space as the current Mosquito cockpit view. More over it provides a much clearer view of the ground except in the middle of the picture.
One problem with this view, if it were what we saw inside the Mosquito, is that it has too broad a viewing angle and would make it much harder to engage targets at longer range. This is actually one of the issues that iron sites (when done well) seeks to solve. Allowing players to have a wider viewing angle when dealing with closer targets, then zooming in a little bit to simulate focusing on more distant targets.
What I would propose is that pilots be given two in cockpit views to toggle between. One view would be more like the F18 picture (with more viewable area than the current skeeter cockpit view), and the other being more zoomed in, like this:
Only with the cross hairs more centered and without that big red thing.
By default, the same control that toggled iron sights could be used to toggle between these two views, so it would be easier for new players to learn, although it should be able to be customized separately. Maybe the zoomed in view would be the default position, while the pulled back view would automatically switch you to free look.
If the free look were good enough, it may cut out a lot of (not all of) the need for a 3rd person view.
Obviously the viewing angles would have to be adjusted so that the zoomed in view wasn't quite as bad as it is in my hastily cropped example, but essentially what it would hopefully do is give a in cockpit view that was almost as good as a completely unobscured view.
Most of the work for the idea should already be done if the devs already have freelook inside the cockpit included. All it would require is figuring the best positioning the the camera inside the cockpit and the best viewing angles for zoomed out and zoomed in.