QFA-60

So after hyping the Children of the Drones a bit it was time I designed what they fly in. This is the "rival ace squadron" of my yet-to-be-named Ace Combat fanfiction/reimagination. The whole squadron is children, mostly war orphans from drone strikes or ex-child soldiers who have been observed to posess an uncanny, natural talent in flying ENSI-habilitated aircraft. They are both completely desensitized to violence and their young brains are still very neuroplastic, two traits which combine to make of them deadly pilots which can almost effortlessly bring down the standard AI-flown aircraft of the 2050s, usually by adapting their flight skills from mission to mission faster than what the AIs can keep up with.

The Children of the Drones always sortie in groups of at least seven. They control their aircraft from far away via ENSI datalinks through something called a "COFFIN Hub" and grimly nicknamed the 'mass grave' by ground support staff. This device enables every one of the Children to simultaneously control every aircraft at once, so that the Children do not pilot individual aircraft as much as they collectively fly the entire formation and are able to utilize swarm tactics much more effectively and with a much smaller electronic footprint than networked AI flights. Usually COFFIN hubs cause too much dissonance between the minds of the different pilots to be able to work properly, but the Children synch up almost perfectly.

To exploit their unnatural skills they are given the QFA-60, a distant and significantly upsized development of the older Malebolge-series drones. The QFA-60 is a supermaneuvrable, hypersonic, three-winged suborbital interceptor and air superiority fighter launched ballistically from a flyback rocket booster. The costs of a single sortie are through the roof, but this gives the Children immense reactivity as the entire squadron can bring its force to bear in an hour at most anywhere in the globe. As their ballistic boosters are air-launched from large cargo aircraft, there is usually almost no warning given before the Children arrive to the battlefield and, once they do, they have a kinetic and altitude advantage so significant over even high-altitude scramjet interceptors such as the Aurora that it's almost as if they are drones striking at static ground targets.