Bay 12 Games Forum

If i understand it right those are simply a bunch of prima donas who will cry about anything that kills them unless it's a nosegun.
Heck you don't even have to kill them. The sole act of using or even having them on your ESF is enough to trigger them.

Use coyotes.
They will fling invective.
Use tomcats
They will fling invective.
Use a G2A launcher they might consider overpowered (like the Striker pre nerf) as a HA.
They will fling invective.

They were the reason G2A launchers where nerfed to the ground and then some (the lockon ranges used to be halfway decent before)
Tomcats were repeatedly slammed with nerfs untill they became borderline useless because they couldn't stand being shot down by a fighter equiped for air combat.
Admittedly tomcats were OP as hell in the begining but they were constantly battered by nerfs that reduced damage and finally made it necessary to keep the target in your crosshair until it hits.
Then people found out that you can lock into people by holding MMB and looking around the cockpit.

But since anything that wasn't a nosegun is persona non grata they whined to nerf tomcats further by reducing the margin of error you get when keeping the crosshair on target and removing the "cockpit" lockon.

So nowadays after all the nerfs the tomcat is an A2A option that needs laser targeting to keep on target and has to hit an ESF 3 times to kill (unless it was nerfed even further after i gave up on the airgame) while an ESF with a nosegun can kill another ESF in seconds.
Basically you are better off with A2G rockets.

Also there were coyotes but since SOE (at the time) didn't want to offend the nosegun pilots with an effective non nosegun weapon they were hot trash from the very beginning.
Of course the prima donas still whined about it so it probably got nerfed since i last played as well.

Oh and they form pacts to farm non "knights" so if you are following a rank 100 pilot and are attacked by a "knight" from the opposing faction there is a good chance that he won't help you... or even attack him after he kills you.

And if you manage to kill one he will usually consider you unworthy (especially if you used lockons) bail and DC while falling to deny you a kill.