[Nowhere Man]

It’s the pilot not the plane.

Agreed, the training of the pilot, his/her skills and the application of his/her ship is what is important (of course you can add in intangibles too such a luck, divine intervention and what else you can think of) but the first three are important. It is quite possible where you could have an F-100/MiG-19 win over a Su-30/F-22 although if I had to take something up, I'd want at least an F-4 or something made from 1960/1965 onward. Actually jet fighter performance in the physical world such as max speed, range and maneuverability pretty much plateaued at about 1960, from then on, it was mainly improvements in avionics/computers and stealth, the latter I think is overrated IMHO.

I'm a believer in Kurt Vonnegut where he wrote in his 1958 story, "The Manned Missiles," where you had UAV's fight each other in the future to a stalemate where you had the idea of using manned aircraft and manned kamikaze missiles being used to overcome the artificial intelligences of the UAV's.

[SkyDancer]

But the UAV’s are manned to an extent. It’d be one ground pilot against another. My feeling is that when your plane is out of missiles what are you left with? Guns. And the one who is up on ACM will win the day.