Killercraft

Killercraft was the for a fighter aircraft used by The Race, a reptilian alien race who invade Earth during World War II in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series of alternate history novels. The Killercraft is, like most Race weapons technologies, roughly comparable in capabilities to a real-world fighter jet of the 1990s. The aircraft was capable of flying at speeds greater than the speed of sound, and could fly at an altitude high enough to land on Race spaceship, allowing them to operate even in areas where airstrips were unavailable. The Killercraft was armed with 18 air-to-air missiles and at least one radar-controlled cannon for close range armament, and could also be equipped with air-to-ground and even nuclear weapons for ground attack missions.

When the Race invaded in 1942, the Killercraft easily destroyed almost the entirety of human air forces with their superior firepower, and were subsequently used in a ground attack role. While the Race held near total air superiority at the start of the war, they suffered from the crucial weakness of being isolated from their homeworld, and unable to replace destroyed craft or expended missiles. As the Race had fought only two conflicts in the last 100,000 years, their aerial tactics were far more primitive than those of humans, and human military forces, the British in particular, developed tactics to defeat them using radar and massed anti-aircraft guns.

As more the war dragged on, more Killercraft were lost due to anti-aircraft fire and could not be replaced, and advanced munitions such as guided missiles ran low. The major powers of the US, USSR, British, Germany, and Japan, on the other hand, could replace their aircraft, and Germany and the UK even produced their own, albeit much less advanced jets. In the end, the Race conquered some smaller countries on Earth, but failed their efforts to conquer the major powers of Earth.

By the Race-German War of 1965, the Race discovered, much to their alarm, that humanity had created fighter aircraft and other weapons nearly on par with their own. By 2035, the human race had completely technologically surpassed the slow-advancing Race, even managing to create faster-than-light capable spacecraft, which the Race failed to invent.