That might have been me, although I'm sure I'm not the only person to have thought of it.

Being able to downgrade a plane's performance by up to ~20% or uprate it by ~5-10% would shut up most of the "chart wars" and would eliminate many mods which purport to "fix" a particular plane's FM.

More practically, it would model factors such as manufacturing quality, wear and tear, and higher octane fuel.

a 20% downgrade is absolutly abusive. that would be flying a p51 without a tail section. thats loosing 120 km/h on top speed

i think this should be a difficulty option, and should be editable by mission creator. soemthing like a "plane quality" bar in the main base. if you put it 100% the players who spawn in that base get 100% performing planes. if the missio nmaker lowers that option, some planes start to get mechanical problems, and loosing sped, turn rate and such. evnetually at 0%, there should be a 100% chance you got a bad plane ( 10% speed loss at maximum) and a 50% of mechanical / weapons failure in a 45 min flight.

There are so many other interesting and less controversial features waiting to be incorporated... wouldn't that whole 'fatigue' thing be a waste of valuable resources? :) Anyway, I don't see much point in it.

Holy cow, you guys kept a lot of stuff under wraps :) This will be awesome, that testse mossie is getting its own campaign. Cant wait to try some of my missions with the new AI.

It seems from from this that you don't have a proper view of what FM "modding" is about

An upgrade/downgrade does not make an FM more convicing regarding specific behavioural properties of plane in flight.

Sometimes it is really just about correcting obvious typos...

What about mistakes like a plane using the wrong engines? upgrade or down grade all you want, it is still a mistake.

Take a dive bomber whose dive brakes do not have any effect (just eyecandy) because a typo in the FM? downgrade/upgrade all you want, it won't fix the problem.

What about 2 variants of P-39 in which one has fuel tanks removed to get it ligther, but in game has the weigth & fuel reduction inverted (the ligther variant is actually heavier than the other one)

But sometmes it is about emphazising certain properties over others (say acceleration vs top speed), ie about subjective criteria on what is more important to capture the essence of an aircraft personality.

It is not about "upgrading" and "downgrading"... FMs are not THAT simple. A plane's behaviour is not a linear thing and requires making hard choices.

Selectable fuel grades would also be a good idea.

This is taken as granted, and it's not what we're talking about.

Sometimes performance figures vary across a wide variety of testing circumstances, and each plane can behave slightly differently. It's impossible to make a sim that is 100% correct in terms of top speed, break-up speed, g-limits, ability to absorb damage, etc. So why not add a bit of variability so that "X is actually 5kph faster than Y and thus is intentionally porked" discussions are a thing of the past. Taking into account the hurdles of wartime production and logistics could make a campaign really interesting.

Maybe, but Pursuivant was suggesting that such updrade/downgrade option would eliminate the need for most FM modding.

Just pointing out that this is not really true.

Maori makes a good point that there's more to FM than just improving or degrading performance across the board. The ability to alter FM within certain parameters wouldn't just be top speed, but also things like stall speed, loaded weight, G-stress, turn radius, engine overheat time and a host of other factors.

When I proposed the -20%/+10% figure, I pulled it out of thin air; actual changes to parameters would have to be left up to those who know a lot more about aerodynamics and aviation history.

The idea is that serious reductions to performance would would represent a really beat up plane and/or a plane flying with really poor fuel. They should rightly be very rare. They'd represent things like the AVG's P-40/Hawk 81s towards the end of their service life, the F4Fs of the "Cactus Air Force" after a few months of hard use on Guadacanal, or some of the really poorly built Soviet, Japanese or Luftwaffe airframes.

Slight bonuses over nominal performance would represent factory fresh planes with souped up engines, extra weight removed, fancy wax jobs and the sort of stuff you get on racing planes, not combat aircraft. Souped up combat aircraft did appear occasionally, especially for aces, high ranking officers, factory test planes and/or propaganda purposes.

S~

Does anyone know what the average time span of the "Holiday Season" is?
(From which day to which? Dec. 24th? -->________? )

Oh, and btw.. In patch 4.37, can we please have the random need to urinate,
sneeze or cough added? And while you're at it, if the AI could have the urge
to scratch "this or that" while having me in their sights from time to time, that
would be nice too, or maybe a "light victory cigar" button, either that or a pony.
:mrgreen: ^ Please.. Please realize I am just joking ^ :mrgreen:

Thanks for the info/teasing us worse than the strippers did when we were 18 TD.

Cheers
EZ

*Edit*
D'oh! Just read this after I posted this..

I was wondering that too, but since this is russian game, and in these eastern countries are Christmas celebrated on 7th Jan, we might be quite close ;)