Lag lag lag ! Why why why ?
 

... and it seems to have got worse since the last patch came out.

For a bad pilot like me, it makes it nearly impossible to get off the ground, let alone stay in the air for any length of time.

Yet my pings are reasonably low.

It's not stutter either. My rig can take it. It's lag. Lag lag lag.

This game's been out a month now and it shouldn't be in this state of near unplayablility.

How much FPS do you get when you've got this problem ?
Does your plane teleport itself ?

Well I just went on your server. I was the only one there. I had a ping of 36 and my FPS averaged 4 with a max of 7 ... Needless to say I couldn't even get on the runway !

I had this kind of lag too. On the ground it would take a very long time before i could start the sim because of lag or while nearing the French border chasing a 109 the sim would stop and then the next moment i find myself in the water. In my case it didn't had much to do with connection speed but all with graphic settings. Since i lowered my graphics settings the problem is almost gone or not as drastic as before. Might be that this is what causes your lag too. I hope in a future patch there will be some advanced control over audio settings as well, because i think this also isn't optimised yet and may add to lag.

You're describing my prob near exactly. What are your graphics settings ? I'd like to give them a try.

Here you are:

1440 x 900, 60 Hz
Full Screen
Model detail: High
Building detail: Low
Land detail: Medium
Forest: Low
Visual effects: High
Texture quality: High
Damage decals: High
Buildings amount: Unlimited
Land shading: Medium
Grass: On
Shadows: On
Roads: On
AA: 2x
SSAO: Off
Anti epilepsy: On (because i think reflection of the sun on front windscreen isn't really possible with the angle the screen has)

Land detail and Texture quality are imho the most important contribution to caching (lag cause)

you guys might have joined prior to the server crashing....when our servers crash they become VERY unresponsive :(

Thanks for that. Sadly your settings offered little improvement in playability for me. This lag/stutter prob, whatever it is, has worsened considerably for me since the last patch. Worse than the "beta" version even !

What are your system specs, BluDog? Maybe your settings should even be lower. What also could have helped on my system, i've set my XFX soundcard to lowest processing option (no Soundblaster enhancement and lowest sample frequency).
For me the game improves after every patch. I remember initially there was a lot of cache cleaning going on after i quit the game, this gets less with every patch. Thats almost the same experience i had with the first release of RoF. Which now runs very smooth on my computer.

Those settings are very badly chosen; no wonder you're having trouble. Set building quantity to minimum and disable the epilepsy filter.