[Voyager]

Don't know if this has been proposed before, but would it be possible to make the P-51 fuselage fuel tank a Weapon Loadout option? Sort of as a stop-gap for the P-51 CoG issues, until the SoW engine is done.

As I understand it, one of the reasons the P-51 is spiny is because the 85 gallon fuselage tank was installed without any counter balance to it, and adversely impacted the loaded CoG because of it. Typically pilots would drain it before moving on to the drop tanks, but limitations in the Il-2 engine prevent fuel tanks from having independent CoG effects or complex CoG effects.

The idea is have one CoG mapping for the P-51 with the 85 gallon tank starting full, and have a second CoG mapping for when the 85 gallon tank starts empty, on control which one is in use the same way the 109 field mod kits are currently handled. You do start to run into the exponential loadout issue the late war German, but the P-51's only have four loadouts apiece currently.

The real question is, how hard a fix is it? Is this something that's deeply buried in the flight model, and can a loadout flag even change something like that? Is this a five-lines-of-code sort of change, or a suicide-watch-on-the-dev-team sort of change?

Harry Voyager

I almost hesitate to even propose this: it just feels like something that is far less simple than it seems on the surface.