[Les]

I too don't have any real knowledge, and so, funnily enough, am free to discuss it.

There's next to no chance of seeing any more Grumman planes in the official Il-2 series, as Grumman won't let representations of their aircraft be used for free. You'd have to be making a paid add-on for it to be worthwhile and I don't think even Team Daidalos will be doing that.

I'd like to think that by the time the new Storm Of War series gets back to the Pacific, if it ever does, that Oleg will be prepared to pay the Grumman fees and we'll see those planes looking better than ever. But who knows?

As for my interpretation of events, which should not be taken as fact, I thought the whole affair was a petty cash-grab from Grumman. At the time, they were targetting plastic-model-kit makers as well, and at least gave the impression that any hobbyist using images of their planes was also fair game for litigation. I also read or got the impression that Oleg himself thought of Grumman's demands as a form of extortion from the greedy capitalists in the U.S. He was annoyed too because it had been someone elses responsibility to make sure the legal bases were covered, but they stuffed up and left Oleg to pay the bill, which he might have just palmed off to Ubisoft anyway. (Pacific Fighters, the add-on in which the Grumman planes appeared, was done mostly by and at the instigation of, Ilya and his crew, unlike the rest of the Il-2 series.) A similar thing happened with the cover-art on the Pacific Fighters retail boxes, which had stuff in it that Oleg himself wouldn't have included. In fact it might have been the use of the Grumman name on that which alerted the legal eagles at Grumman that someone might have done something they could make money off. Along those lines, it was also pointed out that, just by coincidence, some head honcho at Grumman had recently moved over to work for Microsoft just before all this shit went down, and back then Microsoft's CFS3 was still competing with Il-2... but that's getting into conspiracy-theory territory, and this is about rumours and hearsay, not conspiracies, so, yeah...I can't remember if there were any more Grumman Planes in development that never saw the light of day after all this happened, but I think there were.

All in all it was a shame more wasn't made of the whole Pacific theatre side of the sim, but really, to do it justice would have required a whole other team of developers. There was just too much to do. Hopefully any add-ons for SOW won't be so half-arsed. But again, who knows. In cases like this I find it better not to expect anything, or to think of what could have been.