Quote:
Originally Posted by JG27CaptStubing
Sounds pretty anecdotal to me...
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-Well you would be surprised how consistent front-line fighter pilots descriptions are, without most of them having ever gathered in one room to conspire to tell the exact same same story...
Note at the end of my original post how
both the British and Russian sources I linked observed the exact same thing: The lighter Me-109G diving and extending away from above, while the heavier FW-190A stayed low and "stayed" in the fight by turning horizontally against lightweight fighters...:
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=15392
I have read thousands of combat reports, and most of them make no sense at all if you don't accept that the FW-190A out-turns the Me-109G, and most other Western types also if it downthrottles, during low speed sustained turns...
Surprisingly, side-by-side tests with unfamiliar test pilots are a lot more hit-and-miss than combat anecdotes, and the US Navy's Fw-190A tests in particular do little more than regurgitate what they assumed beforehand to be true... Plus the aircrafts they tested were badly out of tune in the crucial aileron adjustment, since they could not even detect the FW-190A's superior roll rate! This led to an official wartime rebuttal of this test by the British RAE, with a document sent to the US Navy indicating the F4U and FW-190A are in no way equal in roll rate, as the US Navy test claimed!
In addition to roll rate, the ailerons are also a crucial part of the FW-190A's low-speed sustained turn performance: They are used to "catch" the stall's wing drop, and the turn then "rides" on the aileron, as one FW-190A pilot described it...
Note I spent fifteen years researching these issues to create a full colour boardgame simulation based on the Avalon Hill's "Air Force" system: They may be just anecdotes, but I have found over fifteen years of research that they painted an infinitely more coherent picture than any math-based conclusion I ever read...
http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/t...708#5031083708
Sadly, there is one mistake that is left in my game that I will likely never fix: Only the P-47D Razorback is depicted, but I assumed that the paddle-blade propeller made it a better-turning aircraft in sustained turns...
It then occurred to me that from May of 1944 forward, the P-47D no longer seems to be competitive with the FW-190A in sustained level turns in the 600 combat reports I studied here:
http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.o...r-reports.html
I assumed that it was the introduction of the fuel-heavier "Bubbletop" variant that made it somehow less maneuverable, which is why I limited my game Data Card to the Razorback variant... Maybe the different shape worsened the handling? That was my reasoning at any rate...
But now I am having doubts: The Bubbletop variant barely started to be delivered in April of 1944, and the loss of maneuverability in sustained level turns is evident almost simultaneously in that period, when most P-47Ds would still be "Razorbacks"... This noticeable difference in sustained turn performance seemed to be because of something introduced earlier...
It was this Luftwaffe assesment I saw later that increased my doubts: They tested a captured P-47D "Razorback" which, in addition to having the "handicap" of a narrow needletip-bladed prop, could not be run at full War Emergency Power... They only barely got up to "Military Power" on it, and it was sluggish compared to a P-51B in speed and
especially in climb performance...
Despite this, this was their surprising conclusion: A flat-out: "The P-47D out-turns our Bf-109G". (Source: "On Special missions: KG 200")The lack of qualification of course means sustained turning, since unsustained high-speed turns are usually accompanied by a turn radius figure, and are often of only 180° of duration for the radius...
This sustained turn performance was puzzling to me for an underpowered P-47D running a needletip prop... It shouldn't have been if I had been logical in applying my "prop load traction loading the wing" theory...
Only then did it strike me that the introduction of the Paddle-blade propeller on the P-47D started in January of 1944, requiring about two to four months to be really generalized: About the same timeline as when poorer sustained turns seems to be observed as a matter of course against the FW-190A...
One P-47D pilot said of the Paddle-blade prop: "It was like having 3 or four hundred extra horsepower pulling"... A significant improvement in climb rate. On the FW-190A I knew a broader prop blade allowed it to sustain speed better when downthrottled "It gave more "bite" in the slow-speed turns", said one FW-190A Western ace pilot who used downthrottling in turns...
So it should also be better on a P-47D... But then I never heard, in those 600 reports linked above, of a P-47D pilot downthrottling, except very briefly to avoid overruns: With such a heavy aircraft it just didn't seem right to downthrottle in sustained level turns I suppose...
But at full power, if you have less power to begin with, and a needletip prop which is like 3-400 horsepower LESS, then you unwittingly sustain tighter slow-speed turns better because the prop disc is less loaded, which in turns means your wing is less loaded...
In other words, the earlier P-47D is downthrottled for you from the start, hence early 1944 P-47D level turnfights that make for very interesting reading: The P-47D absolutely crushes the Me-109G in level left turns, gaining fully in 1 to 3 X 360° turns on average, while the P-51D can often take 15 minutes of continuous turning: 40+ full 360° turns, to do the same thing vs the very same Me-109Gs...
Right turning is apparently not to the P-47D's advantage vs the Me-109G, but right turning is very rare as pilots find right turns unnatural if they are right-handed: The bank side maneuver required feels unnatural to the pilot, according to an Israeli pilot quoted in the show "dogfights". This seems to be true: Right-sided sustained turn fights are a fairly small minority in those 1200 reports...
In any case, it does seem to follow my logic that early P-47Ds, if they are going to be run at full power anyway, will do tighter sustained turns if they have less power and less efficient prop thrust to ruin their wing's lift to begin with...
I wish I had thought of this before I had "finalized" my game's P-47D...
Gaston