Quote:
Originally Posted by Romanator21
Another thing to touch upon is power settings. Really, you can not run at full power for more than a few minutes, or you will damage the engine, or at least dramatically shorten its service life. In Il-2, you can cruise around all day at 100%, but I think this is already being addressed in SOW given what has already been shown to us.
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That has been a pet peeve of mine for the past 2-3 years, which is when i first came into contact with civilian sims. When there's no combat, they have to add other stuff to keep the virtual pilot occupied and i was pleasantly surprised to find there's a ton of things to keep you busy.
The good thing is, for a WWII combat sim it's not that complicated so it won't really detract much from combat, while adding something to do during the transit to and from the target. Since there's no complex avionics, IFR flying or air traffic control in WWII combat, all one has to do is take care of their engine a bit.
It will only force us all to take a quick glance at two gauges (yes, just two, manifold pressure/ata/boost and RPM) while advancing the throttle, so that we don't go over the redline. Essentially, everyone will be flying at up to 20% less power depending on altitude (numbers are arbitrary, some crates have a bigger "gap" between max continuous power and full out war emergency that others), but since it will apply to everyone the relative strengths and weaknesses between aircraft types will remain the same.
What will change how the various types stack up against each other is the workload. The pilots of better performing planes will be forced to work for that performance boost. For example, an early 109E with a manual prop pitch system will be a handful to fly (it didn't have a constant speed prop, so it needed constant monitoring) compared to an early Hurricane that has the wooden fixed pitch prop, an early Spit with the two-stage propeller or the more mainstream Hurris/Spits with constant speed props. In a similar fashion, as the timeline of WWII advances with expansions, nobody will dethrone rides like the pony and the jug from their seat as supreme high altitude performers...what will change is that the pilot flying them will have to work with 3-4 different engine controls to get that performance, while the German rides are all automatic by that point.
I think it will be interesting to learn new skills and use these individual quirks in order to score kills, it makes for a more diverse array of tactical considerations and a couple extra stuff to think of before charging head-long into the fight. As an example, it might become impossible to simply chop the throttle and dive straight down from 10km on someone who's flying at 2km...either you set throttle to idle and damage your engine from rapid cooling during the dive, or you keep the throttle up and overspeed the airframe. After a while, clever pilots with some experience will learn that they can balance the situation by giving a bit of throttle and closing their cowl flaps/radiators and intercoolers to prevent both overspeed and rapid cooling.
Of course, as altitude changes so does engine power output (having the throttle more than half-way forward at sea level exceeds the operating limits in some of these warbirds, having it at full at high altitudes might not even generate full power though) and heat build-up and dissipation, not to mention that we'll be getting dynamic weather to further complicate things (eg, diving through a frozen cloud or a cold air mass). This is where experience will start to show. The guy who sticks with one ride will soon learn to set up everything before the dive, in a way that the parameters may be on the knife's edge during the descent but give optimal values when the target altitude is reached where the shooting takes place (ie "i don't have time to fiddle with this now, lucky for me i did it 10 seconds ago"), before setting everything up again for the climb back up.
It will be great fun learning where all the new "sweet-spots" for all these compromises are.
