'I hate Spits!'- that's a sentence I heard again and again. It is the Bf pilots, of course, who have been saying it, but this newest version 4.10 'll make them sigh with relief, I am sure. Short time ago, on a Russian server a Bf flier starts an usual spitting on the Spit as being overclocked until a Russian countryman tells him 'Better take a look at these Russian planes of ours.'
Quite true what he said, of course. It is the La's and 185's that have been heavily overblown in climb and turn rate, not the Spit. Spit has the very suspiciously strong flaps which wouldn't break at speeds as high as 370 km/h- but that is in common with all the other planes in the game. Moreover, real Spits had a 5 minute limit to the use of WEP, because of the feared (it did happen sometimes) engine bearings damage, if used longer. This has no representation in the game.
That closes the list of the inaccuracies of the Spit FM I know about; if someone knows of any additional ones, I would be grateful.
Speeds, climb and turn rates are accurate as far as i know. I suspect, even, the turn rates of the 8 and later models has been spoiled a little bit, but I cannot say for sure.
Now, not being able to put the game plane performance in question, the Spit-hating creators of the 4.10 release literally sabotage the Spit's flying qualities.
In 4.10 the Spit has been made marginally stable about the yaw and pitch axes. Any fast stick movement and the plane is wallowing in the sky. The nose oscillates merrily around anything you may be aiming at, and hitting anything demands loads of luck. If brought to a stagnation in a verical climb, the plane has no naturally stable tendency to drop the nose, but it falls like a leaf showing almost indifferent static stabillity.
The plane behaves as if it's tail surfaces have been halved compared to the 4.09.
NO OTHER plane in the game shows such instabillity. The FM of NO OTHER plane has ever been touched significantly from DT, only the Spitfire's .
If DS ever thought about correcting the maximum lift of the Bf, which does seem to be a nice bit lower than the real one(especially for the 109E), I do not imagine they would ever get the permission to do it. That would change how the Bf-s compares with the russian planes, too.
What makes the Spit hating so laughable- Luftwaffles seem unaware their own planes have been spoiled, but think the Spit has been improved. Now Oleg lets them spoil the Spit too, that makes the Russian delta-dervesina high-tec look even better.
The trouble with the Spit is - it really has been a great plane, never needing any of the Oleg's 'Keep-the-sides-even' help. Russian fighters , weighing 3.5 tons to the German 2.5 at the war's beginning, did, though. Why he boosted the quite adequate Russian late war planes heavily, too- that is something to ask Oleg about. Interestingly, La-s have never been hated that much by the Luftwaffe fans as the Spits.
The Bf and the Spit have been designed at roughly the same time, but the Spit has been designed around a 1000 HP engine and the Bf around a 700 HP one. Accordingly, the Bf is quite a bit smaller, and in spite of the genial details like HP automatic slats, the arrival of the powerful DB-600 series engines made the Bf's wing loading much higher than the Spit's, with all the disadvantages it brings.
Once the Spit got the cannon, it steadily held the edge on the Bf. Especially the late and heavily overmotorised Bf-variants suffered badly from the higher powerplant and armament weight and other effects.
I imagine the 4.10 to be the last or one of the last Il2 releases. This sabotage work on the Spit FM seems bent to leave a similarily bad aftertaste in our mouths like on many other occassions of plane FM 'improvements' during the 10 year long history of the game. One weak point of this game surfaces again and again, this time to put the period to the Il2FB story. It's creators couldn't care less about the truth.