[Viper2000]

Perhaps it would be a good idea for those people who are interested in this work but cannot yet access the sim to concentrate on collecting historical data?

In order to avoid possible accusations of bias, I suggest that we work exclusively from verifiable historical documents (which may be translated to *.pdf or *.jpeg files for transmission, provided that it's obvious that they are derived from original sources).

At this stage, I would like to point out that a lot of the historical work is going to come down to interpretation, especially as regards handling. Unfortunately, interpretation is emotive.

My intention is to try to keep this thread objective. Past experience strongly suggest to me that this will be almost impossible if we discuss individual aircraft types, because there will always be partisans both "for" and "against" any given type's performance characteristics*.

Therefore, I suggest that we split our work as follows:

1. This thread should be the "general purpose" flight testing thread
2. Individual aircraft types should each have 3 threads:
   • An historical thread, detailing reference material
   • A flight test thread detailing what the simulation does
   • A comparison thread detailing what (if anything) we think needs to be changed

This arrangement should act as a sort of fire-break, such that we only get flamewars in a relatively small percentage of our threads.

I hope that in the fullness of time we might get our own sub-forum, possibly with limited posting rights in order to reduce the risk of trolling; naturally any such hope does not constitute an expectation.

*I've never really understood this; if you think that "your" airforce's aeroplanes were "better" then you're naturally implying that its pilots were "worse" and vice versa, since the historical record is essentially fixed...