Quote:
Originally Posted by TomcatViP
If you fly at 4/5K you will hve to manage/close your oil rad to prevent excessive cooling and warm up your oil.
It seems to be alrdy modeled in the game
~S
PS: What I am concerned more is the Fuel consumption that seems pretty low for the 109. I had seen myself taking off from France for a free hunting online miss over sth london area ans still got back to base with 50% fuel remaining in my tanks ??!! And Don't tell me that those are fuel fumes  |
Quote:
Originally Posted by ZaltysZ
Try asking a friend to fly Ju87 the same route and then stick to him closely in your BF109. After your trip back, check your fuel level.
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Exactly. The slowest speed is not always the most economical fuel-wise
I'm going to use totally arbitrary numbers i pulled out of my head just as an example, so don't quote me on the exact values, but they way it goes is something like this: you might make 10km per liter when flying at 400km/h, whereas flying at 300km/h gives only 7km per liter but a longer overall flight time.
That's usually why aircraft manuals specify two kinds of economy speeds. There is maximum range cruise speed, which is usually a bit on higher side. This burns more fuel per second, but because it gives you higher speed (more distance for every such second) it ends up being more efficient in terms of distance to fuel amount used.
There is also maximum endurance cruise speed, this burns less fuel per second and as a result allows you to stay in the air longer, but the total distance you can cover before you are out of fuel is lower than in the previous case.
In ideal circumstances, the fighters would fly to the target area at their best range speed and then switch to their best endurance speed if they wanted to loiter over the target area. This illustrates the problem faced by 109 pilots perfectly, as it happens to be the optimal profile for a freijagd/fighter sweep mission which they were usually not allowed to follow.
However, when flying close escort you have to slow down to keep pace with the bombers. In such a case the fighters would use best endurance speed while zig-zagging over them and switch to combat cruise (the maximum continuous setting) when getting closer to areas where combat might occur, in order to be high and fast when the engagement starts.