I'm with ICDP on this one. Options should be there to accommodate everyone, that includes the players who want to fly a more "by the book" recreation of WWII air combat that follows real-life constraints a bit closer.
The issue is not so much if an engine could run flat out for a few hours, but the fact that there are no underlying features in the sim yet to model the chain of penalties and drawbacks that would occur in reality when doing so. We jump into a fresh airframe every time we spawn and unless there is some continuity between sorties, it's a bit too much of gaming the game for my taste to be able to easily exceed the limits.
On the other hand, if we get a complex dynamic campaign engine that can be used both offline and online, one that tracks the supply and strategic side of things then by all means i'm in.
I could be pushing the engines all i want, but if the lufties bomb the convoy carrying the spare parts to my base i would have to take off on the next sortie with an abused, inadequately serviced engine and that might give me trouble. That's an entirely different kind of gameplay though than the one which will occur if we opt for selective realism only where it suits us as players. Statistically it might even out (ie, every aircraft would get the same treatment), it just draws a sizable part of the tactical considerations and problems faced by a pilot out of the picture.
This is what bothered me most about IL2 as well. Our FMs might have been accurate to the Nth degree, but we were all constantly mucking around with amounts of horsepower that were in reality severely limited in their duration. And since so many parameters of any given FM, no matter how accurate, rest on the amount of available power, the end result is that the entire fight changes and non-realistic tactics are adopted, simply because we can.
I'm not preaching to get everyone onto the full real boat, heck i fly with externals on when i'm offline because i like pausing, watching all the pretty effects and the aircraft and taking screenshots. There should always be options to "pull" this piece of software away from sim and more towards game, this is how the series sells and new "converts" join our ranks. I'm just saying that such implementation should be optional and part of the realism settings, not a default across the board change that applies to the highest difficulty settings.
Case in point, what ICDP mentioned about the overheat modeling. It's far too forgiving while idling on the ground, to the point that it's sometimes hard to properly warm up the engines and they choke when applying throttle smoothly, forcing the player to do it in steps of "throttle up and wait for the temp to catch up".
The most glaring example is the Blenheim which i've taken to studying with a bit of an obsession (i like radial engines
). The Mk.IV pilot's notes specifically state keeping the cowl flaps full open during start-up, warm-up and taxi because lack of airflow at near zero airspeed will make the engines overheat. It also advises closing the cowl flaps completely to improve acceleration during the take off run, because the airflow is sufficient to cool the engines once the aircraft is moving.
In the sim it's the exact opposite. To warm up i step on the brakes and gradually increase throttle with the cowl flaps closed and once i hit the magic 200 degrees of cylinder temps i apply take off power and fully open the cowl flaps.
Like i said before, if we get merlins running a constant +12 lbs it won't be long before we get DB601s running a constant 1.45 Ata as well and it will be IL2:1946 all over again: less need to plan ahead and adopt real life tactics, because my magic horsepower is always there for me.