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Originally Posted by 5./JG27.Farber
Anyway back to this website... (and all the others like it)
I was talking to a Aeronautical engineer over steam (I will let him name himself if he wishes) he basically said something like, "just like any other flight page, this is grains of truth mixed with BS..."
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Most flight websites are like this, but there are some good ones out there. You have to be literate in the underlying math and physics to discern between the two, though.
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So I guess what we have learned here is that none of the information we ever find will give us definative answears on aircraft performance... These debates of this source said this and that source said that will just continue... Would be nice if we just new the right physics for the game but I suppose it will always be a bit of science and a bit of legend...
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It's always science.
The problem is that aircraft performance is complicated stuff, and this is compounded by the fact that aircraft design was a nascent art at the time. Lessons were still being learned, and they don't necessarily do stuff the same way we do things now.
On top of that, things get lost over the years and much of the available data is incomplete.
Aircraft performance is ideally recorded in conjunction with the atmospheric conditions on the day the test was flown. That data is then converted to standard atmospheric conditions. The data is supposed to represent an idealized aircraft flying in the standard atmosphere, and engineers understand that aircraft performance exists as a range of values within an acceptable tolerance.
Test data can often contradict other test data. Sometimes the reasons for the contradiction can be discovered if there is qualitative data accompanying the test. Often this data does not exist or is insufficient and so the difference cannot be resolved. This is where the "legend' bit comes into play.