[Pursuivant]

Had the original designers of IL2 been thinking a harder about the future of the series, they would have designed the plane selection GUI and FM/DM a bit differently to make the game a bit more "modular."

For example, in the GUI, it would make sense to have 3 levels of menus for plane selection:

Basic Type --> Sub-Type --> Ordinance Loadout.

Example: Bf-109 --> G6 --> R6 field mod.

It would also be cool if the GUI had allowed you to select planes by year of introduction, nations or organizations that historically used a particular plane and/or role. For example, you could select by "U.S. Air Force, "level bombers" and "1944"

It would also be cool if the ordinance menu were somehow interactive, so when you click on particular ordinance combination, the plane in the view window changes to reflect the currently selected loadout. Or, when you moused over a particular ordinance layout, you'd get hypertext describing a particular weapon and its uses. That would be very useful for explaining obscure ordinance or foreign acronyms.

For FM, it would make sense to have engines and airframes separate, so you could model several different versions of the same plane, with identical airframe but different engines, using one airframe FM. Engine type would be selectable by the user or mission builder.

It would also make sense to model optional systems on the plane (e.g., radar, extra fuel tanks) as internal, non-droppable ordinance rather than as a dedicated part of the FM.

FM should also be alterable in the mission builder based on fuel type, state of repair, weather (e.g., ice on wings, moisture which soaked into wooden or canvas parts of the plane) and changes in mass or CG.

DM should be tweakable based on state of repair, quality of construction, sabotage, etc.

Modeling extra fuel tanks as internal, non-droppable "drop tanks" would eliminate the need for certain FM.

Certain internal weapons could be easily "swapped out" using meshes, rather than coding for an entirely different FM and 3d model. For example, British .303 caliber defensive guns rather than U.S. 0.50 caliber, or Soviet style dorsal turret rather than U.S. type, or removing the tail cone on the later G4M
series.

Other FMB/QMB niceties:

1) Being able to select Ammo loadout and amount of ammo for each weapon.

2) Listing amount of ammo available for each gun.

3) Listing types of guns rather than just saying "default".

4) Being able to select sight type (if multiple varieties were historically available).

5) Being able to select engine heat state when the mission starts (i.e., a dead cold engine which must be warmed before it can be safely started, or an overheated engine.)

6) Being able to "paint" damage onto an airplane so that certain parts have light or heavy damage when the mission begins.

7) Being able to assign special damage to an airplane (e.g., wounded crew, reduced engine power, oil leaks, jammed guns, landing gear that doesn't work) before a mission, or trigger failures at some point during a mission.