[jermin]

Originally Posted by WTE_Galway

BEFORE TRIM DELAY WAS INTRODUCED
- tapping the keyboard was reasonable realistic it took a few seconds to get full trim
- trim on a slider was definitely unrealistic as you could instantly go from full up trim to full down trim (whereas in a real aircraft, even with powered trim it takes several seconds to change), furthermore many people claimed in the IL2 flight model full elevator PLUS full trim incorrectly had MORE effect than full elevator alone. If that was true it was clearly wrong.
- players with trim on a slider had a big advantage over players using the keyboard

I'm curious how come you could overlook the time Russian and USAF pilots spent in moving so many levers in the cockpit during combat while overemphasize the advantage of mapping elevator trims onto a rotary axis. It is also not realistic to map all those lever controls onto HOTAS switches and/or axes.

In the summer of 1943, a brand-new La-5 made a forced landing on a German airfield providing the Luftwaffe with an opportunity to test-fly the newest Soviet fighter. Test pilot Hans-Werner Lerche wrote a detailed report of his experience.[1] He particularly noted that the La-5FN excelled at altitudes below 3,000 m (9,843 ft) but suffered from short range and flight time of only 40 minutes at cruise engine power. All of the engine controls (throttle, mixture, propeller pitch, radiator and cowl flaps, and supercharger gearbox) had separate levers which served to distract the pilot during combat to make constant adjustments or risk suboptimal performance. For example, rapid acceleration required moving no less than six levers. In contrast, contemporary German aircraft, especially the BMW 801 radial-engined variants of the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 front line fighter, had largely automatic engine controls with the pilot operating a single lever and electromechanical devices, like the Kommandogerät pioneering engine computer on the radial-engined Fw 190s, making the appropriate adjustments.

It's the same thing with all USAF fighters. To execute a simple boom and zoom bounce with the P-47 you need to:

lower the turbocharger RPM (this is like a throttle for high altitudes, but it takes time for the turbo to spool up/down and this makes it difficult to judge the fine-tuning of it all)

set the pitch/RPM for the dive

possibly lower the throttle too (if it's a long dive and you want to accelerate slowly)

close the cowl flaps (they can get damaged at high speeds, these control the cylinder temperatures)

adjust the intercoolers for the temperature you expect to meet at the lower altitudes as you dive (these control carburetor temperature: too low and it freezes and stops fuel to the engine, too high and the mixture is too lean to produce power and causes overheat in the cylinders)

adjust the oil coolers in a similar manner to intercoolers (low oil temp means the oil is thick and doesn't flow or lubricate well plus oil pressure gets high and you might burst a pipeline, high oil temp means the oil breaks apart/dissolves, lubrication is bad because the oil runs through the parts too fast and it may even catch fire)

The only help in all this is that oil temps change slower than carburetor temps and cylinder temps so you can afford to make a mistake, plus late war US aircraft usually had automatic oil cooler control.

After you do all this and dive, you can attack your target. When you pull back up from the dive to climb away you need to do all this in reverse.

And please bear in mind that flight sim is not supposed to be played on keyboards. Because no WW2 pilots used keyboards to fly a plane.