Quote:
Originally Posted by Luno13
The last statement isn't offensive, it's just plain weird. There is no reason to believe that Oleg and crew would punish the fans of the game for something one stingy company did, especially because the fans were very supportive (hey, didn't they buy him a new car after he totaled one?)
I also fail to understand your reasoning that Oleg and crew would choose to model the lend-lease aircraft well, but not the other aircraft like the P-51. If he was going to rig the FM's for a misguided sense of patriotism, as you imply, the lend-lease craft would have been utter crap in comparison to the indigenous soviet designs. Yeah, the La-5 and 7 are UFO's, but the LaGG-3s are death traps compared to P-40s and P-39s. If you can fly the P-39 to the limit without spinning, you are almost untouchable. The early Yaks are so-so, but even then, they are representative of new machines, and not necessarily of worn-down front-line material. We also had some pretty UFO-ish late-war spits for a long time, and last I checked, the USSR was not friendly with UK either.
Maybe something is off, but if it is, there's more to it than an off-hand conspiracy theory can answer. It just makes no sense.
Anyway, I want to remind some folks that the P-51 is about 50% heavier than the Spitfire using the same engine. It was faster than the Spit, but only due to superior aerodynamics (the spitfire was, after-all, a late 30's design). I would not expect the Mustang to be as tolerant of hard maneuvers as the Spit in terms of acceleration and climb, at the very least.
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First, the Airacobra and the P-40 were both supplied to the USSR in large numbers, and would seem to have a large domestic 'fan base' in the former Eastern Bloc countries; to some degree, the Russians often seem to think of the P-39 as almost exclusively theirs.
Second, the P-39 was an integral part of the original Il-2 Sturmovik inventory, and the P-40 was either in the original offering of Forgotten Battles or an early addition. In any case, their positions in the Il-2 'pecking order' was established quite early on. Changing them would alienate a much larger portion of your base market than you can justify.
Third, the original offering of the Mustang came with the Ace Expansion Pack which came some time before Pacific Fighters, and as Max says, the original Mustang was pretty sweet; the serious issues with the late-war US fighters began with Pacific Fighters and the ensuing legal problems with that certain US Defense company. The 4.0x series of patches is where the big problems started rearing their heads and trim became a critical problem on the old Ubi forum. The big heavy late war US fighters were easily the worst affected; all of these aircraft required some trimming (although not remotely like the real life P-40), but in teeny-tiny increments, which may not fit well in the game engine, especially for those of us who trimmed with button inputs. Most are nearly impossible to trim intuitively; it takes many hours of practice to get them anywhere close to the degree of control the average player obtains in a fraction of the time on late-war German or Soviet fighters.
Additionally, Oleg and his people rejected some widely accepted performance figures and data from official US sources which left some of the US fighters well short of their 'book' performances and extremely twitchy, as they remain to this day.
I think that Oleg made a good faith effort to fix things, but some individuals took the performance data rejections and offered changes quite personally, and it got ugly. Like the infamous 'bar' on the FW 190 windshield, positions hardened. I do think that there is a certain element of anti-Americanism; my countrymen tend to be direct, if not flagrantly undiplomatic, and America must seem like the Dallas Cowboys to the rest of the world in the sense that they have been too successful for too long, and even when they are not, they get waaaay too much attention.
As regards the Spitfire vs the Mustang, your numbers are a bit off; empty, the Spitfire Mk IX weighs between 5600 and 6000 lbs, depending upon your source and which version of the Mk IX is cited. The empty weight of the Mustang is 7,635 lbs. 'Combat weight', or for an aircraft carrying full internal tanks and ammo is 7,500 for the Spitfire IX (oddly, every source I found in a quick search used this loaded weight) and for the Mustang full combat weight is 10,100 lbs. However, the 'full' figure for the Mustang assumes a long-range escort role, which means that the overload fuselage tank is filled. Subtract the 516 lbs that the 85 US gallons in that tank weigh, and you get a combat weight of 9,584 lbs for a Mustang optimized for a point defense role like the Spitfire's.
Worst case is the D/K Mustang being 1.34 times heavier than the Mk IX (which allows the Mustang a round trip to Bremen and back vs the Spit making a round trip to Calais), dry weight vs dry weight is 1.32, and with the 'point defense' loaded weight, the Mustang is 1.28 times as heavy as the Spit IX (and able to stay in the air for at least twice as long, not to mention that its ammo load endows it with several seconds' longer firing time).
The Spit is probably better than the Mustang in a close-in knife fight, but that presupposes that the Mustang pilot is not very bright. The higher and more extended the contest, the better the Mustang becomes, especially under actual combat conditions rather than artificial rules of a co-alt head on pass before turning around and engaging.
cheers
horseback