Quote:
Originally Posted by EJGr.Ost_Caspar
Telling, the japanes pilots were generally weak, is some kind of rassism. Little bit...
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There is a big difference between pointing out that one group of generally larger people might be exert more strength/control in a given set of circumstances than another group composed of generally smaller people and asserting that the reason is inherent racial superiority. If you pick five Croatians who are over 200cm tall and have them play basketball against five other Croatians who average 175 cm, it is not unreasonable to expect the taller group to be more successful, and it has nothing to do with race. One might think that my being American is causing you to make racial/nationalist assumptions about me.
The Zero, like
all of the main Japanese early war fighters was optimized for a certain kind of combat, based on the preferences of the IJN's senior aviators and their technical staffs. That choice required sacrificing certain other capabilities and limiting others in order to obtain the qualities they considered more important. Some of those choices limited the potential top speed and maneuverability at the higher speeds where Western fighter designs were generally superior. It was noted fairly early on that at higher speeds the Zeros didn't have nearly the margin of maneuverability over their opponents that they enjoyed in close-in dogfights where being light and having good climb/acceleration allowed them to make use of their ailerons and elevators at maximum efficiency.
The loss of maneuverability was markedly disproportionate to the increased speeds, and American tests of the recovered 'Aleutian' Zero in the fall/winter of 1942 revealed that the stick became uncomfortably stiff at 200 kts and the faster you were going, the more difficult it became to exert fine control; I merely pointed out that it would be even more difficult for smaller men to handle, and it gets blown into some sort of racial slur.
I think that my original point was that this particular fault is not modeled in the game, but someone latched onto the 'smaller man/people' comment instead of recognizing the main point that the game often ignores some historically significant factors.
cheers
horseback