The Stuka has been in the sim for a very long time too.
The FW190 has been tweaked up and down over the years, I remember one patch saw it's wings flying off with one hit, then the next patch it was made stronger. I think with most of the aircraft they have found a good balance, you can hobble home with a few hits but when they start adding up your chances of staying in the air quickly go way down.
It just seemed to me that the 4.12 P-47 and Stuka were not as tough as the fW190A, and I have even had better luck while flying the 109 in taking hits than the 4.12 Stuka.
I had a mission set up where I was intercepting four Ace p-47 razorbacks and I was surprised at how easy it was to knock them out of the sky, often one pass, even an off angle one will take the plane or pilot out. I can see getting the occasional lucky hit, but it seemed every one of the P-47s I hit with the FW190 went down very easily. I don't remember reading about how their tail sections were weak or vulnerable like you can read about the IL2 or Bf109.
The Stuka I was flying was the D-5, the late one that is supposed to be more heavily armored than the early ones, but it seems it would light up like a torch with one hit from a fighter, and it fell apart very easily from one AA hit, which is not what you read about in combat accounts.
I have a lot of experience with engineering and mechanics, I know more about internal combustion engines than most people ever will, and I have a good feel for what machinery should do under abuse.
Once I got a look at a sort of blueprint for a FW190 and I am pretty sure I saw that it had a large diameter piece of pipe going through one wing, through the fuselage and into the other wing, and I though about how hard it would be to shoot one of those wings off, it would take a good hit on that metal pipe, hitting the rest of the wing might make it useless, but it would hang onto the fuselage. So when you see wings flying off model aircraft frequently which were specifically designed to be in combat carrying heavy loads while dive bombing etc. it makes you wonder if something needs tweaked a bit.
I don't know what the blueprint for the p47 or stuka looks like, but unless a hit is very lucky or well placed, I would think it would take more than one to break a wing off a dive bomber, or the tail off the massive P47 fuselage. And a late war dive bomber that is heavily armored should not light up in flames as often as a paper-bag early Japanese fighter with no armor and no sealing tanks.
So I don't want to complain, but just offer observations and comparisons between history texts and the modeled aircraft and betwen the modeled aircraft themselves where inconsistencies seem to show up.
Thanks.
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