I'm fairly confident we don't have the SoW flight model, just because FB still has some of the Sturmovik design choices in it. I forget the exact altitude this starts at, but in Il-2, once you get high enough, you discover that the position bit accuracy isn't quite high enough to keep all the parts flying in formation to a sub-pixel accuracy. Your plane starts aliasing noticeably.
I don't know how they've I'm assuming they selected a relatively low bit precision for positions, with the origin being the surface of the center of the map, and the altitude axis being a small floating point. A lower bit precision for part location makes sense when most of the aircraft fly close to the origin. It keeps the data size compact, offers high effective resolution at low altitudes, yet has the flexibility to handle extremely high altitudes, albeit at the expense of accuracy. It is an elegant compromise, but it isn't one you would make if the player aircraft are going to be the ones operating at those altitudes.
The Il-2 flight engine was originally designed to handle the Il-2 Sturmovik. Many of its fundamental assumptions are based on the player aircraft being low altitude, and fairly slow, and past a certain point, there is very little one can do to change those assumptions, without redesigning from the ground up, even with all of the patches and stop-gap measures that the Maddox team has implemented over the years.
My understanding of the SoW engine is that it is starting off with an entirely different set of assumptions and goals than the Il-2 engine did, in order to handle the scale that the Moddox Games flight sim franchise has reached. Considering what they did with the Il-2 engine ten years ago, I can hardly wait to see what they're doing this time.
Harry Voyager
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