FM's the State of Play with empasis on Climb performance.

[IvanK]

After flying On line and believing I was seeing unusually poor Spit IIA Climb performance I went and did some specific climb testing. Its time to height is now significantly below spec performance. Attached jpg show the results of the Climb test data overlayed over Spit IIa RAE Tests and the climb tests performed in Ver 159550. My Climb profile was identical to that flown in the RAE test. As you can see Climb performance is now well below spec and after passing 16,000ft is totally unacceptable imo. So the FM changes made here are not acceptable imo and have gone to far to reduce RAF fighter performance. Given the results I saw with Spit IIA I then re tested all fighters (except G50).

I am not sure exactly what FM changes were made to the Spit IIA, IA and Hurricane ROTOL in this CLOD Beta/alpha patch version but imo certainly Climb rate wise it was pretty much spot on in Version 159550 as the graph attached here shows. At present the Spit MKIIA and IA are outclassed by the BF109E3/4 in the climb area. They shouldn't be ! The BF109E4 and SpitIIA and even IA climb performance real world should be quite close. as the graphs and data from RAE flight tests show.

Testing the Spit IA reveals a similar issue. The Spit IA Climb performance has also been decreased to well below spec performance. The ROTOL Hurricane has had its climb performance reduced as well and imo is the worst of all and now bears no resemblance to Spec climb performance !

From a Climb performance point of view all that was really needed from Ver 159550 to 1.06.17582 was to improve the the BF109E3/4 climb performance as it was clearly below par. Instead we see the Spit IIA and IA climb performance being degraded to the point of making them uncompetitive in the climb arena. The Hurricane is worst affected of all.

I have also re tested the BF109E4 Climb performance and find it unchanged from Ver 159550 which was and still is also below the OKL Climb specification.

So it would seem the Spit IIA and Spit IA Climb performance that was pretty close to spot on in Ver 159550 has been reduced to bring them down to even worse performance than the Ver 159550 Bf109E4 (which is still below spec). This testing of climb performance is also backed up On line with the E3/4 generally dominating in the Dog fight arena in the vertical. The Bf109E3/E4 in most cases can simply climb out of a fight and disengage at will.... even with Climb performance still below OKL spec .... this is how bad the issue is !

So how to fix this ? The Spit IA, IIA, Hurricane ROTOL Climb performance of Ver 159550 needs to be returned. You guys did an exceptionally good job imo on this one for Hurricanes,Spit IA and IIA. In fact all the climb performances in Ver 159550 except from the 109's were exceptionally good and close to available data. The BF109E3/4 performance needed/needs to be improved to bring it up to its spec performance which is close to Spit IIA. Based on the RAE data and the OKL 109E4 data the E3/4 should above 4000m show slightly better climb performance than all the RAF fighters. (the Yellow line).

Maybe be I am wrong but given that excess power is one of the prime determinants of climb performance and all Merlin powered aircraft have become worse (shifted to the right on the graph) by a similar amount could it be that Power output for this engine type/class has been reduced globally ? It would also explain the reduction in Vmax performance of the Merlin powered aircraft ?