Small Bf-110 combat report and some nice details i spotted

[Skarphol]

Inspired by your report, I took on allmost the same mission; put myself in a 110 against 2 Sunderlands. No other planes were in this mission.

There are some weird things about the Sunderland's behaviour in this game:
- After a few shots to the #2 engine of the first one, the crew bailed out
- I gave chase to the second one, and it started a series of rolls, so fast that I think the 110 would have had problems keeping up. I chose to fly level and steady behind the huge flying boat instead.
- After a few hits in the #2 engine, also this crew bailed.
- I cheked up on the first plane again, and it flew happily along on one wing:


- I went back to the second, and it flew slow circles, loosing heigt rather slowly, while flying allmost knife-edge.
- After a while the starboard wingtip hit the water and broke off. The rest of the plane flew on, knife-edge, for a few hundred meters before it chrashed into water and disappeared instantly.

After quiting the mission, I was told I had damaged the Sunderlands 4% each. But number of Sunderlands shot down was 0.

This was not too convincing. But overall, I love the game.

Skarphol

[JG52Uther]

Great report Blackdog!
Not had much time in the 110 yet,because I am concentrating on the 109. I flew a mission 6 109's against 15 Blenheims,and took a few hits.Flying all the way back from the English coast to France at low level,trying to manage the engine,the canopy off,and holes in the windscreen was awesome,especially watching the fuel run out and the red light come on!
Finally made it back for my first perfect landing in CoD!
My next step will be to turn the overheat controls on, just to make it a bit more difficult

[Blackdog_kt]

Overheat is not that hard to manage, as long as you accept that you won't be running the engine flat-out all the time. I never use emergency power except in short bursts or, well, emegcencies

I use 1.35 Ata for the 109 as per the manual and work the prop to keep the RPM needle on or below the red triangle that marks the end of the normal range, but it won't break immediately if i push 1.42 Ata and 2700 RPM for a few seconds (never exceed RPM is 3000, so you have a big safe margin).

Similarly with the 110, i have mapped a key to switch to instrument panel view and it's very useful. It even over-rides your head-tracking device if you have one and it's easy to use: as long as you keep pressing it your view is locked to the instruments, the moment you release it you return your previous view.

On the 110, i use the RPM and Ata marked with the "d" letter on the instruments as my max continuous setting. The one marked with "30" is, evidently enough, power that you can use for 30 minutes (probably for the climb) and the one marked with "1" is usable for one minute. It's a bit more of a handful than the 109 because the values are a bit close to each other, but as long as you keep it in the range from a bit below "d" until midway to "30" you will not have any problems at all.

Absolute precision is not required because you might be a bit higher on the settings one moment and lower on the next so it evens out temperature-wise, plus altitude and airflow changes (airspeed helps cooling) further complicate things.

I just set my rads to full open for take-off, climb and any length of high-power scenario like combat. When i have the time to take a look, i watch the needles and fine tune it a bit. It's just about making a habit to check the needles periodically, just like you do with all your other instruments. You don't look at your compass in the middle of a dogfight and neither do you have to look at the temp gauges, as long as you've kept the engine running well up to that point and check the gauges whenever you make power changes that will stay that way for a long time (ie, if you just throttle up/down around your main setting in a fight it's no big deal, it's constant changes that matter most) it will be fine.

It's not necessary to worry about absolute precision. Of course, during the dive your RPMs will rise above the limit or when applying power you will go past the maximum continuous setting sometimes, but that will not kill the engine immediately. You still have to correct it, but it doesn't have to be an instantaneous correction.

Like i said before, listen to it because it talks to you. No matter if you like or dislike the sounds, the in-cockpit ones are very useful for tuning your engines.

Mind you, that's all for German injected engines. I tried flying the Hurricane and despite the easier constant speed propeller, i can't get it to run smooth no matter what...it always coughs and sputters, especially at altitude, but i think this has something to do with the way the mixture control is displayed.

In the real one, rich was back and lean was forward. In the game it works that way too in the virtual cockpit, but on the engine controls info window that shows the position of your sliders it seems to reverse from time to time. This confused me to the point that i didn't know what to press for lean and what for rich, so maybe that's why i couldn't run it smooth.