Just curious about the P-51 FM

[horseback]

Originally Posted by RPS69

Your accounts were acceptable, until this last comment. Some other statements, could belong to USA propaganda. After all, they got vast amounts of obsolete ships at the end of the war, and they urgently needed a market to sell the vets and make some money.

But this last statement is at best, a poor one.

Sorry if it offends you, but I was there in '05/06, when the 4.0x series of patches came out and things got weird with the US fighters that had not seen a lot of Lend Lease service with the VVS. Every problem I cited can be found on that forum, and I am far from the only poster to make those points. It's very difficult to believe that there wasn't at least a small measure of vindictiveness involved with the treatment of late war US fighter's FMs, after so many documented conflicts with the historical record. I've been flying this sim since 2002; if you doubt me, check the Ubi forums and do a search for my posts. You will find that I registered there back in June of 2002.

Now if you think that the US government was so desperate for cash at the end of WWII that it had to 'propagandize' the P-51's reputation to sell it at 1/10th of the government cost to veterans who had often already flown it in combat or known someone who did, you really need to re-think a few things. Admittedly, a great many war planes were sold off for very low prices, but not because the US government needed the money; the aircraft were being sold for much less than their scrap value--it was thought that promoting sport aviation would result in a stronger demand for aircraft production and strengthen that industry, which was looking at a severe contraction after almost five years of all-out demand. Also, you must realize that the P-51 was still the USAAF's best fighter overall until the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star was available in reasonable numbers (and even then the Mustang had vastly more range and payload); it was 'obsolete' only in the sense that it wasn't a jet, but given the limitations of the early jets, it had a great deal of military usefulness over the next six or seven years.

Finally a question: who was the only major industrial power in the world in 1945 that had not been subject to major damage to its infrastructure and had to provide modern goods and services to not only its own population, but to most of the free world (generally at a reasonable profit)? Bear in mind that we were (and still are) also a major agricultural power and produced a large portion of the world's food for most of the 1940s. The United States is not Pakistan; we are kind of big and wealthy, and have been since early in the 20th century. Unfortunately, the hallmark of governments is that even the best ones tend to be wasteful, even when they are trying to look thrifty, and the US is no exception.

cheers

horseback

[Luno13]

The last statement isn't offensive, it's just plain weird. There is no reason to believe that Oleg and crew would punish the fans of the game for something one stingy company did, especially because the fans were very supportive (hey, didn't they buy him a new car after he totaled one?)

I also fail to understand your reasoning that Oleg and crew would choose to model the lend-lease aircraft well, but not the other aircraft like the P-51. If he was going to rig the FM's for a misguided sense of patriotism, as you imply, the lend-lease craft would have been utter crap in comparison to the indigenous soviet designs. Yeah, the La-5 and 7 are UFO's, but the LaGG-3s are death traps compared to P-40s and P-39s. If you can fly the P-39 to the limit without spinning, you are almost untouchable. The early Yaks are so-so, but even then, they are representative of new machines, and not necessarily of worn-down front-line material. We also had some pretty UFO-ish late-war spits for a long time, and last I checked, the USSR was not friendly with UK either.

Maybe something is off, but if it is, there's more to it than an off-hand conspiracy theory can answer. It just makes no sense.

Anyway, I want to remind some folks that the P-51 is about 50% heavier than the Spitfire using the same engine. It was faster than the Spit, but only due to superior aerodynamics (the spitfire was, after-all, a late 30's design). I would not expect the Mustang to be as tolerant of hard maneuvers as the Spit in terms of acceleration and climb, at the very least.

[MaxGunz]

P-51 had superior high speed lines but inferior turning and low speed climb. Spitfire moved in that same direction from start to finish.

Many people see patterns that may or may not be there. They make their arguments and back them with picked data. You have to look for the personal angles as well as 'facts'.

Would Oleg have deliberately marred his work with petty sleights against selected planes? That's what some views would have and then some.

It was made clear from the start that IL-2 was to be based primarily from tests and factual data and not from 'pilots recalls'.

Try the P-51 as it first came out and 1 patch later. Not a teeter-totter. It was the low stick force boys that forced that, CoG closer to CoL results in lower stick forces without having to make model changes that amount to 'magic'. Demands were met and Oleg was clear that he did not like them nor would we. The intention-assigners decided it was petty revenge and made it clear that lower stick forces should only be achieved through numbers (modeling magic based on decree, not physics) to make the P-51 fit their own notions gained more from subjective accounts than actual tests and really a step or half-step short of full-on Gastonology.

I don't know the DCSW P-51, I can't run that sim on my PC! My favorite P-51 was the one in Rowan's 1999 Mig Alley Ace.

I look at IL-2 as a physics-based combat flight sim that uses a system superior in its time to the others. It still had to run on the hardware of the time and did that well. It had to be stretched, bent and twisted to meet an increasing number of additions and features all of which were met well through huge amounts of extra work on the part of the development team even as they were roundly abused on forums mainly by over-aged spoiled brats.

It is what it is and instead of assigning evil intentions to the makers there should be marveling at how few cracks there are given the amount of changes put to it. Those who focus on the bits they don't like should realize that everyone has bits they don't like so why are YOU more important and why do the good bits count for so little? My feeling is that much of the time the answer to that is found in emptied bottles.

[Buster_Dee]

Ok, I'll make and a** of myself. Sometimes, you get a feel that an a/c will let you do something, and damned if it doesn't. It happened to me in R/L. It's not defying the math; we just miss defining the problem. When I saw the dramatized account of cartwheeling the stang and spraying the enemy, I didn't dismiss it. Some pilots play with an a/c to see what it does that is not "published." If you don't fall into a flat spin or break the airframe, it's a good day.

To my weak example: an instructor was trying to talk me through a short-field landing. Something just told me to try something, so I was "ignoring" him. I came in steeper than he advised, and flared a lot harder than he wanted. Basically, I used aerodynamic braking "in the vertical." The a/c stalled just above the runway, settled like a feather, and rolled a few feet. We just stared at each other, then I throttled up to get to the 1st taxiway.

And I knew I had better never try that again.

[JtD]

There were times when the P-51 could manage 14s sustained 360° turns. As physics prevailed, those times are gone, but to some it is the result of a conspiracy, not a reality check.

[KG26_Alpha]

Since the beginning of IL2 series its all ways the same with fanboi's and their favorite planes and conspiracy or Oleg using the wrong data

1C Have had to deal with

Russian forums all our planes are porked
German forums all our planes are porked
Eng/US forums all our planes are porked

Most of the time no actual manufacturing flight data was supported in the accusations,
only some vets story or a book written by someone using accounts of a pilots recollection and testing ac that are worn/damaged/wrong fuel etc etc

This still happens even today in this forum............apparently.

[horseback]

Originally Posted by Luno13

The last statement isn't offensive, it's just plain weird. There is no reason to believe that Oleg and crew would punish the fans of the game for something one stingy company did, especially because the fans were very supportive (hey, didn't they buy him a new car after he totaled one?)

I also fail to understand your reasoning that Oleg and crew would choose to model the lend-lease aircraft well, but not the other aircraft like the P-51. If he was going to rig the FM's for a misguided sense of patriotism, as you imply, the lend-lease craft would have been utter crap in comparison to the indigenous soviet designs. Yeah, the La-5 and 7 are UFO's, but the LaGG-3s are death traps compared to P-40s and P-39s. If you can fly the P-39 to the limit without spinning, you are almost untouchable. The early Yaks are so-so, but even then, they are representative of new machines, and not necessarily of worn-down front-line material. We also had some pretty UFO-ish late-war spits for a long time, and last I checked, the USSR was not friendly with UK either.

Maybe something is off, but if it is, there's more to it than an off-hand conspiracy theory can answer. It just makes no sense.

Anyway, I want to remind some folks that the P-51 is about 50% heavier than the Spitfire using the same engine. It was faster than the Spit, but only due to superior aerodynamics (the spitfire was, after-all, a late 30's design). I would not expect the Mustang to be as tolerant of hard maneuvers as the Spit in terms of acceleration and climb, at the very least.

First, the Airacobra and the P-40 were both supplied to the USSR in large numbers, and would seem to have a large domestic 'fan base' in the former Eastern Bloc countries; to some degree, the Russians often seem to think of the P-39 as almost exclusively theirs.

Second, the P-39 was an integral part of the original Il-2 Sturmovik inventory, and the P-40 was either in the original offering of Forgotten Battles or an early addition. In any case, their positions in the Il-2 'pecking order' was established quite early on. Changing them would alienate a much larger portion of your base market than you can justify.

Third, the original offering of the Mustang came with the Ace Expansion Pack which came some time before Pacific Fighters, and as Max says, the original Mustang was pretty sweet; the serious issues with the late-war US fighters began with Pacific Fighters and the ensuing legal problems with that certain US Defense company. The 4.0x series of patches is where the big problems started rearing their heads and trim became a critical problem on the old Ubi forum. The big heavy late war US fighters were easily the worst affected; all of these aircraft required some trimming (although not remotely like the real life P-40), but in teeny-tiny increments, which may not fit well in the game engine, especially for those of us who trimmed with button inputs. Most are nearly impossible to trim intuitively; it takes many hours of practice to get them anywhere close to the degree of control the average player obtains in a fraction of the time on late-war German or Soviet fighters.

Additionally, Oleg and his people rejected some widely accepted performance figures and data from official US sources which left some of the US fighters well short of their 'book' performances and extremely twitchy, as they remain to this day.

I think that Oleg made a good faith effort to fix things, but some individuals took the performance data rejections and offered changes quite personally, and it got ugly. Like the infamous 'bar' on the FW 190 windshield, positions hardened. I do think that there is a certain element of anti-Americanism; my countrymen tend to be direct, if not flagrantly undiplomatic, and America must seem like the Dallas Cowboys to the rest of the world in the sense that they have been too successful for too long, and even when they are not, they get waaaay too much attention.

As regards the Spitfire vs the Mustang, your numbers are a bit off; empty, the Spitfire Mk IX weighs between 5600 and 6000 lbs, depending upon your source and which version of the Mk IX is cited. The empty weight of the Mustang is 7,635 lbs. 'Combat weight', or for an aircraft carrying full internal tanks and ammo is 7,500 for the Spitfire IX (oddly, every source I found in a quick search used this loaded weight) and for the Mustang full combat weight is 10,100 lbs. However, the 'full' figure for the Mustang assumes a long-range escort role, which means that the overload fuselage tank is filled. Subtract the 516 lbs that the 85 US gallons in that tank weigh, and you get a combat weight of 9,584 lbs for a Mustang optimized for a point defense role like the Spitfire's.

Worst case is the D/K Mustang being 1.34 times heavier than the Mk IX (which allows the Mustang a round trip to Bremen and back vs the Spit making a round trip to Calais), dry weight vs dry weight is 1.32, and with the 'point defense' loaded weight, the Mustang is 1.28 times as heavy as the Spit IX (and able to stay in the air for at least twice as long, not to mention that its ammo load endows it with several seconds' longer firing time).

The Spit is probably better than the Mustang in a close-in knife fight, but that presupposes that the Mustang pilot is not very bright. The higher and more extended the contest, the better the Mustang becomes, especially under actual combat conditions rather than artificial rules of a co-alt head on pass before turning around and engaging.

cheers

horseback

[majorfailure]

Originally Posted by KG26_Alpha

Russian forums all our planes are porked
German forums all our planes are porked
Eng/US forums all our planes are porked

All wrong. The truth is:
The Italian planes are porked.

[MaxGunz]

It would be nice to have an IL-2 P-51 with empty rear tank and CoG to match.

That high pitch noise on the forums would change to a new note singing the stick-force-is-porked song instead of the too-much-trim song. But that's what the choice is about same as not being able to have both the climb performance of a wide prop and the speed of a thin prop on the same plane either. The latter was about a FW chart-monkey association agenda, IIRC. Oleg let the answer to that one be known, chart-mixing is a no-no. Stick forces for one condition don't go with performance in other conditions. All from the same and how many differences can IL-2 support?

[RPS69]

The P39, was there with the 109 since the beginning. At that time, it was a hell of an airplane, much better than now. Still, what we have now is far more acurate than what we have in the begining.

190's are a history apart. They entered as flying bricks, evolved to a pilots dream, and then returned to almost the brick condition again. I rtemember being catch by il2 on level flight on the original il2. Now they are at a far more reasonable point. Not perfect, but reasonable.

The big problem with il2 world, is that the algorithms employed, lack the needed complexity to allow an acurate representation of all airplanes at the same time.

Tweaking in one direction, may correct things in one place, and disrupt them in another.

Obviously a product like DCS could have a better P51 perfromance, it's the only model that needs to be that accurate. They could choose what aerodinamics they could ignore.

Like previously said above, at many different times, some plane or family of planes will go to the all star position, to the underdog of the whole sim. But that is very far away from a conspiration. Is just an an oscilation of the pendulum in the search of equilibrium.