Corsair and Hellcat throttle/supercharger settings?

[horseback]

Originally Posted by stugumby

Level flying cruising into a airfield. had to trim after climb a bit but still seems so slow, fw and bf zip along and so do yaks but the corsair and hellcat seems slow. Realizing of course yaks etc are half the weight and a large horsepower difference.

Corsair and Hellcat had relatively low cruise settings because they were designed to travel long distances over water, engage in combat and then return to a tiny island or even tinier (and moving) aircraft carrier with limited navigation aids; the actual pilots' handbooks call for 2250 rpm (approx 77% prop pitch), 33% rads and about 60% throttle for max endurance cruise, which generally works out to 200 knots at medium alts and somewhat faster up high for the Corsair and around 180-190 knots for the F6F in-game.

IMHO, both need a lot of very precise trimming to get maximum performance in-game, and this may rob you of some of your speed if you don't get it exactly right, but in-game neither aircraft seems to perform to expectations until you get into the 95-110% throttle settings and vary your prop pitch between 85-100%, at which point the overheat indicator likes to come on if you try to sustain maximum settings for more than a minute or two.

In practice, the real aircraft (particularly the F6F) were thought a bit sluggish compared to the late generation USAAF fighters, which were designed for higher cruise speeds and had lighter structures(not having to land on carriers), but the F4U and F6F were considerably faster than the Japanese opposition that they most often faced.

cheers

horseback