Acceleration comparisons

[horseback]

Originally Posted by Jumoschwanz

Yes, some aircraft need different trimming and other settings to get the most out of them, but that is to be expected as they were different machines manufactured thousands of miles from each other by extremely different cultures and engineers.

That is why making all the aircraft behave exactly the same would be ridiculous whether it trim or any other parameter or control feature, if you do that we may as well get rid of all the aircraft in the sim except for one, we could all just fly 25lb spits.

I say plug the engineering data for each aircraft into the IL2 simulator and fly what you get. Every pilot in WWII had to learn his specific aircraft, if he switched to a different one then he was set back and had to learn many things all over again.

Fine by me, but let's limit the engineering data to what was known and documented in 1945, instead of a steady diet of revised, new & improved data taken with newer and better measuring sticks for just the one group of (aging) aircraft. I spent a good sized chunk of my life testing refurbished and rebuilt weapons and fire control systems that date back to the 1960s; one of our ongoing problems was that modern testing and measurement methods are far more accurate than the ones used to establish the original performance parameters of these systems back in the day. We often had to demonstrate to the Government representative who had to sign off on the performance that these new testing systems left us a whole lot less 'wiggle room' than the ones devised during the Nixon Administration, and that we were still meeting and exceeding the original specifications that could be measured when the specs were written.

Excessive trim modeling is a very good way to keep a good aircraft's performance down in practice while still allowing it to achieve its accepted performance figures; the historical record says quite clearly that the Corsair, the Mustang, the P-47 and the Hellcat were 'easily trimmed', specifically in reference to the earlier US fighters like the Wildcat, P-39 and particularly the P-40, all of which enjoy relatively similar (and easy) trim models in the game compared to the other depicted fighters of WWII (as of version 4.11.1; time will tell if 4.12 is any better).

Of the later fighters, only the Hellcat needed 'much' trim adjustment, but it was considered easily done. That is obviously not my experience in this simulation. The Merlin Mustang from every contemporary account and description needed very little or no trim adjustment for minor changes in speed or throttle (the Allison Mustangs needed practically none at any speed), but the in-game version needs trim adjustment in elevator and rudder for every variation of 10kph (that's only 6 mph, fellow Yanks) in speed or 5% of throttle, which is considerably more than either of the two best known study simulations of the P-51 depict (and strangely enough, I found a quote from a pilot in America's Hundred Thousand that complains of exactly that sort of behavior in the P-40,only for speed variations of as little as 10 mph (or 16 kph), which tells me that the trim model would be overdone by at least 60% even if it were assigned to the universally acknowledged worst trimming American fighter of the war).

The real P-38 needed NO elevator (or rudder) trim for speed and throttle variations (per America’s Hundred Thousand), but the Il-2 Sturmovik Lightning will go literally straight up when you push the throttle forward without shoving the stick three quarters of the way forward at the same instant and punching the elevator trim button constantly for as long as the speed continues to increase. (and it's a lot slower than the real thing was)

The real life P-47 needed no elevator trim for initial acceleration, but the in-game version does the same thing as the Lightning, with the added entertainment value of needing a ton of right rudder as well, and like the Corsair, the nose tends to dip as speed increases in the level plane; by this I mean that the angle of attack varies significantly with speed, something I've never read or heard about in these aircraft in over 45 years of reading, modeling or personally talking to men who flew these aircraft (you'd think that somebody would have mentioned it...).

As for the Spitfire, I have no documentation or discussions of its trimming requirements at all, which would indicate to me that it was fairly well-behaved by the standards of the day (it was well-enough known as an easy aircraft to fly that even German pilots would say "Anyone can fly a Spitfire," which implies to me that they considered themselves more manly because they had tamed the 109...). Yet the Il-2 Sturmovik Spitfires demand a lot of trim adjustment, about the same degree as the Mustang, although with the added difficulty of that hard to read Turn and Bank needle arrangement.

In short, in this simulation these specific aircraft are much harder to trim and control than the real ones were, particularly when measured against the other WWII fighters depicted in this sim, and all of them demand un-historic trim adjustment in the form of multiple button presses for relatively minor variations in speed and throttle settings, as well as climb or diving conditions, and it is next to impossible to roll your trim settings to a set position in anticipation of a sudden change in speed or throttle, as the real-life pilots did regularly.

Exaggerated behaviors like the ones we experience in this sim would have made these fighters practically unacceptable as combat aircraft, and make "historical tactics" next to impossible. No amount of brains in the world is going to change that.

cheers

horseback