109 advice needed (climb)

[CaptainDoggles]

Originally Posted by Insuber

if stating one's honest, yet subjective opinion is irresponsible or requires recordings, we should close 100% of the free world's forums, not to speak about newspapers, parliaments etc. LOL! FM is clearly broken, for all planes, so it is pointless to defend it, full stop (unless you have recordings, of course ...).

I'm not "defending the FM" so much as debunking bogus claims that the Spitfire/Hurricane are overmodeled.

It's been satisfactorily demonstrated elsewhere on these forums that the Spitfire MkIa is actually undermodeled. On top of that we've got the nebulous term "Energy Retention" which is entirely the construction of sim pilots, and not a real performance parameter dealt with by engineers.

I say that it's irresponsible because other, less knowledgeable posters might take what you say as fact, and then we get into the highly-polarized territory so familiar to 1946 pilots where stark lines are drawn between Red and Blue pilots. People get emotionally attached to their favourite rides and spew vitriol at any potential gainsayers.

[Insuber]

Originally Posted by CaptainDoggles

I'm not "defending the FM" so much as debunking bogus claims that the Spitfire/Hurricane are overmodeled.

It's been satisfactorily demonstrated elsewhere on these forums that the Spitfire MkIa is actually undermodeled. On top of that we've got the nebulous term "Energy Retention" which is entirely the construction of sim pilots, and not a real performance parameter dealt with by engineers.

I say that it's irresponsible because other, less knowledgeable posters might take what you say as fact, and then we get into the highly-polarized territory so familiar to 1946 pilots where stark lines are drawn between Red and Blue pilots. People get emotionally attached to their favourite rides and spew vitriol at any potential gainsayers.

I see your point, but I see no interest either in nursing people and hide the fact that the FM is incomplete and wrong. Red planes are porked as blue planes. And God knows how little I care about R vs B querelles.
I repeat it, I've no hard evidence, but after flying some 100 hours on ATAG I grew the subjective idea that the energy retention of Spit is strangely overdone. Not so for the Hurricane, imo. And energy and its conservation (retention) in my engineering mind is a very straightforward concept ... kinetic energy, potential energy, drag, you know, nothing exoteric nor nebulous.
Regarding the highly porked FM that we bought, the hypotetical "less knowledgeable posters" need just to consider some well known facts, so well known that I'm almost ashame to repeat them:

- the ceiling of Spit, 109 and all the other planes is wrong by 25%, at least, with 109's ceiling even lower than the others, in my tests
- the G stall is not modeled at all (not a minor detail!)
- the Vne is a vaguely modeled concept (I can dive from 5000 m with a 109 at full throttle without the slightest frame damage)
- the G-stress frame damage, so nicely done in 1946 from 1.09 on, simply doesn't exist in CLoD.
- some planes, such as the G.50, are penalised by as much as 30% in speed, climb rate and turn rate. Ask El-Aurens.
- Spit is limping behind the Hurricane, when it should be the opposite

I can continue, but I believe that a flight simulation is not one, with all these flaws of FM.

Cheers,
Ins

[ElAurens]

A good observation Captaindoggles.

I hope we can keep this discussion focused and open minded, and not devolve into Red/Blue fanboy-ism. I realize it's hard when discussing polarizing subjects like the Spitfire, and as we progress the Lavochkins, Japanese aircraft of all sorts, and of course the all time target of haters and fanboys alike, the P51.

As I said earlier, get the FMs as close as possible and let the chips fall where they may. Learn to "fly" the aircraft you like well and you will be successful. If you get shot down, and we all do, learn from it. Usually it's not because the other plane is "uber", it's because the other pilot had the advantage and more importantly, knew how to exploit that advantage.

As to our current plane set, in real life both the Spit and 109 had advantages and dis-advantages when compared to one another, yet they were a fairly close match when flown by competent pilots.

And so you know, I really have no horse in this race. I tend to fly the underdog airframes most of the time, as I am bored to tears with the same old Spits-109s-190s-P51s-P47s West Front plane sets. I'm most happy when in Curtiss Hawks, Hurricanes, MC 200s, Buffalos, Ki-43s, F4Fs, etc...

[ElAurens]

Insuber, we posted at the same time...

Your observations about overall performance are indeed valid.

I have passed Spitfires in a gentle climb several times in my Hurri. Now there is no way to know how the other pilot is managing his aircraft, but if both are flown equally that should never happen. And yeah the poor G.50 is terrible, about as bad as the Blenheim is.

We have a long way to go in getting these planes sorted I think. In the meantime all we can do is fly what we have, try to post our observations in as unbiased a manner as possible, and most importantly, have fun.

[Insuber]

Originally Posted by ElAurens

Insuber, we posted at the same time...

Your observations about overall performance are indeed valid.

I have passed Spitfires in a gentle climb several times in my Hurri. Now there is no way to know how the other pilot is managing his aircraft, but if both are flown equally that should never happen. And yeah the poor G.50 is terrible, about as bad as the Blenheim is.

We have a long way to go in getting these planes sorted I think. In the meantime all we can do is fly what we have, try to post our observations in as unbiased a manner as possible, and most importantly, have fun.

Amen!

+ giving a hard time to Luthier until he fixes this mess

[jg27_mc]

Originally Posted by CaptainDoggles

...and then we get into the highly-polarized territory so familiar to 1946 pilots where stark lines are drawn between Red and Blue pilots. People get emotionally attached to their favourite rides and spew vitriol at any potential gainsayers.

It's not a question of favorite ride/emotial thing IMHO, most of us remember the days Red's had Spits, in 1946 , that had those UFO/washing machine FM's and Klingon cloaking devices, in the other had Blue had flying coffins with concrete elevators (specially the late 109 models). That's why 80 to 90% of pilots (if choice was given) were flying FW's. the discussion/debate had to do with the approach MG made in both fighters. Hell the Spity could out maneuver/out climb/almost never overheat/ etc. heavily damaged. In the other hand, the 109 had paper fuselage/suffered from an abnormal rate of PK's and damaged sights/overheated (has it should)/ridiculous ugly big LOD at certain distance(vs the Spit cloaking device)/big basketball balls in the wings that created tremendous drag and therefore loss of speed. If you ask me 109's weren't porked, the problem had to to with the arcade Spifire (FM/CEM/DM) invented by Oleg and Co.

Regards.

[Robo.]

Originally Posted by jg27_mc

It's not a question of favorite ride/emotial thing IMHO, most of us remember the days Red's had Spits, in 1946 , that had those UFO/washing machine FM's and Klingon cloaking devices, in the other had Blue had flying coffins with concrete elevators (specially the late 109 models). That's why 80 to 90% of pilots (if choice was given) were flying FW's. the discussion/debate had to do with the approach MG made in both fighters. Hell the Spity could out maneuver/out climb/almost never overheat/ etc. heavily damaged. In the other hand, the 109 had paper fuselage/suffered from an abnormal rate of PK's and damaged sights/overheated (has it should)/ridiculous ugly big LOD at certain distance(vs the Spit cloaking device)/big basketball balls in the wings that created tremendous drag and therefore loss of speed. If you ask me 109's weren't porked, the problem had to to with the arcade Spifire (FM/CEM/DM) invented by Oleg and Co.

Regards.

What has this 1946 whining got to do with CoD? I flew late war 109s A LOT and sometimes Spitfires, too - they both had flaws and problems, but I never felt the Spitfire were favoured in any way as you describe. You say this, a pure Spit pilot will be telling me about the 109 rocket climb, Spit one granade no wing etc etc. No point discussing any of that here.... Cpt. Doggles said it all.

Insuber's observations are spot on and I am really curious what the new patch brings us regarding the FM adjustments.

[Cap'n Crunch]

IMO the biggest single change in the way we fly and fight will occur when superior VR goggle are marketed at a reasonable price. Air combat is above all a visual game, as it stands now you really have no choice but fight mono on mono most of the time.

Having real scale visuals and better peripherals will throw the battle in favor of those who bring a team over those who bring a few 'Aces'. Performance will drop a few notches to the new found team tactics.

[ElAurens]

Originally Posted by cheesehawk

All you have to do is check out www.spitfireperformance.org to know that even in 1946 the Spits were undermodelled. They should have superior performance to even say... an F-16?

[6S.Manu]

Originally Posted by Robo.

What has this 1946 whining got to do with CoD? I flew late war 109s A LOT and sometimes Spitfires, too - they both had flaws and problems, but I never felt the Spitfire were favoured in any way as you describe. You say this, a pure Spit pilot will be telling me about the 109 rocket climb, Spit one granade no wing etc etc. No point discussing any of that here.... Cpt. Doggles said it all.

Insuber's observations are spot on and I am really curious what the new patch brings us regarding the FM adjustments.

jg27_mc is totally right.

The thing is related to CloD because the FMs seems to be a copy'n'paste of the 1946's one, at least looking at the ingame FM data.

DM and CEM are totally another matter.

As Insuber writes, there is still nothing about G-forces, structure damage and mostly the nonexistent torque... and this time I think they should also do something about the pilot's condition during combat.
I'll always remember that the Tempest pilots were prohibited to stall/spin at less than 3km because that machine was a unforgiving flying brick. In 1946 I witnessed many times (both as tempest's pilot or his enemy) those planes going into high speed spins and autorecover without any conseguences for the pilot inside, of course at very low altitude. Look... this expedient has been used by many pilots (blue and red) to escape bounces and searching overshoots.

This does have to change is you want to call this a "combat flight simulator".

Are there few to none real tests? Use that little data for those related planes and translate it for the other models in a honest way. If you need ask for opinions from engineers... there are many of them here.
Open a ****ing blog to get informations and start open discussion about that. There are so many experts here to help you! If they would release a FM SDK I'm sure that many here would lose their time to test and tweak the planes.

More time helping the development = less time of whining on this board.

Then as I said before, there should be also a simulated pilot's condition inside: fatigue, nausea and G force related waggles above all. But this is another step.